clair056

'Some day all the adults will die!: punk graphics 1971-1984' is a free exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, on until 4th November 2012. I wonder sometimes whether anything else useful can be said about punk, feels like we have been reliving that moment endlessly for the last 30 years. Ageing collapses time in unexpected ways. At school in the late 1970s and reading about May 1968 it felt as remote to me as the First World War. Now the late 1970s feel not so far away, even if the equivalent of this exhibition in 1977 would have been a show about early 1940s style. So an exhibition like this is essentially a kind of nostalgia for some ('ooh I've got that original 7 inch of Scritti Politti's Hegemony') and ancient history for others.   The exihibition, curated by Jon Savage and Johan Kugelberg, is less a coherent take on graphics and more a very good collection of memoribilia - zines, flyers and record sleeves. But in subtle ways it does undermine some simp...

34 people were arrested in Haren, Netherlands , on Friday night (21 September 2012), after thousands of people turned up for a young woman's 16th birthday party inadvertently publicised on Facebook. The party was cancelled after media publicity and 'going viral', and hundreds of riot police were deployed in the small Dutch town. Youths clashed with police, who fired tear gas to disperse the crowds. A supermarket was looted. In the lead up to the weekend, people had begun making 'Project X - Haren' t-shirts, a reference to the American film about a teengage party that ends in chaos. On the same night in Madrid, around 1,000 people who could not get into the MTV Beach festival rioted , clashing with police and setting up burning barricades in the streets. Plastic bullets were fired by police.

Coming up on Saturday 22 September,  8:00pm - 10:00pm,  at the Mayday Rooms , St Brides Yard, outside 88 Fleet Street, London: 'An evening including interventions from Stewart Home, Peter Laugesen, Fabian Tompsett, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen to mark the UK launch of the anthology Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen. This volume is the first comprehensive English-language presentation of the Scandinavian Situationists and their role in the Situationist movement. The Situationist movement was an international movement of artists, writers and thinkers that in the 1950s and 1960s that strived to revolutionize the world through rejecting bourgeois art and the post-World War Two capitalist consumer society. The book contains articles, conversations and statements by former members of the Situationists’ organisations as well as contemporary artists, activists, scholars a...

Following on from Negri and Hardt's recent reference to 'low frequency' communication between struggles, here's another example of bass as radical metaphor: 'Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there. A body that resonates does so according to its own mode. A insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire – a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their ownvibrations, always taking on more density' (The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection , 2007)

'Early in 2011, in the depths of social and economic crises characterized by radical inequality, common sense seemed to dictate that we trust the decisions and guidance of the ruling powers, lest even greater disasters befall us. The financial and governmental rulers may be tyrants, and they may have been primarily responsible for creating the crises, but we had no choice. During the course of 2011, however, a series of social struggles shattered that common sense and began to construct a new one. Occupy Wall Street was the most visible but was only one moment in a cycle of struggles that shifted the terrain of political debate and opened new possibilities for political action over the course of the year... Each of these struggles is singular and oriented toward specific local conditions. The first thing to notice, though, is that they did, in fact, speak to one another. The Egyptians, of course, clearly moved down paths traveled by the Tunisians and adopted their slogans, but the ...

Global Day of Action in support of Pussy Riot next Saturday September 15 - London action is 11 am - 2 pm opposite Russian Consulate, Bayswater Road. Facebook details here . There's also a Free Pussy Riot benefit gig tomorrow night (Sunday 9 September) at the Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen with PEGGY SUE, GAGGLE, NEUROTIC MASS MOVEMENT and SKINNY GIRL DIET. Translations of Pussy Riot letters and documents at this site . Here's a letter from Maria Alyokhina (20 Aug. 2012), one of three members of the collective jailed in Russia last month for two years for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred after an anti-Government punk performance in a Moscow cathedral: 'Right after the reading of the verdict, we were taken to the cells, accompanied by guards with dogs. After a few minutes my guard asked for an excerpt from the verdict. A few minutes after that, a special forces cop burst into my cell and started swearing at me, telling me to get my things together. Eviden...