FryingPanFire

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 [...]

Thanks to a fateful week in journalism, I got to have a little fun at the expense of Rupert Murdoch, Andy Coulson, Rebekah Wade and the Metropolitan Police…with a coupla dudes in dirty macs and cheap hats….

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?

Adam Curtis is a documentary filmmaker and academic who is best known for his use of videomontage to relay sociopolitical analyses of the modern age. His films include The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. His latest project is a three-part BBC internet series called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving [...]

Peter Kennard is an artist and teacher who has been creating photomontages for nearly half a century. Dubbed the “master of the medium” by the critic John Berger, Kennard’s ‘Broken Missile’ image for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is still deployed in protests today. Journalist and filmmaker Leah Borromeo is a former deputy foreign editor at [...]

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained on 03 April 2011 by the authorities at Beijing Capital Airport preparing to board a scheduled flight to Hong Kong. He has yet to be charged and the state has not yet confirmed his whereabouts.
A major survey show of his work has opened at London’s Lisson Gallery joining his [...]

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, [...]

First met Jonnie through a strange phone call.
“Hi Leah. Do you want to film a comedian who’d like to get himself kettled at the next anti-cuts demonstration?”
“Does this mean I’d have to be kettled with him?”
“Yes.”
“Ok,” I said, knowing I had a press card that could – at the very least – get ME out [...]

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, [...]

Today we have been busy working out the lyrics to Belarus’ entry into the Eurovision Song Contest. Seems a reasonable break from looking Indian cotton farmer suicide statistics.
Twenty-year-old Anastasiya Vinnikova sings the praises of her homeland with a Stalinist disco swagger. The audience nods with sycophantic gusto.
“You’re my passion, do it old-fashioned / When I [...]