Tensions rise once again in the streets of Greece’s major cities. Radicals and Anarchists join workers from around the country in voicing dissent. Airports, hospitals and other public services have shut down for the day as the Greek Government attempt to impose harsh new austerity measures.
Greek authorities have reacted with an iron fist. Another anarchist Lambros Foundas, lies dead after police fired upon a group in the suburb of Dafni, south Athens. Thousands of police tear gas and attack crowds of protesters. Police snatch squads roam the streets making violent arrests.
Maybe in contrast to this an interesting discussion point is the fact some police joined the strike, weakening the states power to some small extent.
But what does this all mean for the long term anti-authoritarian struggle within the country and for the international community? The backdrop of December 2008s riots,sparked by the police shooting of 15 year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos give these fresh events a more revolutionary appearance. What could be framed as simply the acts of reformist trade unions now appears as serious social upheaval. In 2008 radicals, students and immigrants set a new precedent for social rupture in Europe, however there was a clear absence of the less marginal working classes. This time around it is already clear this is not the case. The insurrection has begun to leave the old left behind, taking on a more organic shape all of its own forged by the people taking part in it.
Last Hours attempts to examine the context and actions that shape these new days in the hope that we can all apply new theory and action to our own situations, in our own communities.
This list will grow in the coming days. Please check back for fresh content.
People keep asking me about this roller derby sport I recently started, so I’m posting something I wrote for a zine being made by girls from London Roller Girls. It’s about the rookie/beginner boot camp which started in January of this year, which took place over four weeks and was designed to determine whether we could continue with the LRG training programme.
In January all the new wannabe rollergirls headed down to CoLA in Bermondsey to see if we had what it took to participate in the London Roller Girls rookie programme. Although that part of South London might seem like an unlikely destination for a Saturday morning convergence of women of all ages, shapes and sizes, armed with wheels and helmets, around forty of us stormed the changing rooms and filled it with the smell of brand new skates and nervous chattering.
We came from a range of backgrounds; people who hadn’t skated since they were kids, others who had been unsuccessful in the last rookie in-take and were trying again, and some who were proficient at the roller disco jam skating style and wanted to branch out into new territory. We all wobbled down the hallway in our squeaky new skates and into the gym to have a crack at becoming full fledged rookies. I personally felt sick to my stomach when I put my mouth guard in for the first time and looked around at all these girls gliding across the smooth floor effortlessly and with grace. I felt like a lumbering hulk with two left feet and an oversized head due my ill-fitting helmet. I had the distinct impression that I was making a big mistake.
Once we were all in the gym and warmed up, we were split into groups and taught the basic derby skills we were expected to master over the coming four weeks. These included the t-stop, the plough, the one, two and four point falls and derby position (which is basically people skating as if they are taking a shit in a toilet at Reading Festival, as someone helpfully put it). For the next hour the room was exploding with the sound of pads-on-floor and laughing. Every time I threw myself onto the boards my peripheral vision caught multiple other girls throwing themselves down in kamikaze fashion and springing awkwardly back up. It felt like an extreme army boot camp. I can only speak for myself, but having not done much sport except cycling and skiing since school, I felt like I aged about ten years in that two-hour session. My thighs and back were screaming with the exertion of constantly throwing myself up and down and and my legs were beginning to stubbornly resist any attempt to form the required t-stop shape. I looked around me and dozens of other girls were sweating and red-faced, but equally determined and good-natured about the brutality of the first rookie practice.
After learning the basic derby techniques we had to do an assessment in front of all the judges to determine whether we had grasped enough to be able to continue. It felt a bit like I was in a bad high-school cheerleading film with all of them sitting there in their skates with notepads while the uneasy beginners tottered around the track for their perusal. Of course, during my turn I fell flat on my face and lay there for what felt like an eternity before getting up to the sound of some girls clapping and encouraging me to carry on. At points I wondered if I really needed to put myself through this kind of stress, but the experience of learning something new and meeting a whole host of different people convinced me that the balance tipped far more to the positive side than the negative. Read more…
Just to let you all know we have a load of new stock in the shop.
Titles include:
Flying Close to the Sun by Cathy Wilkerson
Flying Close to the Sun is the stunning memoir of a white middle-class girl from Connecticut who became a member of the Weather Underground, one of the most notorious groups of the 1960s.
13 Years of Good Luck
To celebrate their thirteenth anniversary, Microcosm put together this compilation of work from their authors and artists.
As The World Burns by Derrick Jensen
Two of America’s most talented activists team up to deliver a bold and hilarious satire of modern environmental policy in this fully illustrated graphic novel.
About Anarchism
About Anarchism, by Nicolas Walter, “This is a struggle which we may not win and which may never end but which is still worth fighting…” a pocket size book from Freedom Press.
Off The Map
A punk rock vision quest told in the tradition of the anarchist travel story, Off the Map is narrated by two young women as they discard their maps, fears, and anything resembling a plan, and set off on the winds of the world.
Anarchy in Action
An excellent accessible introduction for those new to anarchism. Ward gives a wide-ranging analysis, drawing on examples from housing, education, the workplace and the family to name but a few, to demonstrate that the roots of anarchist practice are not as alien or quixotic as they might at first seem, but lie precisely in the ways that people have always tended to organise themselves when left alone to do so.
So, I finally got this published! Year of the Monkey contains all 360 of the daily comics that I did over the course of a year between the summer of 2007 and 2008. It was a fairly insane project. I mean a comic everyday is nuts! But I stuck with it, and they were pretty good, if I do say so myself. It certainly does a good job of documenting my daily life during the period, and exploring my relationship with Natalie.
Below are some of the strips:
The project ran for the full year as an online comic. The website no longer exists, so the only way to see the comics is through the book.
This Saturday, 13th February, marks the Alternative Press Fair’s first birthday, and they’re having another small press fair to celebrate. It’s a cool free event that celebrates all things self-published and DIY. Read more…
This years Brighton Zinefest is a huge four day event. We will be taking part on the Saturday, setting up shop at the Hanover Community Centre along with over 30 other zine distros.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
1.30-5.30pm, free entry/donations.
Hanover Community Centre, 33 Southover St, Brighton
Last Hours are gonna be there with a table and we’ll have a new selection of zines and books as well as some familiar titles covering everything from anarchist theory to DIY screen printing and radical comics.
Last Hours presents:
“Excessive Force” – policing in Britain
Wednesday 24th February – 6.30pm to 8.30pm
At Housmans books, 5 Caledonian Road, near King’s Cross
We’re finally having a book launch for our comix anthology, ‘Excessive Force’, that explores the problems of modern policing. At the launch there’ll be talks about the anthology and a discussion about the state of policing in the UK today with speakers from LDMG (Legal Defence and Monitoring) and FITWatch.
It will be a fun evening and a chance to chat with people involved with the project, have a drink, and listen to some interesting talks about how people can respond to the police, and how art, and comics, can play a role in that.
It seemed like such a good idea when it was agreed upon. A blog about working for the ambulance service; interesting and bizarre situations get spoon fed to you every day, all I would have to do would be to package them pleasantly and post them too you.
I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want after working 100 hours in 10 days is to come home and start raking over it all in a blog. I want peace and to not have to help people who are not trying to help themselves.
More than anything I don’t want to rekindle the embers of anger and frustration that I spend a great deal of my working day trying to dampen. Every single person in the call room has had this conversation:
CALLER: Hello, I’m a carer and I’ve just come to my client and he isn’t breathing
CALL TAKER: Is he still cold; is he beyond help?
CALLER: No, he’s still warm
CALL TAKER: Well, start by putting him on his back I’m going to tell you how to do CPR
CALLER: No, I don’t want to.
And no amount of argument will persuade them to. Or the passerby who leaves an unconscious homeless man bleeding from the head; or the person who shouts ‘send the fucking ambulance you piece of shit or I’ll find out where you work and smack you’.
My body feels just a little more tense now, my heart is beating a little faster and I’m a little more angry and on edge. I don’t want to rekindle this stuff.
They’re pretty good at work for giving you time away, ‘stress breaks’, and there is an in-house confidential counseling scheme. But it’s a kind of anger and resentment that wares away at you over huge periods of time that you may not even realise is there until a stray angry thought is perused back to its origin.
Fortunately this low key anger has never spilled over at those I love (with the possible exception of me almost demanding to my partner that we leave London after a spate of stabbings one night close to my home). But as it is resulting from strangers, people I never even see, the anger, only ever expressed as nasty thoughts in my head, is expressed as strangers also. Don’t get me wrong, nothing is ever expressed outwardly, I just find my mind, which has previously been a relatively serene and calm place can feel like there’s an angry wasp buzzing through it, nasty pointed and angry. It’s no-one’s problem but my own I just want to find a healthier way to express the frustration.
I’ve had grown men allow their children to die before them, because they will not listen to my CPR instructions. Ironically he was praying to his god to save his son. His son died. He may well have survived if the guy hadn’t panicked and he had done as I’d asked.
How can one process such a thing? How can I forgive the caller for that?
This year Last Hours has a table at the international comics festival in Angoulême, France. We’ll be taking our two new books – Diary of a miscreant and Excessive Force – to the BD Alternative area. If you happen to be going to Angoulême, drop round for some politically inspired comics at our table. Also on the table will be Gareth Brookes, Jimi Gherkin and Peter Lally of Alternative Press and other UK small-press shenanigans. It should be a lot of fun!
Statistically this past Monday, the 18th January, is the most depressing day of the year. Normally I don’t buy into this kind of hype, but this year I’m a fully paid-up member. Aside from the chest infection, not seeing the sun in weeks and being dumped in the rain in a city I didn’t want to be in, outside of my own selfish spectrum, there isn’t too much to be thrilled about. Natural disasters, families crippled by post-Christmas debt, the depressing fact that the sun won’t come out for many more weeks, the lack of prospects for young people, the lack of consideration for old people, the grim prospect of an pre-determined electoral choice between tweedle dum and tweedle dee and all the surrounding circus. The new year hangover is officially gone, the residue from fireworks are moulding into the hard ground and everyone is too broke to wash away the misery with cider and revelry…Right? Right? RIGHT?
I woke up this morning with the intention of writing down something self-indulgent and positive, so here it goes. The following three things are stopping me from being sucked into a vortex of self-loathing and agitation. They make me feel like this city might have taken my money, but it will never take my optimism.
1) Roller Derby. I wanted to start a new activity and meet some new people in London. Roller Derby had been on my mind for ages because it was just starting up in Leeds when I was leaving. What’s not to like about a sport practised by tough girls on quad roller skates? My attempts to become awesome at this are still in the fledgling stage, as I’ve only attending one session of boot camp so far and my epic crash landing during the assessment stage may mean I don’t get invited back for the second one.. However, it feels good to be getting out on Saturday mornings and Monday nights to skate around strip clubs (really) and roller discos with friends. Learning a new skill, especially a physical one, seems to become scarier with each year I get older. The shame of making a fool of yourself or simply not being good enough is far more daunting for an adult than a child, in my opinion. But when I was lying on a gym floor smelling the sweat and failure, having fallen over doing a demo of possibly the the easiest derby stop in front of about 50 people, no one was laughing at me. In fact, a couple of people clapped and some laughed with me. Today every single muscle I didn’t even know I had is hurting. Leaning over to pick up a pen requires groans and a gritted jaw… Maybe my body can’t cope with this…But I feel like my body is flexing, re-assessing itself, measuring the possibilities... And the possibilities are endless.*
2) Lawrence Arms coming over to the UK. I love the Lawrence Arms. I haven’t seen them in quite some time and the last time was a bit average because they were touring with this Fat Wreck package and no one seemed to really give a shit about them. The time I saw them which still makes the hair on my arms prick up was the The Verge in Kentish Town with Jerry Built. The band were really pissed and had drawn all over themselves, but they somehow managed to blast out shambolic renditions of some of the finest melodic punk rock I’ve ever heard. The night ended at The Underworld with snakebite, Bon Jovi on the PA, a near bar brawl and a euphoria which lasted for weeks. I don’t care if melodic punk songs sung by gruff Americans are a dime a dozen: Lawrence Arms did it early and they did it the best. When I hear the beautiful simplicity of lyrics like ‘all these words trip over cracks in the side walk’ and think of all the times I’ve tried to express myself and failed, or the anthemic chorus of 100 Resolutions, I feel like my ribs are going to burst out of my chest. Needless to say, I am pretty stoked about seeing them for the first time in five years.
3) Everything Sucks club night in London. If you haven’t been to this yet, shame on you. Since Sublime and Take Warning club nights died and Nasin remained shit, there has been a dearth of club nights playing punk rock in a dingy room surrounded by all yours mates. On the negative side Everything Sucks is on a Tuesday night, so a lot of my working buddies are eliminated from attending unless they can hack the brutal sleep deprivation and sore limbs at the office desk the morning. However, the guys who run it are friendly and took the best elements of premier Leeds club night ‘Juvenile Hall (Juvi) and applied them to this format. The barman is a wanker, the drinks overpriced and all the obscure melodic hardcore punk you thought you’d never hear over a PA again is being blasted out while movies are playing on a projector behind you and a guy you haven’t seen since you were still listening to Reel Big Fish daily is sat on a chair in the corner. Obviously, with it being London, loads of people don’t dance and they stand around being incredibly cool. However, my motto has been and shall remain that one should ‘dance like no-one’s watching’, so if it doesn’t have a beat – make one up! you feel uncool? Have another beer… you’d be surprised how instrumental a beer can be in crossing the line from tapping your foot on the sidelines to pulling your T-shirt over your head and jumping around with some sweaty topless men to Kid Dynamite. It also ends at a reasonable hour, so you can be home and civilised (super noodles + Scrubs and/or Simpsons + underwear) before 3am. On my journey home in the snow, I saw three urban foxes and pissed in some shrubbery in Peckham. Good night out? I think so.
So statistically speaking, my life should be shit right now and I should be checking into the Priory with the post-Christmas blues along with Amy Winehouse and Les Dennis. Things might not be looking good on paper, but I’m certainly pumped about the future. Now excuse me, I have an Alkaline Trio gig to mentally prepare for.
