Poison Girls, Chumbawamba, Mark Miwurdz, and Toxic Shock reviewed live in Whitby zine Trip Into Realism, number 1, 1984.Thornton View Benefit Gig Poison Girls, Toxic Shock, Mark Miwurdz + Chumbawamba
Thornton View is an hospital in Bradford which provides special care for geriatric patients. Due to the tory health cuts this hospital and a nearby hospital in Shipley are due to be closed. The Regional Health Authority claim that even if these two hospitals close there will still be enough geriatric beds in the area.
In 1988, Joe Strummer embarked on a tour across Britain called ‘Rock Against the Rich’.
The tour was endorsed and organised by the anarchist group, Class War. Ian Bone, former leading member of Class War, has published this on the history of the tour.
..”Remember, in the late ‘80s, rock had zero street credibility – hip hop and sound system bass ruled the streets of the inner cities. The music may have changed, but the politics of the street remained the same: Class conflict, with a varying intensity of class warfare, raged the length and breadth of Britain. Strummer recognised this, and saw in the Class War people he met, the passionate intensity that he lacked and needed. He tried to use the media’s fixation with Class War to re-launch his career with a radical edge. And to a degree it worked well for him…”
Amongst a collection of newspapers and journals that I recently obtained, I found a copy of Class War that featured Joe Strummer and the Rock Against the Rich tour.
Australian-British academic interested in history, politics and criminal justice issues, with a little pop culture on the side. View all posts by hatfulofhistory
Fifteen years ago today, on February 2nd, 2002, I became an anarchist. I was nineteen, living in NYC, and I attended the World Economic Forum protests. I knew the anarchists by reputation only — they wore all black and they smashed things. They were going to wear masks in defiance of NYC’s anti-mask laws. I wanted to know why, so I approached a man with his face obscured by a black bandanna.
“What’s anarchism?” I asked.
“Well, we hate capitalism and the state.” He was very forthcoming, which I appreciated.
“What do you all do about it?”
“We build up alternative institutions without hierarchy while attacking and interfering with the existing, oppressive ones we despise.”
“Oh,” I said. I pondered this for a moment, but honestly only a moment. “Do you have an extra mask?”
Read a F*cking Book: Cristy C. Road‘s “Spit and Passion”
Posted byGabrielle Spit and Passion by Cristy C. Road is a graphic memoir about the anxious, fragile and formative moments between childhood and adolescence. Written with the wisdom of hindsight and illustrated with the often-gruesome imperfections that Road’s art is famous for, her memoir centers around her newly felt queerness and how her love affair with Green Day (yes, the band) saved her from the pain of being a weirdo.
Spit and Passion, via the Feminist Press
Raised by a “gang of boisterous Cuban women” in a working-class family, Road was torn between the casual homophobia that was part of the backdrop of her daily life, and her growing physical attraction to women. Continue reading “Cristy C. Road’s “Spit and Passion””
Three members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot said Vladimir Putin’s Russia was the one on trial as they delivered closing arguments on Wednesday in a case seen as a key test of the powerful president’s desire to crackdown on dissent.
“This is a trial of the whole government system of Russia, which so likes to show its harshness toward the individual, its indifference to his honour and dignity,” Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, one of the trio on trial said in an impassioned statement. “If this political system throws itself against three girls … it shows this political system is afraid of truth.”
The judge set 17 August as the day she would deliver a verdict against the women, charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred following an anti-Putin performance in a Moscow cathedral.
Prosecutors have asked for a three-year sentence, arguing that the women sought to insult all of Russian
Pussy Riot members, from left, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich sit in a glass cage at a court room in Moscow. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
Orthodoxy and denying they were carrying out a political protest.
Tolokonnikova called the charges against them a “political order for repression” and denounced Putin’s “totalitarian-authoritarian system”, insisting Pussy Riot were an example of “opposition art”.
“Even though we are behind bars, we are freer than those people,” she said, looking at the prosecution from inside the glass cage where she and her two bandmates, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich, have spent the nine-day trial. “We can say what we want, while they can only say what political censorship allows.
“Maybe they think it wouldn’t be wrong to try us for speaking against Putin and his system, but they can’t say that because it’s been forbidden,” she said, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the revolutionary words “No Pasaran”.
Couching their case in the long plight of political prisoners in the country, the three women urged Russians to reject Putin’s system and embrace freedom.
Alyokhina, 24, compared the trial to the Soviet Union’s persecution of Joseph Brodsky, when the young poet was charged with being a “social parasite”, becoming a global cause celebre that highlighted the government’s farcical control over culture.
“We are not guilty – the whole world is talking about it,” Alyokhina said, hours after Madonna became the latest, and biggest, star to come to the women’s defence.
“I am not scared of you,” Alyokhina told the court. “I’m not scared of lies and fiction, or the badly formed deception that is the verdict of this so-called court. Because my words will live, thanks to openness.
“When thousands of people will read and watch this, this freedom will grow with every caring person who listens to us in this country.”
Lawyers for Pussy Riot have been expecting a guilty verdict and three-year sentence, but said that was called into question following the judge’s delay in issuing her decision. Lawyer Nikolai Polozov said growing international attention, including recent messages of support from the likes of Madonna and Yoko Ono, had had their effect. “To take a quick decision under such pressure is very dangerous for the authorities, so they’ve taken a time out,” he told the Guardian. “No matter what the verdict is, we have won,” he added.
Each woman ended her closing statement to loud applause from the Russian journalists sitting in the courtroom.
Yekaterina Samutsevich is seen here being escorted into court Russian prosecutors have asked for three years’ in prison for three women musicians accused of inciting religious hatred during a protest in a cathedral. The three members of the punk band Pussy Riot played a song attacking Russian leader Vladimir Putin in front of an altar […]
The Free Pussy riot campaign has gone global, hitting at the heart of oppression, semi slavery and open violence against women, in the sexist macho State and the medieval inquisitorial evil church. update https://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/ God-is-punishing-jailed-pussy-riot-mothers-says-patriarch Аction […]
The trial continues of 3 women from the punk band Pussy Riot. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Mariya Alekhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich were taken into custody in February after singing a protest song against Putin in Moscow. They have spent already 5 months without bail for nothing more than playing a song in a church without permission. Their […]
Trial Update. Tuesday. Witnesses were called who swore they were outraged by Pussyriot playing in a church…. God is judging Pussy Riot, says Russian church leader.
The Free 