In response to the little buggers trying to hold onto the back bumper while I'm working, I've designed a simple two part bumper sticker. It goes something like this.
After FINALLY getting broadband in the new place, I've come to realize the DSL in Pico just sucks. I was around 280-300 kbps max! This is what I've got now:
2003-09-25 03:26:22 EST: 1982 / 79
Your download speed : 1982826 bps, or 1982 kbps.
A 242 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 79744 bps, or 79 kbps.
Seems like broadband .. above the 1mbit barrier!
If only the ftp servers were back up. Damn RIAA!
I'm not certain how I ended up at Andy Martin's memories of the anarchopunk scene, but this is one of the best things I've read in a long time. It's one thing when Ed, Rick, and I have discussed these issues, but it's all the better when it comes from a member of The Apostles. When a member of a band that's remembered for such idealistic DIY principles mentions how he joined the band just to get laid, you know it's a good read. He talks about the good, the bad, and the ridiculous.
The achievements:
At an anti-fascism rally a colleague of ours was arrested and charged with assault. It took us just fifteen minutes to raise enough money to pay his bail and locate a decent solicitor for him at one event at The Centro Iberico (he was subsequently let off with a caution).
There is another advantageous result of the anarcho-punk movement as it then existed: lonely and isolated individuals could be put in contact with others, often in the same town or village.
The failures:
I hinted briefly at two reasons for the demise of the second wave of punk. The first of these is simple: instead of the adoption of a new, original and intelligent panaura (expressed through music. magazines and visual arts), the anarcho-punks opted for all the old cliches, tired routines and fashionable formulae as if to suggest that to breathe new life into those cracked models was enough to succeed where previously it had been shown to fail.
Do we really need another song about nuclear war when the other 4000 haven’t exactly achieved any change?
These punks shouted about revolution as they punched the air with their fists, but frankly, the temporary displacement of a few nitrogen molecules isn’t going to drastically hasten the demise of Western capitalism.
Great stories from past gigs:
One amusing – yet also rather sad – event took place which does stand the test of repeated relation: the day Wattie Buchan visited The Centro Iberico. Let me make this clear: Wattie at no time acted in a provocative or antisocial manner, he paid to come in, he sat down at a table and watched the bands. He was accompanied by Annie Anxiety, a friend of Crass, who brought him along to introduce him to the Crass Clone Society in order to reveal to him a fact of which I was previously unaware, that is, according to her, we can all get along with each other and fight the struggle in harmonious relations if we really want to; in the whole history of humankind, has there ever been a shred of evidence for such an attitude?
By about 9pm; Conflict had just finished playing and Crass had come on; Dave and myself both brandished huge black bin-liners (they couldn’t be any other colour I suppose... I’m surprised they didn’t bear circled A’s on them, come to think of it...)
Let’s end on a positive note – the music stopped – but seriously,...
Pay attention to the punk "riot" of Westbourne Park Road. Great read.