The Sisters of Mercy are pretty obviously influenced by Leonard Cohen. Their name is a reference to the song Sisters of Mercy, pretty simple. The name of their album Some Girls Wander by Mistake comes from the Cohen song “teachers”, which I just found the audio of them covering (above).
A well-done, simple video advertising the upcoming protests against the International Monetary Fund, put together by the IMF Resistance Network, who I don’t really know anything about. They are calling for protests on October 9th to 11th, 2010, in Washington, DC (where the IMF is headquartered).
The IMF is, in short, an institution pushing global capitalism as the solution to all the world’s problems. Ironic, of course, to promote capitalism–an economic system intentionally engineered to siphon resources, money, and power into the hands of a small minority of people–as the solution to things like poverty. The IMF has an absolutely horrid track record as well. This is the kind of stuff that led to the anti-globalization movement of a decade ago, the same movement that largely defeated the consensus that neoliberalism was an effective system of global governance. Of course, as an anarchist, I’m rather against the idea of global governance at all.
From the IMF Resistance Network:
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have a well-deserved reputation for being the loan sharks of global capitalism. Both institutions are infamous for forcing poor countries in the global south to ruin their own economies in order to further enrich Western corporations. Nations who decline to borrow money at exorbitant interest rates and then beggar their populations to pay it back (or worse, default on their existing debt), are subjected to trade sanctions that have been described as “the economic equivalent of nuclear war.”
Contrast!
Above: the sky this evening over the lake.
Below: “She Fell Away” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (not a video, just a song)
I spent this past weekend at the Musta Pispala festival in Pispala, a suburb of Tampere, Finland. I don’t know… this might have been the best anarchist gathering I’ve ever been to. A few hundred people came over the course of the weekend, mostly anarchists from all over Finland. I was immediately struck by how welcoming the atmosphere was, by how friendly people were, how engaged and unpretentious the scene here seems to be. I sat in a meeting in which green and red anarchists listened respectfully to each other… hell they even work with each other here. I led my usual anarchism and fiction workshop, and a really interesting anarchism in the USA workshop in which tons of people had insightful comments and questions. I attended workshops on the anarchist prisoners of spain and on the anti-fascist scene and struggle in Russia.
The festival opened with a few hundred people marching without incident from the city center out to a complex of three abandoned factories in the suburbs, where a squatted party was thrown. The sun went down sometime after eleven and the twilight lasts until 1am before starting again sometime around 3am. I never got over this.
The second night I went to the beach on a lake. The third night, a crowded punk show at a collective-run bar and venue, where I watched an amazing doom/stoner/hardcore/crust band that refuses to record, I think named Ward. The fourth night, after the festival was over, I watched the world cup championship. Something I never would have dreamed of doing had I been in the states. It’s bizarre and beautiful to be places where my cultural conceptions and stereotypes simply do not apply.
36 images below, most of abandoned factories and sunsets and all of that lovely stuff.
I spent an enjoyable few days in Naples, one of the more lawless places I’ve been. Unfortunately, the city is run by the Mafia instead of the cops, which doesn’t really make it much better, but it’s still fascinating. Once while we were walking, two cops told a man on a scooter that he couldn’t drive his scooter where he was. “I don’t care,” he said, and kept going.
I heard stories about how, if the police try to chase someone, the general populace throws debris or soapy water and the like into the street to prevent the police from their pursuit.
The city is absolutely the most cyberpunk place I’ve ever seen, and unfortunately these photos don’t capture that. The buildings are old and cracked from a decades-old earthquake and left with scaffolding to hold them together. Immigrant children play with LED lit mini-drones in the middle of medieval squares, and what would be pristine, tourist architecture and monuments are covered with graffiti and youth. People play football in the streets, ignoring passerby and plants grow wildly out the side of the walls of buildings. It’s fascinating.
I went on a tourist tour of the aqueduct beneath the city, and our tour guide was trying to explain to a typical american tourist that he thought that bank-robbery was awesome when no one got hurt, that catholicism was worse than useless, all kinds of fun things. Anyhow, while down there I saw people growing plants underground, fascist graffiti from WWII (hitler on the left, Mussolini on the right, “we will win” carved below, fortunately incorrect), strange artistic testimonials to the war, and the recreated conditions of the original aqueduct. I also saw the Mediterranean Sea for the first time.
Before we left the city we went to see sulphur fields in the suburbs, with boiling mud and constant steam, part of an active volcano and apparently where the Romans believed the entrance of hell to be situated. I’m fascinated by the idea of old ruins and strange things that are situated in the suburbs (like the sunken market that looks like a temple)… I heard from my friend in Sweden that he took public transit out to the pyramids in Egypt, because they are basically now in the suburbs of Cairo.
This following photo is of a statue of King Umberto I, killed by an anarchist. Nya nya.
I’m crossposting this from Postcivilized.net, a site which is now up and running. Mostly, it features various articles related to post-civilization theory, but it will also include bits related to a sort of post-civilized culture, like the following:
I ran across this today: Route Couture. (site is in Finnish, but there are two galleries of images: fashion photos and art photos. There is also an artist statement in English elsewhere.) Some Finnish radical fashion designers have created “high fashion” clothing out of roadkill. According to google translate, and confirmed by my Finnish friend sitting next to me:
The group seeks to comment on the works for the fashion industry, a market economy and human-animal relationship.
CrimethInc. gives us the blow by blow account of the anti-g20 protests in Toronto from an anarchist perspective. Of particular note is the debunking of the myth that the police allowed for the trashing to happen, but rather shows evidence that we managed to overextend the security forces of the state, allowing for cracks in their armor to appear, which we then took advantage of.
Of course, burning cop cars and looting posh stores doesn’t actually present a world free of hierarchy, but it inspires the hell out of a lot of people fighting for that. And it shows that the state is not all-powerful, that it can be, from time to time at least, successfully challenged. And yeah, it points out that people are really, really fucking mad that there are closed-door meetings of world leaders in a society that pretends to be about “democracy,” the idea that people rule themselves.
I’m in Finland!
Finland is one of my favorite places. This is my third time here… I guess I come here every five years. Anyhow, the reason Finland is great is because Finnish has no gendered pronouns! For awhile I was advocating its use as the universal language, but I never got past cursing, ordering beer, and thanking people. Also, Finnish doesn’t have the word “please,” near as I can tell. Which is also somehow kind of cool.
Right, anyway, I went for a walk in the woods about five minutes from the house I’m staying at. I took pictures:
I couldn’t help but think that whole “when in Rome, do as Romans do” cliche the whole time I was in the car on the way to Rome. I, of course, didn’t know what it is that Romans do. I still don’t. So instead I guess I did what tourists do. I went around the center of the city, I went to the Colosseum and I went to the Forum. I thought about how the Goths sacked Rome and about how lovely it will be when the Goths get their shit together and sack the rest of civilization.
I took a lot of photos of the gladiator stuff, because its fascinating to me. It’s sort of the root of civilization: you take people, make them put on ridiculous costumes, and then make them kill each other. All the while the rest of the civilization cheers them on. It really gets right down to the root of it. I probably also took lots of photos of the various helmets and such because I’m a geek and grew up playing dungeons and dragons. There was also an old-school multitool on display, which is cool.
And there was the best human statue I’ve ever seen.
We also went to a squatted 19th century castle (it had a moat! it counts as a castle). Most of what I did in Rome, which was sit around a hacker conference, I didn’t take photos of.
I’m writing this from HackMeeting 2010 in Rome.
From their website:
Hackmeeting is the annual meeting of communities, (not only) digital countercultures and individuals who have adopted a critical and proactive approach towards the advancement of new technologies — which are more and more tied to social control, the business of war and the marketization of every vital space. Three days of workshops, games, parties, debates, exchanges and collective learning.
The event is totally self-managed: there are no organizers or users, but only participants.
With my friends from the countercultural fiction magazine Ruggine, who among other things print translations from SteamPunk Magazine from time to time, I just did a workshop on steampunk, the crisis that is civilization, apocalypse, and about countercultural access to radicalism. One of the writers from Ruggine did an excellent bit on what it means to be No Future, about how this liberates us to imagine our lives as they ought to be lived and makes it clear to us that we need to reject authority.
This space is a fucking brilliant example of counterculture. I’m at a squatted villa surrounded by a remarkably gender-diverse crowd of radical hackers. There’re bands playing and people teaching workshops on how to reclaim dumpstered computers from the 70s. This is a space that appeals to a certain kind of person, and it offers them access to radicalism, culture, solidarity, and community.
I’m leaving Italy in a few days, and I’m certain I’ll miss it. I toured through Vicenzia, Milan, Florence, Naples, and now Rome, and Italy is fascinating. The government is practically fascist (after WWII the leaders just changed the name of what they believed) and the mafia runs many of the cities, but that’s just the existing power structures and is a terrible way to judge a country’s spirit.
