A worrying development for those of us who like taking photos.

A few years ago on an anti-war demo in London there were these cops with a huge camera, taking photos of the protesters. Feeling provocative, I broke off from the demo and took of photo of them, taking my time to compose it carefully and making sure they could see exactly what I was doing. Unfortunately I lost the photo shortly afterwards when my hard drive died, but since then I’ve always taken the opportunity to take snaps of cops. Really this post is just an excuse to post this photo from a demo in San Francisco, August 2006:

Hehehe…

Won via a competition, a lovely new Rock Against Racism T-shirt dropped through my mailbox this morning. The t-shirt commemorates the 30th anniversary of the legendary anti-racist carnival in Victoria Park headlined by the Clash, and was produced by the fine people at Philosophy Football. Somewhere I still have the ‘No War’ t-shirt they did which I wore on the early Iraq War demos. Anyway, they’re running another competition for t-shirts featuring Angela Davis, the Black Panther and Communist activist who in 1970 was framed by the police, placed on the FBI’s most wanted list, captured in a manhunt and later acquitted of all charges.

Before anyone gets smarmy, I’m well aware of the contradiction in celebrating a revolutionary movement with a commodity. I just thought I’d throw it out there, given that entering only costs an email and you have a reasonable chance of winning. And they’re very nifty t-shirts.

Yesterday I attended a film screening of, amongst others, Guy Debord’s seminal Letterist film Hurlements en faveur de Sade, shown at Goldsmiths University by our good friends the New Cross Situationists. It’s easy to see how this film caused so much scandal when it was first shown in 1952- the first screening was stopped after the first few minutes as the audience rioted and demanded their money back. As this was a free screening sadly no such scenes were realised, but 14 out of the 23 people in the audience did walk out before the end. A situation was created!

Those of us who stuck it out for the whole 1 hour 15 mins went down the pub afterwards, got drunk and in true Situationist style argued about everything from the class nature of Guy Debord to the class nature of Blur. The south bank of the Thames is not the left bank of the Seine, but we try our best.

Next Wednesday the New Cross Situationists are showing two more Guy Debord films, the classic La Societe du Spectacle and the retrospective In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, with English subtitles. Main building (RHB) room 308 at 5pm, all welcome (Facebook group.) Do say hi if you come along!

Reminder: 1968 and All That is tomorrow, 10am-10pm, central London.

Right now my reading material for the tube is She-Bop II, a veritable encyclopaedia of information on the role of women in popular music. No doubt there’ll be a proper post on the subject sometime in the near future, but for the minute take a look at these videos with rather unusual representations of gender.

Never guess she used to be a primary school teacher in Canada, would you? It’s pure cock rock, casting a woman in the sexual predatory role usually reserved for bare-chested alpha males. How many mixed metaphors can you get into one video?

This song could be the theme tune for this blog. Pretty obvious what this one’s about- freedom through sexual ambiguity. It also gives Shirley Manson an excuse dress up in half a dozen different outfits to make her point. Cherry Lips explores similar territory.

For those of you that need a little gothic love this Sunday, “The Dead Boy at Your Window” by Bruce Holland Rogers is a  wonderfully sweet, mildly morbid short story.

Credit where it’s due, these guys were excellent at the Love Music Hate Racism Carnival. This ’supergroup’ boasts quite an array of talent, consisting of Damon Albarn (Blur), Paul Simonon (The Clash), Simon Tong (The Verve) and drumming legend Tony Allen. I think you can hear contributions from all of the musicians in the music. Lyrically, Albarn deals with the same topics he did in Blur, but in a more mature and introspective way. Which is no bad thing.

I was hugely into this band when I was at high school. Atari Teenage Riot were formed in Berlin in 1992, consisting of techno genious Alec Empire, riot grrl Hanin Elias, and MC Carl Crack. Later, Japanese noise artist Nic Endo joined the line-up. Their musical sound stole from punk, metal, industrial, rave and breakbeat, and a their philosophy was based on situationalism and ‘77 punk.

Their liner notes read like manifestos. Amid the collapse of communism and the false promises of capitalism, neo-Nazism is on the rise, taking over the Berlin club scene. Ravers are reactionary because after the rave they go back to work on Monday; as situationists we reject making divisions between work time and play time. Ecstasy is bad because it makes you too nice; speed is what you need is what you feel is what you’re livin’ for! Berlin 1992 is like London 1977; the ravers are apolitical hippies, and must be defeated.

So, a new form of punk was required, and that was Digital Hardcore. After founding Digital Hardcore Recordings the name became a genre, and dozens of groups sprung up who were not necessarily associated with the label. The 1995 compilation Harder Than The Rest is an excellent introduction to the genre and blew my mind when I first heard it. The legacy of the label lives by forming a musical blueprint for groups such as the Prodigy, and inspiring breakbeat and ‘drill n bass’ artists to take things to the extreme.

Living fast usually entails dying young. Drugs were a major part of the group and their shows were often accompanied by violence. When a bouncer in Brazil tried to stop Hanin stage diving by grabbing her between the legs, she smashed her microphone on his head and hospitalised him. The band infamously played at the 1st May 1999 anti-NATO demonstration in Berlin, which ended in a riot and the arrest of the band. Rage Against the Machine would later be inspired to play at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

By the end of 1999 the band was falling apart, due to drugs and exhaustion. Their final show was supporting Nine Inch Nails at the Brixton Academy; the show consisted of 27 minutes of pure noise. This was later released as a live album; NME described it as “not so much a performance as an attempt to punch a gaping hole in the space-time continuum and rip its throbbing purple guts out with a giant sonic pitchfork”, and gave it 11 out of 10. The band split up after they left the stage. Carl Crack went into psychosis, overdosed and died. Hanin fell out with Alec Empire; Alec still writes and performs solo material with Nic Endo.

Quite a story, then. If your ears are up to it, have a listen to these. These two are from their last album, when they had enough money to do decent videos.

An earlier single…

…and their last, featuring Tom Morello on guitar.

Enjoy!

Wanna read something disturbing? Stroppyblog has done a survey on the what lefties do in bed (part 1, part 2, part 3.) Okay, so most of it is just an excuse for a load of in jokes between the various sections of the British left, but there is some interesting information to be gleaned from it.

The clear majority of respondents (72%) were male. Around two-thirds of respondents use porn at least occasionally. A third of respondents think porn degrades women, with a lot of ‘not sure’ answers. A similar number (28%) think that porn should not exist under socialism; 23% think that sex work should not exist under socialism, with a lot of people answering ‘depends what type.’

So what does this tell us? Firstly that lefties, who tend to have a theory on pretty much everything, have no unified approach to sex. In my experience most left-wing bloggers, who are generally male, tend to avoid or fudge the subject. It does however come up quite regularly on Splintered Sunrise and A Very Public Sociologist, and Madam Miaow can be also very funny when she deals with the subject.

The survey also tells us that a lot of people- presumably men, as they are primary users of porn- are hypocrites, in that they use porn even though they think it degrades women. I also suspect that the ‘hmm, not sure’ response may be code for ‘yes, but I don’t want to admit it’. Now, this is interesting because we are running up against the biggest problem with socialist theory, namely that creating a world in which people are not exploited or degraded might not be compatible with human desires, in this case male desires. And human desires are not so easily circumnavigated, nor should they necessarily be. Sometimes ideology doesn’t translate well into real emotional life; lots of liberal minded people are totally in favour of free love, right up until the point when their partner sleeps with someone else.

Again my mind returns to Valerie Solanas and the SCUM manifesto. It almost seems to me that she has the right idea, but unless you seriously want to suggest the creation of a female only society, her conclusion does us no good. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the conservative feminists (who are usually anti-porn and indeed anti-men and anti-sex altogether) are the libertarian feminists, who produce porn for women and organise female centred, sexually uninhibited club nights. Although Female Chauvinist Pigs has it’s flaws, it does effectively tell the story of how these two branches of feminism diverged after the successes of the seventies, and the damaging this effect this had. So we get ultra-feminists working with the religious right to ban porn, and libertarian feminists working with the porn industry to attack sexual inhibition. Both approaches are far from satisfactory.

There’s an analogy to be made between the sex industry and the drugs industry. The progressive attitude towards drugs is much more clear cut- decriminalise, legalise, treat addicts. Here’s my own opinion- recreational drugs (cannabis, ecstasy, mushrooms etc) should be legalised and sold to adults in dedicated shops, which are either run by or heavily regulated by the state. Drugs are extremely cheap to produce, and the current market price reflects how much people are willing to pay rather than the cost of production. Prices could be maintained at current levels through taxation, the revenue from which could then ploughed into addiction treatment centres and other public services. Harder drugs (heroin, crack cocaine etc) should not be sold to the public but prescribed to recovering addicts in accordance with the wishes of their doctor, free of charge.

Why do I and other progressives make these arguments? Because you can’t stop people taking drugs. Drugs are fun. This is the simple, undeniable truth. Hence, you will never eliminate the consumption of drugs for pleasure. This begs another question- why would you want to? Is people taking drugs for pleasure so intolerable to society that it must be prevented at all costs?

I would argue that it’s not. The actual negative effects of drugs on people are usually no worse to that of alcohol, for example. Friends of mine who are much more into hard drugs than myself tell me that in their experience the drug which has the most potential to fuck you up is alcohol. This is probably true in the short term; in the long term, tobacco undoubtedly takes that title. Flipping through the free London Paper today, I read Babyshambles guitarist Drew McConnell arguing that alcohol and heroin are the ‘big two’ to be wary of, and he criticise anti-drugs campaigns for making an unnecessary distinction between legal and illegal drugs. I agree with him.

What is most undesirable about drugs is the industry that goes with it; pushing drugs to kids, gang wars for territory, dealers trying to hook recreational users onto more addictive drugs. Simply put, the worst thing about drugs is making the financial transaction, having to deal with the people you have to buy them off. These problems can be eliminated or at least reduced by legalisation and regulation; denial and criminalisation just works in favour of the gangster capitalists who run the drugs trade.

Now, back to porn and prostitution. The act of having sex is certainly not harmful or immoral in itself; if we can make the case that taking drugs for recreation is okay, then we can surely say the same about sex. What is harmful is the act of paying someone to have sex, whether it’s directly with the client or to be filmed in a movie. Simply legalising the sex industry does not work; despite operating legally the porn industry is extremely sexist and exploitative, and legalising prostitution does not necessarily provide an improvement in working conditions. If you’re in any doubt about that, read some reports about the conditions in legalised brothels in Nevada. The Netherlands take a much better approach, with a recognised sex worker’s union leading to much better working conditions, but it’s still hard to escape the conclusion that having sex for money is fundamentally degrading and should ideally be eliminated from society.

So what do we do about this? I’m not in favour of legalising prostitution, but decriminalising those who work as prostitutes, and giving them the help they need to achieve a change in career. This problem is analogous to, and indeed crosses over with, the attempts to tackle drug addiction I expressed support for above. As for the ‘recreational drug’ of the sex industry- pornography- we need to take an approach similar to recreational drugs. Porn is already legal, and rightly so, but the production of porn should be regulated more heavily than it is at the moment to protect the rights of those who appear in porn. It should also be noted that there is an inverse correlation between the availability of porn society and the incident of sexual assault, as frustrated men can relieve their tensions without resorting to physical violence. Another argument against criminalising porn, then.

Finally, here’s a more radical solution to porn. Given that it is the exchange of money for sex and not sex itself which is the problem, why not eliminate the financial transaction from the equation? Place a ban on people paying others to be filmed having sex, and paying for material of people having sex, but not on the creation or dissemination of pornography itself. Thus the porn industry would become something done by amatures out of their own volition. If you don’t think that people would be willing to film themselves having sex and have that distributed on the internet for free, you probably haven’t been keeping track of trends in this area of commerce. Amature porn is fast catching up on professionally produced porn, and there’s more than a few people who get a thrill out of making home movies and having strangers watch the results. What this would result in is a reduction in the amount of porn featuring unrealistic models doing unrealistic things, but then that’s probably a good thing, and would make our perception of sex as a whole somewhat more realistic.

I can see a couple of problems with this approach. Firstly, if you’re not charging money for distributing something, you have no control over copyright. I can sympathise with someone who makes home movies but doesn’t want them ending up all over the internet. However, I’d say that the only way to avoid that is not to put material of yourself on the internet; given the nature of the beast, it’s best to assume that everything you put on the internet will be seen by everyone you know. (I remember a minor scandal a few years back, when it was discovered that ‘Friends Only’ Livejournal posts could be read by searching for them in Google.) Secondly, it’s possible that an underground industry dealing in the more violent and unpleasant aspects of pornography may spring up, out of the reach of state regulation. This could be dangerous; the only solution is vigilance against such activities. The government is already planning on passing a bill against ‘extreme pornography’, which covers the sort of things that people really would have to be paid to do rather than do out of their own free will.

So, that’s my two cents. Anyone wanna start a debate? While you’re chewing that over, here’s a huge phallic symbol to feast your eyes upon.

Insert joke about the thrust of British capital here…

Warning: spoilers a go go.

Ah yes, Skins. The budget indie show which seems to have snowballed a minor youth subculture. I’ve already sung the praises of series one, but I think that the program makers have achieved that rare feat of making the second series even better than the first, so it’s worth discussing a few of the changes between the two.

The first episode of series one established the characters as hedonistic Bristolian lower-sixth form students with a penchant for sex, drugs and wild parties. This is what unites them, but as the series progressed each episode fleshed out the background of one particular character, establishing why they had ended up at this place in their lives. Often their chaotic lives was shown to be the result of their parent’s chaotic lives. The series ends with Tony being hit by a bus, and the cast (including the supposedly unconscious Tony) performing a sureal rendition of Cat Steven’s Wild World.

Given that we’ve already established who these kids are and that like to party, there was no need to labour these points in the second series, and they rightly move to the background. This allows a narrative to develop over the course of series two which is not confined to developing individual characters. So the second series feels more epic in scope than the first, sometimes feeling like a Holyoaks-style soap opera, though thankfully without the contrived moralising.

The Best…

One thing program makers tend to do when making a second series of anything is try to make things bigger, better, faster, louder! to compensate for working with an idea which is no longer original. This usually makes for bad TV, as it’s ideas which make for great viewing, not special effects; and making a show ‘bigger’ often means destroying it’s believability, and the breaking the viewer’s empathy with the characters. Series two episode one of Skins was actually rather low key, especially compared to the first episode of series one. Several characters have been effectively written out; Tony, who dominated series one, is still recovering from his accident, Cassie is convalescing in Scotland, and the rest of the cast are far more subdued as a result of these loses. Even Bill Bailey, playing Maxxie’s dad, is understated. But the story expands and unfolds as the season develops, charting Tony’s recovery and the dynamics of the relationships and events that unfold. There are deaths, pregnancies, affairs and expulsions. The college and the teachers within it are featured much less, although there are still a few great jibs at adult authority. During the final episode the kid’s behaviour is blamed on “Asbo culture. Or Arabs, one of the ‘A’s.”

The penultimate episode in particular deserves a mention. By this point, Chris is living in a tower block flat, which is frequented by most of the other kids. He has a brain haemorrhage and dies in front of Cassie; she panics, packs a bag and heads to New York. Sitting in a cafe without any appetite, a guy finishing his shift takes pity on her and gives her a bed, without expecting anything in return. He is an artist, in the sense that we all are; he’s a photographer, and his flat is festooned with black and white prints of his estranged girlfriend. LCD Soundsystem plays as Cassie looks at these. ‘Like a rat in a cage/Pulling minimum wage/New York, I Love You, but you’re bringing me down’.

Call me a hopeless romantic if you like, but it is, I think, quite beautiful. Wanting to escape, to lose yourself in the big city, is something I can understand. North American Scum was featured earlier in the series as well, so clearly someone on the writing team likes Sound of Silver. The matching of music to scenes is almost as effective as during the first series. If you want to watch the series again then bittorrent is your friend; unfortunately, by the time it gets to DVD all the good music will have been culled for copyright reasons.

…and the Rest

There are a few slip ups. The new character Sketch is not developed well, and rather seems to be an excuse to take the piss out of the Welsh. Also, the introduction of Sid’s extended family seem to be an excuse to take the piss out of the Scottish. These, and a few other missed gags, meant that the series took a while to get up to speed. But all in all it’s been excellent, especially compared to the competition. Series two of Torchwood was very mixed, managing to do the opposite of the first series by starting and ending poorly but benefiting from a few good episodes in the middle, such as the trilogy based around Owen’s death. Problem is, that when you go down the ‘bigger and better’ route with something as already over-the-top as Torchwood, it starts to look a bit silly. And, as Madam Miaow points out, much of the plot was jacked from Angel.

Ashes to Ashes was a spin off from Life on Mars, but failed to match the excellence of its predecessor. The character of DI Alex Drake is nowhere near as likeable as DCI Sam Tyler, and the actor playing her doesn’t quite manage to fill the shoes of the formidable John Simm. The ‘bigger and better’ approach results in some ridiculously unbelievable plots- Drake and Hunt manage to breaking into a top-secret military weapons research site with minimal preparation, before being rescued by the rest of the team who have made no preparations whatsoever! Finally, some dodgy politics are evident in the last episode, as the programme makers encourage us to applaud Gene Hunt as he berates a senior officer who dares to criticise Hunt’s violent, racist and homophobic policing methods.

So, Skins stands tall above the competition. The programme makers have said that the characters from the first two series will be absent from series three- as they’ve all gone off to university- and the third series will focus on a new group of kids starting sixth form, revolving around Tony’s sister Effy. This sounds like a good idea. If one season = one academic year then the cast will need to be refreshed every two years, and hopefully this will keep the show from falling into the dismal fate which has befallen previously great shows such as Shameless. We shall see.

This is due to come out over the summer. It’s an eXile related publication and there is a possibility that it will extensively make fun of Fresno- a winning combination!