Read, Watch and Listen

A Wise Old Man by Kamengeri's Rock

“Someone told the King that Kamengeri was exchanging goats. The King called him to his palace and said: ‘If you were me and someone betrayed you, what would you do?’

Kamengeri replied: ‘I would tell the people to heat a rock with wood until it becomes red. And then I would burn that person.’ ‘Well’, said the King…

It took one month to make the rock glow red with heat.”

A Wise Old Man by Kamengeri's Rock

“My grandfather told me this story when I was ten years old, surrounded by children like I am today. My grandfather was among the guardians of the king. His father knew Kamengeri.

Now I am 84 years old and a survivor of genocide. I have many grandchildren and some of them also have children.”

A. Michael Noll

A. Michael Noll 1949-

Computer Composition with Lines

1964

Photograph

Museum number: E.35-2011

This is a photographic print of a computer-generated image created by A. Michael Noll in 1964, at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey. The artist has stated that "This work closely mimics the painting ‘Composition with Lines’ by Piet Mondrian. When reproductions of both works were shown to 100 people, the majority preferred the computer version and believed it was done by Mondrian."

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Adaptation

D. H. Lawrence, adapted by Hunt Emerson, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Knockabout Publications, 1986). It’s not surprising that Hunt Emerson chose to adapt D. H. Lawrence’s controversial novel: frank depictions of sex were ubiquitous in the underground comix of the 1970s, the milieu in which Emerson came to prominence. But this comic’s visualisation of the 1920s inhales deeply the class politics of a later period in history: Lord Chatterley, after all, is a mine owner, and this adaptation brings to Lawrence’s text a political sensibility forged in the miners’ strikes of 1984-85. Showing his own allegiances, Emerson inserted anachronistic details into the text, such as 1980s badges supporting the National Union of Mineworkers pinned to a tree in the woods. The Cartoon Strip Lady Chatterley’s Lover © 1986 Knockabout Publications

Aerial view of the Bund, 1927

The same year and source: the riverside ‘Bund’, and wide Avenue Edward VII which marked the boundary of the International Settlement, top and the French concession, to the left. The crowded river and the meteorological signal tower remind us that Shanghai was a city on and of the water, a key point in global maritime networks; the imported cars on the streets exemplify its ostentatious modernity. The War Memorial, facing the end of Ave Edward VII locates foreign Shanghai in the European world, but the Shanghai Club, the second building north along the Bund places it in the British orbit, for this was the informal headquarters of the British presence.

Afghanistan

James Nachtwey photographed detainees held by the Afghan authorities like the man in this photo. Sasha, an ICRC interpreter based in Kabul, accompanied him. Afterwards, Sasha spoke of what he had learnt:

"I discovered that many of them had held on to their sense of themselves, that they had emerged intact from some very difficult situations. Sometimes, I ask myself: 'In a situation like theirs, would I have done as well?' How they managed to preserve their dignity: this is the astonishing thing for me."