When I first heard Dean Atta’s “I Am Nobody’s Nigger” on Sound cloud last week. I was rocked to the core. Not because he was telling anything new, but because I’d never associated that word with being the last word Stephen Lawrence heard or the the last words my African ancestors sold as slaves heard [...]
This actress, writer and ex-slam poet has the charisma to go from a comedy turn on TV to the lead in a compelling drama documentary
Dazed and Confused photographer Amy Gwatkin, has spent two years taking pictures of naked men with bags over their heads. She says: “I felt that after two years I’d become disgusted and exhausted with nudity, sex, sexuality, exhibitionism and all that.” She has now delved further into her past to consider the embryonic beginnings of [...]
The issue of personal bankruptcy – core of the novel – is still something of a taboo theme in the western world. The question of whether bankruptcy is the ‘ultimate’ taboo of a materialist society is asked directly in the book . Yet bankruptcy laws have been changed (rather, heavily relaxed) over recent years to [...]
Angola 3 Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King, have spent almost a century between them in solitary confinement in Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Herman and Albert are still held in solitary confinement today after thirty eight years. How could this be? In America…In Obama’s America? The film will be followed by a discussion [...]
An anthology of writings from Hackney residents is in the making and will be published in July 2011. The organizers are looking for original and differing perspectives from people who live in the borough, with a focus on airing the voices of those involved in the various subcultures and communities that are unrepresented in fiction [...]
Nine Hackney Based Photographers over 1 Weekend Friday 6.30-9.30pm Saturday & Sunday 11.00-6.00pm www.bradburysgallery.co.uk
A brief history In 1966 Dalston resident Newton Dunbar, founded what was to become the iconic Four Aces Club on Dalston Lane. Known as a venue for Reggae, Ska, Soul and Dub music, it hosted musicians such as Desmond Decker, Jimmy Cliff, Count Shelly, Ann Peebles, Percy Sledge, Ben E King and Billy Ocean. The [...]
It’s a cold Friday night on Clarence Road, and while most people are drowning the week’s sorrows in their local watering hole, a large crowd of people have congregated at the celebrated vegan café and social centre, the Pogo, for a night of spoken word and poetry, entitled ‘The Spoken Sedition’. Run by Stoke Newington [...]
Stoke Newington resident and first time author Jonathan Kemp, will be reading from his recently published London Triptych, which we reviewed this summer. London Triptych is an intriguing look at the homosexual experience through the prism of male prostitution over the past 100 years. Episodic in structure, it flits between the lives of three men [...]