sprite-hoodie replied to your video: all steve roggenbuck videos made me want to do…
hell yes Met him before ahaha
seriously everyone find some heavy grime and some steve roggenbuck and mute the roggenbuck it’s hilarious
he makes so many angry faces and jerks the camera so much and makes so many edits and does so many weird psuedo-london-gun finger ting gestures with his arms while he’s holding the camera that it all just syncs perfectly
it all comes out looking a little bit like this
The Death of Rave: panel discussions from CTM.13
Landian ruminations on “Rave Culture”
The UK edition panel discussion featured producer, DJ, and Hyperdub Records founder Kode9; PAN-signed electronic musician Lee Gamble; noted blogger and author of Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher; and co-author of the forthcoming book Folk Politics Alex Williams and was moderated by Electronic Beats’ online editor Lisa Blanning. It began with a presentation by Alex Williams. - See more at:
sweet
LONDON — The government on Friday hoisted the rainbow flag symbolising gay pride over one of its ministries for the first time.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg requested the flag be flown on Whitehall, the central London street that houses several ministries, ahead of the World Pride parade celebrating gay rights in the capital on Saturday.
“There has to be a first time for everything,” said Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrat party.
“Flying this iconic flag in the heart of Whitehall is a small but important emblem that the government and this country are behind equal rights,” added Clegg, whose centrist party is junior partner in a coalition led by the centre-right Conservatives.
The striped rainbow flag was raised over the Cabinet Office, the ministry responsible for coordinating central government.
Ministers have pledged to legalise gay marriage in England and Wales by 2015 despite opposition from some Conservatives and religious figures.
Clegg has gone further by saying religious venues such as churches should be able to host gay weddings.
Homosexual couples in Britain have been able to obtain civil partnerships, giving them similar legal rights to heterosexual married couples, since 2004.
THE BRITISH GOVERNKENT IS KILLING LGBTQ PEOPLE.
Some one kill Clegg the co-optingneo-liberal piece of shit.
“[T]he artistic preoccupation with identity politics, however noble and progressive, often enforces, rather than subverts, the dominant ideology. In a world where Western political parties legitimate themselves with the rhetoric of identity politics and liberal democratic compromise, such art is often co-opted for their own personal agenda… identity politics risks losing its subversive potential in a world where even the Tories have floats at gay pride parades.”
so bloc was a disaster, which is a shame given that last year it had been one of the best weekends of my life. for context, bloc has been held at a butlins in minehead for the past 5 or so years, with no more than maybe 5000 people attending each time, all staying in chalets (you couldn’t attend without having a room on site, which was included in the price, meaning overcrowding was simply never an issue). there would be around 6 stages, all about the same size apart from the much larger main one, and all indoors, with impeccable sound systems. i didn’t queue once at bloc 2011, even for aphex twin, who was the only act for which there was anything approaching ‘overcrowding’. otherwise, there was always more than enough room to dance and move around in the other acts.
the gist of my experiences and the rumours we all heard circulating at bloc 2012, however, adds up to:
for some reason (someone mentioned asbestos maybe?) one of the largest stages was declared unfit for use before the event, but instead of cancelling they just moved the acts onto the second stage of the stubnitz boat. this meant a boat with a capacity of 700 people was holding some of the biggest, most popular artists at a festival with (at least) 15,000 people attending (the second day in particular was when basically everyone i had wanted to see was supposed to be playing on the boat)
we arrived just around the start of the events and there was such a massive queue to get in that we ended up missing steve reich
the only act i actually managed to see was amon tobin’s amazing ISAM show (which we also had to queue quite a while for)
after that we hung around for a bit, had a go on the ceephax acid waltzers (so sick) and then we tried to get on the stubnitz. there was an angry crowd outside, and we were being told by security the boat was closed for the night, no more information
what seems to have happened is the boat got overcrowded, a few people started getting crushed, and it had to be evacuated as paramedics were called in
around the same time, snoop dogg was refusing to go on stage in the main arena
the only other big stage open was essentially overcrowded and the sound system was awful, sounding almost broken, and so whoever was meant to be playing there was also refusing to go on
by midnight things started to fizzle out, the organisers (and apparently some of the festival goers too) having called the met police in to have the event shutdown
another factor was an apparent crowd surge at the main gates by people who had arrived as early as 6 and still hadn’t got in by 9. it was described as a mini-riot, barriers knocked down, boxes of wrist bands knocked over and people snatching them up, rendering tickets useless etc.
as we were leaving, having been finally told by security that the event was now cancelled, there were some 50-odd people, some of the last left in the event grounds, banging on one of the metal containers in a relatively inspiring instance of communal music production, with a sizeable crowd dancing to it. incidentally, i was briefly manhandled by a 7ft monster of a met officer who went into the crowd just to take a bit of wood from someone who was using it as a drum stick against the container
with many acts left stranded in london with no festival to play, nights were quickly set up around london on saturday which were free for people with bloc tickets, so i still managed to see a few acts at XOYO (namely an amazing set by oneohtrix point never—noticably confusing for the half of the crowd who had just wandered to the club for a saturday night out rather than going specifically to see acts from bloc—and a ridiculously heavy hour-long set by flying lotus, with the weeknd as surprise guest MC not really doing much)
chances are this whole fiasco has killed bloc, easily the best alternative electronic music festival in the world for some time now. it was getting so popular that i suppose they had to take it to a bigger venue, if only because the council at minehead were complaining of the increasing strain the event put on the local infrastructure each year. it seems in making the transition however they simply ended up going overboard, overselling it and booking far too many huge artists who could easily have acted as sole headliners at other festivals, and then failing to suitably organise the space etc.
of course none of this would have happened if the government hadn’t consistently cracked down on self-organised raves since the 90s leading to the blunting commercialisation of the entire sub-culture
Senior jobcentre executives have warned staff of the risk of benefit claimants attempting suicide as controversial changes to sicknessbenefits are being pushed through.
The warning, contained in an internal email sent to staff by three senior managers of the government-run jobcentres, warns staff that ill-handling of benefit changes for vulnerable claimants could have “profound results” and highlights the case of one suicide attempt this year.
It emphasises the need for the “utmost care and sensitivity” when dealing with customers, as a result of “difficult changes which some of our more vulnerable customers may take some time to accept and adjust to”.
The email, adds: “Very sadly, only last week a customer of DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] attempted suicide” – which it adds is “said to be the result of receiving a letter” informing him that his sickness benefit would be cut off.
And yet the Tories label us the violent thugs …
ARGH AND THEY STILL CALL THEM “CUSTOMERS”
At least as important a component of any ‘British’ aesthetic as the familiar self-flattery of eccentricity, foppishness or the picturesque is brutality.
—Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism
Based on the tone of this item, Damian Grammaticas had an erection during his entire trip to North Korea. It’s the same in any piece of reportage you get from that country; the reporters sound weirdly aroused by their experience of this peculiar communist state.[…] Note what Grammaticas presents as examples of this tension between reality & state propaganda. I almost vomited at the sneering tone when he describes how the workers kept telling him how happy they were - so what? We know it’s bullsh*t. If Grammaticas went into any factory in the UK & asked how the workers felt - in front of their bosses & the government - it’s unlikely they’d immediately reveal their true feelings. “Yeah, so the conditions are pretty dismal & our manager is an abusive twat.”
& then there’s the bit where it shows the drinks factory that isn’t actually producing anything - yeah, so a bit like all the offices in the UK where all the workers are refreshing their Twitter/Facebook accounts between 9 & 5. […]
When I arrived late for a demonstration at Westminster Bridge at the end of November, a kettle had been put in place. Those who had travelled south from the University of London Union building in Bloomsbury were safely ‘contained’. As I walked down the street the first group of people whom I noticed on my side of the police lines were a dozen black and Asian teenagers, male and female, all in school uniform. One of the kids, standing about five yards from the police line, leaned down to pick up a discarded Socialist Workers Party placard. The police watched him as he placed the sign under his foot and, nonchalantly enough, snapped off the stick. This was not the way that most students used placards.
[…] It is now 31 August. Two or three minutes ago I received an email which states that 87 departments in Greek universities are now under occupation. The Greek students are acting in protest against a recent education bill, part of the imposing edifice of ‘austerity’ (the word is in this case infinitely euphemistic) now being hammered through the country’s fine and democratic parliament. In the last week, two Chilean students have been murdered by state police; both were participants in a much older and more mature student struggle than the one currently in remission in the UK. In other words, the UK student struggle from 2010-2011, with all of its smashed glass and all of its waves and networks, is already very much old news, as indeed are all of the associated acronyms – NCAFC, NUS, EMA, EAN. Even in the national context the domestic spokespersons of capital are much more hotly concerned with the riots which took place between 6 and 10 August. On the ‘left’ those riots are still treated with a stunned confusion: who among the hordes of those who looted during those five days can be selected as a spokesperson? And how can we communicate our ideas to a political subject who has about as much interest in being the ‘new’ 1968 as Guy Debord had in being the new Burger King? In response to this quandary, and in conclusion, one lesson of late 2010 stands out. As was argued above, students repudiated the suggestion that their ‘rebellion’ was no more than a paroxysm of middle class discontent by pointing to the working class teenagers who attended the street demonstrations which they organised. These teenagers were the ‘EMA kids’. The label did more than stick: it implied an analysis. The analysis in turn implied that what the ‘kids’ had to protest against was the withdrawal of their below-subsistence grant. This was of course in part a claim of convenience, necessary for a practical politics structured around ‘inclusive’ demands. It was, in other words, the sort of thing that could be crammed into a press release and floated out into the media ether to fuel the enmity of proto-fascist newspaper columnists. But it was also an honest assumption. What the ‘middle class’ students had to offer the ‘working class’ college kids was an organisational framework in which those college kids could protest against a particular act of state-led resource withdrawal. And in fact when the college kids acted ‘disruptively’ or violently the middle class students often became perturbed and spoke in wounded tones of their beautiful pacifism and their high ideals, and tugged dolorously at their keffiyehs. That the EMA scheme was a pathetic crust tossed by the State to ‘lower income’ teenagers in compensation for a lifetime spent being churned through an underresourced and overcrowded state education sector (and for a thousand other iniquities better known to EMA recipients than to their bourgeois comrades) was not on the collective bargaining cards.
But what student demonstrations offered to the working class teenagers in fact was not an ‘organisational framework’. What the demonstrations offered was a material setting in which working class students could partake in aggressive and confrontational collective action in conditions of relative security. It is difficult to make this point without sounding as if one is speaking through a mouthful of Habermasian ideal speech situation. The students did not offer to the working class college kids an ideal speech situation (more than this: all the execrable sign waving and sloganeering at the demos ensured that the students didn’t offer even a passable one): but in spite of the assumption that working class kids just wanted to keep their EMA, it is nevertheless true that the student demonstrations and the middle class demonstrators did offer to working class college kids something for which they had a use. This was not the rhetorical straitjacket of a sensible demand politics, and nor was it thirty quid a week and the promise, sometimes in the future, of a certificate qualifying you to trim the ornamental hedges in the gardens of some of the idealist students you went on the march with, or in any case it was not just these, because the ‘student’ demonstrations also offered to the college protestors the material suspension of the balance of forces whose permanent imparity is active in determining the results of working class struggle. What that material suspension provided for a lot of ‘kids’, in other words, was the opportunity for an intense collective expression of social agency whose object was not peremptorily confined to an inadequate programme of state provision but which could outstrip the limits defined by everyday (isolated) struggle against repressive authority, and which moreover could know each time that it clattered against a riot shield exactly who was on its side. And as the left toils to imagine what ideas it could ‘offer’ to the inscrutable young men and women who went rioting in early august, and as the job market continues to stagnate, and the profits of McDonalds and Tesco to rise, and as the academics continue to bid for a role on the market steering committee and to dream, not of 1968, but of 1965, and as the EMA scheme ends and the housing benefits plunge, and as new students begin to arrive on bright autumn mornings at the campuses of their chosen training camps – this is something which might yet be worth learning.
For so long as the material conditions in the universities have not been equalised, ‘access’ to university, whether or not it is universal, and whether it costs £9,000 per year or nothing, will continue to mean access to educational commodities of wildly discrepant value, distributed across institutions whose ‘diversity of missions’ at last promotes nothing besides a diversity of class positions. Shall we ask then, access to what? And access to what with what exit onto what? These are questions, in good Beckettian prosody, which will have to be asked in Beckettian fashion, which is to say, again and again. Middle class students might piously hope that working class teenagers will be allowed to ‘access’ universities and become more like them; but in fact the similarity is more likely to become visible not at the ‘point of access’ to universities, but, instead, at their exits. And it’s the view from the exit, from which can be seen the greatest expanse of nothing at all, which will perhaps give the clearest indication of how UK education struggle ought to proceed.
- Danny Hayward, ADVENTURES IN THE SAUSAGE FACTORY: A CURSORY OVERVIEW OF UK UNIVERSITY STRUGGLES, NOVEMBER 2010 – JULY 2011
As a report by the State financed Economic and Social Research Council put it in 2007 – note: in 2007, I.e., before the crisis had caused investors to become doubtful of their own omnipotence – ‘Many… companies were increasing the proportion of university graduates within the workforce. But it was difficult to assess whether this reflected an increase in the proportion of jobs involving technically difficult roles or ‘over-qualification’… because ‘anyone half decent has now got a degree’.’ Though employers continue to yammer about a ‘skills gap’, the skills which are referred to are not ‘hard’ (I.e., technical) skills but ‘soft’ skills, which include competencies which could well be programmed into students at secondary school level – IT skills is the primary example – but which are defined above all by repressive pseudo-categories like ‘self-management’, ‘customer-facing skills’ and (best of all) ‘high-end empathy’. In other words, what British capitalism lacks is not educated students but obeisant employees. The employer’s tribal dance to the gods of skill acquisition is nothing more than a prayer that their human resources will acquiesce voluntarily to intensified degradation, and, what is more offensive, recognise in that degradation the continued acquisition of ‘skills’. Skill acquisition along these lines is just virtualised accumulation for the exploited.
- Danny Hayward, ADVENTURES IN THE SAUSAGE FACTORY: A CURSORY OVERVIEW OF UK UNIVERSITY STRUGGLES, NOVEMBER 2010 – JULY 2011
