Southpaw

oh, and SPOTTED at Streatham Hill railway station a week ago...
Dan O'Connor (AKA Ned Parker from Neighbours)

If called upon to make a speech: "I can't remember what I was going to say for the life of me - I don't think that ever before in my life have so many people been so directly responsible for my being so very, very glad. It's a wonderful moment and a rare one and I'm certainly indebted. Thank you!"

Excellent new finds:

False Economy
Nina Power
China Mieville

Has the Perrier gone straight to my head?

Macswiney

It is not those who can inflict the most,

but those that can suffer the most who will conquer.

Father and Son.

It would be ignorant to suggest that Ed and David Miliband have less politically in common than either one with their father. Yet, Ed Miliband's portrayal in the press as 'red' Ed, in the pocket of the unions, provokes an analysis of which it is essential to revisit the arguments that made his father renowned as an Marxist intellectual of the highest quality.

The State in Capitalist Society: The analysis of the Western System of Power is a superb examination of the much contested political concept of power. Although contemporary analyses of power are arguably more epistemologically thorough, Miliband hits on a conception of power that is radical for its time. Miliband Snr argues that there exists in western capitalist states such things as ruling elites, whose power is used to protect the interest of the business, capitalist classes. The sense that this power is so holistic and inpenetrable gives weight to later arguments of power as something less central, unique and tangible but more ubiquitous and subtly coercive.

Ed Miliband was not voted into the Labour leadership by the ruling class - that is, the Labour Party elite of MPs, AMs, MSPs, MEPs. Nor was he voted in by Labour Party members. He was voted in by union members; some Labour Party members, many not. This is the antithesis of being propped up by the ruling elite. The fear portrayed by his nickname, by the plethora of unfortunate photographs used by the press indicates a fear that he will not work in the interests of the ruling classes and thus will work against the interests of the moneyed elite. Of course, the notion that he will represent the ordinary working people rather than business is almost completely impossible - at the very least exaggerated - given the state of the post-financial crisis western world. But any hint at it has the press running scared. The press are central to the ruling elite as so many newspaper proprietors are of the big business world. They have a degree of control over public opinion and do not want to lose that, nor their money and status.

Despite Marxists all round the country criticising the institutionalisation of the Labour Party into the ruling classes (indeed, Miliband Snr's criticism of Harold Wilson's leadership followed this line), Ed's 'red threat', based almost soley on the union link, supports his father's theory. That the ruling, political elite of bureaucrats not landed gentry hate to see power dispersed lest it curbs sectional financial interest.

I would encourage those interested in ruling elites and power to look at Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap.

Sailing by

Cromarty.

R.I.P. ME SUPER.

My best pal (except for Fruit Bat and Tom Bobbin) has broken. Here it is on the right, in action at Big Ben restaurant, Haridwar, India.

It has captured my diary entries over the last three years as it followed me around India, Paris, London, Sheffield, the Peaks, Brighton, the Hertfordshire countryside.

Oh! Yoko.

Yoko Ono's Twitter feed:

Imagine 1000 suns in the sky @ same time. Let them shine for 1hr. Then let them gradually melt into the sky. Make 1 tunafish sandwich & eat. 5:01 PM Aug 5th

Imagine letting a goldfish swim across the sky. Let it swim from the East to the West. Drink a liter of water. 5:02 PM Aug 4th

Next time you meet a 'foreigner', remember it's only like a window with a different shape to it and the person who's sitting inside is you. 5:00 PM Jul 24th


Phillip Schofield's Twitter feed:

Happiness is an empty dishwasher and nothing waiting to go in.... Or is that just me? :) 1:31 PM Jul 29th

@jamie_oliver mate! A bloke in the Souk in Marrakech says he's a great friend of yours and I should buy all my spices from him!! Lol :) 8:11 PM Jul 25th

kill your television.

Doppelganger spotting in the créma de la créme of tacky, kitsch television. Ned from Neighbours and John James from Big Brother 2010. With Josie as a Janae figure.




















John James gives Janae a massage.


Whilst Ned flirts with Josie in the Big Brother house.

Thru the Flowers


Your prospects will please her
The iron-king's daughter,
Up here on Broomhill:
Strange Hallamshire, County
Of dearth and of bounty,
Of brown tumbling water
And furnace and mill.

Grist to the Mill

The liberalism of Mill and Locke has enjoyed a golden age which must soon be in decline. Yet its grip is strong. It reifies its world-view, establishing a state of being which is necessarily right and natural and in need of protection.

Liberalism assmes that a distribution of power to the masses is realised by decentralising, individualising, marketed as giving citizens autonomy or control over their lives.

This has two effects. The first is to create a society of individual customers where the right to choose precedes all others. This is beneficial for the primacy of capital in society. Secondly, it gives the impression that power has been distributed and that people are freer or enjoy more self-determination.

This assumption is based on a liberal conception of society as a mass of individuals, rather than considering the manifestations of power relations between social beings in families, communities, regions and nations. The illusion of greater freedom and self-determination hides the requirement of the state to subsequently rationalise the behaviour of citizens, thus maintaining a crucial power over subjects which is more transcendent than choice over local facilities or a voice in local decision-making. This voice of personal freedom foresakes a louder one that has the potential for greater influence. For liberalism creates bureaucrats, not ideologues, as the individual freedoms must be properly managed, and thus shuts out potential for inspirational change at a high level when choice is appeared to be practised at a lower one. Indeed New Labour's obsession with bureaucrats and targets is because of their ideological acceptance of liberalism. Politicians become managers, creating productivity to enable ideas to be implemented locally - half-baked, cut-cost ideas. As citizens are endowed with these greater levels of freedom over certain issues (such as GP surgeries), their increased scope of action must be restrained. Order must be maintained by somehow limiting the capacity for citizens to act completely freely (as this real freedom would be anarchic and stateless) and so individuals are rationalised and behaviouralised, placed in categories of ethnicity, gender and class to assess how they will act, their likely career, their predicted consumption of public services. Courageous, unpredictable acts are seen as dangerous and state intervention necessary. This is the case in schools where pupils are punished for not respecting authority. Public protest is allowed, but only the type that fits the state's description of regular, peaceful protest; anything else is illegal. Expression is welcome in liberal states, providing it does not rattle established truths.

And therefore humans are not truly free from the shackles of the state and its power, under liberalism we are simply free to believe we are.

And so inequality can rise, because the rhetoric of liberty maintains that some are freer than others and intervention is anti-liberal since it creates more trouble than it solves.

And electoral democracy is a freedom because it gives people a voice, and voices and choices are good.

And some public services suffer because it is not liberal to redistribute wealth.

Less state intervention reduces inequality. This is a fact. Private companies and local authorities discriminate, the latter on geography and the former on profitability, preference or luck. Liberalism is a system that meritocrises and allows the best (cf. the elite) to gain ascendence, no matter how small this number, no matter about the rest. This contrasts from a society that values all, in which diversity reigns.

No to characterisation. Refuse rationalisation, categoritisation of gender, class, race, nationality. Refuse unequal treatment, sliding salaries, poor life chances based on the lack of profitibility of your passion or 'vocational choice'. Embrace the unusual, the unpredictable and the sub-par which make society more than the sum of its parts.

Summer Playlist: Glastonbury Special

Tracklist:

The Eraser (Satoshi Tomiie Reconstruction)- Thom Yorke

Hatari- tUnE-YarDs

Angel Echoes (Caribou Remix)- Four Tet

Graceland- Grizzly Bear

Watching the Planets- Flaming Lips feat. Karen O

On and Ever Onward- Dirty Projectors & Bjork

Intro- The XX

Who Am I (What's My Name?)- Snoop Dog

10 Mile Stereo (Cough Syrup Remix)- Beach House

Bossy (SebastiAn remix)- Kelis

Sera Sera- Shakira feat. Wyclef Jean

Hyph Mngo- Joy Orbison

At Home He's a Tourist- Gang of Four

This is the Way- Devendra Banhart

You Don't Wash (Actress Remix)- Kode9

Always On My Mind (Julian Mendelsohn Extended Dance Version)- Pet Shop Boys




Bonus Track:

terrorist performative

Gerhard Richter October 18, 1977.

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored

No one has any right to condemn him for this, because all who live under the present system practise selfishness, more or less. We must be selfish: the System demands it. We must be selfish or we shall be hungry and ragged and finally die in the gutter. The more selfish we are the better off we shall be. In the 'Battle of Life' only the selfish and cunning are able to survive: all others are beaten down and trampled under foot. No one can justly be blamed for acting selfishly - it is a matter of self-preservation - we must either injure or be injured. It is the system that deserves to be blamed. What those who wish to perpetuate the system deserve is another question.

ARCHIVES OF PAIN.

I wonder who you think you are
Do you damn well think you're God or something?
God give life, God taketh it away
Not you
I think you are the devil itself.



This is the image I have been fearing. For the past few months, perhaps year, I have been (hysterically) urging people to vote Labour. This is why.

As a side note, Cameron's interesting claim that the Labour government has made us "more compassionate abroad" seems strange considering the messes of Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe he inadvertantly is referring not to foreign policy as such but the devolution question regarding Northern Ireland. To say that policy towards Northern Ireland has been more compassionate than the previous Tory administration is an incredible understatement. The peace of the province is in his hands.

Tread slowly, tread slowly,
or don't tread at all,
under your pen are a thousand lives.

the rest of my life.

LAND.

Life is filled with holes, johnny's laying there, his sperm coffin

Angel looks down at him and says, “oh, pretty boy,

Can't you show me nothing but surrender ? ”

Johnny gets up, takes off his leather jacket,

Taped to his chest there's the answer,

You got pen knives and jack knives and

Switchblades preferred, switchblades preferred

Then he cries, then he screams, saying

Life is full of pain, I'm cruisin' through my brain

And I fill my nose with snow and go rimbaud,

Go rimbaud, go rimbaud,

And go johnny go, and do the watusi, oh do the watusi.

Jingle-jangle morning.

The best compilation I ever bought.

Rough Trade Shops Indiepop volume 1 (2CD) LINK

CD86 (collection of tracks from the C86 era including most/all of the original songs feature on the C86 cassette)
DISC ONE LINK
DISC TWO LINK

Whatever you do, just do it for peace.

Why are there no songs for peace anymore?


Imagine Peace. This film 'I Met the Walrus' uses an interview by a young Canadian teenager with John Lennon in 1969. The accompanying graphics are amazing. The message is nonviolence. Non-violence is a core teaching of Buddhism, in Pali it is called ahimsa. It is hard to believe in universalism since diversity should triumph over homogeneity. But perhaps by saying if all human beings can share just one thing, it should be peace.

Dreams.

Greenfield Morning

BANK HOLIDAY.

comes six times a year.
days of enjoyment to which everyone cheers.
bank holiday comes with six pack of beer and then it's back to work.
A-G-A-I-N!

We must not change its colour now.

'We must not change its colour now' is a line from The Red Flag. It makes no sense to hand over control of the country to some inexperienced poshboys from Eton who seem not to grasp the importance of a budget defecit in helping to secure recovery. Very confusing to see people assume that they will be more competent than New Labour. They are amateurs. They have the support of big business over Labour's proposed rise in National Insurance which the Tories claim is a sign that Labour have lost it, too stupid to consider the fact that business don't advocate for competent economics but for tax cuts, just as the unions protest against cuts in jobs.

Anyway, onto New Labour. The lack of delivery of social democratic policies by New Labour was a real disappointment and Brown has somewhat acted in a fairer way (except for the 10p tax cock up) and has been pretty good with the economy (except for courting business too much and allowing the banks to run riot but we all have the benefit of hindsight). I was trying to think of the fundamental reason for New Labour's mistakes; greater inequality, harsher border controls and policing, assault on human rights, ID cards, nuclear deterrents etc.

This, again from The Red Flag, is something they probably forgot:
'It well recalls the triumphs past,
It gives the hope of peace at last;
The banner bright, the symbol plain,
Of human right and human gain.'

Human gain. A Labour government should have presided over a collectivisation of material wealth through redistribution in the tax system and nationalisation of public services which would make the cost of the railways variant on income (through the tax system) rather than on use, inspired by the anarchist concept of 'property is theft'. Instead they presided over a collectivisation of individual thought and action, chipping away at autonomy and crippling democracy by curbing protest and repressing diversity. They encouraged individualism in the City and selfish attitudes in business, but made self-expression the business of the police.
Thank god Blair is gone, the arch-Neoliberal. Let's hope Ed Miliband, son of Ralph, writes a good manifesto.

Freedom only comes if you take it!

Breaking news is that Delroy Smellie, police officer who smacked about a peaceful protestor has been cleared of assault. Video evidence here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8597217.stm

The judge said that Sgt Smellie was acting in self-defence and that he had a 'mere' 7 seconds to act. Time seven seconds on your watch and see if it is enough time to decide whether to smack someone in the face and legs with a baton. It's actually a lot longer than you think.

The judge was "satisfied he honestly believed it was necessary to use force to defend himself". Apparently he feared objects in her hand were weapons. Watch the video. She opens her arms out (in a typical stance that indicates 'I have nothing to hide') fairly early on, displaying a juice carton in her hand.

He blames the woman for his behaviour. The defence claiming that "Sgt Smellie lost composure because of Ms Fisher's aggressive behaviour".

Why is this significant? Well, police already are overly vicious against members of the public who protest or even just take photos or even just walk home from work (see Ian Tomlinson). This sends a number of messages. That police can act violently and not be held accountable. That you must be a violent thug to join the police. And that rather than keep the peace, the police are there to fight down political protest.

There should be a public political and legal outcry. The right to assembly and protest should not be impinged by violence of any kind, least of all by police.

Two ways to make a sub-standard legal high evolve from a poor quality amphetamine imitator to the most widely-used drug and cause of teen deaths:

1. Give it weird, exotic nicknames that absolutely no-one apart from journalists use. Examples include meow meow, drone, M-cat, plant food. Plant food is how it is described to circumvent the law. This does not mean it has become widely used slang terminology.

2. Slather the Daily Mail with coverage of any teen deaths involving the drug/warnings about its use/painting Professor Nutt to live up to his name. Anything the Daily Mail criticises is normally good (political correctness, health and safety, multiculturalism, feminism, socialism, music festivals, binge drinking, taxes) and so its condemnation does not help rationally-minded people stay away from it, even if it is rubbish.

3. Make sure the chair of the government's Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs (I'm patiently waiting for an Advisory Council for the Use of Drugs to teach young people how to roll joints and make lines) says things like this:
"I have never experienced such a widespread use in such a short space of time. There is no question this is the drug of the moment." And then make sure they get plenty of media coverage.

The only reason people are taking this drug is because they find out about it, and finding out about its status as the drug of the moment makes it seem even more zeitgeist and exciting, even though it patently isn't. Would be eternally more helpful to say:
"I have never experienced such a widespread use in such a short space of time. I have no idea why this is, considering it has produced so many deaths and there are safer and more interesting drugs available. Maybe if we did more laboratory tests and regulated these drugs then less people would die from consuming dodgy substances."

Reminds me a little of this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwylBRucU7w

British Summer Time

Eastern Standard Time



i found this photo by a scanner in the university library last week. i couldn't resist scanning it in for myself, it looked like a fairly old photo so i left it by the scanner in the hope that someone would remember they'd left it there and reclaim it.


and hilarious spoof richard madeley blog.

Keep up the good work.

We're captive on a carousel of time.
We can't return we can only look behind from where we came.

i was dancing when i was twelve.

weekly installment.

song for sunday III.

Happy International Women's day for tomorrow, March 8th.

WHERE THERE IS POWER, THERE IS RESISTANCE

Twenty-nine years ago today, Bobby Sands first refused food, starting what became a 66-day hunger strike to the death. Another 22 men followed him into hunger strike, 9 of these dying.

As resistance to power, self-starvation is the ultimate protest.

There is currently a hunger strike in Yarl's Wood asylum detention centre in protest at the inhumane conditions and lack of medical attention they receive. The fact they are prepared to starve themselves and ultimately die should speak volumes. The media gave more publicity to the 1981 hunger strike involving an outlawed terrorist organisation than they have given to this strike, involving women who are seeking refuge from violence and persecution.


I am more terrible than armies,
I am more feared than the cannon.

Kings and chancellors give commands;
I give no command to any;

But I am listened to more than kings
And more than passionate orators.

I unswear words, and undo deeds.
Naked things know me.

I am first and last to be felt of the living.
I am Hunger.

-Laurence Binyon

song for sunday II.

To the Birds by Suede live at Brixton Academy 16th May 1993


Hari om tat sat.

EVERYBODY TALKS ABOUT THE WEATHER... WE DON'T.

Ulrike Meinhof was a journalist and radical political activist in West Germany during the 1960s and '70s. She was a founding member of the Red Army Faction . She killed herself in prison before her trial, charged with numerous murders. Her cult status and subversive journalism is such that many believed and still believe that she was murdered by the authorities. The West German media held her in such contempt that she was continually labelled as insane and her medical history was used as explanation for her actions; her advocacy of and active terrorism was blamed on prior brain surgery to remove a tumour.


"Because women in this society do not need to be expelled in order to be rendered politically impotent. The social work they do raising their children goes on in the isolation of their private lives, though not in response to their own needs or those of the children. It goes on behind closed doors and in response to the norms of an achievement-oriented society whose demands hit children at school [...]. (Women) are interchangeable as workers - given what women's work is - and as consumers. In this sociey, women are not perceived as unique, irreplaceable beings. Things would be different if the Left had functioning women's organizations; such organizations could and probably would point out that the apolitical aspects of the protests about Bahman Nirumand's wife are in and of themselves an example of the oppression of women, based on the failure to recognize their needs, and on the difficulty for women to see their private trials and tribulations as social problems and to organize them accordingly. It is apolitical to protest about women, because women's issues are human, humanitarian issues. There! Everybody's talking about the weather again! What they view as apolitical is the almost completely internalized oppression of women, an oppression that is still quite beyond comprehension."
-Ulrike Meinhof

"The law that gets broken when department stores are set on fire is not a law that protects people. It is a law that protects property. [...] It protects those to whom the law in a capitalist state assigns the right to amass wealth."
-Ulrike Meinhof

"Capitalism may well produce wealth; it does not produce happiness or freedom for all."
-Herbert Marcuse

This article on the Prison Photography blog caught my attention. Institutionalised murder is, apparently, green.
Particularly looking forward to seeing Donovan Wylie's photography of the Maze Prison (formerly Long Kesh, informally H-Blocks) at the Photographers' Gallery.

song for sunday.

i'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought.


Tussi loma, tussi loma
(Like falling autumn leaves, the leaves of time)

Sylvia

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

Slippery slope

Besides flogging his new novel and memoirs of his time as Tony Blair's Communications Secretary, Alastair Campbell is trying hard to defend his evasiveness on the Andrew Marr show yesterday morning (his evasiveness at a judicial inquiry is clearly less shocking than on a BBC1 talk show).

The clip here shows Alastair Campbell avoiding answering a tricky question by having a mini emotional breakdown. Breakdown or fakedown, he still should have been forced to answer the important query posed by Andrew Marr: if the intelligence shows that there was not unequivocal evidence - evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" - that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, does that mean Tony Blair misled the House of Commons when he repeated this as fact?

The answer is obviously yes. The heavy breathing and fury was Campbell buying time trying to think of how to avoid giving a 'yes' or 'no' answer. A 'yes' answer means that the ex-PM has to change his name to Bliar by deed poll when it emerges that there was no evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" of WMD. A 'no' answer posits the question: how? How is it not a lie to say you have seen evidence stating X when evidence stating X does not even exist?

What seems most frustrating about Alastair Campbell's discomfort with Andrew Marr's line of questioning (expressed here in his blog, paragraph 14 onwards) is his accusation of BBC bias against the government's decision to go to war. The BBC was sickeningly supportive of the invasion of Iraq, as the media almost always is of governments going into war. Journalists' proximity to action - and first-hand reporting - is reliant on a positive relationship with the armed forces. This is known as embedded journalism. The excellent book Tell Me Lies edited by David Miller about the media distortion in the run-up and opening weeks of the Iraqi invasion describes how BBC journalist Gavin Hewitt became so embedded within the army that he began to pick off targets to shoot and bomb. The use of language - liberation, not invasion - is systematic of the media's role in presenting war and bloodshed as democratic and peaceful.

In the opening few weeks of the war, Andrew Marr himself claimed that Blair's decision to invade had been vindicated by the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, which many saw as getting far too carried away by victory and jingoism and forgetting his journalistic integrity.

His most famous quote, that has undoubtedly come back to haunt him, that Blair “said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.” (see John Pilger's article)

To accuse the BBC and Andrew Marr especially of anti-war bias is an attempt to paint himself as a victim. The victims here are the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured Iraqis, coalition soldiers and the citizens of the warmongerng nations. We are the ones with no voice as the media and politicians scream at each other in a mutual love-in/hate-in.

Only good thing to come out of the Hutton Inquiry saga:
(Don't ask me ask the ministry)

(There is a) Light

Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as (I trust) shall never be put out.
- Hugh Latimer to Nicholas Ridley, 1555

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
-Edward Grey, 1916

Our comrades have lit with their very lives an eternal beacon that will inspire this nation and people to rise and crush oppression forever.
-Richard O'Rawe, 1981

(To the) Lighthouse

From the Front Parlour, Sharrow Vale Road, Sheffield