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Extinction Rebellion protesters block some of London's busiest roads and bridges
Thousands of people took to the streets of central London on Monday, blockading some of the UK capital's busiest roads and bridges, and gluing themselves to street furniture, to raise the alarm over a mounting climate crisis.
On Monday morning, a group of demonstrators with trees, plants and solar panels in tow barricaded Waterloo Bridge, one of five locations being targeted by environmental campaigners in the city as part of the protest, which is expected to continue for at least a week.
The demonstrations are part of a global campaign, orchestrated by British climate organization Extinction Rebellion, which includes rallies in at least 80 cities across more than 33 countries, demanding governments "take decisive action on the climate and ecological emergency."
The group, which is supported by a slew of academics, scientists and celebrities, including the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams
and American actor Willem Dafoe, claims that more than 3,000 people will take part in protests in the city.
Extinction Rebellion, which launched late last year with climate protests that shut down five London bridges, made headlines earlier this month when members of the group disrupted a Brexit debate in Parliament with a nude demonstration.
Photos and videos shared on social media showed some protesters outside London's Shell Centre near Waterloo Bridge on Monday.
While some demonstrators glued themselves to the revolving front door, others scrawled Extinction Rebellion's hourglass symbol in graffiti and smeared black paint on the exterior of the building. The protesters also smashed a glass door.
A Shell spokesman told CNN: "We respect the right of everyone to express their point of view, we ask only that they do so with their safety and the safety of others in mind."
London's Metropolitan Police said in a statement that policing plans were in place to support public order during Extinction Rebellion demonstrations over the coming weeks, and advised those traveling in the capital to allow for extra journey time.
...Mark Ovland, one of the protesters glued to the pink boat at Oxford Circus, said he and others were trying to bring massive disruption to transport in London to "gain attention to what is the biggest crisis facing humanity at the moment."
"For 30 years people have known the signs of what's happening with the climate, with the ecological crisis, nothing's been done.
We've tried writing letters, we've tried voting with our feet, we've tried campaigning in all the usual institutional ways, nothing's worked, emissions keep going up year on year and so this is the last thing we can think of," Ovland told CNN.
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Mon April 15, 2019
by Eliza Mackintosh
reprinted from CNN online
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Taj Mahal is his stage name: real name, Henry Saint Clair Fredericks.
[Wikipedia excerpts] -- He is a blues musician, a singer-songwriter, and film composer; he plays the guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica, and many other instruments.
He often incorporates elements of world music into his works and has done much to reshape the definition and scope of blues music over the course of his almost 50-year career by fusing it with nontraditional forms, including sounds from the Caribbean, Africa, and the South Pacific.
Born in 1942 in Harlem, Taj Mahal grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was raised in a musical environment; his mother was a member of a local gospel choir and his father was an Afro-Caribbean jazz arranger and piano player.
His family owned a shortwave radio which received music broadcasts from around the world, exposing him at an early age to world music.
Early in childhood he recognized the stark differences between the popular music of his day and the music that was played in his home.
Taj also became interested in jazz, enjoying the works of musicians such as Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Milt Jackson.
His parents came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, and instilled in their son a sense of pride in his Caribbean and African ancestry through their stories.
...Taj Mahal worked on a farm when he was a teenager, and he developed a passion for farming that nearly rivaled his love of music....He believes in growing your own food; he has said,
"You have a whole generation of kids who think everything comes out of a box and a can, and they don't know you can grow most of your food."
Because of his personal support of the family farm, Taj Mahal regularly performs at Farm Aid concerts. [end, Wikipedia excerpts]
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I got to see Taj Mahal perform in Boston, the summer between freshman and sophomore year.
The free encyclopedia says his stage name came to him in dreams....
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That singer in the Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton performance
IS
Taj Mahal.
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On You Tube
type in
Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton - Corrine, Corrina
uploader: EClaptonAddict
and Play
Vocalist -- as the kids would say -- "sings it like a boss."
(I'm just going to call him The Commander. [I think it might be Taj Mahal.])
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The college admissions cheating scandal burst upon us recently, featuring the parents who are "celebrities," actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin.
The main point in the news stories is that these wealthy, already-advantaged people "stole" freshman-class "spots" from kids who studied and did well on the SATs, who may have parents who are not dishonest enough and wealthy enough to bribe and cheat and money-launder to get them into the "college of their choice." (Or -- the college of the parents' choice....)
The thing I see is, probably the parents very strongly want their children to go to college and the kids are less enthusiastic about it. So the parents "threw money at the problem," as the saying goes.
Lori Loughlin's younger daughter didn't want to go to college -- she said it in a video.
And her videos are good! She has a talent for that, and her You Tube channel, "Olivia Jade," had sponsors, so she apparently made money with it.
Typically, parents don't have faith in their children's Project of Enthusiasm, right? (The daughter's vlog... the son's rock band... even Mick Jagger's father wasn't supportive of his musical ambitions...) Loughlin said in an interview that she wanted her daughters to go to college so they will "have something to fall back on."
That's what parents said when I was in high school! (Maybe it goes back to cave-man times: "You must study these stone tablets and get a degree in hunting and gathering, so you will always have something to fall back on.")
I don't understand all the drama attached to the idea of entering college: the drama isn't necessary, and for some people, college is not necessary. Bob Dylan didn't go to college -- or -- he did, sort of, but dropped out pretty early. He had other things to do.
Tina Turner
didn't go to college. In her autobiography she said out of four children, "Craig was college-minded -- the others were like Ike and me, they just wanted to be done with school."
I have a faint, distant memory of taking the ACT test, and acceptance letters from Boston University and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern said I could come to school there, the next year, because they were already full for the current year. BU said I could start this September.
I didn't have any interest in waiting a year to start college (although many people choose to do that -- travel first, or something... in England they call it taking a "gap year") and I wanted to go to the East Coast more than I wanted to go to Illinois. Decision makes itself.
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"Mr. Hitler"
by Lead Belly
on You Tube
1,265,021 views
Hitler started out in 1932
Hitler started out in 1932
When he started out, he took the homes from the Jews
We're gonna tear Hitler down
We're gonna tear Hitler down
We're gonna tear Hitler down someday.
We're gonna bring him to the ground
We're gonna bring him to the ground
We're gonna bring him to the ground someday.
When Hitler started out, he took the Jews from their homes
When Hitler started out, he took the Jews from their homes
That's one thing Mr. Hitler you know you done wrong.
We're gonna tear Hitler down
We're gonna tear Hitler down
We're gonna tear Hitler down someday.
We're gonna bring him to the ground
We're gonna bring him to the ground
We're gonna bring him to the ground someday.
You ain't no iron, you ain't no solid rock
You ain't no iron, you ain't no solid rock
But we American people say "Mr. Hitler you is got to stop!"
We're gonna tear Hitler down
We're gonna tear Hitler down
We're gonna tear Hitler down someday.
We're gonna bring him to the ground
We're gonna bring him to the ground
We're gonna bring him to the ground someday.
Mr. Hitler we're gonna tear your playhouse down
Mr. Hitler we're gonna tear your playhouse down
You been flyin' mighty high, but you're on your last go 'round.
We're gonna tear Hitler down
We're gonna tear Hitler down
We're gonna tear Hitler down someday.
We're gonna bring him to the ground
We're gonna bring him to the ground
We're gonna bring him to the ground someday.
Mr. Hitler, you know you ain't so keen
Mr. Hitler, you know you ain't so keen
But we American people say you're the biggest liar they ever seen.
We're gonna tear Hitler down
We're gonna tear Hitler down
We're gonna tear Hitler down someday.
We're gonna bring him to the ground
We're gonna bring him to the ground
We're gonna bring him to the ground someday.
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Songwriters: Huddie Ledbetter / Alan Lomax
Folkways Music Publishers Inc. 1942
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As 'Sopranos' Returns, Art Irritates Life
by Clyde Haberman
March 10, 2006
Unless you've been hibernating all winter, you probably know that they are back on Sunday, Tony and the gang, that fun- and gun-loving brigade of sociopaths, the kinds who know how to put the Freud in schadenfreude.
After a long break, a new round of "The Sopranos" is about to begin on HBO, to the delight of devotees dying to see who gets whacked next.
But there are others. Some Italian-Americans roll their eyes. Here we go again, they say in resignation -- another season of those on-screen gavones, those lowlifes, those embarrassments to themselves and others.
Lucky Luciano
Emanuele Alfano will not be watching. He is director of a group called the Italian-American One Voice Coalition, which would like to be sort of an Anti-Defamation League for Italian-Americans, a flashing light warning of bigotry and harmful stereotyping.
Seven years after "The Sopranos" first went on the air, his dismay over it has not waned.
"The attitude toward Italian-Americans, especially those from New Jersey, is that you have to be connected in some way," said Mr. Alfano, who lives in Bloomfield, N.J. "'The Sopranos' reinforced that attitude a hundredfold."
Worse for him is that the creative forces behind so many Mafia-themed film and television shows are Italian-Americans, people with names like Scorsese, Coppola and De Niro. In the case of "The Sopranos," it is David Chase, original family name De Cesare.
There is nothing really new here. The pros and cons of "The Sopranos" have been argued since its beginning. And for every Mr. Alfano, there is someone who says,
Get over it. Mafia movies are today's equivalent of the old westerns, a harmless form of entertainment.
One prominent "Sopranos" fan, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, advises some of his fellow Italian-Americans "to be less sensitive."
"You could spend your whole life wanting to be insulted," Mr. Giuliani said a few years ago. "Why?"
Part of the why may be
the relentless grip that the Mafia has on popular culture and the news media.
Witness the enormous, often inexplicable, attention paid to all things Gotti.
That includes the current New York trial of John A. Gotti, whose mob-boss father, even in death, is treated by some newspapers as if he were a cross between Garibaldi and St. Francis of Assisi.
What troubles the writer Helen Barolini is the incomplete picture of Italian-American life that emerges. "I don't mind that it exists," she said of the "Sopranos" series. "Let it exist. But where's all the rest of us?"
Dr. A. Kenneth Ciongoli, board chairman of the National Italian American Foundation, says he enjoys watching "The Sopranos." But he also feels that it has taken "what I as a doctor would call the urban sclerosis of America and superimposed it on Italian-Americans and made it ours."
Urban sclerosis?
"Dysfunctional families, impolite people, materialism, hedonism et cetera,"
he explained. "All of the things that represent the excess of America. They have made it Italian-American, unfairly."
One wonders what Tony Soprano himself might think about this debate. In fact, we have an inkling. No question, he takes his Italian heritage seriously.
But he is prepared to go only so far down the group-pride road.
In an episode about Columbus Day a couple of years ago, Tony reminds his consigliere, Silvio Dante, of all that he has achieved. Leaving out the expletives -- no easy task with a "Sopranos" script -- he tells Silvio:
"Did you get all this because you're Italian? No. You got it because you're you, because you're smart, because whatever. Where is our self-esteem? I mean, that doesn't come from Columbus or 'The Godfather' or Chef Boyardee."
That's the thing about "The Sopranos." Like it or not, it is often insightful.
Robert Viscusi, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, makes that point in a new book, "Buried Caesars" (State University of New York Press). It is fair to say, Professor Viscusi writes, that
"discrimination inevitably accompanies and draws nourishment" from "The Godfather" and "The Sopranos."
But make no mistake about those works, he says. They are, "for good or ill, works of art."
Mr. Alfano, for one, doesn't buy it. Asked if "The Sopranos" was not indeed well made, he replied with a trace of scorn: "Well made. 'Birth of a Nation' was also well made."
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