I really like thinking. I enjoy thinking actively, although sometimes passive unintended thinking can be a little disturbing. I enjoy thinking because I can do it on my own - I take pleasure in the relation that it gives me to myself as an inventor and originator of ideas. My best thinking starts as feelings and other fuzzy forms and inclinations, which then slowly articulate themselves into ideas. Then I write those ideas down in words and those written words reflect and reinforce my ideas - and my sense of creativity and of self - and at the same time slightly changes everything. It makes it all sharper, clearer, more accute, but also less personal... more defined, determined and accomplished. I like reconsidering my ideas in a new light and interacting with myself through my thoughts; crossing out, scribbling over... deleting, amending, adapting. Sometimes it is as though I am having a conversation with myself. I like having conversations with other people too. But then I always have to happen at the same time as my words. More often than not, the words take over. Sometimes they precede me and my thoughts, as heralds or revelatory unfurlings; self-makings. But sometimes they march me headlong into untested regions that I'd not have dared so uncarefully. When I speak me all at once, it is usually because I feel obliged to say something. That's the oppression in the dialogic nature of conversation between two people who can presume each other only in their words.
Sunday, 7 September 2008
Sunday, 31 August 2008
Chromehoof @ Offset 30/08/2008
Chronic, and cataclysmally dazzling. Mighty Chromehoof slew us, with a broadsword to the heart, then conjured the shards of our shattered souls from the dust with a devastating disco beat. I never knew that I could jump and headbang like that at the same time. Magnificent, supreme.
Thursday, 21 August 2008
Climate Camp 2008
I’ll admit that I did have some serious reservations about the idea of the climate camp in general, mostly in the form of prejudices about the sorts of people that I was likely to encounter there; namely middle-class, middle-age, white hippy liberals, out for a nice camping weekend[*] ; an impression if not formed then at least confirmed by the sorts of media coverage (of this years camp and last) that starts
“Sitting in a teepee in the peaceful Kent countryside, surrounded by campaigners from across the UK mulling over the future of renewable energy and swapping vegan cake recipes, you could be forgiven for temporarily forgetting the outside world and its many woes.”·
Of course this is the extreme end of the prejudice spectrum that counters that other favourite stereotype of the hardcore violent ‘anarchist’[†] contingent hell-bent on enacting their twisted world-view on an innocent public through such horrific means as stabbing police horses with forks. But whilst the media swings illogically between these two contradictory caricatures, the reality is that there was no typical sort of attendee. The diversity of people who had come to talk with each other and work together – from very young to very old, to local kids and residents, to seasoned activists and others who were new to the idea – was reflected in the representation of a diverse spectrum of interconnected issues, ideas and activities throughout the week’s workshop programme.
If the planned action itself of trying to shut down the power station for a day was somewhat tokenistic (the potential endlessness of our possible agenda was made clear in the closing considerations of where we could go next), it provided us with a focal point and objective that was clearly positioned within the wider sphere of all the myriad issues tackled that weekend: the goliath, Climate Change, and the endlessly intricate structure of social change that would necessarily support its defeat. 1500 people recognised the need for and effectiveness of doing things for ourselves. We realised the futile unblinking subservience of the law to corrupt business interests and understood our power to create real situational catalysts for concrete change through its transgression. And we effectively co-ordinated a huge direct action despite having a cop per head to match us and our plans publicised for months in advance. We managed to retain a firm anti-capitalist agenda despite the politicians and the journalists. And we had so much fun. It was fun in the planning of our action, it was fun in the doing (apart from the confrontations and arrests obviously) and loads of fun in the celebrating afterwards.
Perhaps a bunch of people were radicalised by the wholly overblown and aggressive policing. The constant intrusive helicopter drone, the video cameras and binoculars, the blanket stop-and searches and the dawn wake-up alerts as vans of riot cops turned up at the gates were particularly frustrating and ridiculous. Certainly when in the main tent on the Saturday night, someone projected altered footage and photos onto the ceiling along with the drum n bass, it was only a little while before the uniforms and dumb expressionless faces started to exert a silent oppressive presence and everyone slowly stopped dancing and started looking uncomfortable. And the eventual critical stance of the media (for the most part) - even if our protests were only regarded as legitimate once expressed through the voice of an MP who found himself on the frontline knocked down by riot cops, or else articulated in terms of economics and ‘taxpayer's money' - was crucially helpful to our cause. But the narrow focus of the coverage in no way reflected the substance or the spirit of the camp, which for the most part managed to transcend these disappointingly inevitable inconveniences.
So we had a clear goal (the action), an immediate common adversary (the cops), a context and a vision (the world and everybody in it being fucked over and that not being the case) and an understanding of the need to act for ourselves; then, there, and with one another. Facing the same destiny, fixed on the same objectives, we became a working body: connections developed immediately spontaneously and horizontally between us. From the moment we were welcomed across the gate, stepping over the straw-bale stile, from one world to another, we connected to one another as whole people, supporting one another to work together towards a common end. The community structure occurred spontaneously in all of our activities: in mutual education, in our planning and eating together, in the processes of consensus decision-making with which the camp operated, in our assumption of working roles according to skill and volition and without hierachy.
The will to work - for ourselves and with one another - was strikingly pervasive throughout the activities of the camp and the driving force of its operation. By my third day there I felt desperate to contribute towards the daily tasks of its running (my attempt to help carry beer in the day before had been thwarted by the infuriatingly slow stop and search procedures: by the time I got through the gate and to the drop-off point everything had already been collected) so I did a marathon washing-up session after dinner for the Anarchist Teapot tent. I have worked before washing dishes on minimum wage and every single shining plate was tinged nonetheless with my secret resentment, but this time I enjoyed it: I felt a sense of value in my work and people thanked me as they added their plates to the mountainous stack. But the work took lots of different forms. Discussion: thinking, sharing, educating, arguing, brainstorming tactics and ideas, was central to the operation of the camp, and took place within the greater framework of our action. Spaces of exchange and confrontation were created within, enabled by and supported the working body as workshops, planning and decision-making occurred throughout the day across the centre of the site whilst others held the fort at the gates.
A critically important aspect of the week was the outreach work done by workers groups, leafleting and visiting local pubs to engage the miners in dialogue and to contextualise the specific objectives and arguments of the camp within the fundamental wider considerations of people: their lives and livelihoods. From our far perspective on a hillside with its long grass and scenic views, it could have been tempting to look out across the landscape to the tall chimmney belching sooty black smoke into the sky and concentrate our vitriol in its image. But of course for many it represents jobs and sustenance, not to mention the retro industrial patriotic appeal that coal production seems to have gained in public perception. And it seemed as though many of the workers may have understood our quest as being blinkered in this way: there had been talk of local protests against the camp and despite the visit of Arthur Scargill on Monday for the purpose of debate and dialogue, there was still very much an ‘us vs. them/making the other side see’ sort of attitude. The task was to involve and associate the local working community with our struggle in a way that brought to light the common ground between ours and theirs, and not just in the superficial terms of facing police repression[‡], but rather our need and right to live and work now in a way that is self-sustaining and is coherent with our being as both fundamentally social and future-orientated.
Which was a principle expressed in all sorts of useful practical ways in the final workshop that I attended put on by the ‘Treesponsibility’ group: ‘Creating Autonomous Livelihoods: Moving Beyond the Job Economy’. Crammed into an A3 straggly spider-diagram was a blunt analytical overview of our lives as they could be but weren’t yet, helpfully categorised into key areas of need, want and means. Inspiring in the simplicity and obviousness with which it put everything into perspective (…damn these credit card debts). My other outstanding workshop was the first that I went to upon arriving onsite on ‘Confronting Male Privilege’: extremely well-attended by people of all genders and with a quiet atmosphere of vital importance. Before we left on Sunday we walked around for half an hour trying to collect litter and managed maybe a quarter of a bag-full. And then eventually, reluctantly we left the site with the strains of RJD2’s ‘Ghostwriter’ following us in vague trumpet fanfare down the hill on the wind. Drawing back into a bleak and dismal London landscape on the train I was feeling distinctly underjoyed to be back, amongst the developers’ cranes and dirty black brickwork, with the rain speeding along the window and a pathetic fallacy grey sky. And then we noticed the rainbow: solid and vividly distinct, rising gloriously up out of the housing estate, with a faint double-arc just above it. And then we saw it out of the other window too and we laughed at our ourselves and our ostensibly hippy sentiment as our train ran through the middle of it: a massive perfect arc spanning the breadth of the city. And it seemed to somehow articulate the meaning of the struggle, and remind us that this was our home, and that work had to be done here to.
[*] None of which traits I object to in themselves you understand – with the possible exception of liberal – but they do tend to converge together to form a specific sort of persons who, when they get together with other people of their sort in expressedly political contexts, can be a little stifling to your objectives.
· Caroline Lucas, Green MEP, writing for the Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/04/kingsnorthclimatecamp.climatechange
[†] In a wilful abuse of the term.
[‡] "There are similarities in that they are people who are demonstrating for what they believe in and they are doing so in a way that draws attention to them from the media and from the forces of the state. I find it offensive and obscene that you can have police in the numbers that you had at climate camp, particularly riot police, stopping people entering the field. They are stopping and searching people going inside and asking for their names and addresses. It cuts across their civil rights…The people at the climate camp have my sympathies in that they have a right to demonstrate."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/888279.html
“Sitting in a teepee in the peaceful Kent countryside, surrounded by campaigners from across the UK mulling over the future of renewable energy and swapping vegan cake recipes, you could be forgiven for temporarily forgetting the outside world and its many woes.”·
Of course this is the extreme end of the prejudice spectrum that counters that other favourite stereotype of the hardcore violent ‘anarchist’[†] contingent hell-bent on enacting their twisted world-view on an innocent public through such horrific means as stabbing police horses with forks. But whilst the media swings illogically between these two contradictory caricatures, the reality is that there was no typical sort of attendee. The diversity of people who had come to talk with each other and work together – from very young to very old, to local kids and residents, to seasoned activists and others who were new to the idea – was reflected in the representation of a diverse spectrum of interconnected issues, ideas and activities throughout the week’s workshop programme.
If the planned action itself of trying to shut down the power station for a day was somewhat tokenistic (the potential endlessness of our possible agenda was made clear in the closing considerations of where we could go next), it provided us with a focal point and objective that was clearly positioned within the wider sphere of all the myriad issues tackled that weekend: the goliath, Climate Change, and the endlessly intricate structure of social change that would necessarily support its defeat. 1500 people recognised the need for and effectiveness of doing things for ourselves. We realised the futile unblinking subservience of the law to corrupt business interests and understood our power to create real situational catalysts for concrete change through its transgression. And we effectively co-ordinated a huge direct action despite having a cop per head to match us and our plans publicised for months in advance. We managed to retain a firm anti-capitalist agenda despite the politicians and the journalists. And we had so much fun. It was fun in the planning of our action, it was fun in the doing (apart from the confrontations and arrests obviously) and loads of fun in the celebrating afterwards.
Perhaps a bunch of people were radicalised by the wholly overblown and aggressive policing. The constant intrusive helicopter drone, the video cameras and binoculars, the blanket stop-and searches and the dawn wake-up alerts as vans of riot cops turned up at the gates were particularly frustrating and ridiculous. Certainly when in the main tent on the Saturday night, someone projected altered footage and photos onto the ceiling along with the drum n bass, it was only a little while before the uniforms and dumb expressionless faces started to exert a silent oppressive presence and everyone slowly stopped dancing and started looking uncomfortable. And the eventual critical stance of the media (for the most part) - even if our protests were only regarded as legitimate once expressed through the voice of an MP who found himself on the frontline knocked down by riot cops, or else articulated in terms of economics and ‘taxpayer's money' - was crucially helpful to our cause. But the narrow focus of the coverage in no way reflected the substance or the spirit of the camp, which for the most part managed to transcend these disappointingly inevitable inconveniences.
So we had a clear goal (the action), an immediate common adversary (the cops), a context and a vision (the world and everybody in it being fucked over and that not being the case) and an understanding of the need to act for ourselves; then, there, and with one another. Facing the same destiny, fixed on the same objectives, we became a working body: connections developed immediately spontaneously and horizontally between us. From the moment we were welcomed across the gate, stepping over the straw-bale stile, from one world to another, we connected to one another as whole people, supporting one another to work together towards a common end. The community structure occurred spontaneously in all of our activities: in mutual education, in our planning and eating together, in the processes of consensus decision-making with which the camp operated, in our assumption of working roles according to skill and volition and without hierachy.
The will to work - for ourselves and with one another - was strikingly pervasive throughout the activities of the camp and the driving force of its operation. By my third day there I felt desperate to contribute towards the daily tasks of its running (my attempt to help carry beer in the day before had been thwarted by the infuriatingly slow stop and search procedures: by the time I got through the gate and to the drop-off point everything had already been collected) so I did a marathon washing-up session after dinner for the Anarchist Teapot tent. I have worked before washing dishes on minimum wage and every single shining plate was tinged nonetheless with my secret resentment, but this time I enjoyed it: I felt a sense of value in my work and people thanked me as they added their plates to the mountainous stack. But the work took lots of different forms. Discussion: thinking, sharing, educating, arguing, brainstorming tactics and ideas, was central to the operation of the camp, and took place within the greater framework of our action. Spaces of exchange and confrontation were created within, enabled by and supported the working body as workshops, planning and decision-making occurred throughout the day across the centre of the site whilst others held the fort at the gates.
A critically important aspect of the week was the outreach work done by workers groups, leafleting and visiting local pubs to engage the miners in dialogue and to contextualise the specific objectives and arguments of the camp within the fundamental wider considerations of people: their lives and livelihoods. From our far perspective on a hillside with its long grass and scenic views, it could have been tempting to look out across the landscape to the tall chimmney belching sooty black smoke into the sky and concentrate our vitriol in its image. But of course for many it represents jobs and sustenance, not to mention the retro industrial patriotic appeal that coal production seems to have gained in public perception. And it seemed as though many of the workers may have understood our quest as being blinkered in this way: there had been talk of local protests against the camp and despite the visit of Arthur Scargill on Monday for the purpose of debate and dialogue, there was still very much an ‘us vs. them/making the other side see’ sort of attitude. The task was to involve and associate the local working community with our struggle in a way that brought to light the common ground between ours and theirs, and not just in the superficial terms of facing police repression[‡], but rather our need and right to live and work now in a way that is self-sustaining and is coherent with our being as both fundamentally social and future-orientated.
Which was a principle expressed in all sorts of useful practical ways in the final workshop that I attended put on by the ‘Treesponsibility’ group: ‘Creating Autonomous Livelihoods: Moving Beyond the Job Economy’. Crammed into an A3 straggly spider-diagram was a blunt analytical overview of our lives as they could be but weren’t yet, helpfully categorised into key areas of need, want and means. Inspiring in the simplicity and obviousness with which it put everything into perspective (…damn these credit card debts). My other outstanding workshop was the first that I went to upon arriving onsite on ‘Confronting Male Privilege’: extremely well-attended by people of all genders and with a quiet atmosphere of vital importance. Before we left on Sunday we walked around for half an hour trying to collect litter and managed maybe a quarter of a bag-full. And then eventually, reluctantly we left the site with the strains of RJD2’s ‘Ghostwriter’ following us in vague trumpet fanfare down the hill on the wind. Drawing back into a bleak and dismal London landscape on the train I was feeling distinctly underjoyed to be back, amongst the developers’ cranes and dirty black brickwork, with the rain speeding along the window and a pathetic fallacy grey sky. And then we noticed the rainbow: solid and vividly distinct, rising gloriously up out of the housing estate, with a faint double-arc just above it. And then we saw it out of the other window too and we laughed at our ourselves and our ostensibly hippy sentiment as our train ran through the middle of it: a massive perfect arc spanning the breadth of the city. And it seemed to somehow articulate the meaning of the struggle, and remind us that this was our home, and that work had to be done here to.
[*] None of which traits I object to in themselves you understand – with the possible exception of liberal – but they do tend to converge together to form a specific sort of persons who, when they get together with other people of their sort in expressedly political contexts, can be a little stifling to your objectives.
· Caroline Lucas, Green MEP, writing for the Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/04/kingsnorthclimatecamp.climatechange
[†] In a wilful abuse of the term.
[‡] "There are similarities in that they are people who are demonstrating for what they believe in and they are doing so in a way that draws attention to them from the media and from the forces of the state. I find it offensive and obscene that you can have police in the numbers that you had at climate camp, particularly riot police, stopping people entering the field. They are stopping and searching people going inside and asking for their names and addresses. It cuts across their civil rights…The people at the climate camp have my sympathies in that they have a right to demonstrate."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/888279.html
Monday, 4 August 2008
Colour Ride @ The Windmill
furies of frenzy bolt from the blue poppy shirt fields of death black blue filth beating sax-sweat ensweetened surrender. in pants. in a hole in a room. (hell and people).
"i can't do it". tache and cape pseudo pidgin-pop parody. mental monkey-chicken-rib oriental. swarming scrum.
heavy heavy space-invader flashing bleep annihilation. lemming-lemming-lemming-doom. didnintendo crush 'em all? blip. (blp).
"i can't do it". tache and cape pseudo pidgin-pop parody. mental monkey-chicken-rib oriental. swarming scrum.
heavy heavy space-invader flashing bleep annihilation. lemming-lemming-lemming-doom. didnintendo crush 'em all? blip. (blp).
Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno @ Corsica Studios
I have a nagging ringing in my right ear every time I close my jaw. The point where my skull meets my neck is vaguely aching. Yesterday I went to see Acid Mothers Temple and the Cosmic Inferno in Elephant and Castle. In front of a chunky stack of amps on the right-hand side of the stage guitarist Kawabata Mokoto radiated effortless metallic glory shredding relentlessly like the demented old uncle of Herman Li from Dragonforce. I don't think I saw a single drop of sweat come off that guy's forehead and when near then end he thrust his guitar up with one muscled arm to deflect the laser into the crowd amidst feedback and fuzz it felt like it might have been ultimate energy. Adorned with long wizard sleeves and silver beard Higashi Horishi swayed high over crowd and keyboard like a mystic poplar of portent, clearly illuminated by the divine cosmic connection that reveals itself to you after three bottles of red wine. Effortlessly immense and relentlessly fun, two hours and the tiny dark den of Corsica Studios couldn't contain the universe-inspired rock resplendence of these willowed old masters. And perhaps it was the wine, but they seemed in top form. "Perhaps you don't remember him .. last time we came he was thin: now he is very fat" joked Makoto of bassist Tabata Mitsuro, later professing unashamedly to capitalist tendencies as he entreated us to give up all our money at the (overwhelmingly equipped) merch table: turns out the poor guys had been taxed £600 to send everything over from Japan. "Please Queen help us" he beseeched. With drummers Shimura Koji and Pikachu ("Like father and daughter" joked Makoto) feeding perfectly into one another to add extra layers of minute detail to the underpinning rhythm, and a pretty constant undertone of screeching fuzz, A-M-T raised a holy hell-storm of metal prog-psych of interplanetary proportions, light-year speed and zen endurance.
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Nurse with Wound @ London Fields Lido (Wet Sounds) 19/07/08
Sound affects you differently in the water. Things seem more distant; more tinny and echoed, but also more immediate. Underwater, things sound more watery. Which sounds obvious but is strange if you consider that water is a tangible thing and sound is not, and the one shouldn’t really be able to take on characteristics of the other. But this wateriness of sound is really just descriptive of the way in which we are aware of being in an element other than our own. The curious mixture of muffled distance and interiority with which sound reaches us underwater is our awareness of the element across which it has travelled; and of our being physically immersed within that element. Nurse with Wound’s set was perfectly suited to this slow, strange and dense sort of atmosphere. Swells of enveloping resonances, deep creaking pulses, indistinct strains of a lilting French tone suffused and surrounded; ethereal yet wierdly omnipresent. Shaking a rattle into a microphone struck you as a series of disappearing clicks, like an invisible shoal of tiny darting fishes. And it was the less earthly higher-end frequencies that seemed to filter through best: sounds that were muffled and confused above surface hit you with a strange clarity underwater – through the skin and in the stomach. Swimming in water that carries an audible dimension is immensely pleasurable. Noise surrounds you physically. It is both highly individualising as you are wholly immersed in your own senses without the possibility of communication, and extensive as it carries your awareness out across the expanses of your environment. Your physical processes interrupt as your breath becomes bubbles and the continuity of sound is continually broken by the necessity of coming up for air. The disparity was heightened by the unsociable July weather. To keep diving deep was by far the best way to keep warm and each time you surfaced you were assailed by a harsh wind that cancelled out the sunshine and, creeping ominously up one side of the sky, an oppressive sheet of grey cloud. Fortunately, that also meant that the lido was empty enough to swim around in. Exploring sound through a co-ordinated fluid, weightless movement. I suspect that it was rather like being in the womb. Or like being some kind of giant marine mammal: a blue whale picking up other whale song. Or maybe a giant squid. A sense of experimentation – of a new experience and way of doing things made for a collective triumphancy at what would have always been a great gig anyway, and at the end of the set Steve Stapleton listened to feedback from the small gathering of stoic listeners and thanked us for being their guinea pigs and we all clapped like seals. On the way home we stopped for fish and chips, and when we stepped outside again the bleak grey clouds had flushed pink.
Friday, 18 July 2008
Guapo @ ULU (Supporting Red Sparowes) 08/07/2008
Guapo are four guys who are very talented and probably a little unhinged. They play prog proper, of quirkily compelling character and of plenitudinous proportions. The wandering journey of a long song (or was it several?) that formed their set was an ongoing exploration of the strange and complex textures that their respective instruments could weave together: an epic interplay of guitar, drums, keyboard, bass, each spinning its own private spiritual path around the others - always in balance and never quite touching - to create a sound at once naive and deep, intricate and whole, organically electric. More than anything these guys knew how to draw the essence out of their battered instruments; pedals and keyboard effects seemed to unmask rather than distort their true character. The hunched keyboardist hammered at the keys as though he were prophesising on a vast organ in a lonely cathedral; the drummer carefully tinkled a little string of bells around his drumkit using nothing but space and air to gain new perspectives on a sound; the curly bassist pulled a clipper out of his jeans pocket to slide ethereally up and down the fretboard. Complete with sparkling lycra shirts, Guapo are all the visionary insight of the old prog masters made present as an intuitive understanding of their own powers of creation and of their connectedness with one another; with their audience; with earth and cosmos; and with the more mischevious and darkly magical forces in the universe that like to lead us astray once in a while.
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