freely associating

On the 28th of April 2006 a group of activists dressed in Superhero costumes burst into the insanely expensive Hamburg delicatessen, Frische Paradies and ran out with 1500 Euros worth of expensive food. Despite several police cars and a helicopter rushing to the scene, the culprits they got clean away. Not, however, before they posed for the photo above, which they release along with a communiqué explaining that ...

I went to a really productive meeting at the CommonPlace last night, throwing about ideas on the financial crisis and trying to work out how best we can 'intervene' (ugh, bad word but you know what I mean). I'm slowly coming to terms to with the fact that I'm fairly crap in meetings: I get distracted too easily and lose the thread; plus I have the turning circle ...

I went to a great evening of talks and films put on by the Leeds Surrealist Group yesterday. They presented material from their new journal Phospher, which includes a positive review of Turbulence 3. There was a load of interesting stuff but the main focus was on surrealism and games, including a talk on the subject by our good friend Gaz. The talk is reproduced below but before ...

As well as being a place to store our half-baked ideas, this blog is also meant to be a place where we can collect, record and circulate interesting stuff. And amidst all the shite that’s been written about the current credit/finance crisis, this piece (by George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici of Midnight Notes) really stands out. Read and think on… “MUST THE MOLECULES FEAR AS THE ENGINE DIES?” –NOTES ...

We gave a talk recently over in Hebden Bridge. What follows are the bare bones of what we said, but if you scroll right to the end, there's a concrete idea building on a recent post here. We got asked to talk on the theme “Who will save us from the future?” which is the theme of the latest issue of Turbulence. We’re sort of going to do that ...

I've just written a post for the Red Pepper Obama blog. It's called Barack and Roll and is re-working of a previous post from this blog on Becoming-comets.

Seeing as we have our own history of political lego in Turbulence, I couldn't pass this picture without nicking it (apologies to Jane Dark's Sugarhigh). The non-lego version of this image came to represent the Tiananmen square events in the West. It seemed to sum up the narrative that the western press had forced onto the events, of the merciless Stalinist state apparatus being stopped by a symbol ...

Or the incredible credit crisis. And so the dominoes begin to fall. In many ways this is a classic capitalist crisis, the popping of a 15 year credit fuelled consumer spending bubble, but it is also a singular event. It is singular because, the ‘credit fuelled' part of the sentence is not some foolish excess or avoidable side effect but is inherent to the neo-liberal wave of accumulation ...

While thinking about Dave's post on shock and awe, I stumbled over this quote which merits a post of its own. It's from Jack Common, a working class writer from the 1930s (more on him here). The dark age technique of unlearning is what is needed, and it is not such a strange thing as it seems. We have an acquisitive view of learning as of a thing you ...

I've been away so this overview is a bit late and more than a bit disjointed… First up a couple of positives. Against an absurd level of police harassment, the camp for climate action refused to be intimidated… That might appear a small thing but it's easy to underestimate the importance of such an open and public display of opposition. Elsewhere 'politics' is daily reduced to questions of public ...