john eden
male pale and stale
RTS was just as ritualised as any other protest after the first few, though.
1) Get crowd, get space, get soundsystem.
2) party and/or defend space.
3) Have ruck with cops.
Whats the difference between
- Thread starter Room with a view
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RTS was just as ritualised as any other protest after the first few, though.
1) Get crowd, get space, get soundsystem.
2) party and/or defend space.
3) Have ruck with cops.
john eden
male pale and stale
not too much to add to this, it's all dead on (only I'm still in my 20s, I'm not one of you pot-smoking dads yet! though I'm quite looking forward to senility & all that)
and it really doesn't take a tremendous effort to break out of the subcultural ghetto. I promise.
Ha ha, but dissensus is pretty subcultural, is it now?
I figured you were older, padraig - in a good way!
john eden
male pale and stale
different thread I guess - there was an interesting piece in the Guardian last saturday about this and the polanski stuff. Cohn-Bendit was quoted I think with some kids-lib stuff he definitely regrets now.
rave stuff is interesting - a great example of people doing something to have a good time and almost ending up being subversive by accident.
there was something on his blog or possibly here where he was talking about a student who insisted on keeping his earphones in during class, even though there wasn't any music coming through them.
I seem to remember he interpreted this as kids having to be connnected to the matrix at all times yadda yadda.
But it now occurs to me that said student was in fact subverting conventional deference to teachers.
I remember that well. I thought it was of the most awful accounts about working in education ever - was desperately fishing for some kind of counter to this.
I'm not too sure... don't know how well versed you are in UK politics etc but I think you can see the Government's reaction to the rave scene and the subsequent legislation against it, and the harrassment of "new age" travellers (John Major: "Not in this age, not in any age") as part of a continumn, that began with the Heath Government losing to the miners in the strike in 1974 - this moved through the Greenham Common peace protests, stopping off to bash heads at "The Battle of the Beanfield" and onto the Miners Strike. This is why I don't think you can segregate off partying from political protest, easily. When executed on a mass scale, it is scary to the powers that be...and in this instance, provoked a clear reaction.
I think the Government were frightened by the mass mobility aided by new technology in the early 90s - 10,000+ people turning up at Castlemorten - thus the Criminal Justice Bill and the harrassment of the travellers. The whole "alternative culture" that they represented seems to me to have been driven off the map - in part because it represented a challenge to hegemony.
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Maybe in some ways. London is relatively crowded and a lot of roads are old and not very wide. Pavements are squashed and narrow, cars inevitably take up a lot of the available space. There's often not enough room for people to park their cars near where they live.
At the time also, and still but to a lesser extent, public transport in London was rubbish and expensive, and there were next to no cycle lanes. It seemed that funding and planning was heavily weighted in favour of private car drivers, for whatever reason.
Neighbourhoods can be a lot more local than the size of a city might suggest. We who live around here, nothing wrong with saying there's an overall community.
But actually in practice that's not how those (first few) street things manifested. Somewhere like Camden Town really has the feel of public space. It's so busy, it doesn't belong to anyone. And I was a local. It was nice, Camden could be great with less traffic.
Nah, it's a bit of prankery, and trying to express something in the face of not knowing. Nobody was dictated to and nobody's life was messed up. It provided a bit of street theatre and novelty.
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Danny, worth noting I think that some of the exact same people who were already on the road and/or involved with the rave and free festival scenes, and who caught some at the beanfield etc., were instrumental in organising subsequent direct action environmental protests, they may have been involved before but being specifically targeted and criminalised had a certain catalysing effect, including I believe the much maligned RTS. I mean there was a certain momentum and unlikely solidarities emerged across cultural lines. Things that might seem now like ill conceived gestures at the time were parts of a wider response to what was felt as cultural suppression, for want of a better term.
New technology? Portable generators :slanted:
bob effect
somnambulist
This.
The free party/ traveller/ protest axis that originally had its roots in the sixties counter-culture has been completeley wiped out in this country. I remember a bit in CJ Stone's Fierce Dancing where he talks about thousands of people on the road in the early nineties, you can see why the authorities clamped down hard. It isn't exaggerating to say the government saw this axis as a threat, not because they thought that Parliament was in imminent danger of being stormed by hippies, but just by existing they prove there's an alternative way of doing things. And this is NOT ALLOWED.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
decently well versed, not with the strike of '74, definitely with the '84 strike & the old free party scene/Criminal Justice Act stuff.
honestly I dunno how different it is* from the U.S., the big parallel being the original Summer of Love. one of the problems with phrases like "powers that be" is how vague they are. the point is that - whatever politicians may have said in the media - there never was any serious "challenge to hegemony", certainly not from kids getting together & taking LSD or ecstasy. which, fine, but don't pretend it's something it's not. as if the great majority of these people weren't going to back to their studies/jobs & wind up buying back their youth in neatly packed nostalgia 10 or 20 years on, the same way the hippies cleaned up & become stockbrokers. honestly it's not as if the govt really had to do much to stamp it out anyway.
that's the problem with youth subcultures; everyone grows up.
I'm not deadset against parties, or against mixing party & protest. I'm saying, don't conflate hedonism with action. don't hand me some vague claptrap about "glimpsing an alternate way of existing" or whatever. there's too much deadly serious stuff going in every day in the real world.
(*one difference that should be noted is the power of labor, which was largely broken or bought out in the U.S. well before the 80s. Reagan did break the air traffic controllers, of course, but that's hardly comparable to the Miners Strike).
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padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
you're definining what the community. look, it's not that you're having your street party. it's that you're doing it in the name of something - which you're using for credibility. because "our communities" sounds a lot better than "activists having a street party". perhaps you are the exception (though I doubt it) but in my experience activists who bang on about "their community" have little to nothing to do with whatever they're claiming affiliation with.
I've been to plenty of real community festivals of the type John's described, they have almost naught to do with RTS-style business. they're usually a much better time. for one, no one's worried about being cool.
that's not the point, it's the attitude it stems from, that arrogance. the assumption that your ideas are the good ideas. that was a problem I always had with activist culture, the assumption of rightness & the lack of critical self-examination (as opposed to guilt-tripping).
matt b
Indexing all opinion
there was something on his blog or possibly here where he was talking about a student who insisted on keeping his earphones in during class, even though there wasn't any music coming through them.
I seem to remember he interpreted this as kids having to be connnected to the matrix at all times yadda yadda.
But it now occurs to me that said student was in fact subverting conventional deference to teachers.
found it:
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007656.html
1st google result when you search: kpunk student earphones matrix
Right well, this was nearly 15 years ago in another country, you don't know what my relationship to it is or was.
That said I think it's obvious, if it was framed that way at all by the rts people at the time, that community means all the people that live somewhere, perhaps specifically in that context people as opposed to heavy traffic passing through. But I don't even think those actions were intended to be justified or sanctioned on those terms. Take it up with them if you like.
But while we're on it I don't think people would have had a problem talking about 'activists having a party' either, except that I don't recall that many 'activists' as distinct from 'people'. Just like people weren't especially trying to be cool, well no more than is usual. That's actually one thing that made them good events, they were very unpretentious really.
Oh jolly good for you.padraig (u.s.) said:
It's not like these things are mutually exclusive or indeed haven't fed into each other though. Actually I can tell you that at the time of the aforementioned reclaim the streets stuff, which was one approach among many, some excellent local festivals in London (Debtford Urban Free, Clissold Park, Clays Lane, no doubt tons I wasn't aware of) were being organised with the involvement of many of those same people who happened to have energy, enthusiasm and resources. Yeah those same pain in the arse arrogant 'activists'.
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Your experience, OK.
Sounds a bit weird though. I think people know where they live and what they are a part of. Are you trying to say that people aren't part of a community because they are 'activists'?
Anyway talk about your experience by all means but give the self righteous preaching a rest.
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padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
yeah, as described by me, not some dude who's never met me and reduces a good chunk of my life to being "unremittingly tawdry".
just about everything I've said about the pitfalls of activism could have been applied to me & most of the activists I've known, if that somehow wasn't clear.
I'm not sure about being accused of self-righteous preaching (anyway, guilty as charged, I'm sure) by a dude who can't stop turning people dancing around a soundsystem into some kind of gateway to an alternate existence. it would be farcical if it weren't so depressing.
more that activists often aren't part of "communities" they claim to be part of & that they often claim to be part of them for self/cause-serving reasons. though what you say is sometimes directly true as well; go to any radical bookstore/social center and see how connected it is to the neighborhood it's in.
anyway, we're just going around in circles, so. the dislike is clearly mutual, why don't we just agree to disagree. you can get on with your road protests, or whatever you're up to these days, and best of luck. I'll get back to what I'm up to these days. I'd say in 20 years we could meet up & compare notes & see how your "catalyzing effect" on a "certain momentum" or whatever worked out, but I'd just as soon skip that part.
LOL, come on you were being so derisive I had to take the piss.
Ha, really. No the thing is that I'm well aware of the criticisms of those events (though RTS isn't the only thing we've been talking about here) and I could have pointed out many of the problems and contradictions which made me uncomfortable with them at the time, it's not new information by any means. But I'm not a snob about it, I don't feel the need to make a show of distancing myself from all that. I can see the value it had and I can cherish some of those times as well. I had some friends involved in those things and there were some idiots as well. Many people attended just because the government had decided to turn dancing outdoors in the sunshine into a political act in itself. But obviously we are not talking about quite the same things in the same contexts. That's not a relative judgement, just a fact. No-one's trying to push anything on you or sell any idea but it remains that those events had significance for some people and were tied up in various ways with wider goings-on.
Anyway yes, this is all not only off-topic but quite possibly very boring as well.
I think people should actually try and get to grips with what they think of the k-punk oeuvre in this thread, that could be much more interesting. Take it easy padraig.
woops
is not like other people
1st google result when you search: kpunk student earphones matrix
have you seen the carbon footprint of a google search, matt?
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Nowhere near what you breathe out on a regular basis I'd guess...