Culture

Drawing (along with shouting, swearing, throwing things and throwing up) is not allowed in the houses of parliament. All the more reason to do it. Here is David Cameron defending the SAS mission to Libya in PMQs last week.

I'm presently confined to bed, after a serious and very painful fall from my bicycle. I'm re-reading Muriel Spark's excellent 1963 novel Girls of Slender Means which is set in 1945. Not only does it explore the world of ideas, its central male character is an “anarchist and poet”. In an early scene he and another poet are sitting in a café in their “corduroy trousers” discussing art and life: “a copy of Peace News lay on the table between them”. I whooped aloud – and painfully – when I read…

This is a set of pictures that I drew in 1991 in the nights leading up to the first Gulf War. They are not very hopeful, but maybe in themselves they were an attempt to avert the very apparent horrors that war would bring. Partly they were an attempt at magic and partly they were like willing the aeroplane’s wings not to fall off when you are 50,000 feet up in the air. It would take an awful lot of poppies now to mark the dead of the last twenty years.

The most memorable film I saw in 2010 – at the cinema or on TV – was Julien Temple’s visionary TV documentary Requiem for Detroit.

The most memorable book I read was Richard Mabey’s Weeds. The two are linked. Both produced a surge of hope within me which ran contra to a generalised feeling of despair against which I was battling. Still am. Both works are concerned with – to put it crudely – the survival of the natural world in the teeth of our man-made conspiracy to…

To exist as a band without the corporate music industry is in itself a political feat.
– Ian McKaye of Teen Idols, Minor Threat, Fugazi, The Evens

White Man Destroys Culture.
– Sticker stuck on a wall at a venue in North Germany

Sitting in a village on the edge of Kathmandu happily listening to the Subhumans, I had this yearning to go to Europe. A good friend of ours from Holland calls the West “the fortress”; he said the people, the culture, and…

“WHITE MAN DESTROYS CULTURE” is printed in big letters on a sticker at a venue in West Germany where we played. This phrase became my “theme” as we continued to tour throughout Europe. I realized how just reading about stuff or about people’s lives is simply not enough. There’s nothing more important than meeting people from different worlds. I talked a lot about how white man may have destroyed something in the past, but right now I felt that white people can give something back by…

One of the most amazing things that struck me was that 95% of all the shows were organized by people who were just hitting 40 or were beyond it. We were amazed to see such necessary collaboration between ages and sexes. I was sure we were going to be the only oldies (+37) at each show but in fact it is mainly “the oldies” keeping many underground venues and squats going.

I was totally inspired by that.

In one city in France I met three women who all played music or sang in at…

Much of my time in Europe was spent drinking… drinking tons of their best herbal teas and not-so-good chalky hot water. It was not until I got back to Nepal that I thought, maybe that chalky stuff all boiled up and hot probably didn’t help my voice recover one bit.

Drinking alcohol is big in Europe, I decided. There is no party without a drink. And there is no gig without drink. There are band names about drink; there are band names named after beer, or drinking, or about being drunk, or…

As the latest wikileaks show, the royal family is deeply involved in the military-industrial complex. While Prince Andrew acts as a blunderbuss, mouthing patriotism and interfering in anticorruption investigations against BAE Systems, the queen plays a more subtle and perhaps insidious role. On 18th November she ‘launched’ construction work on the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre outside Sheffield. Described as a “factory of the future” it will house research projects…

“To exist as a band without the corporate music industry is in itself a political feat” – sticker stuck on a wall at a venue in North Germany

Sitting in a village on the edge of Kathmandu happily listening to the Subhumans, I had this yearning to go to Europe.

A good friend of ours from Holland calls the West “the fortress”; he said the people, the culture, and the way the whole place works is like a fortress, sealed and intimidating. I agreed with him and so why would I want…

This month’s drawings come from a graduate recruitment fair, held at the NEC, Birmingham at the end of October. The impact of the recession was clear – the show barely filled one of the twenty exhibition halls, and it was dominated by defence. Exhibitors included BAE Systems, EADs, Rolls Royce, Selex, the army, air force, GCHQ and M15. In spite of this, defence was curiously absent from the list of careers in the show guide.

BAE Systems appeared, instead, under almost every other…

On 6 November, a small but dedicated group of peace campaigners braved the rain in Glasgow’s Victoria Park for a rededication of the Peace Tree. This cherry tree was presented to Glasgow by Christian CND 21 years ago, to mark their 1989 annual conference.

Speakers Pauline McNeill MSP and Martin Bartos of the Green Party reaffirmed their own personal commitments to the anti-nuclear cause and reminded the gathering of their membership of the burgeoning worldwide movement for a…

Wobegone is the third solo album by former Chumbawamba member Danbert Nobacon. Chumbawamba were (indeed still are, in their current acoustic incarnation) unique in UK popular music in combining a radical anarchist analysis and action with a creative trajectory that showed the same integrity as their politics.

Never afraid to experiment, their music was, at times, hit-and-miss but some of it was astonishingly, ecstatically good – all the more impressive when you think of the band’s…

UN World Peace Day was marked in Edinburgh with the rededication of the Peace Pole at the city’s Peace and Justice (P&J) Resource Centre. The P&J Centre was celebrating its 30th birthday and friends gathered for the re-dedication and to enjoy a celebratory lunch. The centre, co-ordinated by Janet Fenton, supports all groups and individuals committed to issues of peace and justice. Later that day one such group, Scotland’s for Peace, launched their Campaign for a Nuclear Weapons…

Regular readers of this page will know that the Cynefin Y Werin network is pursuing a major project to establish a Peace Institute (Academi Heddwch), working with academics and others in Wales. The Peace Institute is likely to be based on the model of the Flemish Peace Institute. Delegates from Cynefin Y Werin have visited Brussels and speakers from the institute undertook a speaking tour of Wales. The Wales project has the rhetorical support of the Welsh Assembly government but the…