Past coming back to haunt…
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Had a fab time at the Sheffield demo yesterday. Texted various ppl on the
way and most of em were on the way to London (12 coaches IIRC
from Leeds alone). The demo had several hundred people there, mainly CND
and Quaker and floating voters. No SWP, must’ve been in London, but this
seemed to mean it was a mainly white crowd — SWP seem to be very good
at getting the asian community out judging by previous demos. Day was
blazing sunshine all day, didn’t see a cloud anywhere. Mood was very
friendly and relaxed, loads of kids playing, hardly any cops, really
nice. Cringed a bit at the Xtian peacenik singalongs but fuck it they
were there. All passed off very peacefully.
Afterwards went to an art gallery and played in the peace gardens, which
have fab water sculptures, with the near-full moon looming overhead. I
was struck by how well served Sheffield is by public spaces that bring
together people from different cultures — a real sense of politics of
the everyday in the air. A sense of hope.
The mighty John Eden, who is blogging nicely at http://uncarved.chaos.org.au, is investigating political mythaeopia, which is good to see. No doubt he will be mercilessly attacked by the fundamentalist-realist leftie massive, but then they are always attacking everybody, all the time.
From Simon Reynolds on garage rap slowing down…
“he’s not talking about that though, a brief intermission of slow jams — but the whole tempo of the scene’s output falling — you’re starting to get tunes like ‘they wanna talk about us’ which ahve the UK garage style of Mcing but are as slow as American rap like Ludacris. tunes that are quite dirgy with doomy fanfares a la ‘rollout’ or Swizz Beats tunes.”
In other words — “you’re out of touch matey”! Oh well, I guess I’m too far away from the pirates to keep up with the bleeding edge of garage, despiute Onextra…