NO STREET-DRINKING ZONES IN HACKNEY - PART 1

LAST CALL FOR THE RETCHING SLURRING BEATIFIC BODY. AN ELEGAIC LAST HURRAH FOR THE STUMBLING CARNIVAL; THE PAVEMENT TALKERS, BUS STOP PREACHERS AND THOSE WHO HOWL AT TRAFFIC.

MEAT WAGONS AT 8:00 AM NO SIRENS NO PACK DRILL JUST DULL THUD OF CARCASSES AND THE SLOW TRICKLE OF AUTHORISED POISONS RECENTLY UNAUTHORISED, POURED AWAY. PLEASE LEAVE THE AREA IN AN ORDERLY FASHION.

SLEEP EASY – YOUR INVESTMENTS ARE SAFE. NO RESIDENTS WILL BE HARMED BY THIS ACTION. IF YOU ARE HARMED, YOU ARE NO LONGER A RESIDENT.

DO NOT PANIC – THIS ORDER IS NOT FOR YOU


View CLASS CLEANSING DRINKING MAP in a larger map

‘LONDON 2013’ CLOSING PARTY AND SAVAGE MESSIAH 11 ZINE LAUNCH.

March 14th, 4-6pm Hales Gallery . ‘London 2013:Drifitng through the ruins’
Issue 11 is a drift around the Olympic zone and focuses on a particular moment in the build up to the June the 18th Carnival Against Capitalism riots in the City of London. The riots happened in 1999 and were a protest against the ludicrousness of the global financial system. The zine was written after a day of walking around the perimeter fence of the Olympic zone In March 2009 and is a direct response to the mass destruction of the Lower Lea Valley.
The launch will be followed by a trip to the Blade Bone public house ( now Noodle King) on Bethnal Green road and a pub crawl round the East End.

“I found the pub soon after that. From the outside it looked ordinary, an estate pub from the late 60s, early 70s, something of a bunker with fortress windows at the front, plastic hanging baskets and St George flags all over it. I thought at first the old man must have got the wrong place but then I could hear the thudding of the sound system inside, the frantic bpm and chaotic vocoder yelps. As I got closer I saw all these skinhead types outside wearing tie dyed t shirts and temple of psychic youth symbols tattooed on their arms. There were groups staggering about lighting fires and breaking palettes. This party was the continuation of a Saturday all nighter at one of the massive abandoned factories on Carpenters road. They were all off it, topping up on psilosibin after a big weekend of acid and flyagaricks.” Savage Messiah March 2009

Baz is back< Round 2.

Just to let you know, cos yeah, its been a long time, but Baz is back.
Baz has been, let's say, away for a while., South of the river if you really want to know. But now he's back on his manor, not chastened by his experience or humbled, but angrier and madder than ever.
Baz is now living back on Queensbridge road near the Holly Street estate, this is a freindly warning to all those thinking of buying flats in them new blocks at the Dalston end, DON"T BOTHER. I said it before and i'll say it again, YUPPIES OUT OF HACKNEY!!!!
Some people think it aint ok for Baz to act like a thug, to swear and shout and headbutt fences, they think he should be a noble and dignified member of the working class, a neighbour they can boast about being friends with at their dinner parties. They don't like it when people stand outside pubs shouting, huddle outside bookies smoking fags or have barbeques on the balcony with old rave classics blasting out from inside....they dont like it and think everyone should subscribe to their dull values and turn the whole East End into Crouch End, well it aint happening! And i'm sorry to disappoint our middle class readers who would rather all depictions of the working class were flattering and nice, but I AINT NICE and never will be. So you better fuck off cos i aint goin nowhere!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
One more thing, Baz has been getting letters off people asking if he is a Nazi or fascist or in some way related to the BNP. The answer to all you lot is FUCK OFF, if i catch any of them Bigots. Nonces. Perverts round here i will stamp em out personally. I did have a look at that list when i was inside and i can tell you now there's none of them weirdos still living in the E8 area now, but obviously i wouldn't have had nothing to do with that what with me bein otherwise indisposed and all that. Right, laters.

Calling all Hackney WAB activists and supporters.

Hackney Council is tying to raise money by selling off its land from the borough’s council estates: they call this Estates Plus. Right now they have been trying to convince the residents of Frampton Park estate (just off Mare st) that the sale of five sites on the estate will lead to improvements and help with overcrowding. This includes green space, play areas and garages used by the residents. The land will be sold to housing associations, who will build and then sell and rent the flats they build.

Although there will be more low rent housing, which is much needed, it will be achieved by cramming more people into an overcrowded area.

Most of the residents don’t want the development; they don’t want to lose their green space and play grounds, when there aren’t enough places for kids to play already. One of the proposed buildings will be just yards from older peoples flats, on a piece of land kids use for football. The pensioners living in the flats would like to see a garden there, but instead they will have a multistory block towering over them.

Meanwhile across Hackney the council has sold off land that was and could be good alternative places for this social housing to be built. On Dalston Lane for instance, a row of Georgian houses with shop fronts were sold five years ago by the council to an off shore developer. They are protected and so could not be developed unless they were damaged and derelict. Since then the houses have been damaged by a series of fires, and some have been demolished. Those houses could be muti bedroom accommodation for Hackney’s overcrowded tenants and homeless families. Instead Hackney will let those buildings rot till they are developed into yuppie flats, while off the main streets the council estates are over developed.

This is making working class people bear the brunt of the housing crisis, and taking facilities away from those who need it most.

DEMONSTRATE at Hackney Town Hall! Say NO to selling off our land!

6-7pm Wednesday 23 July 2008

HEATHROW:THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF PARANOIA.

“In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference" Giorgio Agamben.

"Of many shifts , blandly cunning, a robber, a cattle driver, a bringer of dreams, a watcher by night, a thief at the gates, one who was soon to show forth wonderful deeds among the deathless gods." Chalked on the roadside were words lifted from a Homeric hymn to Hermes.

Heathrow is a tangle of paranoia, to traverse the perimeter is to dodge clusters of armed coppers. We edge beneath the razor wire of a forlorn camp , a guarded non space mutating into a contemporary locus of struggle. Middle England just this side of the fence, clinging to heritage and hanging baskets,, no site clothes/work boots, no third runway daubed on George cross banners, who do yOU align yourself with? Immigration removal centres, privatised prisons, they're not keen, they don't want them coming in, and they don’t like unhealthy proles holidaying in Spain much either.
Terrorism, a word almost drained of its psychotic cravings by the anodyne platitudes mouthed on ABC lurks in the infrastructure. Does anyone really believe in it? Conspiracy theories abound, there’s a retreat into the escapism of fantasy lands, the irrational.

The three magpies, relic of the 70’s, nothing really changed, a saccharine rendition of’silent night’ on the juke box, it’s August. We’re ignored for a long time and when I get my tea it’s lukewarm and the little cup only half full, its like tea you get from a flask. Its Monday afternoon so there’s just us and a couple of baggage handlers. We leave the faux heritage of this Edwardian tudor and head for the patio bar which is actually some tables and a fence and a car park then the airport. It’s an out of time zone, where people come to have clandestine encounters, a few drinks before a dash to the Renaissance hotel. Its a place of undertable powder slipping and hawkers peddling stuff off the luggage truck. You get it now, or its on its way to the auction house in Tooting love. Julie’s had everything in here, mainly perfume and stuff, specially since the ban on hand luggage and liquids, some nice stuff, expensive, all sorts really. Julie grew up in Bradford, she used to be married to a biker, she had tattoos and loved the allegiance of belonging to a tribe. Then there was feuding and he got nasty and she swapped her council house in Bradford for a flat in Hounslow, it was a clean break,a fresh start..,here in this transit zone everyone was just passing through, she could just disappear. It was her and the Polish and the Somalians and Sikhs and everyone, loads of Polish everywhere, all the pubs and shops turning Polish now. Used to be that a lot of the pubs closed and turned into boring stuff like burglar alarm fitting businesses cos the Asians didn’t really use them so much but now the Poles are bringing them back to life.
The three magpies is alright, she’s been working there three years. Strangely, for a transit zone you get your regulars, blokes from the airport. Then there’s lads from nearby up on a weekend, mainly for the karaoke and late licence, airport meant it was easy to get one, funny hours people work and us with no neighbours to annoy. Outside this strictly controlled zone we had this little pocket that was almost operating outside the law. We had all sorts going on, a lot of young ones off their heads but the old bill never looking in.

savagemessiahzine.com

WE WILL MAKE YOU BETTER (PART 2)

I always look in skips. There are a lot of them around here. The Victorian terraces are being reconverted, gutted, as owner/occupiers move in. New plaster getting slapped on, walls repointed. The cheap shit of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s that furnished peoples’ needs when these places were all divided into bedsits and flats ends up dumped. No one has carpets these days either.

You can find furniture, clothes, electrical goods. I used to have a mate who would just go around picking out the copper wire. He’d spend hours stripping the insulation off it, and then take it down to the scrap and weigh it in for a few quid. It was a living, of sorts.

It was half hidden by a board, and some shreds of grim wallpaper – stripes in pink and lilac, with convoluted flowers. It looked like a strange glove in pale yellowish leather. One that was designed to look like a hand, but with holes where the fingernails would be. I thought it was pretty unusual, so I grabbed it; but the board was on top so I had to lift that enough so I could pull it out from underneath. I saw that the glove was a long one, over elbow length. Holding up the board with one hand, I pulled the whole thing out with the other. The glove came out. It wasn’t a glove. There was the glove part that turned into a tube, and the rest of whatever it was wadded into a mass, screwed up, squashed, and covered in plaster dust. I tried shaking the dust off it, then took some of the wallpaper and laid that down in the road next to the skip. I smoothed it out on that, starting at the glove end. The material very fine; wrinkled, but not brittle. I thought that it was some weird sort of garment, and was really impressed at how there was no visible stitching. The glove turned into a tube that seemed to be made to go over the shoulder, but it seemed to have been in a fire. It was charred at the top of the shoulder and across, from under the armpit, leaving a just a circular flap. The edges were brittle, and burnt black, brown scorch marks went across. I was thinking it must have been some sort of expensive fetish wear, being made so well; like an upmarket version of the glove vets put on when they stick their hands up cow’s arses. I was also thinking of the scenario that led to this expensive sex apparel getting burned. Then I stopped. It had a nipple. A scorch mark ran across it, but it was there. Pale tan, with the small nub of flesh in the middle (this had been dried by the fire so it had the translucency and the texture of a dog chew). I looked again, the thing had pores. The “glove” part had lines on the palm, life line, love line.

It lay there in the gutter, against the lurid wallpaper, like a used condom, or a discarded sock, or any of the other things that usually littered the pavements around there. I left it. Someone else could find it, or call the police, or whatever they wanted to do. I left it there and went home to wash my hands until they were sore.

I’ve seen a few others since then. Screwed up, and left against walls with dead leaves and empty crisp packets. Drooping from yellow skips amongst old doors and floorboards, and those shitty white laminate wardrobes with the gold plastic handles that used to be everywhere, as the old houses around get their shiny new facelift. No one has called the police.

TO BE CONTINUED...