SATURDAY APRIL 11TH, LONDON: SAVAGE MESSIAH WALK AROUND THE CITY AND ISSUE 11 ZINE LAUNCH.

SATURDAY APRIL 11TH, LONDON: SAVAGE MESSIAH WALK AROUND THE CITY AND ISSUE 11 ZINE LAUNCH.
Walk.
We will be walking around the city of London and drifting towards Housmans where we will be having drinks and showing films to launch the ‘zine. Meet at Dirty Dicks Public House, Liverpool Street 3pm.
Launch.
Housmans Bookshop, Caledonian Road N1, from 7pm.
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.
“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.”
Laura Oldfield Ford
Savage Messiah Issue 11. March 2009

More info to follow.

“The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draft the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambience, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the earliest navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.” Guy Debord

We Are Bad – Bronze Graffiti

Recognising the high art status of graffiti the We Are Bad Collective have had the letters cut from their stencils cast in Bronze. These Bronze Graffiti plaques reading, “WE ARE BAD – PLEASE KEEP AN EYE ON US”, have been cast with polished text on a green Patina background.

A spokesperson from the We Are Bad Collective said, “Given the recuperation of Graffiti into a fine art category, and in recognition of its roll as public art, we thought it only fitting that graffiti artists should start using materials that reflect its new found status”.

On the 2nd April 2008 30 Bronze Graffiti plaques where attached to CCTV camera posts in various London locations.

eBayers and Treasure hunters be warned the WAB Collectives love of the drift means we have placed these plaques in some of the most obscure London locations, (non in Shordich).

Take a drift through the hinterlands!!!! Happy Hunting…..

Wearebad.net

Life in Poplar.

You might think being booted out of my gaff was bad enough, but yuo should have seen where they tried to rehouse me. They showed me some shithole estste in poplar that even the Homeless families unit rejected on the grounds that it was unfit for human habitation. I refused it, there's no fucking way yuo'd get me living in a dump like that.
So you lot out there who prefer hackney to be a yard full of braying toffs with wooden bikes and organic bread, BE WARNED, BAZ IS STILL AROUND. So now i've got me new gaff i'm gonna be back on here more often I"M TELLIN YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tracing the path of the River Fleet.

We drift in circles around each other. Threads untangle in the memory flashes of an uncanny landscape.
One night in a pub on Rosslyn Hill, I witnessed three skirmishes, three explosive grasps at ultra violence. We ended up in a cab to Camden, shifting over the path of the Fleet, and I felt London cascading, cinematic and charged. When we got to Inverness street there was a carnivalesque loopiness , it was a feverish Summer night and there were hordes of screechers and brawlers, a real demented din. We weaved through a maelstrom of dodgy loiterers and onion fryers , delighting in the thrill and degeneracy of the fairground.

The slow arduousness of that coach trip ,the impossible yearning, stranded up North, I saw our first encounter played out in such vivid clarity, the frantic kisses, it was the most alive sequence, I just watched it unfold, didn’t have to focus or even try, all that plotting and dreaming, eyes pressed to the window to see the first ragged boundaries of Edgware. Drill holes in rock, ravines gouged out in the cliff face, envelopes of blocks opening one on top of another.
In Wooley Edge services I yearned for the baroque whorls and curlicues of the labyrinth, smearing red lipstick in the fluorescent glare of the mirror.

The coach stops at Golders green station, a limp nexus, then there’s an ecstatic bundling rush with a hip flask of rum to the heath. London sprawls under a canopy of ruptures and livid blooms. I’m so tuned in to the desire you wouldn’t believe it, it scuttles all over me, little shivers of pleasure, bursts of erratic joy from shoulders to finger tips.

The ancient pathways are hazy with smoke as I drop down to the glowing windows of the Vale of Health. I search in the November dark for the traveller site behind corrugated iron, briars and hawthorn. A big crew of skinheads smash up cars defying the dead time of the Barrat estate. Caravans and trailers are reconfigured as mobile architecture. .
To desire placelessnesss is to defy authority.

Bouts of extreme violence activate my desire.

Michael Foot campaigned against that traveller site when he lived up there, called them vermin.

The covert symbols of chance encounters are visible on the heath. The city becomes cinema, signs oscillating and shimmering. I find scattered rice and hearts chalked on stone. London is a character in flux, vivid and psychoactive .

Jack Straws castle. I run through the back to blush up face and backcomb hair. Stop for a pint and conjure up images of Wat Tyler on his way to invade London with an enraged mob, smashing open prisons, beheading judges and lawyers. The Jack Straws castle is now a weather boarded simulacrum dating from 1964, you can sit in the ‘turret bar’ and survey the ‘spectacular views of the heath’

Surveying London from Parliament hill I think about De Certeau’s writings on the city. He says the aerial perspective that offers an overview of the city in it’s entirety ”transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes” but denies knowledge of the city in it’s rawest sense. I look down imagining all the knots of disorder and crave my place in it.

TO BE CONTINUED..........................

A Drift through the ruins of Post Modernism

We have traced the ruins of Post Modernism along the flight paths radiating from the Genius Loci of the Airport.

The Airport has shifted from the once ultimate post-modern experience, a non-space in which all sense of time and place was suspended, to a locus of struggle and Conflict in which all the anesthetising tenants of postmodernism have been shattered.

Al Qaeda as they sat suspended in the placeless and timeless ambiance of the departure lounge understood in an instance that they where the first truly post-modern fighters, decentered and Deterritorialised, detouring the ultimate symbols of modernity, the airplane and the Skyscraper, in order to puncture simulacra so deep that the momentary stench of the rotting flesh of the real was revealed. A stench so strong that only a new paradigm could mask the scent. A paradigm that would lay waste to post-modernism and aim for our own ideological mobalisation in its support.

The Airport has become the flashpoint of contestation from climate change, terrorism, surveillance technologies, immigration and the transfiguration of the future body.

The We Are Bad Collective are engaged in experimental research exploring the lines of flight connecting the Airport to the ruins of Post Modernism.

A day glo explosion of glitter balls, balloons and killer klowns from outer space.

As soon as I spy The Stag on the corner of Fleet road I’ve crossed an imperceptible boundary that takes me beyond the grasp of affluent Hampstead and into a realm of inebriation and spontaneity. I pass the council yard on Cressy road where a multitude of sweepers are setting out to know every contour of the Fleet valley. The subterranean river asserts iself in street signs.

I pause to call on a lost acquaintance in Polgrave house and push through amusement arcade kitsch, tainted nets and falling dreylon. There’s a cat in the communal launderette dozing between geraniums pots.

This place is a nest of junkies, the dank pain of boredom spans the threshold.
I haven’t been here for 9 years but everything’s the same, even the scorched teaspoon on the gas fire is still there.

I drift out of those flats with that dislocated feeling you get when you emerge from a matinee, and suddenly feel a deep nostalgia for those film noir treble bills at the Everyman. In 1960 a film called Peeping Tom came out by Michael Powell,it was about voyeurism,the ubiquitous eye and covert surveillance. The main character was a TV studio serial killer who prowled around Hampstead secretly filming people.

I pass the hysterical darkness of Party party, a day glo explosion of glitter balls, balloons and Killer Clowns from outer space.
The Gospel Oak estate is a nexus of brutalism. There’s a warped Cartesian logic at work ,an attempt to eradicate the erratic flare ups of the street. Got to keep moving to escape the striations of control. Taking photographs risks being hauled in for enforced DNA swabs.

Sculpture For Airports

Sculpture for Airports proposes a democratisation of the security at airports by rerouting the naked images of travellers produced by the Rapiscan Secure 1000 scanner, to the portrait mounted flat screen TVs used for plane timetables. This will result in an interactive artwork that both references classical art history and the early experiments in photography carried out by Edward Muybridge, whilst allowing travellers the opportunity to take responsibility for their own security by keeping a lookout for concealed suspect devices.

.rupture.