freely associating

The band Crass had a big effect on some of us Free Associator's lives. Indeed we've had a bit of talk about them here of the years. We've discussed the chances of a Crass revival, or whether, in fact, Crass are beyond recuperation. In fact Brian brought up the topic just the other day. Well M'lud, I present above exhibit A, nicked from the ever interesting Uncarved Blog. ...

We gave a talk last night at the CommonPlace on capitalism and climate change. The slides and notes for it are available here, but a horribly brief summary goes like this… The climate crisis is an energy crisis. It's about the conversion of one form of energy (fossil fuels) into another. Physicists call that conversion 'work'. But the climate crisis is also a 'work' crisis in the everyday sense ...

Seeing as Brian brought up Max Gogarty I wanted to add my two peneth worth to an affair that has been sorely under reported. I mean I basically agree with everyone else that the whole thing was thoroughly heart warming. Still I want to waste a bit more bandwidth doing so.What I liked was the unveiling of the utter hatred that Guardian readers have for Guardian journalists. ...

Yeeuch, it's a horrible mash-up. Sometimes it feels like we're living in the last days of Babylon, with the strange becoming increasingly common and Deleuzian concepts storming up the charts; at other times it's like the 1970s never really went away (I'm half expecting another Winter of Discontent run alongside a Crass revival). But of course it's none of those. It's just the way things are… So how does ...

A new year arrives, we have a new project to be getting on with and I should be concentrating on that but I just can’t stop my head from turning backwards. To be more precise I can’t stop musing on those moments when music and politics collide and the effect they’ve had on my life. This was all sparked off by one of my Christmas presents: “The Future is ...

La la la La la la la la La la la La la la la la… We've been vaguely considering doing some sort of anthology of our work so far, and it's made me think about the different ways of reading (and by extension of writing). My first reaction was that it would only be worth collecting up our various texts if we could somehow make them cohere, so that they stand ...

At the risk of sounding Hegelian, antagonism seems to have two sides to it. Dave’s mentioned how we are sometimes much closer to the most progressive wings of capital than to dickheads like Monbiot. If we’re about ‘production of the new’, how do we avoid that new being ‘captured’ by (or rather, becoming part of) capitalist development? One of the ways might be that antagonism draws a line ...

I know I’m a bit late with this (I’ve been searching for the missing mass of the universe) but I stumbled across an interesting snippet about the response to Tony Wilson’s death. Apparently someone went down to Whitworth Street and chucked a load of yellow and black paint over the posh flats where the Hacienda used to stand. OK, it’s not big, and it’s not clever but it ...

These are some notes/a rough draft for an op-ed piece we thought the Guardian might publish to coincide with climate camp. As it turned out, the Guardian lost interest. In Keir’s words: “It didn’t fit the narrative the media were building up on the climate camp which had a ridiculous amount of publicity when BAA tried to take out an injunction against Prince Charles amongst others. And also ...

Ok, seeing as we’re posting quotes about punk this one from “Rip It Up and Start Again” needs flagging up and reflecting on: “Devo had been hippies, of a sort. Gerald V. Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, the group's conceptual core, were among the anti-war students protesting at Kent State University, Ohio, on 4 May 1970 when the National Guard opened fire. Two of the four slain students - ...