Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

Hi Phil, The last few days I've been thinking about Eve and Tony and their house, and, surprisingly I can remember very little. I have a bit of a visual picture of the house with a long hallway to the right and living room leading into dining room leading into kitchen on the left. I feel I should remember more as I lived there for a short time - in the garage. But maybe it was actually for a shorter time than I thought. I do remember that there was ALWAYS a huge pot of vegetable curry on the stove that fed god knows how many people.  and there were always people in the house, visiting, hanging out, talking, arguing, sleeping, staying over.  of course they were people of all races.  If you were black of course you could not leave till the morning because of the curfew, so I think a lot of people stayed over.  It was a very laid back, welcoming place - and of course very interesting.  Lots of journalists and music people I think. Tony was seriousl...

'If you are ready,' said the Walrus,  'now we we can begin to feed.' Discussions over how to help poor oysters proceed  at the 2011 conference in Davos Awkwardly, Jesus said: 'It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven.'  That is the real message for Davos. Last night The Moral Maze on Radio 4 chose to discuss the topic of happiness and well being, and whether society should aim for it. I agreed with Claire Fox when she said that it was disquiet that caused people to act and change society for the better. However, I didn't listen carefully to the whole discussion. I think Michael Buerk lead it in the wrong direction. There was an arts programme later on that night: 'If you were not a moral being, I said to my wife, wouldn't you abandon the work that you do, the concerns that you have for others' welfare and just dedicate yourself to arts and crafts. I wonder what my parents would h...

  Defend your cyber-reality. It may be your only one.  A 'real' singularity Bidisha's article today is just a little dollop. She doesn't say very much at all. It's a throw-and-run Guardian online type article. A keep-your-name-floating-about in-cybespace without-saying-too-much article. But I'll respond to it anyway. I chose my new Guardian log in (shortly to be banned no doubt) after A.C. Clarke's comment that the computer age would end in a ' Cyberclasm' a catastrophe. But the alternative view is that it will end in the singularity. Ray Kurzweil elaborates. People are noticing that being electronically connected has changed the very way we think. The Internet can form a sort of cybershell for the mind. What is Cyberspace? Read the latest novel of Ian Banks,Transition Bidisha should read far more science fiction. How provincial people can be who find their intellectual edge in selectivity. You have to be omnivo...

Private morality is not public morality.  Savitri Hensman The personal doesn't intersect perfectly with the public . What is personal and experienced by you is not a guide to what is injustice for the whole of society. Some Pakistani men in Leicester groom young white girls as prostitutes.But this localised truth about a criminal gang in Leicester, whether it is recounted heartbreakingly by a young girl in care in Leicester really doesn't give us a sense of what is going on on society. That is why what Jack Straw said was reprehensible. A woman I knew was raped by a black man. She hated men, but she also hated black men as a result. Where is the intersection of the personal and the public here? If she challenged black men would she be challenging rapists? If the girl in Leicester challenged Pakistani men would she be challenging gangs of pimps? Take the example of an errant father not accepting his son because he is gay as an example of a public injustice. ...

Amrullah Saleh, former Afghan chief of Intelligence   By Arif Salimi Yesterday we heard the news that the Afghan Chief of Intelligence has been forced to resign by Hamid Karzai. The reason is because he exposed a $500 million drugs deal that Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai  carried out of Bagram airbase, with the approval and involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America. The rumour is that not only did Karzai want Amrullah Salah gone, but the US government also wanted him to go. And because he has been very effective in combating Al Qaeda and those elements of the Pashtun Taleban that support Al Qaeda, the Pakistani intelligence services, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), who use these extremist groups to extend their influence in Afghanistan, also want him gone. The ISI tried to kill Karzai. When Salah found out that the ISI was behind the 4 assassination attempts on Hamid Ka...

Stop the killing’ of baboons in the mountains of Mpumalanga, South Africa! At least 1,914 baboons had been ‘removed’ by a controversial ‘trap and shoot’ method by FSC Certified plantation companies during the past two years. Most of the affected troops were from the Sabie, Graskop and Blyde River areas in Mpumalanga province, South Africa. GeaSphere is demanding an immediate moratorium on the killing of baboons by FSC certified companies and the de-certification of plantation companies involved in this practise. Baboons are a integral part of our environment. They perform various vital functions, such as dispersing seed of indigenous plants they naturally eat. Very little data is known about baboon dynamics in our area, or the long term consequence of removing baboons in such large numbers. Baboons damage pine trees by removing patches of bark reducing the value of the timber and in some cases killing the trees – causing financial losses to the plantation industry. This pro...

Last year My friends and I adopted a tree in Hyde Park. It was a very, very big tree. I don't know what kind. Seven of us used to sit around it using the gaps between the roots as chairs. My whole social life revolved around this tree. It's not that crazy.There is a logic behind what we did. Most of us were Spanish speakers from the Spanish School in Portobello road. If you take the 52 to Victoria then Portobello leads to Notting Hill, then you go down one big road and you are in Kensington. There is a corner of Hyde Park in Kensington and our tree was on that corner next to the entrance. We were at that tree the whole year round. It didn't matter if it was raining or snowing. We were there. The coldest day I have experienced in my life I was at that tree. In fact, on that day, the park was closed. The police came and asked us what we were doing there? Everyone else was warm at home or in a shopping centre but we couldn't leave the tree. We would stay by...

  ‘L'urbanisme social se doit d'organiser un meilleur aménagement de l'humanité, vers un niveau de lumière, de joie et de santé, un meilleur rendement économique car il y a urgence à défendre la race dans tous les domaines contre la certitude de dégénérescence et de destruction que les lamentables statistiques de la natalité, maladie, mort, laissent apparaître : 18 % de la perte du revenu national est due à la maladie’ Henri Sellier   Henri Sellier, from the web site of the French senate When Lisa came back to Suresnes and Richard was gone and war had broken out and she had her little Eve to look after and the worry of Else living with them.  For a while she did not know what to do. Her savings would soon run out and she would need to work. Else, meanwhile rushed around ineffectually, looking for a way out of the country. Now that war had broken out it was almost impossible to leave it. The borders were closing. The Spanish were interring refug...

 Isidor Steinhardt and his sons flanking him: Richard and Arthur Be careful when you listen to stories of Pakistani men grooming white girls in Leicester. Be very careful. There is history there. The history of the link between accusations of white slave trade and anti-semitism and the link between white slavery and poisonous orientalism. In Mein Kampf Hitler worked himself into a frenzy of anti-semitism and at the peak of this frenzy he refers to the way young non-Jewish women were prostituted by Jewish pimps. There is a dangerous history of confusing poverty and crime with the fomentation of racist hatred. Notice the arguments made by the British National Party that say Black men are more likely to be criminals. Now we are told men of Pakistani origin are pimps and abusers because they are Pakistani.   In a sense my Great Grandfather Isidor was also a victim of this old black ops technique. Your enemy is always a baby eater, isn't he? That's what the population is to...

  Picture one of us took of Sharks' Bay in 1983 We all piled into the Land cruiser and headed for Shark's Bay, about 15 kilometres outside the city of Mogadishu. Much nearer town my father, with very occasional help from me, had taken time to do up the UN beach club, to smear plaster lovingly over the crumbling pillars and, when all the plaster had dried, to paint the club a beachy beige. The UN club was a simple, small, rectangular, flat roofed Italian house with a veranda that looked out over the sea. (Later it became a nightclub and then the property of a warlord.) While drinking and watching the sun go down UN staff sitting on the veranda had witnessed a shark attack. A young boy in the shallows was grabbed at the calf and bled copiously into the sea. He was rushed away to hospital. I don't know if he survived. So swimming on Mogadisciu's town beaches was off limits. The Soviets, guests of Siad Barre, were to blame. with typically manic disregard ...

 The Frankfurt branch of Bernard Moteurs Richard was very charming and sociable, he always had been.  That's how he met Granny. He went to the theatre where Heini was acting. He went backstage and then invited the whole cast to a good restaurant in Frankfurt. Lisa in Frankfurt in the early 1930s Richard lived for four years based in Frankfurt until 1935 working for the German branch of Bernard Moteurs. Heini and Granny were inseparable twins. Though granny had been training and then working as a seamstress for 5 years since the age of 19, she was always out with her brother and his friends at the theatre. Because of her beauty, kindness and joi de vivre, she was very popular. In fact she was approached by a Hollywood agent, Harry Piel, also a prolific actor. Perhaps Harry was being serious, perhaps he was trying to seduce Lisa, but certainly Lisa dreamed a little of a career in Hollywood. She accompanied her brother to the resta...

Richard and Lisa's friends on their way to the USA and the UK, Mom in the centre, Else smiling on the right was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 From 1936 to 1939 friends of Lisa and Richard flowed through their Paris apartment on their way to the the safety of the UK, the USA, Canada and further afield. Most of them were rather wretched, having suffered different degrees of persecution in Germany, Austria and the Balkans. Richard's older brother Arthur and his wife Flora left too. They went to Israel where Arthur continued to work as a journalist. Arthur and Flora did not leave only out of a sense of self preservation. Arthur's father had supported the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Monarchy; partly because the emperor had resisted anti-semitism and allowed ambitious, young, nominally Jewish boys like him to enter the Staat Gymnasia and assimilate; partly because he loved Vienna one of the great cul...

Mom's handwriting: This is our front lawn. The bush on the left is a "moonflower bush." 

Photos of Eve Hall taken in Matumi by Tony Hall

   

   

They were both working for Oxfam and writing for the Guardian and Times and other UK newspapers on the famine in Maharashtra. The picture looks like it was taken at a feeding centre.

I suppose I've been a fan of Captain Beefheart for 35 years. I listened to him for the first time at Mike and Dallis's house at the Lido in 1974 and then I bought a copy of Trout Mask Replica in India. The covers of LPs in India were made from thick card, sometimes the records didn't even come with a plastic sleeve. When you have few records you play them over and over and you mine them for all the meaning you can find. All too often, I used to discover only gravel under the shallow top layer of rhythm and melody. But with Captain Beefheart I could dig deep and when I had gone as deep as I could into the music of Trout Mask Replica I would find nothing artificial, only more black loam. Dachau Blues Old Fart at Play Veteran's Day Poppy Pachuco Cadaver Fallin' Ditch Dali's Car China Pig My Human Gets me Blues Ella Guru Bill's Corpse Neon Meat Dream of a Octofish Hobo Cha Ba Steal Softly through Snow Hair Pie The Blimp Swee...