Head-meld-bonkers Update
Every day I see things that make me realise that the assertions of Derrick Jensen that the dominant culture hates itself and everything to the point where it is dragging us into a mass ecocide; "There can be no real peace when living with someone who has already declared war, no peace but capitulation. And even that, as we see around us, doesn’t lead to further peace but to further degradation and exploitation..." from 'A Language Older than Words' by Derrick Jensen

I read this and then I see: "The British Environment Agency has reported that the anti-depression drug Prozac can now be found in Britain's drinking water. Prozac is being used at such an alarming rate in Britain that it is building up both in river systems and groundwater."

Its fucked. We are fucked unless we act now – so come to the G8 meeting as a suggested starting point. While on the subject of fucked – Iraq. How fucked up can it get?

This fucked up?

I guess so.

Massive Attack on Bristol

Massive Attack! Basement Jaxx! Some other middle-brow artists! "There's only one city in the world I'd live in - f*** Paris, f*** New York - it's Bristol," stated Robert Del Naja to the BBC! Yeah! Except the fiasco of the Cannon’s Marsh gigs demonstrate something more fundamental that the cities influence on music – it betrays the corporate heart of the city that now tries to force us to jump to its beat.

First you get a brand (Grolsch owned by the Coors Brewing Company, who have a history of funding hard right political organizations, environmental damage and homophobia) and then some hip, groovy bands (Massive Attack, Basement Jaxx and so on) and what do you have? A summer sizzler. Now all you need to do is charge £25 and the witless punters will throng into your embrace...

Except that they don’t. The first nights gig was not sold-out, with only 3500 of the 4000 tickets gone. Touts were offering more unwanted tickets for the cut-price of £19. It seemed like Bristol was not willing to spend £25 per night to watch the summer set. The promoters, who had not anticipated the low take up, began bringing in PR people from other beer brands to boost the profile. Those who did attend were not happy to find that not only were you being asked to spend £25 to get in, but security were searching people on entry for alcohol – then sending you into the arena where the only beer was Grolsch at £3 per pint. The most obvious sign of the mess was that by the time Basement Jaxx were playing on the Wednsday, you could get tickets for £12.50.

However, not content with trying to fleece the willing, the promoters then moved to fleecing the unwilling: First they showed the corporate clout they had by closing down the far side of the harbor, oblivious to the fact that many people use this route as a through route. Next they began pressuring the harbour-master to harass the boats so as to prevent them from listening in. On hand were also the cops to hassle those on Prince Street Bridge about drinking in a pubic space (though if you paid £3 for some Grolsch on the other side on the bank you can get as pissed as you want.) The evening post joined in by moaning about the boats who had be allegedly listening in for free.

The arrogance is such that these corporate promoters think they can control the very land and air of the city; the complicity of the local authorities, police and media lends credence to their world-view. But to me, if they choose to have a concert in the middle of a city, they should live with the consequences - which include the reality that some people will be able to hear (whether they want to or not) the music outside their branded space. Grolsch is a guest in our city, and it should behave as such and not like some spoilt child trying to eat all of the pies.



PS. I'm reading Derrick Jensen's 'A Language Older than Words' the book is stunning and so on my thoughts that friends are complaining that at each opportune moment I get the book out to read a passage to them. You can get the book at Greenleaf, I urge you to do so. The book is about the culture of destruction that we find around us, each and every day I see examples of what Dezza is talking about write large. Example of the week the Guardian's total word count from the mainstream media: the genocide in Dafur: 27,660 words while Sven and the football/sex thing: 208,366 words.

Contrasting News - Linked in the Middle
It seems that something very interesting and positive is going on in Bolivia, as the Qhepus Anarchist Collective (posed on the excellent ainfos anarchist newswire) take up the story...

Bolivia is a poor, backward country, turned into a colony of Yankee imperialism, where an insipid bourgeoisie uses this "nation" as its own property, rotating the country's governors between the members of its social class, and opening the doors of the country to imperialism and the transnational companies so that they can pillage the natural resources of the country however they feel fit. And this has already been going on for a long time....To all this must be added that there are a total of 10 municipalities that have expelled the state authorities and got rid of institutions like the police and army, to put into practice, once and for all, the communitarian model that the Aymará people call "ayllu".

This "ayllu", in agreement with the Aymará view of things, is a system where Direct Democracy is put into practice, as the main decisions are made on the basis of open assemblies of the whole population, and where Mutual Aid and Solidarity form part of daily life for these people, who are looking to build a better society through means of these valuable tools. And without doubt they will obtain it, as long as they, together with the inhabitants of the cities, can free themselves from the claws of the State, be it national or supranational (imperialist).

The world's libertarians must salute with raised fists these initiatives by the indigenous communities that inhabit Bolivia, who, without parties or vanguards, support each other in natural organizations, seeking by themselves to construct a future of Freedom....

Well, if it is as you say, I salute you with raised fist.

On the flip side - Seymour Hersh, the multi-award winning journalist who originally broke the My Lai massacre story and who recently broke the Abu Ghraib torture, gave a speech recently in which he shows how deep the hole goes in that prison and Iraq really goes. It's really deep:

"I can tell you it was much worse. There are worse photos, worse events....some of the worse things that happened you don't know about.....The women were passing messages out saying 'please come and kill me' because of what's happened, basically what happened is those women who were arrested with young boys, children, the boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling, the worse above all of them is the sound track of the boys shrieking. That your government has...."

You could dismiss this as the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist with a tinfoil-hat if it was not for the fact that the assertions come from somebody who has received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. How fundamentally wrong can this Iraq enterprise be when we are asked to stand shoulder to shoulder with a corpse-machine that uses the rape of children as a weapon of war? Can you rape your way to a democracy? If you accept (as the evidence points to) that the horrific operations in Abu Ghraib come from the top - there is no other conclusion than it is all wrong. Blair can ask us to rejoice because Iraq is free, well Tony, state sanctioned rape is not freedom. It is all wrong. The enterprise that is Operation Iraqi Freedom and the system that spawned and sustained it must be brought down, person by person, bit by bit. Then we can talk freedom.

And here is the link between the two - I am hopeful that what is happening in Bolivia is part and parcel of building a better world. A world without the corpse-machine of the military industrial complex. A world of direct democracy. Dick Cheney was right, we are entering a state of perpetual war - but for those opposing the corpse machine, the war will not be fought with cruise missiles or Depleted Uranium rounds - it will be fought in hearts and minds, on streets, in lockdowns, insurgencies, petitions, die-ins, demos, by surviving, through non-compliance and a million other ways - until their whole enterprise is stopped dead.

Head-Meld-Update
 
The Russians might be sending troops to Iraq.  The report going around is that in exchange for oil concessions and help in getting Russia into the World Trade Organisation.  The report says that it may be as many as 40,000.  Money not only talks, it mobilises armies!  It circular irony of the few al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq, who cut their teeth fighting the Russians in Afghanistan in the 80s then alongside the US – will now once more be facing the Russians – different decade, different land – but to them, I guess, its all for the same cause.
 
On a totally unrelated topic – there is a cool picture of Roni Size at Ashton Court here:  
http://www.photex.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Image012.jpg
 

Ashton Court Walkabout
 
Well for anyone who missed it, another year of Ashton Court madness has come and gone.  First up I’d like to send a shout-out to the people who made it a great two days – the mentalists!  You knows you make it what it is!  Guy in all-over body-glove dancing round talking to people who weren’t there – mentalist.  Guy who stood on the comedy tent stage with his tackle out singing (badly) the Burt Bacharach cover the Stranglers do, to an audience of around 200 people – mentalist.  The people at the disinformation tent – mentalists.  The (many) people whos summer tipple of choice was a gallon bottle of skullfuck cider – apple mentalists. 
 
Here is how it went down for me:  Saturday I spent quite a while at the Blackout stage and hugely enjoyed Distance/Time (but I’m bias in that opinion).  Distance/Time kept the audience pretty rapt with contemporary dance, electro-acoustic music and VJing and is (I guess) the first time contemporary dance has been done with a breakcore soundtrack?  Correct me if I’m wrong.  I hung around to see Deaf Rave:  When I first heard about this event I was thinking Death Rave – which sounded pretty hardcore, in the event it was actually Deaf Rave; but it was really focused, impressive and got the crowd moving. The performers were very confident and full-on, resulting in an event that felt like a kind of top of the pops on acid.  I also spend some time in the comedy tent and really enjoyed that too; partly thanks to the mentalist described, but also due to some very funny people giving it some.  I ended the evening listening to Goldie Lookin Chain and could not hear a fucking word.  All I could see is around 150 people in tracksuits running around on stage trying not to bump into each other.  Given that the fun of Goldie Lookin Chain is in the lyrics – this was a bit of a disappointment.  The only line I heard was the chorus, "...JLo ain't shit to me, PDiddy ain't shit to me, fuck you Alisha Keys" ….From there I went off to a party, which was a bit of a washout because, given the bridge was shut, by the time people had yomped the 38 miles back home everyone – party organisers included – were knackered and only seemed to have enough energy to make tea, not war.
 
Incidentally the security were living up to the rep of Bristol bounders, generally driving round at boy-racer speed and busily dismounting their Armoured Personal Carriers to tackle non-existent emergencies each time.  They had also taken a lesson from the cops that is familiar to activists – getting a camera stuffed into your face - I saw a gaggle of these body-armoured goons videoing and shunting a trader along like there were pulling protestors from lockdown as Fairford rather than trying to stop some woman selling hash-cake.
 
So Sunday I got up early (1.30pm) and aimed to get to Ashton Court by 5.15pm to see Five Knuckle Shuffle.  I got there and had a place in the sun ready to punk-out and the boys did not disappoint.  Full-on-punk!  I also noted that the lead singer pledged to do all he could to keep the festival community and cheap to attend.  From there I wondered around (aimlessly) for a bit (as you do) and observed the mentalists being mental.  In the meantime I saw some of Bug Planet, which was good, but as I could only get space to sit by the speaker – was painful in one ear.  The Blackout tent was a top destination for me this year – they had lots of kooky shit on and it was always worth staggering in to check out the sounds.  From there I then saw Rebalado, which was a Brazilian-salsa-carnival type thing.  The rhythms were pretty funky and I noticed that the audience for the show went from a gender mix of around 50/50 to being 70/30 in favour of males after the carnival dancers in silver bikinis and half the EC glitter mountain on, emerged.   That said, they did get the crowd moving and for a while it seemed that the only difference between Bristol and Brazil was the weather.  That done I was dragged to see Banghra Fever; the poor guys of whom were having massive technical troubles and ended up doing the gig with only 1 turntable and no CD player, but they had lots energy and enthusiasm and that made up the slack.  From there more comedy tent stuff, which was still funny but no naked people (invite the mentalist back next year!) and once that was done it the stage went to Blackout (not the top tent, but a drum'n'bass act).  Now, I know Roni and the Stranglers were playing, and I only saw one Roni track in passing, but for me, ending the festival in a tent with full-on grassroots drum'and'bass, a nod to the place where the sound was tempered all those years ago, made a kind of poetic sense.  Blackout were pretty fantastic and kept the huge crowd jumping with singers, MCs, guitars, DJ, wired-noise boxes, flute and sax.  As the sun set to the thumping bass and banging drum, this, rather than the big names, was where Ashton Court belongs.