Life can be boring sometimes. Luckily, there’s a new internet craze going around to keep you entertained: Dog Cheese! Dog Cheese is an exciting activity that Twitter can’t get enough of. It involves throwing cheese on a dog and, well… that’s it. Dog Cheese! But Dog Cheese is so much more than throwing cheese on a dog. Okay, it’s not, but people are seriously enjoying it. The game started when Matthew Elias, a Twitter user from Ontario, took his love of “throwing cheese at stuff and laughing about it” to the next level, telling BuzzFeed News that he eventually threw a slice of cheddar at his dog to see if the canine could catch it. It didn’t really work:
But like a dog unaware of the cheese sticking to its fur, Elias had no idea his mindless activity was about to birth an internet-wide movement:
Dog Cheese was a hit. Within a matter of days, it experienced a full Twitter evolution. Dog Cheese became Cat Tortilla; then Iguana Cheese; then, in a disturbing, Soylent Green-esque twist… Bro Cheese:
It’s only a matter of time before this escalates to Artificial Intelligence Cheese, Post-Apocalyptic Mutant Cheese, and Inter-dimensional Alien Overlord Cheese. So, better stock up on those Kraft singles now. [Image via Twitter.] Source: http://allofbeer.com/dog-cheese-is-the-new-game-taking-twitter-by-storm-perez-hilton/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/12/27/dog-cheese-is-the-new-game-taking-twitter-by-storm-perez-hilton/
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If there’s any sort of running theme among the year’s biggest pop culture fails, it’s a mind-boggling lack of self-awareness. The biggest entertainment disasters were born out of a clusterfuck of delusion, hubris, apathy, and, in most cases, an almost unforgivable deafness to the conversations defining this moment in our culture. So while we’ve spent much of this last month cheering the outputthat challenged, invigorated, and, of course, entertained us this year, let us also grand marshal this parade of shame—in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, there will be lessons learned heading into next year. Here are 15 flops from the past year, be it commercial bombs or tone-deaf cultural grenades, from the worlds of music, TV, movies, and celebrity culture. Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi commercial The solution to institutionalized racism, millennial apathy, police brutality, and Trump-era anger? A nice cold Pepsi, and a tangential Kardashian to deliver it. The message of the resistance-themed Pepsi commercial was so laughably obtuse and reductive, and the reaction so brutally eviscerating, that the company immediately removed it from the internet and actually apologized to Jenner for its misguided creative direction. Seriously, though: Think of the sheer number of people who had to OK this ad before it was released. It’s mind-boggling. Sean Spicer at the Emmys Notoriously cowering former White House press secretary Sean Spicer finally embraced the spotlight at the 2017 Emmy Awards, making a cameo appearance during host Stephen Colbert’s monologue ruthlessly attacking President Trump. Spicer giggled and soaked up the attention and applause, an ovation for a public figure who lived out his short tenure in relentless disgrace and disgust, cheering him for “gamely” participating in the roasting of his former boss. But for many viewers, the booking of Spicer was a shameless absolution of a man who was toothlessly complicit in spreading lies by the Trump administration to the American people; the worst example of the entertainment industry’s instinct to bend any moral for a cheap laugh. “As a father of daughters…” This entire recap of the year’s disasters could be populated with the horrifying misconduct of the litany of Bad Men exposed this year—from Harvey Weinstein to Kevin Spacey and beyond—and the ways in which various institutions mishandled the behavior and fallout. No reactions to these revelations were more infuriating than the famous male figures, ranging from Matt Damon to Ben Affleck to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who clarified that they were horrified because they are fathers who have daughters. It’s a sign of how clueless men are and have been in processing these scandals and the nature of this predatory and misogynistic culture. As Hunter Harris perfectly wrote in Vulture, “Only a sociopath needs a daughter—or a sister, a girlfriend, a wife, or even just a lady standing in front of him at Starbucks—to make him queasy enough at the thought of a sexual predator in his industry to do something about it.” Mariah Carey at New Year’s Eve Maybe it was a simple mistake made in a very public forum. Maybe it was an ominous warning of the year that was to come. Nonetheless, Mariah Carey’s interminable avalanche of live disasters during the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve telecast was excruciating to watch. One of the greatest singers of all-time standing on stage pissed off, first saying she couldn’t hear a backing track to sing along to, then not bothering to lip sync the next song before storming off. It was an inauspicious way to start the new year, especially when you consider the optics of it: a woman helpless as the world, albeit in this case just the Times Square stage, burned around her, then vilified for refusing to smile through the carnage. The fallout was hardly handled elegantly with Carey’s team and the production company engaging in a public she-said-they-said over who was to blame. The launch of Megyn Kelly Today At Fox News, Megyn Kelly was a marketable if polarizing star presence, known for her prosecutorial manner in lines of tough questioning—always admirable, even if you didn’t necessarily agree with the direction. NBC found it admirable enough to spend $15 million to woo her away from the cable news network, rearranging its entire morning news lineup to launch a full hour of Kelly-led programming. Confusingly, however, it eschewed the attributes that made Kelly so popular at Fox. Instead, a manufactured, awkwardly fitting personality emerged that was crucified by critics at each tonal whiplash segment transition, especially during painful interviews with liberal celebrities who couldn’t bother to hide their disdain for the host. La La Land Oscars gaffe The phrase “Oscars mistake” is typically employed to groan about a film voters crown Best Picture that critics or fans don’t necessarily think deserved it, not for a situation in which the literal wrong winner is announced. That a gaffe both so monumental and so careless happened at the 2017 Academy Awards—Warren Beatty was handed the wrong envelope and, confused, announced La La Land as Best Picture instead of Moonlight—is already excruciating and embarrassing. But, again, the optics of it all make everything worse. The La La Land team had to cede the stage after the gaffe was clarified, about as awkward a moment as an award show can produce. But the filmmakers behind Moonlight, a film about the marginalized black and gay experience, were denied the emotion that comes from a watershed cultural moment like winning Best Picture, and the chaos overshadowed the power of the moment, let alone their speeches. While it was deserved to a measure, the amount of attention given to the La La Land team’s graciousness after the mistake only further magnified how problematic the incident was. Marvel’s Inhumans It’s bad enough when the phrase “worst thing Marvel has done” is used to describe your new TV show, as it was for ABC’s fall foray into the Marvelverse. But the launch of Inhumans became more dire in light of the investment made in the series and its hubris in assuming audiences would consume it anyway, despite its middling quality, just because it’s Marvel. The big-budget bet included a release in IMAX theaters of its first two episodes ahead of its ABC launch, a theatrical run that garnered a pitiful $2.9 million. Matt Damon It’s been quite the year for Matt Damon, who needs to fire any publicist whose advice isn’t simply, “Stop talking.” His response to the Weinstein scandal has been disastrous bordering on offensive, with the actor running out of feet to put in his mouth as he attempted to add nuance to the conversation but instead came off as defending bad men’s behavior. But even if you reluctantly put all that aside, the films he was promoting during those calamitous interviews, Suburbicon and Downsizing, have underperformed at the box office and divided critics. All that on top of the way he kicked the year off: in a riotously silly man-bun white savior-ing Chinese history in the epic box office bomb The Great Wall. Louis C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy In September, Louis C.K. premiered I Love You, Daddy at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s a film in which C.K.’s protagonist, Glen, in a very Woody Allen-ish plot, has a 17-year-old daughter who enters a relationship with a 60-something man who is a legendary filmmaker. In one scene, a character played by Charlie Day vigorously mimes masturbation, not bothering to stop when a female producer, used to such things, enters the room. What was purposefully provocative in the film now borders on lunacy after The New York Times confirmed an industry open secret: that Louis C.K. had masturbated in front of upcoming female comedians. Suffice it to say that I Love You, Daddy’s theatrical release was canceled. Kathy Griffin’s Trump mask fiasco When Kathy Griffin was made aware of how ghastly and in poor taste the photo of her holding a bloodied, decapitated Trump head was—which happened instantly—she apologized for the offense. But few celebrity controversies have spiraled this out of control this quickly. Griffin was immediately let go from nearly every entertainment job she held, and, in response, she staged a misguided press conference in which she alleged that the Trump family was targeting her. It’s a classic case in disastrous damage control, but it shouldn’t have damned Griffin the way it has. It certainly says a lot about the latent misogyny in the industry that, as recent months have brought to light, famous men are guilty of truly horrific behavior that for so long was excused—yet an atoning Griffin still can’t get representation or a footing back into the industry she made her name in. The one good to come of this: Griffin’s fed up with all of it, too, and she’s naming names. Fyre Festival The best thing to happen to Coachella’s reputation is the worst thing to have happened to the hoodwinked revelers who shelled out upwards of $250,000 for a luxurious VIP concert experience on a private island in the Bahamas. Rich kids arrived only for it to instead resemble, as one fooled attendee attested, a refugee camp. The entire thing was organized by rapper Ja Rule and out-of-his-element entrepreneur bro Billy McFarland under false pretenses, with no infrastructure in place to support, house, or feed the thousands of concertgoers who paid premium prices only to be met with an unfinished tent village, packs of feral dogs, mountains of trash, no-show artists, and not enough food to go around. A breaking point for the increased lunacy surrounding the culture of music festivals, or merely a cautionary tale for how not to ruin the next one? Tulip Fever Maybe it’s schadenfreude that Harvey Weinstein’s swan song as a Hollywood mogul included this long-gestating, notorious disaster of a period film, riddled with false starts and re-castings and shuffled release dates and, most notably, Harvey Weinstein’s constant tinkering. Perhaps the lowest moment in the botched release of the film, which starred Dane DeHaan and Alicia Vikander and earned a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 9 percent, was when Weinstein himself penned an essay defending it, citing the fact that Vikander’s mother’s friend called her to say she enjoyed the movie as evidence. Kid Rock’s “Senate run” The music industry’s resident American Jackass dialed up his reign of terror this year with the threat of a Senate run, to be launched on his tried-and-true values of cheap beer and racism. In the end, it was nothing more than a barely veiled publicity stunt. Nonetheless, breathless headlines blared the preposterous idea, and, considering the trajectory to public office mapped out by Donald Trump, seriously considered it. Of course, we can hardly fault anyone for, against their better judgement, giving credence to the nonsense that Kid Rock says. We still can’t get over his bigoted use of “gay” as a pejorative—let alone his embrace of the Confederate flag. Baywatch vs. Rotten Tomatoes A bad movie is a bad movie. That’s fine and inevitable, and Baywatch was a bad movie. But shining a spotlight on this turd in particular came reports of industry insiders pissed that critical reviews decimated the movie’s box office haul, as well as that of the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It’s not the fact that these movies were shit you could smell from miles away that made audiences not want to buy tickets. It’s Rotten Tomatoes! If you ever want to know how little Hollywood studios think of you, the audience, just read this quote: “The critic aggregation site increasingly is slowing down the potential business of popcorn movies. Pirates 5 and Baywatch aren’t built for critics but rather general audiences, and once upon a time these types of films—a family adventure and a raunchy R-rated comedy—were critic-proof.” The Mummy and the Dark Universe Tom Cruise’s The Mummy wasn’t just supposed to be a franchise reboot cash-grab using a familiar property and a big Hollywood star. It was supposed to launch an entire shared cinematic universe, dubbed the “Dark Universe,” for Universal, filled with monsters including Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein, and Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, as well as Sofia Boutella’s Ahmanet from The Mummy. It was a whole big plan. They all posed for a photo together and everything! But following disastrous box office returns for The Mummy, not to mention abysmal reviews, plans for the interconnected Dark Universe, at least as far as they were in motion, were scrapped and its architects, producer-writers Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan, jumped ship for other projects. from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/12/27/15-biggest-pop-culture-disasters-of-2017-kendall-jenner-megyn-kelly-the-oscars-more/ These days it seems like $1 really doesnt get you much. Maybe a pack of gum or a scratch-off lottery ticket you hope will net you at least $2. Profit! Butthe people at BuzzFeed asked their communitywhat kind of food $1 can buy in their country for the equivalent of $1 in America currency. After all, it alwayscomes back to food, and you know if you had extra money you would totally buy the name brand cereal even when it wasnt on sale. But if you have an extra dollar, check out what grub you could get around the world. Take it with a grain of saltsome of the choices are kind of weirdbut the differences are pretty staggering. 6 Shanghai 8 vegetable dumplings from a food stand11 Czech Republic one and a half bottles of beer16 Colombia three empanadas21 Poland one shot at a bar26 Uruguay one liter of bagged milk
Via: BuzzFeed
What would you spend your $1 on if we created our own list? Source: http://allofbeer.com/this-is-what-1-will-buy-you-to-eat-around-the-world/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/12/27/this-is-what-1-will-buy-you-to-eat-around-the-world/ A decade ago Amsterdam pumped money into tourism to recover from the global financial crisis but even as the city bans beer bikes can it be saved from a monster industry of its own making? Last weekend, Els Iping caught a group of male tourists ripping out the shrub in front of her house in the centre of Amsterdam. They were wearing pink dresses and they were very drunk. “These kind of things happen all the time,” she says matter-of-factly. “It’s worse when they throw up in your plant boxes, because you can’t rinse it away– you have to scoop it out.” Over the last 10 years, Iping – a 64-year-old, stylishly dressed consultant – has witnessed her picturesque neighbourhood change due to an unparalleled growth in the number of visitors. “Every day throngs of tourists pass by my window. The weekend now starts on Thursday afternoon; the screaming and shouting of tourists boozing it up is deafening. And the rubbish they leave behind!” As she speaks, as though on cue, a group of 30 tourists gathers in front of her window to listen to the lengthy spiel of their tour guide. “The atmosphere in the neighbourhood is very different now,” Iping continues. “Shops for local people have been replaced by shops that cater solely to tourists. It makes you feel like a visitor in your own neighbourhood. Even the tourists have started to complain now – because all they get to see is other tourists.” Amsterdam is by no means the only European city where locals suffer from growing numbers of visitors. This summer, residents of Venice and Barcelona fiercely protested against the negative impact of mass tourism on local life. Many popular tourist cities are seriously trying to tackle the problem, but the Dutch capital is establishing itself as a forerunner among them. Source: http://allofbeer.com/amsterdammers-v-tourists-its-worst-when-they-throw-up-in-your-plant-box/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/12/27/amsterdammers-v-tourists-its-worst-when-they-throw-up-in-your-plant-box/ Any British prime minister would want Boris Johnson inside the tent pissing out, not pissing in. The trouble for Theresa May has been that he was pissing in from inside. Johnson is the most unscrupulously ambitious politician Britain has seen in generations. Now, by resigning as foreign secretary, he has chosen his moment to strike at the very wobbly edifice of May’s government as she tries to impose her vision of Brexit on her cabinet. Since the true scale of the self-harm involved in a full-blown version of Brexit has become apparent, May has been desperately trying to pull back to what is euphemistically called a “soft” Brexit in which the essential commerce between Europe and the U.K. remains relatively undisrupted. Johnson has always been the face of ultra-Brexit, pushing the delusional idea that Britain can revert to some fanciful independent glory of the past. Whether he actually ever believed in this tosh is unclear. His whole blond-capped persona has been carefully modeled on an impersonation of the historical giant he fancies that he follows, Winston Churchill. This is not the real Churchill, who was instinctively pro-European and had learned from his wartime experience that a down-sized Britain could flourish only through alliances, principally with the U.S. and a free Europe. No, Johnson’s Churchill was an imperial supremacist (Churchill’s weak spot was his reluctance to cede independence to India) and Little Englander. This enabled Johnson to sell himself as the logical catalyst for a slew of resentments that surfaced in the Brexit movement, most of them related to immigrants. Until then he had shown few signs of xenophobia. As mayor of London he had presided over Europe’s largest city as it became a model of multiracial evolution. Anyone watching the spectacular opening night of the 2012 London Olympics, with a surrogate Queen dropping into the arena with James Bond, could not have sensed that this great multi-cultural pageant concealed a seething pit of racism. Apparently, Johnson did. And decided to ignore the stench and, instead, exploit it. The first and most effective peddler of the anti-immigrant toxins was a deceivingly clownish figure named Nigel Farage. He was usually seen clutching a pint of beer and grinning inanely as he worked up primitive prejudices in his audiences, composed mostly of members of his United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP. Farage—who, for a while, was a pushy camp-follower during the Trump campaign—was noisy but politically incompetent, unable to protect the leadership of his party against the inroads of more lunatic fringes. In contrast, Johnson was truly a career politician, both as a journalist and as a member of Parliament, and once he appropriated Farage’s message, albeit with more subtlety, and fed it into the receptive ears of the Tory party’s permanently disgruntled right wing he realized that he’d acquired a constituency of his own that he might just be able to ride to 10 Downing Street. His ability to make this move reveals both Johnson’s instinctive strengths and his flaws. He was always a dissembler, able to shift shape and voice to the mood and opportunities of the moment. As mayor of London he acquired proprietorial ego. Everything was a Boris brand—from the Boris Bikes that he promoted as personal transport via rental stations all over the city to a fanciful conceit called the new Boris Airport, a replacement for Heathrow sited improbably on an island in the Thames Estuary. The flaw that went with the hoopla and self-promotion was a neglect of actual day-to-day application to the job. He took the credit for what was most often good staff work. Together with this went an incontinent love of personal publicity. Quite often, it left the impression of an egotistical buffoon. In fact, the term buffoon stuck to him to a degree that, in a strange way, it served as cover for the truly ruthless and unprincipled political schemer he had become. There’s been a continuing commentary during his time as foreign secretary that he was terrible at the job, as he more or less told the European Union’s leadership that they had to swallow Brexit on his terms, not theirs, because they needed the U.K. more than the U.K. needed them. This naked ultra-Brexit behavior undermined May’s negotiating position from the start—not that she was particularly coherent. Then, lately, Johnson astounded leading British industrialists, who were growing increasingly alarmed by the absence of any post-Brexit design that enabled them to plan more than a few months ahead, by blurting out “Fuck business” as a response to their concerns. Johnson was revealed as totally illiterate in the basic functions of international business. Some of Britain’s most advanced companies are inextricably linked with partners in both the U.S. and Europe. In aerospace, for example, Britain is a key partner in Airbus. Elaborate cross-border supply chains depend on the very freedom of commerce that Johnson’s ultra-Brexit would destroy. The head of Airbus warned that if Johnson had his way Britain would most likely lose its role in making all the wings for Airbus jets—a devastating loss of both business and prestige. The Indian owners of the thriving Jaguar-Land Rover brands similarly warned that ultra-Brexit would force them to close British plants and move production to Europe. Brexit could end up becoming the single greatest destroyer of the inherent worth of the British economy. Instead of restoring some atavistic self-confidence in the country, Johnson, if he succeeds in his intent to bring down May and replace her, will be revealed as the real architect of that catastrophe. Source: http://allofbeer.com/how-boris-johnsons-ruthless-ambition-could-topple-theresa-may/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/12/27/how-boris-johnsons-ruthless-ambition-could-topple-theresa-may/ Were you too busy pretending you like beer and trying to figure out how to get out of your romper to pee at Stagecoach this weekend to keep up on the news? No worries, weve got you covered, betch. Heres what you missed this weekend.
Amy Schumer is not having your bullshit. The funny lady criticized an overzealous fan this weekend for badgering/harassing her into taking a photo on a Greenville sidewalk. I say overzealous fan, but I really mean that this dude was probably being an ass hat. You can read up on all the drama and figure out the whole story for yourself on Schumers Twitter, Instagram, and, incidentally, this website. #IDontFuckWithYou
Justin Beiber cut his hair and somehow looks more feminine. Nothing is worse than those terrible dreads he was trying to pull off, but Im not in love with the buzz. #BuzzcutSeason With the clusterfuck surrounding the Presidential Election, our current president is proving hes still a total G. The White House released a video of President Obama, Vice President Biden and the First Lady having some end-of-term shits and giggles. Its actually pretty entertaining. #MyPresident Source: http://allofbeer.com/heres-everything-you-missed-on-social-media-over-the-weekend/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/12/26/heres-everything-you-missed-on-social-media-over-the-weekend/ A Jerusalem brewery has produced a craft beer with a taste it says dates back to the time of Jesus. A sip of the concoction may help explain why wine was the preferred sacred drink of the Bible. Herzl Brewery, Israel’s smallest, took wheat that Tel Aviv University geneticists say was the strain used for beer in the Holy Land two millennia ago to produce 20 liters (five gallons) of “biblical beer.”
Ronen Zvulun / Reuters
There’s a hint of honey and berries in the cloudy – and flat – nectar, which has a three percent alcohol content. The brewery made it from 5 kilos (11 pounds) of grain donated by the university, along with the other traditional ingredients hops, yeast and water. Herzl’s owner Itai Gutman and his friends have downed most of the results of the six-month experiment. Only one bottle remains and there are no plans to make more.
Ronen Zvulun / Reuters
“We were curious about being able to come up with the first ‘biblical’ beer,” said Gutman, whose award-winning brewery produces five contemporary labels for sale. “It’s really not the kind of flavor that has a market.” Wine is the sacred beverage for both Judaism and Christianity, is frequently mentioned in their scriptures and figures to this day in their religious practice. But beer likely would also have been familiar to Jesus and his disciples. It was brought over from Egypt by the ancient Israelites, according to the Jewish Museum in Munich, which is taking part in 500th anniversary celebrations of the Bavarian Beer Purity Law that regulated Germany’s brewing industry. Source: http://allofbeer.com/jerusalem-brewery-recreates-beer-with-a-taste-jesus-might-have-known/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/12/26/jerusalem-brewery-recreates-beer-with-a-taste-jesus-might-have-known/ In the first part of our exclusive interview with Ed Sheeran, the singer talked about writing 10 different versions of his third album, (Divide), and revealed he had a song “better than Thinking Out Loud”. In this, the second part, we delve deeper, using (Divide)’s song titles as the jumping off point for a series of random, but revealing questions. So, if you want to know how he burned his foot on a volcano, what he bought his girlfriend for Christmas, or when Taylor Swift’s new album is coming out, read on. Track one: EraserYou erased yourself from social media last year. Was that for peace of mind? My mind was definitely more settled. I didn’t have as much anxiety, because I didn’t have as many people wanting things from me. Or I wasn’t aware of the people who wanted things from me. Also, I started having conversations with people, rather than just going into my phone. Is it true you got rid of your phone completely? I don’t have one at all. It’s amazing. I was at a house party the other day and 50% of the people were either Snapchatting or watching Snapchat. Someone said: “Why don’t you have a phone any more?” and I was like: “Look around you. This is exactly why I don’t have a phone.” Track two: Castle On The HillNow that you can afford to live in a castle, how do you make your songs relatable to fans? It doesn’t matter how relevant they are. My song Don’t isn’t very relevant to my fans. They aren’t going to “four cities on two planes on the same day”. But the truth of the song is the frustration and anger [of being cheated on]. Everyone can relate to that. So the key is truth. Just be honest. On your last album, you sang about watching Blue Planet. Did you catch Planet Earth II? I was a massive fan of Planet Earth II. I was actually saying we should put David Attenborough in bubble wrap for 2017, because we can’t lose another legend. Whose death affected you most last year? The George Michael thing really took me by surprise, because he was so young. He’s younger than my dad. I had a party for New Year, and people played George Michael tunes the whole night. It was amazing to see how many people were made happy by his music. He really did affect a lot of people in a positive way, and it’s just so, so sad for someone like that to go so young. Track three: DiveYou burst your eardrum diving off a yacht two years ago. Were you worried it would affect your career? Well, I was born without an eardrum in that ear. I got it replaced when I was 11, then I burst it when I was 18 and again I was 24. It’s actually quite a common thing, so I wasn’t worried. I only have about 25% hearing in that ear anyway. Track four: Shape Of YouWhat are the best and worst diet tips you’ve been given? I was hanging out with a model ages ago, and she used to dip cotton wool balls in diet Pepsi and that would be her meal for the day. That’s a bad diet tip. The best tip is to eat what you want and exercise every day. It doesn’t have to be a lot of exercise. Just keep your metabolism up. What’s your poison? Beer is my biggest poison because beer puts on the most weight, and I can really guzzle beer. But now I tend to have one beer then move to spirits, rather than drinking beer all night. Is that better for hangovers? Well, my hangovers are quite bad. I find if you smoke cigarettes, your hangovers are horrendous. A friend of mine swears you can avoid a hangover by drinking two cups of tea before you go to bed. Yeah. I’ve been told to down a pint of water before you go to bed, and then you’ll feel fine. Apparently, flat Sprite in the morning is a good cure too. Track five: PerfectWhat is the perfect song? Something that makes you feel – whether it be happy or sad or whatever. I heard George Benson’s Give Me The Night the other day, and it just made me smile and want to dance. The best songs of last year are the ones that came on the radio and you’re like: “Yes, yeah.” You never want to hear a song that makes you go: “Nyeh, that’s all right.” Track six: Galway GirlGalway’s called the “city of tribes”. What’s your tribe? Suffolk folk – we’re quite easy going, we all own bicycles and we like our ale. Is that song a cover of the Steve Earle classic? No, it’s an original. I actually tried to find another lyric. I did Wexford Girl and Clonakity Girl and Cork Girl… none of them worked. But the whole point of folk songs is taking inspiration from the past and making something new – so people will just have to deal with it. Track seven: HappierWhat’s currently making you happy? Or sad, for that matter. I’ll tell you what’s making me happy-sad: my cats. They’ve got flu, but they’re just really cute. When they sneeze, that’s a happy-sadness. It’s like “Aah,” but also “Ugh.” Track eight: Hearts Don’t Break Around HereWhat’s the worst injury you’ve ever had? I put my foot in a boiling pool of water when I was up a volcano. That was pretty bad… but when you asked that, my hand started twitching – so maybe it’s that. What happened? I smashed a bottle of beer into my hand and got 12 stitches before a gig. Then I played the gig and split them open again while playing. It almost hit a tendon and meant I wouldn’t be able to use this hand to play guitar. So, yeah, that was the worst injury I’ve had. I’m actually getting a bit twitchy thinking about it. Track nine: New ManHave you ever advised a girl to dump her boyfriend because you had a crush on her? Probably, when I was 14. Not since then. Not when it’s been a serious relationship. Because I don’t really have much else to offer. I can’t be like: “You should leave your boyfriend,” and then disappear off on tour for four years. Given your lyrics, do people think you’re wise romantically? Do they ask for advice? I’m great at advice, yeah. I give the best advice. I just won’t always follow it. Track 10: What Do I KnowDo you read your own press? Yeah, all of it. At the beginning I got a bit upset, but you can’t sell 22 million albums, then read a review by one person and be like: “No-one likes me.” But I used to have a hit list. I remembered the people who didn’t help, and then if they asked: “Do you want to go on the cover of our magazine?” I’d be like: “Hell, no.” The list doesn’t really exist any more. It was just in the very early stage of my career. Track 11: How Would You Feel?What’s been the high point of the past five years? I think this year is going to be the high point. I have a feeling about it. Seventeen is my lucky number, and everyone I was scared of releasing of albums around me released them all last year – people like Beyonce and The Weekend and Bruno Mars. Taylor [Swift] isn’t going to be releasing until probably the end of this year – Christmas is the smartest time to release because that’s when everyone buys records. So I’ve got a full year of just all Ed, all the time. Track 12: Supermarket FlowersWhat’s the least romantic present you’ve ever bought? I bought my girlfriend a penknife for Christmas. Not romantic, but she wanted one. I got her a penknife, and she got me a Tech Deck – you know, those finger-sized skateboards you used to play with in school? So you listened to what she wanted and bought her it? That’s the definition of romantic. OK. Do you know what? I was watching the Bridget Jones movie, and they had that new Dyson hairdryer advert – and all the girls around me, all these mums and daughters, were going, “Oh, that looks great.” So I was like: “[clicks fingers] Sorted for Christmas.” So that’s probably the least romantic sentiment. Ed Sheeran’s new album, (Divide), is released on Friday, 3 March, by Atlantic Records. Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion, email [email protected]. Related TopicsSource: http://allofbeer.com/ed-sheeran-interview-12-random-questions-about-divide-bbc-news/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/ed-sheeran-interview-12-random-questions-about-divide-bbc-news/ There is nervousness among some supporters before World Cup opener but most feel welcomed England fans have started arriving in the Russian city of Volgograd before their team’s opening World Cup game on Monday and are abiding by strict warnings not to drape flags on second world war monuments. The city, formerly known as Stalingrad, is dominated by a statue known as the Motherland Calls, an 85-metre-tall sculpture of a woman raising a sword aloft, a memorial to the millions who died in the 1942-43 battle for the city. There are dozens of other monuments acknowledging the Russians who lost their lives during the Battle of Stalingrad scattered around the city. It had prompted concerns that England fans might provoke their hosts by hanging St George’s flags on them. British police have worked with the Football Supporters’ Federation to make supporters aware of sensitive sites and there was an excited but respectful atmosphere on the streets of Volgograd as fans from several countries mixed. Situated in the south of Russia, Volgograd was a closed city until the 1990s and there had been some uncertainty about how residents would respond to the expected 4,000 England fans who began to trickle in on Friday before their side’s opening match against Tunisia on Monday.
Some chose not to wear England shirts out of concern about attracting unwanted attention but most spoke of feeling welcomed by their hosts. One fan, who gave his name as Nobby Rob, from Cornwall, was proudly wearing his England shirt. “I flew via Riga in Latvia and Moscow to get here and mine is the only England shirt I’ve seen,” he said. “I think some others are a bit shy of wearing theirs but I’ve been all over the world watching England in it and didn’t want to stop now.” During Euro 2016 in France organised groups of Russians clashed with England fans on the streets of Marseille, with the violence tarnishing the tournament. “I got gassed in Marseille,” said Rob. “But I think Vladimir Putin doesn’t want it to kick off here so I think it will be all right.”
At the airport, volunteers handed out pamphlets welcoming visitors to Volgograd. It claimed a number of myths about the country had been allowed to take hold. “The Russians are kind, friendly and hospitable people, always ready to help,” it said. “We are the same people like you are. And no, Russians don’t drink vodka all the time.” When a delegation from the Football Association visited the city in February it was so cold the Volga had frozen over. But the mercury hit 34C (93F) on Friday as supporters sought shade at the Fifa Fan Fest, a public viewing site where every game will be shown on a giant screen. Ellis and Clark Leake-Lyall, brothers from Brighton, watched as Uruguay beat Egypt with a last-minute winner. “This is the first time we’ve been to watch England,” said Ellis. “You can’t help but be affected by all the negative stories about Russia but we’ve found everyone to be really friendly since we arrived.”
Source: http://allofbeer.com/i-think-itll-be-all-right-england-fans-begin-arriving-in-volgograd/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/i-think-itll-be-all-right-england-fans-begin-arriving-in-volgograd/ In the first of a special series on the impact of gentrification on cities around the world, Dan Hancox meets victims and beneficiaries of this highly emotive issue and finds that the anger is real, and resistance is coming to a head When Amal had stopped crying, she apologised. I wake up so sick, you know? I have to go to study but I feel so sick. A victim of domestic violence and now a single mother, she lives with her three young children in grimy temporary accommodation in Tooting, south London. She was telling me that Wandsworth council, which has a legal obligation to house the family, tried sending them to a rented flat on the outskirts of Newcastle, then suggested West Bromwich. Shed never heard of either place. I said to them, I already told you, I have a job interview in London, I am studying in London, my children are at school in London, my ex-husband visits every week to help with the children. West Bromwich, the council insisted, was her last chance. Otherwise she would be declared intentionally homeless, and be put out with her young children on the street. They said, just one option: West Bromwich. If I said no, they wouldnt give me another chance. This was one London councils response to the housing crisis to spend £5m on properties for their poorer families, hundreds of miles away, while across the borough, the Meccano scaffolds rose up for the £15bn development of Nine Elms, where most flats will cost more than £1m. The same year I met Amal, in 2014, on the other side of London the now notorious Focus E15 Mums were stepping up their campaign to remain in the city where theyd been born. Nine billion pounds on the Olympics and theyre telling us and our babies we have to go live in Hastings, lamented 19-year-old Adora Chilaisha during their occupation of East Thames housing association offices, as the hokey cokey played out in the background. Theres no way Im going anywhere, she said. My boy Desean is one, and I dont want him to grow up away from his family, from his home. I dont know anyone in Hastings. Two years later, both Amal and Adora and their children are still in London after a long and exhausting struggle against the authorities to simply stay where they are. Meanwhile, those same authorities prostrate themselves before luxury property developers, Chinese business conglomerates and buy-to-let rentiers. Gentrification is an intensely emotive issue with almost endless potential for argument. That shouldnt be in the least bit surprising it speaks to fundamental questions of home, identity and community, how those places define us, and how we define them. The process of displacement of societys poorest members is, of course, not a new thing. You can trace it back centuries, to a time when there was a literal gentry responsible for social cleansing; when the bailiffs were on horseback and artisanal was a descriptor of a pre-industrial social class, rather than vogueish hipster branding. Nonetheless, there is something of the zeitgeist about gentrification. Until a few years ago, only academic geographers and housing campaigners used the term. In recent years, however, the subject has entered the mainstream, and the word has become increasingly ubiquitous in what seems like almost every city across the world. But it is not only the debate that has intensified: opposition to gentrification is rapidly becoming less marginal, and more organised. While it is easy to locate historical rent strikes and neighbourhood uprisings to what you might call gentrification avant la lettre, for the first time, gentrification itself is a serious point of political contention and resistance. The tipping point in the UK came last autumn, when members of Class Wars so-called Fuck Parade, flaming torches in hand, daubed SCUM on the windows of east Londons quintessential hipster cafe, Cereal Killer. The restaurant was already castigated by Channel Four News for serving £4 bowls of cereal in a borough in which thousands of poor families cant afford to feed their children. Although several people, myself included, argued that the bearded cereal entrepreneurs were hardly gentrifications true villains, the news was reported around the world not just as a riot that launched a thousand hot takes, but as the expression of a rising tide of anger. The issue had leaped into the mainstream. Last month, the pre-Christmas episode of This American Life featured an astonishing segment about a San Francisco dad going to see his six-year-old daughter in her school play, and discovering that the entire show was a fierce polemic against the malign influence of tech companies making the city a sterile playground for the rich. The play culminates in a huge demonstration outside city hall, with the young children holding placards reading resistance = love of community and singing that the city is not for sale. So why now? The short answer is demand and supply: demand for well-positioned urban space is higher than ever, while the supply of housing options for the urban poor, and the strength and willingness of the state to provide them, is weaker than in decades. In urban policy, we are witnessing the triumph of the market and the capitulation of the state. If an area becomes desirable to those with money regardless if it was hitherto undesirable or dominated by public housing then sooner or later, the wealthy will get what they want. The problem, said Yolande Barthes from Savills estate agents at a Guardian Live debate last month, is the area of London that people want to live in hasnt expanded at the same rate as the population. As Londons affordable housing crisis deepens spurred by the collapse of new social housing construction, and the sale of hundreds of thousands more social flats under right-to-buy the galvanisation of the British capitals local communities has been astonishing. This customised Google Map, created by Action East End, drops pins on the map for each hyper-local campaign. From Save Chrisp Street Market in the east to Save Portobello Road Market in the west, the campaigns many formed only in the last year range from demands to protect existing social housing, to protests against new luxury flat developments or against the destruction of community assets such as much-loved markets, nurseries, pubs and small businesses. At the time of writing, there are 53 different campaigns. One is Reclaim Brixton, who formed in March 2015 in opposition to the rapidly accelerating gentrification of the south London area. Co-founder Cyndi Anafos mother used to run a Ghanaian grocery in the covered market that has recently been rebranded Brixton Village, a target destination for food tourists and wealthy Londoners. Via social media, Anafo and friends arranged meetings, leading to a carnival-cum-demonstration in Brixton town centre that drew thousands and attracted widespread national media attention. For about 20 years its been on the edge of gentrification, Anafo says. But the last five or six years its all come to the fore Reclaim Brixton came about chiefly through frustration. While the transformation of Brixton is visible in the proliferation of more expensive shops, bars and restaurants, and the influx of a non-resident, affluent demographic visiting places like Champagne + Fromage, Anafo is clear that the cultural and commercial changes are not the main event. It all comes down to housing, she says. Being a kind of accidental activist, and getting to know all the existing housing groups, made me realise the severity of the situation on the ground in Brixton, meeting people who are on eviction lists. People moan about particular types of businesses or shops, or estate agents like Foxtons, but my feeling is that rent stabilisation is something that could help everyone. Last June, Berlin made headlines when it began enforcing rent controls for all, limiting landlords to charging new tenants more than 10% above the local average. The previous year rents had gone up by more than 9%. We dont want a situation like in London or Paris, said Reiner Wild of the Berlin Tenants Association. Such strident legislation to protect poorer citizens does not just drop out of the sky, of course. It emerges from a history of equally robust civic campaigning on housing, gentrification and the right to the city. Nottingham University geographer Alex Vasudevan, author of a recent book on the subject, Metropolitan Preoccupations, says Berlin is in a sense diametrically different from London its a very poor city, where wages are one-third lower than its western German neighbours. In the wake of unification Berlin has seen waves of gentrification, while remaining very poor by German standards, says Vasudevan. Before the fall of the wall, there were subsidies given to squatters to renovate buildings, and they would be legalised as a result a kind of compromise. But that programme ended in 2002, and since the wall came down Berlin has become this laboratory of neoliberal urban governance. As in London, Vasudevan says, funding for social housing collapsed, and simultaneously thousands of what used to be social housing properties were privatised. Berlin tried to become a financial centre. It failed. So then they went with the whole creative city agenda, or at least a version of it, connected with touristification and this kind of Airbnb urbanism. Theres a great Aibrnb map of Kreuzberg: until recently there was only one property in that neighbourhood that was available on the normal rental market everything else was Airbnb. Grassroots resistance in Berlin has revolved mostly around very local geographies, such as saving one particular building, park, housing project, or even fighting the eviction of a much-loved Turkish grocery store. Nonetheless, Vasudevan explains that each victory has galvanised the city as a whole, and made gentrification even more of a common talking point than it is in London. The challenge now has been scaling up, making connections, and sharing information between neighbourhoods, and even internationally. Theyve managed to get the rent cap by just being incredibly well-organised, and absolutely dogged and they are also good at talking to each other. You have local working-class Germans who remained in Kreuzberg, and Turkish migrants collaborating; so everything is written in both German and Turkish, theyre all networked. Theyre also talking to the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) in Spain, the grassroots group whose phenomenal success of blocking thousands of evictions propelled its spokeswoman, Ada Colau, to become mayor of Barcelona. Spains housing crisis has been so destructive that the PAHs use of community self-organisation and support, and direct action to block evictions, has been copied across the world. Ive seen Spanish parents in tears in PAH meetings, being comforted by their foreign-born (often Latin American) neighbours, before rallying to take on the banks trying to evict them. Ive also seen Sí Se Puede, the PAH documentary, screened to housing activists in London. The international sharing of both tactics and inspiration highlights globalisations double-edged sword: property developers and investors may be operating simultaneously in Berlin, London and Barcelona, but the people resisting gentrification in these cities are beginning to network themselves, too. What remains to be seen is whether campaigning against gentrification will grow into any city-wide protests. Certainly, the G word has been tapped as the new culprit for a lot of urban tensions emerging from the influx of younger, whiter, wealthier people into city cores. After a yarn-bombing artist, with the support of the hipster Brooklyn Flea market, put up a 15ft crochet homage to Wes Anderson on the exterior wall of his family home in Bushwick without asking for permission, New Yorker Will Giron wrote: Gentrification has gotten to the point where every time I see a group of young white millennials in the hood my heart starts racing and a sense of anxiety starts falling over me. *** The argument that gentrification represents a kind of urban neocolonialism is hard to miss. Spike Lee made it clear with his viral rant against Christopher Columbus syndrome in Brooklyn. Indeed, after decades of white flight to the US suburbs, since 2010 American cities have seen increases in white populations. Protests in 2014 targeted Microsofts corporate shuttle buses in Seattle; not only did they raise rents, went the argument, they didnt integrate, adding to social tensions in a city where working-class African-Americans were being pushed out. That same year, a video went viral of (older, whiter) Dropbox employees trying to get rid of mostly Latino young people from a football pitch in San Franciscos Mission district. (The Latinos protested, and won.) It is surely the higher-profile, less sensitive invasions that get the headlines, but they speak to a deeper malaise of newly arriving communities with no interest in connecting with the existing populations they are displacing. Dont let the door hit you on the way out, they seem to say. Inevitably, the rise of anti-gentrification sentiment and action has provoked a counter-attack, either to defend the process or deny it exists. Critics of gentrification romanticise working-class poverty, goes the main line of argument. They hate change, and fetishise urban decrepitude. Dont you want the area to look nice? Dont you want poor people to have better lives? Giles Coren characterised anti-gentrifiers last year as middle-aged, middle-class dinosaurs who are determined to keep London shitty. Why? A mixture, he said, of aesthetics, nostalgia and condescension: Snobs [who] like the thought of people less well off than themselves scoffing rubbish [food], so they can keep on looking down at them for it. This shit but real versus polished but soulless dichotomy was borne out in Hackney in London in 2009, when the boroughs mayor, Jules Pipe, condemned opponents of regeneration for wanting to keep Hackney crap prompting a tongue-in-cheek campaign proposing to do exactly that. The sad irony is that local community groups calling for positive state intervention to regenerate a local area for example, to make a local park safer, improve litter collection or fix transport will often have to wait for the area to become more affluent and desirable before those changes will take place. And in a grim example of the law of unintended consequences, where urban communities dosucceed in changing their neighbourhood for the better, the result is often higher rents, more interest from developers, and the gradual displacement of the very people who forced those changes into being. Another argument used against anti-gentrification campaigns is that they are fighting a force of nature. Gentrification is a process as old as time itself, and you may as well just protest against the changing of the seasons. There is a tendency, as with anything, for older, more experienced commentators to take a puff on their pipe and remark, Oh you hot-heads, do you think any of this is new? This kind of response, while containing some truth, is often used to stifle action. This has all happened before carries with it an unstated corollary, … and is thus an organic, inevitable and inexorable process and, presumably, since we are both standing here today having this discussion, with all of our limbs intact, and roofs over our head, not an especially harmful one. It is true that the feared mass exodus of poorer residents from inner London since the Conservatives introduced the bedroom tax and benefit caps has not occurred. Anecdotal evidence from charities and food banks suggests many are staying, paying more rent and just getting poorer. But the numbers of those forced out are still increasing substantially. Many people who are placed in temporary accommodation in outer London and deal with some horrendous conditions, jars of bugs and all are travelling enormous distances to work or school. Perhaps the most dramatic single visualisation of how gentrification is changing our cities is this map of the displacement of former residents of Elephant & Castles substantial social housing project, the Heygate Estate. As the critic Jonathan Meades wrote in 2006: Privilege is centripetal. Want is centrifugal in the future, deprivation, crime and riots will be comfortably confined to outside the ring road. The architects of gentrification are extremely careful not to talk about it. Given the word was coined by a Marxist, and is most often used by opponents of the property industry, this is good common sense on their part. When in 2014 I was asked to interview a property developer about gentrification, I worked through seven or eight before I found one willing to return my calls. Though I was careful not to scare them off by uttering the G word, their PR departments were too good at obfuscating until someone at property giant Bouygues Development agreed to speak. Richard Fagg, deputy managing director, was neither hostile nor evasive, but still chose his words carefully. He denied that their building of expensive new blocks of flats would lead to any displacement. Instead, he suggested that poorer areas would benefit from becoming blended communities. In the poor parts of London where weve been working in the past, they have been and I use this term politely but they have been social enclaves, Fagg said. No one buys homes there, because your money will probably depreciate. But thats changing. So hopefully, the likes of where were working in Barking, people are taking their hard-earned cash, investing it in a mortgage, buying a property because there youre getting good capital growth over time in the future. Yes, its starting at a low base. But youre going to get good growth, because the whole area is changing. Its not gentrification. Its just becoming a more balancedcommunity. Fagg was not factually wrong about the demographic composition of London areas such as Barking, north Peckham or Elephant & Castle. In fact, many are concerned that whats happening to the Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle will become an example that is replicated in the years to come. As the 1950s and 1960s tower blocks reach the end of their life a decline hastened by years of disinvestment and failure to address poverty one popular development model says they should be demolished and replaced with mixed use developments. Social problems are supposedly reduced if you dont have enclaves. Simon Elmer from Architects for Social Housing points to Andrew Adoniss report City Villages: More Homes, Better Communities, which is the basis for Conservative housing plans, embodied in the housing bill currently going through parliament. The report recommends recategorising all social housing estates as brownfield land. In greater London, that amounts to 3,500 estates, 360,000 homes and more than one million people. The concern, says Elmer in a paper entitled The London Clearances, is that these ageing estates will be demolished and replaced with the same mix of luxury flats and affordable housing that have cropped up in Elephant Park, the new private development being built in place of the Heygate, and in which a two-bedroom flat will set you back £659,000. This past weekend David Cameron gave further shape to this plan when he announced a blitz on poverty, suggesting the demolition of sink estates in favour of more homes for private rent. The property industry, meanwhile, has become markedly more sophisticated in how it readies the ground for demographic transformation, by engineering the change in atmosphere that will draw in young creatives to a new area. (Again, the colonial language is always bubbling just under the surface.) Sometimes this is called place-making, and amounts to extravagant marketing exercises that seek to brand (or rebrand) an area, to follow in the footsteps of the advertising industry and sell not just a product, the bricks and mortar, but an entire aspirational lifestyle. We dont think its good enough to build a lovely flat, anyone can build a lovely flat anywhere, Fagg told me. From the very first moment, even before seeking planning permission, marketing is at the heart of your strategy. What are you offering over and above every London borough, every other developer? Particularly in London, when everyone is competing for your hard-earned capital to invest in their new location? In some cases, place-making has meant going to extraordinary lengths: in poor parts of Harlem, estate agents bought up vacant street-front commercial properties and opened four trendy coffee shops, in an unabashed attempt to instigate gentrification themselves. It isnt the most flashy cultural manifestations of gentrification, the cereal cafes and the hipster baristas, who are the most influential actors in this process. Indeed, they are a distraction from where the most important decisions are taken. It is often the less glamorous and headline-grabbing developments, such as the granting of planning permission, the cynical redefining of affordable housing to mean 80% of market rate (it used to be more like 50%), the payment of cash to struggling councils by developers wishing to avoid their legal section 106 requirement to build affordable housing, or the eviction of poor families with no access to the media, that go under the radar, and where the real pain of gentrification resides. Saying that, the cultural manifestations of gentrification do matter. It is partly about symbolism, about a change in atmosphere that tells poorer residents that, soon, they will no longer belong. Or, in areas with an explosion of attractive bars and clubs, it is about the behaviour of the new arrivals; where that sense of belonging is indirectly seized from poorer families by revellers, students and nightlife tourists who drunkenly smash their beer bottles on the pavement. A new independent boutique coffee shop may be benign in itself, but does it help usher in a new clientele to the area, even as a bridge-and-tunnel, just-visiting crowd? Will other hipster businesses follow suit? Will this surge lead to a buzz, to press coverage in newspapers aimed at middle-classes with the money to buy property, or help to entice buy-to-let landlords, property developer interest, and estate agents revaluation? Does this then entice bigger chain shops and cafes, lead to small businesses closing and rents rising? As the hugely telling place-making videos make abundantly clear, for the money-men, a proliferation of art galleries, hipsters and small independent businesses are a great sign. Indeed, for the sharper investors, by the time Starbucks arrives, youre already too late. *** Last year I saw standup comedian Liam Williams tell a joke which went broadly as follows: Everyones talking about gentrification at the moment, and I can understand why. But its a difficult one, isnt it? There are so many pros and cons. On the one hand, your local area is nicer, safer, cleaner, there are cool new shops and cafes and bars to go to. But on the downside, you have to feel guilty about it. It was delivered sardonically, undoubtedly tongue-in-cheek, but was also a useful pointer to white, liberal, middle-class feeling. It was also an unintended guide to what we talk about when we talk about gentrification that the filter for the media conversation remains depressingly narrow. The rise in volume of media coverage of gentrification in Britain has not been accompanied by a rise in awareness that minority citizens are more likely to be victims of displacement. The neighbourhoods on the receiving end of racial profiling and stop-and-search by police, or aggressive raids by border agents, are the same ones transforming into places ready to have the word village added to their name. For every story about the Focus E15 mums there have been two more along the lines of Im middle-class and even Im being pushed out of London. Hard though it clearly is for them to believe, gentrification is not about newspaper columnists who want a bigger garden having to move to zone three. It is about people like Maria, a single mum of three forced out of Westminster into damp, cold, asthma-inducing temporary accommodation in Haringey. Although she is pregnant and has back problems, when I met her Maria was taking her kids on the 90-minute, three-bus journey back to their school in Westminster every morning, just to retain a modicum of stability. She would then spend the day sitting, penniless, in Westfield shopping centre, to keep warm. At other times there is a risk of chauvinism and outright xenophobia. Anti-gentrification artist Gram Hilleard had his sardonic postcards featured in the Observer last year, and in an accompanying interview lamented that his family had been in the same area of London for the last 200 years, but now the indigenous Londoners have been moved out. Its not only suspect to talk about indigenous people in a major cosmopolitan city, its also a misunderstanding of what a city like London has always been. Today, more than 300 languages are spoken and 36.7% of the population were born overseas; the proportion of people who can claim their family have been in the same area of any major city for 200 years continuously must be microscopically small. Legitimate coverage of super-rich Qatari, Chinese or Emirati investors buying up high-end properties in London and then leaving them empty can easily be taken out of proportion, and spill over into the misguided notion that the problem is wealthy foreigners, not wealthy investors. But what about our plucky homegrown rentiers, not to mention those granting planning permission to luxury flats and hotels rather than concentrating on building genuinely affordable homes? Gentrification is a viscerally emotive subject. People take it incredibly personally. As the debate grows louder, fingers will be pointed wildly in every direction. I think I first noticed gentrification, before Id ever heard the word, when the branch of the discount supermarket Iceland in Balham, where I grew up in the 1980s, closed and was replaced by an organic supermarket called As Nature Intended. In my childhood, this part of London wasnt particularly one thing or the other; neither particularly posh nor poor, central but not that central, mixed by race and class and age, the kind of area that thrived precisely because it didnt have a particularly clear identity. A couple of years after the organic supermarket opened, I saw a property advert on the tube that had created annoying alliterative couplets out of different London place names. Balham was Bankers Balham. I have rarely felt so ashamed. But I also know that none of this is at all important, in the scheme of things that places change, and they should change, and getting a bit sentimental about the fact you cant go home again is part of growing up. The challenge for the citizens of the 21st century is to decouple this kind of personal sentiment from the generally unheard or ignored stories of displacement and suffering, from the resounding triumph of private profit in civic life over everything else trampling, in particular, the idea that shelter and the right to the city ought to be fundamental human rights. Gentrification is becoming one of the defining issues of our age. As rich and poor people alike continue to flock to cities like London, Berlin and San Francisco, either for work or a better quality of life, the controversies will only intensify and multiply. Apologists for gentrification can continue to pretend a city is a force of nature, and displacement of poor people from their homes just ripples on the tide, but the rising popular sentiment against social cleansing is not merely a fabrication of leftwing activists, academics or journalists. The anger is real, and the determination to resist is growing. Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook and join the discussion Source: http://allofbeer.com/gentrification-x-how-an-academic-argument-became-the-peoples-protest/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/gentrification-x-how-an-academic-argument-became-the-peoples-protest/ |
AuthorHi my name is Samantha Roberts I am 23 years old and I just graduated with my BSN degree I love to enjoy going out with friends on my spare time and enjoying the Bachelor life. Archives
April 2019
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