Details of BFI plans for library and archive, including job cuts
from bfiwatch by pamcook
BFI management draft proposals: Restructure of Collections & Information Rationale There are five key drivers in our proposal for the future structure of the Archive: The cut to grant-in-aid, whilst managing the transition from the SHUK project and reducing the … Continue reading →
It’s a very curious moment. The first phase of the new youth rebellion (for there will soon be another) is winding down, the whole country is frozen over, yesterday’s snow lies on the ground, and here in Putney—like the days after the Icelandic volcano—no planes in the sky under the flight path into Heathrow. In short, blissfully quiet. But the silence is deceptive. Continue reading
by Hans Kundnani
Published October 23, 2010
Although Paul Celan is my favourite poet, I was somehow unaware of his
poem, “Mapesbury Road”, which refers to a street that is about five minutes
from where I live in north-west London and was written in 1968 immediately
after the death of Martin Luther King and the attempted assassination of
West German student leader Rudi Dutschke. As I learned from a fascinating programme on Radio 4 about the short poem last week, Celan’s paternal aunt Berta Antschel – one of the few relatives of his who had survived the Holocaust – lived in a flat in the eponymous street, where Celan visited
her in April 1968 and wrote the poem, which was published posthumously
in the collection Schneepart in 1971. Like most of Celan’s late poems, it is
incredibly dense with compound words (e.g. “Mitluft”, which Michael Hamburger
translates as “co-air”) and therefore difficult to decipher. As George Steiner
says in the programme, Celan’s poems are “on the other side of our
current horizons”.
However, as the programme showed, the time and place at which
“Mapesbury Road” was written offer a couple of intriguing clues
to its meaning. It seems likely that the bullet in the poem refers to
the shootings of King (which took place in Memphis on
April 4) and Dutschke (which took place in West Berlin exactly a week
later on April 11). In a letter to his wife Gisèle Lestrange on April
10, Celan describes a meeting with the Austrian poet Erich Fried, who
lived just around the corner from Berta Antschel in Dartmouth Road and
knew Dutschke (in fact, Dutschke would come to stay with him in London
that autumn). Celan and Fried talked among other things about Israel
and left-wing anti-Semitism, so it seems likely that the West German
student movement was on Celan’s mind even before Dutschke was shot a day
later. The reference in the poem to magnolias, meanwhile, was probably
prompted by the trees in Mapesbury Road that would have been in bloom in
the spring when Celan was there and reminded him of his childhood in
Czernowitz (and also connects, via the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit”,
to the murder of King).
An exhibition on the poem is also about to open at the Southbank Centre in London.
37 Mapesbury Road
Out of curiosity, I had a look at 37 Mapesbury Road, Oliver Sacks’ old home.
It is enormous, even for a large family. It is now the headquarters of
the British Association of Psychotherapists.
from http://jamespowney.blogspot.com/2010/09/37-mapesbury-road.html
Film, as the first industrial art, has always been a complex mix of business and culture, and its status within public policy has reflected this. Successive governments have employed different strategies to stimulate commercial production on the one hand, and to subsidise cultural film activity that would not be possible if left to the market alone on the other.
by Jack Newsinger
Over the last decade, private lenders, abetted by college financial aid offices, eagerly handed young people hundreds of thousands of dollars to earn bachelor’s degrees. As a result of easy credit, declining grants and soaring tuitions, more than two-thirds of students graduated with debt in 2008 — up from 45 percent in 1993. The average debt load is $24,000, according to the Project on Student Debt.
In some respects, the student loan crisis looks remarkably like the subprime mortgage crisis. First, outstanding student loan debt has ballooned: It grew roughly four-fold in the last decade to $833 billion as of June — surpassing outstanding credit-card debt for the first time.
Secondly, defaults have soared amid a difficult job market.
One of Nina Power’s photos from 9 December protests
Italy arts cut protests reach crescendo with riots at Milan’s La Scala
Demonstrations led by conductor Daniel Barenboim at opera house turn violent as Rome votes on 37% cut in arts funding
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/17569033[/vimeo]
The last few weeks have seen a new spate of agitational web videos, accompanying the amazing upturn of politicking in Britain in response to the brutal, ill-considered and philistine cuts proposed by the coalition government which took office last May. Continue reading
