In the current edition of the always interesting Fourth World Newsletter*, there is a page which brought me up short.
Titled A Bill of Rights for Future Generations, it originates from Adbusters** – a Canadian “radical arts journal” – and something about the directness and simplicity of its composition lifted my spirits during a bleak spell of unrelieved wind and rain.
Its authors may be radical and arty but they’ve pleasingly compressed their thoughts and feelings into…
In October 1916, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz wrote in her diary: “It’s not only our youth who go willingly and joyfully into the war; it’s the same in all nations. People who would be friendly under other conditions now hurl themselves at one another as enemies.” All she could see in the war was “criminal lunacy”. “I have been thinking,” she wrote later, “whether I could not contribute something to the propaganda for peace.”
Kollwitz was born in 1867 into a family with a…
We – Pat V T West, Dennis Gould, Jeff Cloves – first performed together as RiffRaff Poets in St Ives in 1970. The reading was in a pub where Pat’s performance was sexually provocative, verbally explicit, and unfazed by boozy male hostility. In short she was sensational and no one who was there that can ever forget her. So, it was with great sadness we learned of her anticipated but precipitate death in a Bristol hospice on 14 June. Our friend and companion poet at so many RiffRaff gigs has,…
This picture by Milein Cosman, Flight, shows her concern for peace. The refugee: the universal victim; her uptilted chin shows the determination to overcome her plight and to retain dignity. This drawing was chosen by the artist for Peace News, coinciding with Refugee Week. She herself came to England in 1939 from Germany.
There is a chance to see the works of one of our best emigre painters, exhibited at Burgh House, London (until 29 June). They show two things, firstly this is what…
We don’t usually mark Memorial Day in Britain. Previously known as Decoration Day, the last Monday in May is a US holiday which originally remembered American men and women who have died in military service in the American Civil War. Following World War I, the memorial was expanded to include military casualties of any war. More recently, US peace and anti-war groups have reclaimed Memorial Day, holding ceremonies to remember all victims of war, military and civilian, and to call for an end…
Ten Tiny Toes looks at the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the families who have sons and daughters serving there.
Like every mother, Gill wants the best for her sons. Raise them well, keep them safe, clean and out of trouble. But for Michael and Chris the choices are few and far between. The only way to have the best and be the best is to join the army.
The play opens with a montage of news footage on a screen that forms the whole of the backdrop to the stage.…
I heard David Ferrard sing in April at the launch of the Festival of Nonviolence and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
In the very simplest manner of music appreciation, hearing a voice that can touch, with great finesse and sweetness, one’s body is a strange wonder.
This collection has the current wars weaving their way through a series of love songs.
There is the subtle story of a Chechen refugee drawn to England by the music coming from his pocket radio, and…
Lucy Edkins’ paintings are naked, painful suffering images of our fellow men.
They are hanging high up on the walls of Housmans Bookshop – in traditional art jargon they have been “skied” by the primacy of books. But this very inaccessibility that me think of church paintings and then of mediaeval images of “The Passion”.
Lucy Edkins has created a series of paintings of Guantanamo, of men crouching and twisting from their torturers; flinching from the soldiers with their guns…
Whisper & Shout, described as a “new irregular and guerrilla publication” aiming to “print poems and features of guts and sensitivity”, edited by Dennis Gould and published in February 1968:
I disrespect Governors and Government, Lawmakers and Law. I respect conscience and direct nonviolent actions. Disobedience and Love are two gentle but fierce commandments of anarchists and pacifists involved in this trivial and consuming society. Disobedience and Love are two themes of poets…
When I was in my teens I feared I wouldn’t be alive for my 21st. I wasn’t alone in such dread. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was our nuclear fate and it drove many of my generation to join the Aldermaston March.
What I never anticipated was that nearly 50 years later, I’d again be on a coach going to Aldermaston and that politicians across the world would still believe in “nuclear defence” and still believe that they could only cut it as significant leaders if they brandished…
There is something surreal about the holding of a Peace History conference attended by some of the country’s longest-serving peace activists right in the heart of the Imperial War Museum.
The outgoing director of the museum, Sir Robert Crawford CBE, welcomed us all to the two-day event, thanking Bruce Kent of the Movement for the Abolition of War, a conference organiser, for his cooperation over the years.
We then heard an array of speakers on a wide variety of topics, almost…
The War on Terror game is an enjoyable board game about terrorists, governments, evil empires and people fighting for freedom.
It's a cross between Risk and Settlers of Catan. Risk is a game where the purpose is world conquest, and Settlers of Catan is a brilliant game where you use the resources of the land you are on, such as wool, wood, ore etc to build roads, towns, cities. Settlers is all about trading the resources you have access to with other players for ones that you don't…
Climate campaigners won an important victory at the end of January when multinational oil company Shell was ditched as sponsor of the annual Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine `Wildlife Photographer of the Year' exhibition.
The campaign against Shell's sponsorship of the exhibition was co-ordinated by direct action group Rising Tide and was part of its Art Not Oil campaign which seeks to end oil industry sponsorship of arts and culture. Art Not Oil used creative direct…
Here are a couple of books of interest to PN readers; seasonal gifts perhaps? Both are doorstoppers of around 500 pages and both are by blokes who are, to quote 1066 and All That, “a good thing”.
In the 1970s I wrote for Pete Frame's celebrated music mag Zigzag but Pete has since become more widely known for his series of superbly researched and drawn Rock Family Trees. These are the product of his meticulous research and obsessive interest in the minutiae of popular music in…
