It was one of those one-off phone call scenarios.
Dr D, this wheatpasting vandal I know, rings up. “You still doing your telly things?”
Yes.
“What you doin tonight?”
Erm…. I scrabbled around for a camera.
“Wanna meet me at six or seven around [redacted]?”
So after I convinced Emily James to come out shooting with me, we met D on [...]
The second instalment of my Random Acts films for Channel 4 aired on Monday night.
This one is on the Situationist-inspired anarchitect collective, the Space Hijackers. Troublemakers with a dapper cut and a razor-edged wit, they saw fit to tackle moves by the UK’s coalition government to privatise bits of the NHS. Their mode of battle? [...]
The Reverend Billy came to London one autumn weekend to connect Occupy London with Occupy Wall Street. He landed, made his way to St Paul’s and found himself sleeping in Emily James’s vacant tent [complete with inflatable mattress under the bells of the cathedral].
He gave a rousing sermon livelinked with our friends in New York [...]
Comedian Jonathan May-Bowles was yesterday sentenced to six weeks in jail for throwing a shaving-foam pie at Rupert Murdoch whilst the media tycoon was giving evidence at the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee.
Better known as “Jonnie Marbles”, May-Bowles was also ordered to pay £250 costs and a £15 victim fine after pleading guilty to [...]
London’s Metropolitan Police has called for large businesses and the public to report suspicious anarchist activities immediately. A weekly communiqué (see below) issued by the City of Westminster’s Counter Terrorist Focus Desk said:
“Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information [...]
Filmed this recently…. One HDV camera and one mobile phone. It was for Stop Sweatshop Greenwash at Thanet Earth. It’s to the tune of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”. Not a bad stab for a bunch of green and labour activists in green hair and a man with an inflatable guitar eh?
On 20 April 2011, a tribute event was held in London in memory of director, actor and filmmaker Juliano Mer Khamis. Juliano was assassinated on 4 April 2011 in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, where he established the Freedom Theatre in 2006. The son of a Arna Mer, a Jewish woman, and Saliba Khamis, [...]
The day after any major demonstration always brings out the hungover “mostly peaceful, shame about the violent minority” mantra from the meeja-darling bloc. Whenever there’s an alternative popular movement that grips the national imagination, left-ish commentators and journalists fight whitened tooth and manicured nail for public alliance to this season’s worthy cause of resistance. Yet, [...]
I’ve been doing some writing for a bunch of art students.
Such as the copy you will read below.
The first draft I worked off had the phrase “challenging the position of the student as consumer and the pedagogic problems that come with this new condition”.
Call me a bit low-brow but I thought it best to simplify [...]
For Sale. One Space Hijackers Tank. Last seen 01 April 2009 – at London’s G20 demonstrations – steaming down Bishopsgate with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries blaring from its soundsystem. 11 careful owners all registered on the DNA database. Many of us popped our arrest cherry that day.
Our mobile oppression [...]
