Sunday, 30 May 2010
Hong Kong’s rooftop shanty towns
In South America the slums are attached to the outskirts of mega-cities such as Caracas and Mexico City like wasps’ nests on a cliff face. In a hilly island city like Hong Kong, however, living space is limited. Here you only see the laboriously constructed huts made of corrugated iron and planks of wood in which the poorest of the poor live if you look upwards – they occupy, to put it in cynical terms, a penthouse location.
Some of these rooftop shacks, which in the year 2006 after the government’s first slum clearance programme still housed 3962 people in 1554 households, are up to three storeys high. Improvised structures made of ladders and bits of furniture create connections between the individual parts of the buildings and join these impoverished dwellings into complete rooftop settlements – sociologists even talk of a “self-organising niche architecture” and point to the utopian aspects of this urban way of life.
Nazi scum
English Defence League members attend a march in January this year. The group is attracting interest from convicted football hooligans and violent far-right splinter groups. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
In the back room of a sparsely decorated pub in Bolton a man with a shaved head and a tattoo poking out above his shirt collar hands out what look like wraps of cocaine to his friends. It is just after 11am but behind him the pub is already packed with young, mainly white, men. Suddenly it erupts.
"We want our country back. We want our country back … Muslim bombers off our streets." The chants ring out as tables are thumped and plastic pint glasses are thrust into the air.
"It is going to be a good 'un today," says the shaven-headed man, leaning across the table towards me to make himself heard. "We're going to get to twat some Pakis – I can feel it."
The pub, a few hundred yards from Bolton railway station, is the latest gathering point for the most significant rightwing street movement the UK has seen since the heyday of the National Front in the 1970s.
For the past four months the Guardian has joined English Defence League demonstrations, witnessing its growing popularity, from protests attracting just a few hundred hardcore activists at the end of last year to rallies and marches which are bringing thousands of people on to the street – and into direct conflict with the police and local Muslim communities.
The EDL plans to step up its campaign in coming weeks, culminating in marches through some of the UK's most high-profile Muslim communities, raising the spectre of widespread unrest.
With the British National party beset by infighting and recriminations after its poor showing in last month's local and national elections, the UK is facing the prospect of rightwing activists turning away from the ballot box and back to the street for the first time in three decades.
The English Defence League sprang up in Luton last year in reaction to a demonstration by a small extreme Islamist group during a homecoming parade by the Royal Anglian Regiment.
Since then this chaotic organisation – based largely around existing football groups and hooligan networks – has mobilised thousands of people against what it terms "Islamic extremism".
In telephone conversations and face-to-face meetings, members of the EDL's secretive leadership team repeatedly told the Guardian that the group is not racist and just wants to "peacefully protest against militant Islam".
But at each demonstration I attended while making an undercover film for the Guardian's investigative film unit, Guardian Films, I was confronted by casual – often brutal – racism, a widespread hatred of Muslims and often the threat of violence.
It was only possible to film some of the most alarming scenes with a hidden camera. Inside a pub in Stoke in January about 3,000 EDL supporters gathered for the first demonstration of the year. They had spent the past four hours drinking. The balcony around the top of the cavernous pub was draped in flags bearing the names of different football clubs – Wolves, Newcastle, Aston Villa – and the chants "We all hate Muslims" and "Muslim bombers off our streets" filled the air. The atmosphere was tense, and not just because of the growing anti-Islamic rhetoric. The pub was packed with rival football gangs from across the Midlands and the north of England. Twice, fighting broke out as old rivalries failed to be subdued by the new enemy – Islam. "They're just kids," said one man. "That is not what we are here for today."
As we moved outside for the EDL protest – during which supporters became involved in violent clashes with the police – a woman asked me for a donation to support the "heroes coming back injured from Afghanistan". I put a pound in the bucket. "Thanks love," she said. "They go over there and fight for this country and then come back to be faced with these Pakis everywhere." She paused, before adding: "But to be honest it is the niggers I can't stand."
This kind of casual racism is not hard to find on EDL demonstrations. The Guardian has also identified a number of known rightwing extremists who are taking an interest the movement – from convicted football hooligans to members of violent rightwing splinter groups. The EDL says it is doing what it can to keep them away but acknowledged their influence.
"At previous events, we have had far-right groups like Combat 18 turning up," the EDL's self-proclaimed leader, who uses the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, said in a local newspaper interview. "It's naive to guarantee no violence."
Nick Lowles, of the anti-fascist group Searchlight, says these groups have a growing – and dangerous – influence.
"What we are seeing is more organised fringe elements – the National Front, old networks of Combat 18 people and members of the BNP – who are getting involved specifically to try and use the EDL to spark serious disorder," says Lowles. "This is a serious development; we just need one of these demonstrations to go wrong – for there to be a serious incident – and it won't just lead to disorder in Dudley, Bolton or wherever, it will spread to towns and cities across the country."
Strange coalition
But the EDL is not a simple rerun of previous far-right street groups. On each demonstration there is a smattering of non–white faces and one of the group's leaders is Guramit Singh, a British-born Sikh. The organisation's core support appears to be young white men who are often fuelled by drink and sometimes drugs. But its Islamophobic message seems to have acted as a lightning rod for a strange coalition – from rightwing Christians who see it as being on the frontline in the "global fight against Islam" to gay rights activists.
At the front of the EDL demonstration in Bolton in March, among the banners decrying Islam, was a man holding up a pink triangle. He looked nervous when I asked him what he was doing there. "This is the symbol gay people were made to wear under Hitler," he said. "Islam poses the same threat and we are here to express our opposition to that." It turns out he is a member of the EDL's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender division, which has 115 members.
Many of the people I met said they had never been involved in rightwing politics before. "I finished my night shift at 5am and we got on a coach down from Wigan about six," says Steve as the Victoria line tube train rattles along towards Pimlico and the EDL's London demonstration a few weeks later. "Reckon I should be back in time for it to start again at 10."
The carriage is packed with around 50 EDL supporters who set off from the north-west that morning. They launch into one of the EDL's favourite songs: "There were 10 Muslim bombers in the air." Steve explains over the din how his factory is being "overrun by immigrants". Like others on EDL demonstrations, he exudes a sense of excitement that "something is happening". "We have had enough, no one is taking us seriously … about anything – but they are going to have to listen now."
But the EDL is not only attracting disaffected working-class men. On a chilly evening in early March, Alan Lake settles into his seat in a cafe in central London. This smartly dressed man in his mid-40s has emerged as a key figure in the organisation and is quickly into his stride – warning that the UK will have Sharia law in the next 40 years "unless something is done".
A London-based IT consultant, Lake has spoken at several EDL rallies and sees himself as one of the organisation's thinkers. "The middle-class intellectuals are coming forward and also American speakers – some of them quite famous, although I can't give you names yet … they love the fact that we can have people that can go on the streets."
Addressing a far-right anti-Islam conference in Sweden last year, Lake told delegates it was necessary to build a united "anti-Jihad movement" and spoke of the need for "people that are ready to go out in the street", boasting that he and his friends had begun to build alliances with "more physical groups like football fans". Lake says he is opposed to violence or confrontation but regularly returns to the importance of the EDL's physical presence.
"The EDL has a lot of support and is growing quickly and crucially what it has done is deliver an activist movement on the streets," he tells me subsequently. Pressed on the levels of violence at the demonstrations, he replies: "These people are not middle-class female teachers … if they continue to be suppressed it will turn nasty in one way or another … We have put bodies on the street, writing letters to the Times does not work … if we are going to have a mess that is so much grist to the mill."
Lake says he is exploring a political future for the EDL – and argues it should consider throwing its weight behind the UK Independence party. He later introduces me to Magnus Nielsen – a Ukip candidate in the general election – who has agreed to speak at forthcoming EDL rallies. Nielsen describes Muhammad as a "criminal psychopath", "the first cult leader" and "psychiatrically deranged". Lake says there is "some synergy" between the two groups.
A few weeks later Lake tells me that he is no longer an EDL spokesman. "I am really working on the Ukip thing so we can offer people an alternative," he says.
A spokesman for Ukip said it would not form any alliance with the EDL or any other "extremist" group.
However, these efforts appear to be part of tentative steps by the EDL to expand its reach beyond its street demonstrations. In March a delegation of activists travelled to Berlin to take part in an anti-Islam rally in support of far-right anti-immigrant Dutch politician Geert Wilders. It is also forging tentative links with the US anti-Islam group Stop the Islamification of America, whose New York demonstration was advertised on the EDL website in April.
Growing unrest
The upshot appears to be a movement that, although chaotic and beset by infighting, seems to be growing in scope and sometimes violence. At a protest in Dudley last month, demonstrators threw missiles at the police before ripping down barriers and rampaging through the town in an attempt to confront anti-racist protesters and local Asian youths. In Aylesbury a few weeks later they again clashed with police.
And despite the group's protestations to the contrary, the prospect of serious unrest is growing. The list of towns the EDL plans to hit this summer is lengthening – Newcastletomorrow, Cardiff, Dudley and Bradford over the next few weeks. According to Lowles the stakes are high. "What we are seeing now is the most serious, most dangerous political phenomenon that we have had in Britain for a number of years," he says. "With EDL protests that are growing week in, week out there is a chance for major disorder and a political shift to the right."
But the appeal of the EDL is not just down to the extreme opinions expressed by people such as Lake and Nielsen. In Stoke a group of teenagers who were on their first EDL demonstration said they had come after reading reports that "the Muslims" were planning to march through Wootton Bassett with 500 coffins. The proposed march was called by Anjem Choudary and his small extremist group Islam4UK. The group is reviled by the majority of Muslims and the demonstration did not go ahead. But this was lost on the outraged teenagers who turned up in Stoke and subsequently travelled to two of the next three EDL events.
Outside the Morpeth Arms on the banks of the Thames in March supporters gathered for the EDL's London demonstration. One who had travelled down from Blackburn was eager to know who had seen a television documentary that he thought showed how a Muslim group were taking over politics in east London. The EDL had carried a link to the film on the front of its website and most of the supporters drinking in the sunshine knew about it.
For Matthew Goodwin, an academic who specialises in far-right politics at Manchester University, this is a crucial difference between the EDL and previous far-right street movements.
"The reason why the EDL's adoption of Islamophobia is particularly significant is that unlike the 1970s, when the National Front was embracing antisemitism, there are now sections of the media and the British establishment that are relatively sympathetic towards Islamophobia," says Goodwin. "It is not difficult to look through the media and find quite hostile views towards Islam and Muslims. That is fundamentally different to the 1970s, when very few newspapers or politicians were endorsing the NF's antisemitic message."
"The point for your average voter is that if they see the EDL marching through their streets shouting about how the neighbourhood is about to be swamped by Muslims or how the UK is going to be Islamified by 2040, they are also receiving these cues from other sections of British society … the message of the EDL may well be legitimised if that continues."
The people on the sharp end of the EDL's message echo this view. Mujibul Islam, chair of the youth committee of the Muslim Council of Britain, says the foundations for the growth of the EDL have been laid not just by extremists but by countless political speeches and newspaper articles. "It simply would not be acceptable to say the things that are being said on these demonstrations about any other group – black people, Jewish people. But we are now in a position where it seems almost acceptable to say these things about Muslims."
He said the growth of the EDL was having a real impact on the way ordinary Muslims were being treated. "A woman I know got on to a tube train which had a lot of EDL supporters on recently and was really badly abused; another man was attacked as he made his way home on the train. These are the consequences of what we are seeing now. It is not just a theoretical debate about freedom of speech."
Matthew Taylor @'The Guardian'
English Defence League: Inside the violent world of Britain's new far right
Formed less than a year ago, the English Defence League has become the most significant far-right street movement since the National Front. The Guardian spent four months undercover with the movement, and found them growing in strength and planning to target some of the UK's biggest Muslim communities.
MPs expressed concern tonight after it emerged that far-right activists are planning to step up their provocative street campaign by targeting some of the UK's highest-profile Muslim communities, raising fears of widespread unrest this summer.
Undercover footage shot by the Guardian reveals the English Defence League, which has staged a number of violent protests in towns and cities across the country this year, is planning to "hit" Bradford and the London borough of Tower Hamlets as it intensifies its street protests.
Senior figures in the coalition government were briefed on the threat posed by EDL marches this week. Tomorrow up to 2,000 EDL supporters are expected to descend on Newcastle for its latest protest.
MPs said the group's decision to target some of the UK's most prominent Muslim communities was a blatant attempt to provoke mayhem and disorder. "This group has no positive agenda," said the Bradford South MP, Gerry Sutcliffe. "It is an agenda of hate that is designed to divide people and communities. We support legitimate protest but this is not legitimate, it is designed to stir up trouble. The people of Bradford will want no part of it."
The English Defence League, which started in Luton last year, has become the most significant far-right street movement in the UK since the National Front in the 1970s. A Guardian investigation has identified a number of known rightwing extremists who are taking an interest in the movement – from convicted football hooligans to members of violent rightwing splinter groups.
Thousands of people have attended its protests – many of which have descended into violence and racist and Islamophobic chanting. Supporters are split into "divisions" spread across the UK and as many as 3,000 people are attracted to its protests.
The group also appears to be drawing support from the armed forces. Its online armed forces division has 842 members and the EDL says many serving soldiers have attended its demonstrations. A spokeswoman for the EDL, whose husband is a serving soldier, said: "The soldiers are fighting Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Iraq and the EDL are fighting it here … Not all the armed forces support the English Defence League but a majority do."
Following the British National party's poor showing in this month's local and national elections anti-racist campaigners say some far-right activists may be turning away from the ballot box and returning to violent street demonstrations for the first time in three decades.
Nick Lowles, from Searchlight, said: "What we are seeing now is the most serious, most dangerous, political phenomenon that we have had in Britain for a number of years. With EDL protests that are growing week in, week out there is a chance for major disorder and a major political shift to the right in this country."
In undercover footage shot by Guardian Films, EDL spokesman Guramit Singh says its Bradford demonstration "will be huge". He adds: "The problem with Bradford is the security threat, it is a highly populated Muslim area. They are very militant as well. Bradford is a place that has got to be hit."
Singh, who was speaking during an EDL demonstration in Dudley in April, said the organisation would also be targeting Tower Hamlets.
A spokesman for the EDL confirmed it would hold a demonstration in Bradford on 28 August because the city was "on course to be one of the first places to become a no-go area for non-Muslims". The EDL has already announced demonstrations in Cardiff and Dudley.
The former Home Office minister Phil Woolas said: "This is a deliberate attempt by the EDL at division and provocation, to try and push young Muslims into the hands of extremists, in order to perpetuate the divide. It is dangerous."
The EDL claims it is a peaceful and non-racist organisation only concerned with protesting against "militant Islam". However, over the last four months the Guardian has attended its demonstrations and witnessed racism, violence and virulent Islamophobia.
During the election campaign David Cameron described the EDL as "dreadful people" and said the organisation would "always be under review".
A spokesman for the Home Office said that although the government was committed to restoring the right to "non-violent protest … violence and intimidation are wholly unacceptable and the police have powers to deal with individuals who commit such acts. The government condemns those who seek to spread hatred."
He added: "Individual members of EDL – like all members of the public – are of course subject to the law, and all suspected criminal offences will be robustly investigated and dealt with by the police."
Matthew Taylor @'The Guardian'
(Thanx Fifi!)
Dennis Hopper, American film actor and icon, dies at 74
Dennis Hopper, the rogue talent who sparked a renaissance in American cinema, has died at the age of 74. The hard-living screen star died at his home in the coastal Los Angeles suburb of Venice at around 8am local time, surrounded by family and friends, Alex Hitz, a close friend, told Reuters.
The actor and film-maker was believed to have been suffering from terminal cancer and was admitted to the Cedars Sinai Medical Centre shortly before Christmas. His recent months were mired by a messy and public divorce case with his fifth wife. In March, he appeared on Hollywood Boulevard when he was honoured with a star on the Walk of Fame.
Hopper will perhaps be best remembered for his landmark 1969 movie Easy Rider, the film that introduced mainstream Hollywood to the counter-culture. His freewheeling tale of two bikers on an odyssey through America became one of the most successful independent pictures ever made, galvanising the industry and opening the doors for a new generation of film-makers that included Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola.
But Hopper was to prove too turbulent a personality to ever be regarded as a safe bet by the industry. His 1971 epic The Last Movie proved a critical and commercial disaster and his middle years were blighted by drug and alcohol abuse. He would later confess that he used cocaine in order to sober himself up for further drinking bouts.
In front of the camera, he became known for compelling, wild-eyed performances in films such as Tracks, River's Edge and Apocalypse Now. Arguably his most memorable turn came as the psychotic, helium-snorting Frank Booth in Dennis Lynch's 1986 classic Blue Velvet. "You have to let me play Frank Booth," Hopper reportedly told Lynch at the time. "Because I am Frank Booth."
After cutting his teeth at the fabled Actor's Studio in New York, he made his film debut alongside his friend James Dean in 1955's Rebel Without a Cause. He went on to work with Dean again on Giant and had a supporting role in the 1957 western Gunfight at the OK Corral. Other notable roles include The American Friend, Speed and True Romance.
The failure of The Last Movie did not quite kill off Hopper's career as a film-maker. His directing credits include the acclaimed Out of the Blue and Colors, a Los Angeles gang saga that starred Sean Penn. In later years he found a fresh lease of life as a painter, photographer and collector of modern art. He married five times and is survived by his four children.
"There are moments that I've had some real brilliance, you know," he reflected recently. "But I think they are moments. And sometimes, in a career, moments are enough."
RIP Dennis!
Pigeon held in India on suspicion of spying
Indian police are holding a pigeon under armed guard after it was caught on an alleged spying mission for arch rivals and neighbours Pakistan, media reported on Friday.The white-coloured bird was found by a local resident in India's Punjab state, which borders Pakistan, and taken to a police station 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the capital Amritsar.
The pigeon had a ring around its foot and a Pakistani phone number and address stamped on its body in red ink.
Police officer Ramdas Jagjit Singh Chahal told the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency that they suspected the pigeon may have landed on Indian soil from Pakistan with a message, although no trace of a note has been found.
Officials have directed that no-one should be allowed to visit the pigeon, which police say may have been on a "special mission of spying".
The bird has been medically examined and was being kept in an air-conditioned room under police guard.
Senior officers have asked to be kept updated on the situation three times a day, PTI said.
Chahal said local pigeon fanciers in the sensitive border area had told police that Pakistani pigeons were easily identifiable as they look different from Indian ones, according to the Indian Express newspaper.
'Football is made up of subjective feeling, of suggestion - and, in that, Anfield is unbeatable. Put a shit hanging from a stick in the middle of this passionate, crazy stadium and there are people who will tell you it's a work of art. It's not: it's a shit hanging from a stick.' - Valdano
Saturday, 29 May 2010
Jon Savage: He's Not Like Everybody Else
Essential viewing for any N.Y.C. resident who's into punk style, and specifically the spontaneous, from-the-gut creativity of its original British practitioners: "The Secret Public: Punk Montages, Photography, and Collages 1976-1981," an exhibit by Linder Sterling and Jon Savage that opens tonight at Chelsea's Steven Kasher Gallery as a part of Boo-Hooray's "pop-up/parasite" series of art shows. Sterling, in addition to being one of Morrissey's only close friends (legend has it he wrote the Smiths song "Wonderful Woman" for her), designed iconic record covers like the Buzzcocks' "Orgasm Addict" and later fronted her own band, Ludus. Savage, pictured above in the late-'70s next to a Joy Division flyer he made, wrote about the scene for Sounds, Melody Maker, and The Face, and is probably best known for his book England's Dreaming,
widely considered the definitive history of punk music. In other words, the man knows his shit. So we picked up the phone and asked him to tell us about the real legacy of Malcolm McLaren, the records you need to put on your shelves (he's DJing tonight's opening until 9:00 p.m., in case you needed another reason to go), his take on the state of modern rock music ("one huge major suckathon"), and how art helped him kick speed. The full Q&A, and more images from the exhibition, after the jump.
Through May 23 at Steven Kasher Gallery, 521 West 23rd Street, New York, NY; 212-966-3978. Brought to you by Boo-Hooray, a "pop-up/parasite" series of art shows curated by Johan Kugelberg.
What's the biggest misconception about punk?
Everything gets boiled down to a very simplistic idea, and actually punk was extremely complex. Just look at the New York bands that were called "punk" and who played at CBGB's and what a huge diversity there was there; now people tend to think it was just the Ramones. And the same goes for British punk. People in the U.S. think of it in terms of the Sex Pistols and people with Mohicans and stupid stuff like that. And there was a lot more going on.
Page 16 of London's Outrage # 2 fanzine, Jon Savage, February 1977, 11 3/4 x 8 1/2 in.
Is this exhibit an intervention into that received wisdom?
Well, I hope so. The magazine I did with Linder [The Secret Public] came out of the Manchester punk scene, which was the most creative punk scene toward the end of '77. Punk in London had already ended that summer, in terms of it being creative and interesting, and it had become very quickly co-opted into the music industry. And the whole idea of punk in the early stages was that you could do whatever you wanted to do. If you wanted to play music, you could do it; if you wanted to do artwork, you could do it; if you wanted to go out on the street looking like a Christmas tree, you could do it. The Secret Public came out of that, and out of my friendship with the Buzzcocks... who are in fact playing this week at Irving Plaza. The magazine came out on New Hormones, which was the Buzzcocks' record label. So it was all part of a friendship and an idea of possibility.
Buzzcocks/Magazine handbill, montage, Linder Sterling, 1978
Before coming to Manchester you studied at Cambridge.
Absolutely. I studied classics.
So how were you first swept into punk?
Before I had my academic and professional training, I was a pop fan. I was brought up in West London and from the age of nine was completely obsessed with pop music. I'm a child of the '50s, and so my parents had intense expectations: They wanted me to be a lawyer, or an accountant. I was nine when the Beatles hit in the UK, and that was it for me, really.
I got bored with hippie music in 1971. And one of the key points was going to see the Grateful Dead in '72 in the UK. And they were so bad. I went, and I wanted to be beamed up, I wanted to be taken to the furthest reaches of the cosmos, and instead I got fucking country rock. It was awful. And bad versions of "Johnny B. Goode." It was so lame. And so I went back into hard rock; a big group then was the Flamin' Groovies, and their album Teenage Head. And I liked glam rock. In '75 we started to get the first reports of the New York scene, and the first Patti Smith album, and then the first Ramones album, and it was obvious something was happening.
![Linder[1].jpg](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_skYGEh7O7_aoSZnmpX2-8ufu_543YJp71r6NyU4BYZvXecJJyAryOnapdK4d1_heLEJnPcltZFkCbH2nc1x9xdw_tk63OTxK8B6sUwbki-A4obYfwZg6XCXaCyIsj0=s0-d)
You're best known as a writer, but this exhibit shows that you were an artist and photographer in your own right.
It's all about specialization, and people don't like you being able to move across fields. Writing's my core work. I'm a child of pop music: I grew up with those groovy magazines, with pictures and text, the music press in London in the '60s, and then Rolling Stone when it was great in the late '60s, which had great montages by Satty in every issue. So the idea that you combined visuals and words was very much on my mind. The simple A4 format of the fanzine was incredibly liberating, and it tied in with the onset of the Xerox machine. It all really worked. In the UK at the time you could buy the really early Beat books, and they had these great montage magazines, these great William Burroughs cut-up magazines, by people like Claude Pelieu and Norman O. Mustill.
This was a direct influence on The Secret Public, then?
Well, montage is a great form. Because it's a way of condensing a lot of information. And that's a lot of what punk was about. Punk was about acceleration, dealing with information overload. And this was thirty years ago; a lot of things that punk was dealing with have now of course happened. It's very strange for me, in my fifties, to be living in the future that was prophesized when I was a young man. And that's what's happened.
In The Secret Public there was a lot of sex stuff, which I'm very pleased about. Because Linder's stuff is just fantastic, all that kind of protofeminist sex stuff I just love. In my case it was all to do with being a gay man at a time when it wasn't so great to be gay, and also having this particular view of the prevailing idea of masculinity, which I still think is pretty poor and pretty thin... The conventional idea of masculinity—sports and beer—it's pretty sad, really. I mean, it doesn't mean you have to be gay to like more than that.
For montage, your instrument of choice wasn't a brush or a camera. It was... a scalpel?
Yes. One of the times I was doing montage, I took speed, and I was listening to the Television album, Marquee Moon, and I had a scalpel, and I was so out of it on speed that I was rolling the scalpel between two of my fingers. That was the last time I ever did speed. That's my memory of the scalpel.
The scalpel got you off speed.
Thank you.
What did the name Secret Public allude to?
It's that very English idea that the Puritans brought to the U.S., of hiding everything in closets, sexuality in particular. And punk was a lot about wearing very sexually aggressive clothes—that was what McLaren and Westwood were promoting out of the Sex shop. The whole thing with punk was, We're gonna lift up the stone, and we're gonna show you all the beasts that are crawling around underneath. Because it's fucking time.
Those were your politics, at the time?
Yeah. It was like, Britain is fucked. It's involved in this ridiculous kind of nostalgia for the war, and for the '40s and '50s. It's all a fucking nightmare, and this is what it's really like... and let's move into the present and the future, please. Huge areas of London and Manchester were derelict at the time. And out of that dereliction you had a kind of freedom. If you were young and stupid, because you didn't know any better. You had this kind of playground. You didn't need money.
You were very much part of a culture of independently produced, D.I.Y. magazines. How do you feel about online publishing?
I struggle with it. Part of me is very old-school, in that I love the physical thing. It's like stocks and shares. There's something to me not quite real about it, because I can't touch it... My thing with the internet is very simple: It's much harder to make an impact on the internet. 'Cause there's so damn much of it. One of the reasons punk made such an impact was all to do with focus and scarcity. And I can't see that happening again. My whole point with those pictures I took in North London [featured in the exhibit], they were all of complete dereliction, and then suddenly the last two frames, you're underneath this motorway, and there's this graffiti that says The Clash. There seemed to be absolutely nothing in London at that point except two or three punk rock groups. And they were the only signs of life. Scarcity and focus: It's very difficult to see how you're going to get that back again.
You came out of punk, and wrote about it for several magazines throughout the late-'70s and '80s. And yet your first book was about the Kinks.
Well, it's a question of being a young writer and being offered a book. But I'd known and loved the Kinks since I was a kid. When I was 10 I saw them playing "You Really Got Me" on television and I couldn't believe people could look so fantastic, and be so girly, and make such a noise. And The Clash and Pistols sang songs by all those '60s mod-era pop groups, like the Who and the Kinks and the Small Faces.
What are your five essential pre-punk records—the ones that laid the groundwork for what was to come?
You'd have to have something from the U.K. mid-'60s, something garage-y. "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," by the Kinks; or "Substitute" by the Who.
Then you'd have to know about the whole Velvets/Stooges/MC5 axis. I've just been rediscovering "I'm Sick of You" by the Stooges, which is completely awesome and vile, and which is based on a riff by the Yardbirds, from "Happening Ten Years Time Ago."
Then you've got the whole Nuggets thing, '60s American garage. The intensity of it. The 13th Floor Elevators. "Psychotic Reaction," by the Count Five.
'66 you had all these records that were really nasty. "Seven and Seven Is" by Love, "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby?" by the Rolling Stones, they're all completely insane records, very kind of apocalyptic. And then at the end of the year you had "Good Vibrations" and the whole start of hippie culture, which was great in another way.
You'd have to have glam rock, and I'd go for "Dynamite" by Mud, which is killer. Check it on YouTube... There are a couple of Sex Pistols guitar riffs in there. [laughs]
Also the Sweet, "Ballroom Blitz" and "Teenage Rampage."
And then you have the weird, fringe pre-punk stuff from all those insane people in America making insane records, and the ultimate of that would have to be the Electric Eels' "Agitated."
Oh, and the first Pere Ubu single: "Heart of Darkness" and "Final Solution."
Both bands from Cleveland.
Cleveland! For Brits, Cleveland is real weird shit. I mean, New York is kind of understandable, and London's got a big thing about New York, a good thing. But yeah, Cleveland, "the mistake on the lake." What's that all about?
Is there anything going on today in music that's interesting you?
It's difficult. It's definitely an age thing. Most modern rock I just cannot listen to; I think it sucks. People like Arcade Fire... suck. What are all these men doing with these old-guys' beards, and they're in their late-twenties, and they've got these horrible brown beards that are a different color from their hairdos? What is that all about? It's retarded. It's boys trying to be men. One huge major suckathon, I'm sorry. It just doesn't rock. Rock music has got to have that primal urge in it. It's gotta make you want to drive your car 130 miles per hour, take class-A drugs, have bad sex, and just be irresponsible and vile.
Pop music has become a victim of its own success. When I was a kid it was definitely marginal, it was for the weirdos and the freaks and the mutants and the people who wanted to be different. And now it's just the same as everything else. So I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music. Because it sounds modern. You know, like it was made in 2010.
How would you summarize Malcolm McLaren's legacy?
Well, without Malcolm: None of us, in our present form. Terribly simple. We wouldn't have been doing all this. He just started everything in the U.K. He was the catalyst, he was the spark. End of story.
Andy Comer @'GQ'
(Thanx Stan!)
In memorium
In Memoria e Amicizia
In Memory and Friendship:
Rocco Acerra
Bruno Balli
Alfons Bos
Giancarlo Bruschera
Andrea Casula
Giovanni Casula
Nino Cerullo
Willy Chielens
Giuseppina Conti
Dirk Daenecky
Dionisio Fabbro
Jacques François
Eugenio Gagliano
Francesco Galli
Giancarlo Gonnelli
Alberto Guarini
Giovacchino Landini
Roberto Lorentini
Barbara Lusci
Franco Martelli
Loris Messore
Gianni Mastrolaco
Sergio Bastino Mazzino
Luciano Rocco Papaluca
Luigi Pidone
Bento Pistolato
Patrick Radcliffe
Domenico Ragazzi
Antonio Ragnanese
Claude Robert
Mario Ronchi
Domenico Russo
Tarcisio Salvi
Gianfranco Sarto
Giuseppe Spalaore
Mario Spanu
Tarcisio Venturin
Jean Michel Walla
Claudio Zavaroni
Bruno Balli
Alfons Bos
Giancarlo Bruschera
Andrea Casula
Giovanni Casula
Nino Cerullo
Willy Chielens
Giuseppina Conti
Dirk Daenecky
Dionisio Fabbro
Jacques François
Eugenio Gagliano
Francesco Galli
Giancarlo Gonnelli
Alberto Guarini
Giovacchino Landini
Roberto Lorentini
Barbara Lusci
Franco Martelli
Loris Messore
Gianni Mastrolaco
Sergio Bastino Mazzino
Luciano Rocco Papaluca
Luigi Pidone
Bento Pistolato
Patrick Radcliffe
Domenico Ragazzi
Antonio Ragnanese
Claude Robert
Mario Ronchi
Domenico Russo
Tarcisio Salvi
Gianfranco Sarto
Giuseppe Spalaore
Mario Spanu
Tarcisio Venturin
Jean Michel Walla
Claudio Zavaroni
RIP - You'll Never Walk Alone.
Heysel football disaster remembered 25 years on
On 29 May, 1985, 39 football fans died during violent clashes between Liverpool and Juventus supporters at the European Cup final in Brussels.
As a result of the disaster at Heysel Stadium, UEFA banned English clubs from taking part in European football for five years, with Liverpool serving an extra year.
For lifelong Liverpool fan Chris Rowland, the events of that night are as clear today as they were 25 years ago.
"I remember all of it," he said. "The memory has stayed crystal clear in my mind."
More than 60,000 Liverpool and Juventus fans were at the rundown stadium when violence erupted about an hour before kick-off.
A retaining wall separating the opposing fans collapsed as the Italian club's supporters tried to escape from Liverpool followers.
Thirty-two Italians, four Belgians, two French and a man from Northern Ireland died while hundreds of fans were injured.
Mr Rowland, who was not involved in the violence, was aged 28 at the time and regularly travelled with friends throughout Europe to support Liverpool.
"It started out like all the European trips," he said. "There was no reason to suspect it would be very different to any of the others."
But when Mr Rowland, now aged 53, arrived at the stadium half an hour before the match, it became clear that something was amiss.
"We saw people charging over the wall and charging towards us," he explained. "Our first thought was that they were attacking us.
"We saw chaos around the turnstiles and the shabby state of the ground."
He said he heard a sound similar to that of a heavy metal gate clanging - which he later realised must have been the wall falling.
Mr Rowland, who lives in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, became aware that someone had died later that evening.
But it was not until reading the morning newspapers the following day that he realised the real extent of what had happened.
"It was incredulous that something of that scale could have happened," Mr Rowland added.
"You cannot begin to understand the enormity of it. It was awful, absolutely awful."
Inside the stadium's dressing room waiting to play was Liverpool defender Gary Gillespie.
'Completely useless' Mr Gillespie said he and his teammates had no idea what was happening.
"We we very much cocooned in that dressing room," he said. "We did not really know what the situation was outside.
"As we were getting changed in the dressing room there was the usual banter, obviously the usual nerves because it was such a big occasion, and then we got conflicting reports about what had happen."
Following the tragedy, there was widespread criticism of the Liverpool fans and English football supporters in general, who had gained a reputation for hooliganism in previous years.
UEFA imposed the ban on English clubs and in 1989, 14 Liverpool fans were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter at a five-month trial in Belgium.
They were given three-year sentences - although half the terms were suspended.
There has never been an official inquiry into the incident to find out exactly what happened.
Some people claimed Juventus supporters provoked Liverpool fans by hurling stones and other missiles, others blamed the lack of police presence, poor organisation and a decrepit stadium.
Italian journalist Giancarlo Galavotti, London correspondent for the Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper, was at the Heysel Stadium on 29 May, 1985.
He described the Belgian policing of the event as "completely useless".
"I could really tell, let's say 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, before the fatal clash occurred that it was a very serious and dangerous situation that was developing," he said.
"Irrespective of what was the behaviour of some sections of the Liverpool fans, if Belgian police had been adept in policing the situation, like the Italian police were the year earlier in Rome, I do not think there would have been such a tragedy happening in Brussels in 1985."
Liverpool supporter Graham Agg, 48, from Netherton, Liverpool, also criticised the Belgian police and the state of the stadium.
"How they got permission to hold a European Cup final was beyond belief," he said. "It was falling down. There was no security.
"The terrace was crumbling - you could pick up bricks. It was a disgrace.
"In Liverpool's history it is one of the dark days, but a very small minority caused the trouble.
"Even when they did cause the trouble, they did not intend for people to die. If it had been held in a proper stadium it would never have happened."
The game eventually went ahead, despite objections from both managers, and Juventus won 1-0 with a second-half penalty.
The Heysel Stadium, built in 1930, was demolished and replaced by the all-seater Stade Roi Baudouin.
A plaque to remember the 39 people killed was unveiled at Liverpool's Anfield stadium on Wednesday.
A two minutes' silence was held at the city's town hall on Friday when the bells were rung 39 times - a gesture that is being repeated on Saturday.
Katie Dawson @'BBC'
21C Magazine’s Ashley Crawford – Mediapunk interview
Richard Metzger called 21C his favorite magazine of the 90s and “The most unabashedly intellectual and forward-thinking journal that I have ever seen, anywhere.” Editor Ashley Crawford joined the magazine in 1990 when the magazine was still a publication of Australian Commission For The Future “a comparatively short-lived governmental entity.” Ashley took the magazine international with the help of publishing house Gordon & Breach in 1994. The magazine continued in this form until 1999. After a short lived online revival helmed by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) in the early 00s, the magazine went back into long-term hiatus.
Now it’s back in a new digital form. Ashley was kind enough to answer a few questions about the magazine’s past, present, and future for the inaugural Mediapunk interview.
How did you get involved in 21C? Were you the editor from the beginning or were you brought on later? Were you involved the Australian Commission For The Future before 21C?
OK, strange history. 21C was already up and running and had, from memory, two editors before me. I was running an independent arts/culture magazine called Tension. It was actually in the process of folding when the Commission for the Future approached me to take over. The Commission was a government body and the magazine was funded accordingly. I worked under the government structure editing the magazine from 1990-93 in that version and even then, although it had a strong Australian flavor, it was beginning to tackle cyberspace, information overload, virtual reality etc.
In 1994 I was approached by a Swiss-based international company, Gordon & Breach, who wanted to start an international art magazine – World Art. I accepted but didn’t really want to let go of 21C and so organized a take-over of the magazine. Accordingly I ended up editing and publishing a revised version of the title from 1994 to 1999. Given we were suddenly international in scope I made the most of it and approached folk I’d been a fan of for some time, amongst them such people as J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, Kathy Acker, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Mark Dery, Andrew Ross, R.U. Sirius, Claudia Springer, McKenzie Wark, Darren Tofts, Michael Moorcock, Thurston Moore, Erik Davis and others. To my utter amazement they all responded enthusiastically.
How different was the 1990-93 version from the 1994-1999 version?
Extremely. The earlier version was extremely parochial with a strong Australian flavor. We changed the format and structure entirely. The earlier version had a strong socio-political flavor whereas the second version, while maintaining some of that eg; covering Noam Chomsky, tended towards the more speculative which you can see in the selection on that archive site up now. The posthuman, cyberpunk etc.
In the newer material we tend to be going weirdly post-cyber. Where once it was replicants and cyborgs now it seems to be zombies. Where once it was the glittering on-line (albeit wonderfully gritty) world of Neuromancer and Snow Crash, today it seems to be the blasted wilderness of Cormac McCarthy, Brian Evenson and Brian Conn or the strange, fantastical but distinctly visceral rituals of Ben Marcus or Matthew Derby.
What was your background before 21C?
Actually I was trained as an old-fashioned reporter on a newspaper before the days of training in universities – trained on the street as it were. Never attended uni although I’ve lectured in innumerable colleges around the world. Age 17 saw my first slaughtered body on a police rounds job – a poor women cut into a million pieces – long story. Probably did insurmountable damage to a young mind. This was, mind you, 1979, and being threatened by the mafia etc, was part of the job. Fear, adrenalin, alcohol, nicotine and speed were part of the job. Then I got assigned to writing on rock music where fear, adrenalin, alcohol, nicotine and speed were ESSENTIAL to the job. Try snorting cocaine with Ian Drury, trying to out-drink Mark E.Smith or getting thrown into jail with Nick Cave as starting points…
But I was always attracted to the mind-games of folk like Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. Then along came the cyberpunks and through 21C I had the opportunity to meet and/or correspond with some incredible minds; Ballard, Acker, Gibson, etc. There is a kind of adrenalin / challenge to addressing such folk – sadly they’re rarities in our world.
In the early 00s, Paul D. Miller edited two issues of a new, online edition of 21C – what happened with that, and how did the new version come about? Why now?
The DJ Spooky combo came about when a long-term 21C contributor, Mark Dery, invited me on-board as executive editor of a magazine he’d taken editorship of called Artbyte in New York in 2001 shortly after 21C had died in its print-form. Dery had fantastic ambitions for Artbyte but unfortunately the publisher was, to say the least, eccentric. We didn’t stand a chance.
Paul was an contributor to Artbyte. When 21C died he asked if I would be happy for him to try and get it running on-line and I said why not? But of course Paul’s busily running around the world being DJ Spooky and simply couldn’t put the energy into it to do anything but maintain a fairly token presence.
Ever since 21C passed away people have been asking me for back issues or how to source specific articles. It’s been driving me nuts. Also I keep coming across things that I’d love to see covered more thoroughly. Most recently, the plethora of writers of decidedly post-cyberpunk dystopic fiction that I’ve tentatively dubbed Apocalypse Noir in the current issue.
What have you been up to since 21C folded?
Predominantly freelancing in the realms of visual art and travel, soaking up alien cultures in as real a way as is possible in the wired world. Been spending a fair bit of time with Australian indigenous people in the bush, discovering their totally unique culture(s). A lot of newspaper and magazine work.
Magazines and other publications have been rushing iPad apps out the door. Will we be seeing 21C in the App Store?
We’re looking at that right now. I’d love to see it as an App. But I’d also love to see it as hard copy. We have a lot to sort out and, as Mark Dery has pointed out, at the moment it’s just white heterosexual grumpy men featured, so we have to address that urgently.
And on the subject of the iPad – do you see the future of magazines in e-readers of various types?
I still cherish the notion of magazines – and more particularly books – as object. 21C was fairly renowned for its design and illustration and I have yet to see an equivalent on-screen. I’m also concerned that reading substantial articles/essays on-screen is somewhat tiring – maybe that’s generational – but a great deal of what is published on line is intentionally brief – attention spans are getting slighter and slighter to the point that a celebrity telling the world that she burped after breakfast is a hot ticket on Twitter. I’m more of a fan of the approach taken by Harper’s or The New Yorker – not necessarily the subject matter, but the intelligence and effort put into the research and argument. The kind of approach you see in 21C by such writers as Mark Dery and Erik Davis. It’s all too rare in this age.
Can you do that on an iPad? We’ll know soon enough I hope.
I was going to say – there’s something of a new renaissance in indie magazines right now – stuff like Dodgem Logic, Coilhouse, and Steampunk Magazine. They’re all quite successful in their own right, though I’m not sure how many people’s livelihood each of them is able to support. And then there’s stuff like Lulu and Mag Cloud that enable people to get into print with very low risk. So it’s a surprisingly exciting time for print.
Are there any magazines coming out right now that you’re fond of?
I love parts of lots of magazines but few of them have the depth that I hanker for. A part of that is the twitter age of low concentration spans. A part of it is lack of first-hand training. A part of it is a lack of decent pay – few writers can afford to take weeks off to do decent research. I wish something like Steampunk or Coilhouse (or 21C for that matter) had the resources of the New Yorker… we can but dream…
One issue of Coilhouse actually had a piece that had originally been published online years before called “Dark Miracle” by Joshua Ellis (still available here). It was a piece of long form journalism that was “crowdfunded” (before the term had been invented, I think, and way before Kickstarter). I think that’s probably where longer form journalism is headed, especially for the indies – it’s gonna have to be paid for by someone in advance. Two of my big interests right now are “journalist as brand” and “journalism as a service” (as opposed to product).
I can only speak for myself here, but I have a terrible attention span – I’ve always got dozens of browser tabs open, I’m constantly on Twitter and I was a smart phone “early adopter.” But I still read long form journalism (from places like The New Yorker and The Atlantic and Vanity Fair) and even entire books on my laptop and Blackberry. It usually takes me a while, because I’m dividing up my attention, but I do it. So I do think there’s at least some audience there.
Speaking of distractions – have a read of this – I think it’s pertinent to our discussion.
Again only speaking for myself: I’ve been having better luck focusing on reading on mobile devices – my Blackberry and my iPod Touch. There’s just less less stuff going on on them, and I can curl up on the couch and read. That’s something I think is encouraging about dedicated devices like the Kindle – they should make it easier to focus on reading longer pieces. I’m not that worried about arguments about those sorts of devices being “passive” – sometimes it’s best to be passive for a little while.
I did notice something this morning that may be pertinent. It’s my habit to have a read of the New York Times every morning on-line. This morning there was a large and shifting bright red Coca Cola add to one side. It made it impossible to concentrate on the text. Ads in old-style newspapers don’t move and, although they may work subliminally, they’re fairly easy to ignore. The Coke ad on-line was a constant distraction making it impossible to ignore and, indeed, making it impossible to complete an article and after a minute or so I gave up and quit the NY Times altogether for the day. If this is the future of on-line advertising then not only print is dead, so is reading.
What advice would you give young professional journalists? What advice would you give “citizen journalists” in terms of learning the ropes?
I’ve done quite a lot of mentoring for younger writers in recent years. Almost all of them seemed bogged down in an academic approach where each and every word seemed to pose a problem rather than a pleasure. We seem to have two extremes – one is university speak which is unbearable, the other is border-line illiteracy. The first rule of thumb is GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT. The second is the old maxim, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE AND WHY. Don’t assume all your readers know who or what you are referring to.
Klint Finley @'MediaPunk
Dark Miracle by Joshua Ellis
There’s an old story that in the hours before dawn on July 16th, 1945, a young woman named Georgia Green was being driven back to school at the University of New Mexico by her sister Margaret and her brother-in-law Joe. Suddenly, she saw a bright flash of light, and she gripped Joe’s arm hard enough to make him swerve the car. “What’s that light?” she asked.
The thing is, Georgia Green was blind.
At that moment, some fifty miles away, a tall, gaunt man in a porkpie hat was also staring at the light, through a pair of darkened welder’s glasses. He was the architect of Georgia Green’s dark miracle, and he was very, very tired — as tired, perhaps, as anyone can be and still move and breathe. It had been a long road coming out to this empty desert spot, which he called Trinity. It had been a long war.
Some of the men around him cheered. Some of them wept. A few, mostly scientists, were quietly sick in the sand beyond the dim lights of their camp. But he just stood and watched the great glowing mushroom cloud that rose in the darkness like a judgment from one angry god or another.
I am become Death, thought Robert Oppenheimer, remembering an ancient Hindu text. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
* * *
Here are the facts: at fifteen seconds before 5:30 in the morning, Mountain Standard Time, on July 16th, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated, at a site code-named Trinity. It was the culmination of almost two and a half years of intensive work, done primarily by a group of scientists and engineers in a secret city roughly a hundred and fifty miles north of Trinity, called Los Alamos. The project’s director was a brilliant and depressive Berkeley physicist named Robert Oppenheimer.
On August 6th, a bomb called “Little Boy” was dropped by a bomber named the Enola Gay on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, another bomb — “Fat Boy” — was dropped on Nagasaki. The combined death toll is estimated to be between 100,000 and 220,000 people, possibly much higher if later deaths from radiation exposure are counted. Almost all of the casualties were civilian.
The bombings had replaced Operation Downfall, a planned invasion by Allied forces of Japan. Estimates by the American Secretary of War suggested that such an invasion would most likely result in as many as fourteen million casualties — most of them Japanese. This was the justification for the bombings; horrible as they were, it was felt by many in the Allied chain of command that the alternative was far worse. The use of atomic bombs, they were sure, would cause the Japanese Emperor Hirohito to surrender.
They were right. On August 14, 1945, Hirohito surrendered to the Allies, ending World War II — a war which had caused an estimated sixty-two million deaths in fifty-one countries around the world.
Immediately after the bombing, many of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project — including Oppenheimer himself — urged American President Harry Truman to share the bomb with the world, giving control of atomic weapons to a transnational organization of some kind, to prevent any one nation from using atomic weapons.
Truman demurred…but unbeknownst to him, a spy at Los Alamos named Klaus Fuchs had already given detailed plans for the Trinity bomb to the Soviet Union.
And so the Cold War began.
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