The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club.

But even here the battle for land continues. The poor are loosing their grip on the scattered bits of land which they took in defiance of apartheid more than twenty years ago. The state is, again, sending in bulldozers and men with guns to move the poor from central shack settlements to peripheral townships. In every relocation many are simply left homeless. It is very difficult to resist the armed force of the state but people do what they can. Officials are often stoned. In principle the courts should provide relief from evictions that are not just illegal but are in fact criminal acts under South African law.

¡Fuera Ulises!, is a new graphic interpretation of the events in Oaxaca from an antiauthoritarian and anarchist perspective.
The booklet is 6 pages in length, full color, and is a run down of the events of last year. The booklet is also very critical of the actions of ‘politicos’ within APPO to hijack the popular movement for it’s own ends.

From: http://www.collectivereinventions.org/

The comic by Ana Nimo is interesting in several aspects. It presents a view of the Oaxacan movement as seen by an outsider (an “international”), but it is not merely another paean to APPO. On the contrary, she raises important questions about the role played by bureaucrats and Stalinists from the very inception of APPO. She describes how these forces sought to promote their own agendas, intruding on one of the boldest acts of the Oaxacan movement: the appropriation of official media (including a television channel) by APPO supporters, who then broadcast their own programs to the surrounding population.

A comment on Stewart Home’s: `The McGonagall Syndrome: Peter Webb and `Intellectual' Decomposition at the University of Birmingham. 

Any Good Library - 2min39s

DEATH TO THE GODS OF MOUNT OLYMPUS FUCK THE OLYMPICS

Twenty Five Years from Scratch, ed. Michael Parsons, London: London Musician's Collective, 1994.

'Walkabout' a poem submitted by Michael Hampton would have fitted excellently with the collection of verse published as part of our recent issue on credit, debt and financial crisis. As a late arrival it joins the site here and as part of our Ongoing accumulation of fiscal verse 

Walkabout

these cartographies bleed biographies

Sukhdev Sandhu, Night Haunts (2007)

Over ancient slabs

in the portico...[1]

snail-SNAILpaced via

St.Magnus Martyr;

up Fish Street Hill

to see Cibber’s[2] bas relievo

                               Free Software
                         Toni Prug, toni@irational.org
                                August 13, 2007

In the course of his life, Victor Gruen completed major urban interventions in the US and Western Europe that fundamentally altered the course of western urban development. Anette Baldauf describes how Gruen’s fame rests mostly on the insertion of commercial machines into the decentred US suburbs. These so-called ‘shopping towns’ were supposed to strengthen civic life and structure the amorphous, mono-functional agglomerations of suburban sprawl. Yet within a decade, Gruen’s designs had become the architectural extension of the policies of racial and gender segregation underlying the US postwar consumer utopia

Image: Southdale Shopping Center, Minnesota

do not go gentle

dylan thomas/uri gagarin mix and mash

regretful melody to that cusp of modernity when technology promised to be both a salve on male uterine envy and an end to the cult of dutiful sons.

The late Derek Bailey's musical 'career' was founded on years of wage labour as a guitarist in dancehalls and nightclubs. An idea which aspirants to today's fully professional-entrepreneurial cultural sector would find barely comprehensible, suggests Matthew Hyland. For what other than individual elevation above wage-worker status defines the 'creative' life that these subvention-seekers clamour for so shrilly?

This essay was commissioned for the forthcoming book Noise and Capitalism, published by Arteleku Audiolab in collaboration with [Un]Common Sounds, and constitutes a digression on one theme arising in Ben Watson's Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation (Verso, 2004). All page references are too this book unless otherwise stated

Anyone who has experienced the music business from the musician's point of view is bound to be cynical about music, and often, in fact, about everything.