An international week of actions has been called for 10th - 16th of January, 2011 in support of the Reykjavik Nine, nine individuals including anarchists and radical leftists, who face up to 16 years in prison for protest against the Icelandic parliament.
To find out more see http://www.rvk9.org/in-english/
Above, folk at The Happendon Wood Action Camp (happendon.coalactionscotland.org.uk) show their support for the Reykjavik Nine.
Fuck the State! Love the RVK9!
A new theatre piece by Martin Crimp, presented this week at the Royal Court
The protection of children is a priority.
Even a small child on a bike should wear a helmet. And a newborn baby on a plane must be strapped to its mother.
A child on roller-skates should wear kneepads.
And elbow pads.
A child on roller skates should wear knee and elbow pads as well as a helmet.
Buy one of those plastic things to stop young children opening the drawer in the kitchen: there are knives in it.
Don't give children small mechanical toys: they can swallow the moving parts. It's tempting, but just don't do it.
Check the eyes of teddy bears. Don't buy a teddy bear if the eyes are loose. Check the squeak of the teddy bear. If you think the squeak might frighten your child, don't buy it.
If you have a dog, muzzle it - and if you have a cat, mind it doesn't sit on your baby's face.
If you have a mud-scraper outside your house, tie rubber over the blade.
Your house is a potential war zone for a child: the corners of tables, chip pans, and the stairs - particularly the stairs - are all potential sources of harm.
Your house is a minefield.
Your house is a minefield - you only have to think about the medicines in the medicine cupboard - or the hard surfaces in the bathroom - the bath - the enamel sink - these are very hard surfaces. Avoid slippery floors.
Avoid slippery floors and at the first sign of unremitting fever, do call a doctor, call a doctor straight away.
The doctor will come straight away at the first sign of unremitting fever. She will have the latest drugs and the most up-to-date skills. If necessary she will intubate. Don't be frightened to call out your doctor: she is waiting for your call, she has spent her whole life waiting for it.
It's not a good idea to give your child long pyjamas: they can trip over the ends.
Mind zips.
Avoid zips, especially metal ones.
Give your child fresh produce. A child should eat fruit and the fruit should not contain pesticides. The fruit must be grown scrupulously. The growers of the fruit and the land itself must be treated with scrupulous respect if you want your child to thrive.
Although beware allergies.
Beware zips, beware allergies, test for allergies every three days, test for food allergies every three days, or more frequently in summer when pollen is also to be avoided.
When driving in the country to see the country orchards, seat your child in the back and strap it down. Strap the child down hard and if you need to use your mobile, stop the car.
Don't buy a car without rear airbags. Don't buy a car without side-impact protection. Don't let your child play under a car, or beside one, because a car is a minefield.
Just like a home.
A car, just like a home, just like an orchard, just like a zip, is a minefield for a child.
If you have a toolbox, lock it. Lock the tools inside it. Don't let a child handle a chisel - not even a small child's chisel. Even a hard pencil used for marking timber is dangerous.
Don't let children write or draw with a dangerous pencil. Mind the caps of felt pens. Make sure the caps, if inhaled, would not obstruct your child's airway. If an accident does occur, call a doctor straight away. The doctor will come and immediately remove the obstruction.
Explain road safety from an early age. Explain that the traffic comes from two directions. Explain what a red man means. Teach your child the word "amber" from an early age. Explain how dangerous water is. Explain that just two inches of water is enough to drown in.
Supervise all swimming. Make sure your child wears goggles because of the chemicals in the water. By all means inflate a paddling pool in your garden but bear in mind that your garden is a potential war zone.
Like your house.
Like your house, like your car, like your child's colouring book, your garden is a potential war zone.
Keep sheds locked.
Lock sheds. Lock garden chemicals out of reach. Secure hoses. If you have a greenhouse with seedlings in it, keep the child away. When your child is in the pool, screaming in the pool, supervise it at all times, and don't let it burn.
Don't let your child burn. Even on a hazy day it still might burn.
Even in the water. Even in the shade of a tree.
Even in water a child can burn. Even in spring it's still possible. In the time it takes you to cut the grass and trim the edges, a child might have burned, because of the very strong rays. Avoid sunlight, and in strong sunlight, when there are fierce rays, apply cream.
Use a good cream. Use a good brand. Use a reliable cream. If you use a good brand of reliable cream your child will not burn.
Your child will not burn if you are liberal with a reliable cream.
If you want advice about which brands of reliable cream to choose, talk to your pharmacist.
· © Martin Crimp, 2003
· All rights reserved
The on-going battle over open cast coal in the Douglas Valley has had a shocking development, with South Lanarkshire Council issuing each member of the Douglas and Glespin Community Council with legal notices that proceedings against them are to begin at Lanark Sheriff Court over alleged libel claims. This move is seen by the community as an attack on their freedom of speech.
This latest dispute, where South Lanarkshire Council under the auspices of Archie Strang, council Chief Executive, are taking primary school teachers and pensioners to court in an effort to silence their dissenting voices, comes because of a logo reading “South Lanarkshire COALcil” and an article titled “South Lanarkshire Council and Scottish Coal Hand-in-Hand at Community LIE-aison Meeting”. The logo superimposes the Council's logo with that of Scottish Coal, and the article was a repost, linked from the Coal Action Scotland website.
The article described a liaison meeting between the community, Scottish Coal and South Lanarkshire Council. At this meeting, the council made every effort to exclude the community from it, misrepresented what was said in minutes and council workers were indistinguishable from Scottish Coal representatives.
Coal Action Scotland are demanding that South Lanarkshire Council end all legal proceedings immediately and issue an apology to the Community Council.
Fiona Reed from Coal Action Scotland said today: “It is unbelievable that the Council would take legal action over what is essentially a link, and not even contact the original authors of the article. This is nothing more than an attempt to limit the Community Council's freedom of speech. The community has to put up with ill health, environmental and economic degradation from open casting, and now the politically-motivated bullying of this deceitful council. Take it back and say sorry Archie.”
Coal Action Scotland are also asking people to stand in solidarity with the Community Council and post up the controversial logo and article on their websites and blogs.
- The original article can be found here: http://coalactionscotland.org.uk/?p=1635
- Douglas Community Council have been opposing the decisions by South Lanarkshire Council to allow numerous open cast developments throughout the valley for close to 20 years, with the campaign against Mainshill Open Cast Coal site, where over 650 letters of objection were submitted to the council and a survey by MSP Eiline Campbell found that 70% of residents opposed the mine.
- Coal Action Scotland works with communities affected by coal mining and infrastructure and takes direct action in support of campaigns, such as the recent 7-month occupation of Mainshill Wood in South Lanarkshire
- South Lanarkshire Council is renowned in the area for being pro-open cast coal and for putting the interests of Scottish Coal before those of the people in South Lanarkshire. Indeed, the council has never refused an open-cast application by Scottish Coal, despite overwhelming community opposition.
LIBERATE TATE COMMUNIQUE #2
It was us and it was art!
Last night (28 June), as the Tate celebrated 20 years of BP ‘support’ for British Art with a Summer Party, Liberate Tate disrupted the proceedings inside and out by pouring hundreds of litres of ‘oil’(molasses) and scattering thousands of feathers as the UK’s celebrity glitterati watched on in fascination.
Sipping Pimms and gobbling canapés many of the guests expressed confusion at whether these striking actions were ‘art’ or not. Despite inaccurate reporting in various media outlets, Liberate Tate would like to claim full responsibility for these acts of creative disobedience as art – art that refuses to pretend to do politics but is politics, art that makes transforming the world a beautiful adventure.
The Tate Summer Party had been planned to be in the museum gardens and involve speeches from BP executives. However, due to the rumours of disruption, Tate was forced to hold the entire event inside the museum and no speeches were made.
As the evening sun baked down on the stone courtyard of Tate Britain and members of the cultural and corporate elite made their way into the party, 13 figures dressed in black, their faces veiled, appeared from around the corner. In a mournful procession the art-activists approached the entrance carrying large barrels branded with the BP logo. Dozens of photographers and TV cameras swarmed and a moment of tense silence enveloped the area. Something was going to happen.
Then in a perfectly choreographed moment, the front phalanx poured hundreds of litres of the black liquid all over the entrance, whilst others threw feathers into the air which gently drifted down into the huge sticky black pools. The sombre figures walked calmly away, disappearing into the city, as the security redirected the guests to another entrance as the cleanup operation began.
Meanwhile, despite the heavy security at the door, two Liberate Tate art-activists managed to infiltrate the party wearing large floral bouffant dresses underneath which were concealed large sacks filled with the oily molasses. Calling themselves Toni Hayward and Bobbi Dudley, they began their performance in the crowded central gallery. At first drips began to fall from their handbags. “Oh, I seem to have a leak” whispered one of them to the lined up waiters dressed in brilliant white, who kindly provided napkins to stem the spill.
Soon the sacks under their dresses burst releasing tens of litres of ‘oil’ across the shiny parquet floor. As a crowd formed around them, the two donned BP branded ponchos and scrambled on all fours trying to clean up the mess using their high heel shoes to pour the slick back into their handbags, but to no avail. “Compared to the size of the gallery this is a tiny spill, a drop in the ocean,” they apologised to the viewers, “we’ll definitely have it cleaned up by, say, August”.
The polite crowd that had formed continued to watch appreciatively for another 20 minutes, amidst a sea of camera-phones. Many began debating among themselves whether this was art or not (“I think it is. I like it”), whether Tate had organised it, and what their personal aesthetic reactions to it were (“If I had seen this outside, I think I would have felt as I do seeing it… inside”). More than one invited artist openly described this to their fellow drinkers as the most sophisticated work in the room.
LIBERATE TATE
Liberate Tate, is a network dedicated to taking creative disobedience against the Tate until it drops its oil company funding. The 28 June art activist performances follow on from last month’s disruption of Tate Modern’s 10th Birthday celebrations by hanging dead fish and birds from dozens of giant black helium balloons.
The network was founded during a workshop in January 2010 on art and activism, commissioned by Tate. When Tate curators tried to censor the workshop from making interventions against Tate sponsors, the incensed participants decided to continue their work together beyond the workshop and set up Liberate Tate.
http://www.twitter.com/liberatetate
With thrilling career opportunites such as these: Eyebrow Threader, Chicken De-boner, Static Security Guard and Minister of Religion, trips to the Jobbie Centre are just what i need in life.
Dear Tate
Happy Birthday. We wish we could celebrate with you. But we can’t.
As we write, your corporate sponsor BP is creating the largest oil painting
in the world, inspired by profit margins and a culture that puts money in
front of life, its shadowy stain shimmers across the Gulf of Mexico. A toxic
tide that turns thriving ecosystems into deserts and deprives cultures of
their way of life, it is one of the world’s greatest works of corporate art,
a work that reeks of death and speaks of our society’s failure of
imagination.
Every day Tate scrubs clean BP’s public image with the detergent of cool
progressive culture. But there is nothing innovative or cutting edge about a
company that knowingly feeds our addiction to fossil fuels despite a climate
crisis, a company whose greed has killed twenty-one employees in just over a
year, a company that continues to invest in the cancer-causing climate
crimes of tar sands in Alberta, Canada.
By placing the words BP and Art together, the destructive and obsolete
nature of the fossil fuel industry is masked, and crimes against the future
are given a slick and stainless sheen.
Every time we step inside the museum Tate makes us complicit with these
acts, acts that will one day seem as archaic as the slave trade, as
anachronistic as public executions. Every time Nicholas Serota is asked how
a museum that prides itself on dealing with climate change can be funded by
an oil company he responds that there are no plans to abandon BP sponsorship
(anything to do with having an ex-CEO of BP chair Tate’s board of
trustees?).
When art activist group The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
(Labofii) were invited to run a workshop on art and civil disobedience, they
were told by curators that they could not take any action against Tate and
its sponsors and the workshop was policed by the curators to make sure the
artists produced work “commensurate with the Tate’s mission". In March 2010,
Tate Modern ran an eco symposium, “*Rising to the Climate Change Challenge:
Artists and Scientists Imagine Tomorrow’s World*”, on the same day that Tate
Britain was celebrating twenty years of BP sponsorship with one of its ‘BP
Saturdays’. Incensed by this censorship and hypocrisy, participants in the
symposium called for a vote: 80% of the audience agreed that BP sponsorship
should be dropped by 2012.
So today we offer you a birthday present, a gift to liberate Tate from its
old-fashioned fossil fuel addiction – a gift for the future. Beginning
during your 10th anniversary party and continuing until you drop the
sponsorship deal, we will be commissioning a series of art interventions in
Tate buildings across the country. Already commissioned are *Art
Action*collective, with a birthday surprise at this weekend’s
*No Soul For Sale* event, and The *Invisible Committee*, who will infiltrate
every corner of Tate across the country in the coming months.
We invite artists to join us and act to liberate Tate. Free art from oil.
www.twitter.com/liberatetate
So I thought I'd leave you a little something to wake up to, little B. On a regular basis.
