text: Since we last spoke…ah, won’t bother getting into it, check this out, Sarah Maple, you may have heard of her before, good on you, I am just catching up. If you heard of her before, why didn’t you tell me?
  Her father is white British, her mother is an Iranian Muslim, and she went to a Catholic school in Eastbourne. “I always found it difficult culturally knowing where I fit in,” says the 30-year-old artist, who lives in Crawley. “I wanted to be a ‘good’ Muslim, but I was an immediate outcast for being mixed. And I felt guilty about that.”
  She has found her way, and aren’t we glad? Well, no, not everybody is, to the point of throwing bricks through her window.
  “I was at university and we’d go round doing crits, talking about each others’ work. Every time a man got up to speak, we’d be really supportive. But every time a woman spoke, we’d berate her. I realised I was complicit – subconsciously, we’d all taken on that conditioning. It was the first time I realised I might be held back by being a woman. The phrase ‘I wish I had a penis’ just came into my head. So I did that work based on it. When I took it into uni, although all the tutors liked it, everyone else berated me. Then I put it on MySpace and got all these amazing responses. People started sending me their own. That’s the moment I realised that, through humour, I could really communicate something.”
  She has a book coming out, titled You Could Have Done This, which for me is the point of art, especially when people say “Oh, I coulda done that!” But you didn’t, that person did, regardless if you like it or not. Be inspired to move, even with something that rubs you the wrong way. More power to you.
  Should you have some connection with Latin America, the Spanish speaking world, history, Uruguay, literature, oppression, exploitation, IMF, then you are aware of the humble giant who possessed a prose that was profound yet on the surface, easily accessible. His history of the milking of Latin America by the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, the US, Canada etc. were first contained in ¨Las venas abiertas de América Latina¨ (The Open Veins of Latin America), was written in a six week period when he was twenty-seven years old. He would later say he was too inexperienced to have written such a book, however it reading it now, as I have recently done again, it still holds as an insight into manuals of operations that have been played out by corporations, dictators, governments, business etc. aka well-organized crime. This was the book Hugo Chavez presented to Obama, on the latter’s first conference down south. “Read this, then you will understand, what we are saying.”
  Upside Down is another personal favourite, his style now infused with a humour that was not present in his opening salvo. He was raging then, quite rightly so. However with Upside Down, I found myself breaking out in a laugh as I followed the lines with my eyes. Shit like this ain’t supposed to be funny, It eases the pain momentarily though, and we are in need of relief, and he was a medicine for a continent and beyond.
  Below, his long-time translator and friend, Mark Fried talks with Sharmini Periest of The Real News Network about Galeano’s life.
  Terror Tuesday. Every Tuesday, the White House occupant, Oh-Bummer Man has a meeting where he and military chiefs go through a list of people they have decided gets an early retirement, based, many times on evidence which is as solid as a toothpick.
  Brandon Bryant, was in the US Army and worked within the secret drone programme bombing targets in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
  He was told that he helped to kill more than 1,600 people, but as time went by he felt uneasy with what he was doing. He found it hard to sleep and started dreaming in infra-red.
  Brandon Bryant told the BBC/World Service ‘Witness’ program about his doubts and the mission that convinced him it was time to stop.
  If your still awake, Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald discuss the assassination program with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now, (from Feb. 2014) and the piece also includes an interview with Brandon Bryant. Link
  Fort Scott was the town that he had left more than 20 years earlier, when after his mother died, he found himself—a teenager and the youngest of 15 children—suddenly having to make his own way in the world. He used this assignment to revisit early memories of his birthplace, many involving serious racial discrimination, and to reconnect with childhood friends, all of whom had attended the same all-black grade school as Parks. One of the most visually rich and captivating of all his projects, Parks’s photographs, now owned by The Gordon Parks Foundation, were slated to appear in April 1951, but the photo essay was never published. The exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, represents a rarely seen view of everyday lives of African American citizens, years before the Civil Rights movement began in earnest.
  You know the glorious smells of the holidays? They are IN THIS CANDLE! Intended to be lit while curled up under a blanket, reading a favorite book, and drinking a cup of cocoa (or adult beverage *wink*). This candle is the perfect blend of all of your favorite holiday spices, plus the wick crackles as it burns just like a wood fire!