What A Week

What a week, i'll say, by George, that was some week. Went to London last weekend, armed with armfuls of jam and little tasty postcards. Sold some of them, all the jam. sold all the jam and then some. I drank too much and became an idiot: such is the Real of intoxication. In London I stayed in three different beds, which makes a nice change from the sofa that is usually my home. It sounds mighty salacious too. In one room, you had to go through someone else's room to get there; the next was an illegal loft conversion, and the last one had a bed that was falling apart. But each house had their own splendid blend of idiosyncratic hospitality. On the day Palestine became recognised by the UN as a non-observer state – is that right? – i was in the brockley mess having a cup of tea and writing my novel. the news came through on the BBC website and Beirut was playing on the stereo, the song called the Gulag Orkestar. OK, so it's only faux middle-eastern music, but it's more appropriate than Gaga or Barry Manillow or Mumford and Sons or anything at T in the Park. On that day, a shot of olive oil was in order, i'm sure you'll agree. Then myself and my comrade set up an exhibition in shoreditch. the printers screwed us around so we couldn't get the print we wanted. we won't go back – that's the free market for ya. Each day was marked by an inability to fulfil our objectives, but thursday came and went off pretty well. jammojitos, need i say more? banalograms, need i say more? it took a long time to drive from elephant to shoreditch in a overheating car and if there is one i learnt as a result of that ordeal it is this: never buy sausage rolls from shell garages unless you are sure they have been heated very recently. (also, check the water in your radiator) (finally, if sausage rolls are below expectation, do not use them as an alternative to water in the radiator.)

What a week.

what a week, hey? i took to charging around the country side delivering chinese takeaways to people. i've been slowly working out the most efficient way to go about this and i think i have sussed it. it goes like this. drive to takeaway, unclip sat nav and put in pocket. leave car unlocked for expediency. enter takeaway. if meals are not ready then consider the address on the reciept. if address not known, type into sat nav, and then turn sat nav off. pick up bag and leave, enter car, sat nav and bag of meals on passenger seat; reverse, aim the appropriate way down the street, accelerate, switch on headlights, buckle seatbealt, clip in sat nav, turn on sat nav. turn on radio. when i get to the house there are more options of which to choose, including. do i leave engine running while i hunt for the house in the dark and in the rain? do i check the amount owed before i go to the front door or use my phone to check it in the dark? do i leave the car unlocked? do i fumble around for change for longer than nessecary in the hope of a higher tip? yes it's full of intricacies. i speed like a madman, something i am compelled to do by working on commission. it's just like grand theft auto. i ran down a hooker at about 8pm on tuesday night, but i outran the cops pretty quick so it was OK. meanwhile, israel! what would god say? thats what i want to know? ok so they may have different prophets, but yahweh and allah are they same bloke at the end of the day. let's not get into this too much, taking sides and whatnot, and just say the one thing that can be known for sure – this is going to go on and on. when children die and people don't stop doing the things that make children die then something is seriously fucked up. the novel i'm writing is slowing down dramatically around the 20000 words mark, whereupon i have done some serious rejigging and had to stop and consider at length where to go now. maybe i will have a crusading female priest who becomes a maverick bishop in all but name, doing ad hoc ceremonies in underground car parks until catholic henchmen hunt her down. if i were richard dawkins i would say, nay spit, the words 'of course they didn't accept female bishops. their archaic rules are dictated by the word of a made up entity of which there is no factual scientific basis. but the more alienated from society they become, they easier it will be for the atheist armies to crush them when the Atheatic day of judgement comes, circa 2030.' And then i'd chew on the corpse of a newly baptised child.

What a Week

what. a. week. lord, the week has been some week, that much is true. i spent the first part of the week stapled to a pin-board in a corridor of an consultancy office, and i can tell you this. people do not take any notice of notices. hundreds of times people passed me, they didn't notice that i was stapled to the wall. they didn't notice the words on me, the words 'help I'm stuck on the wall, please get me down.' finally, on Tuesday night, i was released, just in time to stay up watching the Americans elect their president. i fell asleep minutes before the result was announced, and thus picked up elements of the speech as soundbites the following day. that obama though, he is slick like a Tony the tiger. that is a man who knows how to talk. romney, he's like a condescending uncle, who smiles and nods as he tells you that he had to kill your dog because your dog had got too big. so i started nanowrimo about 6 days late and have been trying to catch up ever since. some days im like wayooooo let's write and all the pain of the world rushes through me like an empathy conduit and i type a veritable projectile vomit of words onto the computer. other days, like Wednesday, i sit there like a koala, wasting away, clutching something for comfort, possibly watching breaking bad. i went to Devon on a train and saw a double rainbow on the way, as i rode the train. a unicorn was running up the side of the rainbow, which i found particularly weird because the far end of the rainbow's arc was very steep, too steep for a unicorn to get up, i would have thought.

what a week

floods floods, electricity, waves, wind, wind, wind. oh, the USA, battered again by the powers of evil. who would have thought that the storm blighted the Caribbean too? we tend not to focus on that. Cuba and Haiti? no one will notice the difference, they say. and just as one storm passes across the ocean, in a galaxy far far away, Disney buys star wars. who can blame them? the legions of children are just waiting/starving to make toys for the next three films, and can we expect them to be more stupid than the prequels? i say yes! binks the second, i reckon, jar jar binks' grandson, commanding an army which is trying to counter the counter-revolution. (is it not true that the righteous in the sequels will be a new rebellion against the power of the jedi?) but with Disney at the helm, no depth is too low. it's like the ocean – humans barely known what's down there, what evils lurk, and so it is with the rubbish that Disney will be capable of reaching, below the dive depth of any submarine. of course, i will watch it. i like star wars. at the beginning of the week i phoned up the bank to talk to them about my loan. when they put me on hold, the most forlorn music played. it was as if it said, 'sometimes, all you can do is accept the inevitable, and get another loan. don't worry, leave it to us, we will steadily ensure that you will be in poverty forevermore.' barclays, though – who knows – perhaps they will all be in prison before long and all slates will be wiped clean, or the end of fight club will come to pass. but considering the way they've managed to survive so far despite their criminal activities, my hopes are possibly mere fantasy. just got to button up my shirt and pay them payments every month, as the great philosopher kant once said, it is imperative that i maintain a decent credit rating. life is hard but so am i as E once said, another profound thinker. and so i walked towards but not all the way to the beach and i listened to polica. polica makes walking very cool, very cool indeed. breathing changes, loosens up. in all the songs the vocals are the same and yet this never becomes tiring. best recent discovery, polica. i came across a dead pigeon which i nursed back to life by sprinkling upon its head the pollen from a young dandelion and performing the ancient ritual of pigiennia. off he flew in spark of new and profound life, only to be hit by a passing truck.

what a week

what a week hey? gosh, indeed, i mean savile, what happened there? i cant even remember when that story started. i cant remember being surprised – it all rather crept up on you, didn't it? a bit like savile himself! but certainly i was dumbfounded and horrified. i mean, what the hell? bbc! where are you! as Norwich city fan delia smith once said. meanwhile, George osborne doesn't pay for his ticket on the train only to dig into his pockets and pay the £170 or whatever it was or else be thrown in with the animals in the standard seating area. ah but that was a long time ago, an age in the life of the newsreel. but that boy, that George, he's a cheeky one. one day he's skipping the train, the next he's parking a turd square on the head of a pensioner. i also took a train. i took one from crewkerne to home. a girl was crying on the platform and i offered her some chocolate. she said 'oh, go on then' and snapped a bit off. to be honest, she snapped off a bit more than i hoped she had. but i couldn't very well ask her to give some back, with the tears down her face and everything. the train was held up somewhere in Dorset. i had no idea where, it was late and i dont have GPS on my phone. it wasn't a station that's for sure. that's for sure! it was pitch black i tell you. we were all told to get off, they had run out of coal, or whatever it is that makes trains run, and we had to walk to the sea and get a boat the rest of the way. get back and wham, hurricane city! Sandy's on her way. it's like the motion picture Grease, with john travolta and olivia newton john, and just as badass. one of those BBC reporters, john sopel i think, he just loves it, kept saying the sea is swelling like a cauldron. presenters were lining up to get their storm report in, just hoping, hoping, hoping that they will be on TV when a building falls down or a person gets swept away. day after tomorrow, that's what it was, the soundtrack was virtually playing over the montage of waves and satellite images. does new york know when it ends and when its representation begins, i wonder.

The milk

That night I drank milk. I drank it and kept drinking it. I drank all I had and then some. I went out to get more. I cleaned out the local shop's whole supply. I drank full fat semi skimmed and skimmed. I drank it straight from the bottle the carton and the vat and the truck. I had a hose. I had a funnel. I drank until the cows came home. 

I drank it non-stop until the gulps hurt then I drank more. I drank until I couldn't breathe and then I kept drinking. I drank until the calcium in my teeth made them so strong that they bit through my tongue without me noticing. I drank until the milk eroded the back of my throat and mixed blood into the falling milky cocktail. 

I drank until my bones were so so strong they destroyed themselves. I drank until my eyes cried milk and drowned the pupils so they looked like pathetic tiny raisins, shriveled and lifeless, on the expanses of two identical moons. I drank until the quantities of calcium turned my brain into an udder, and made me see cows floating in the milk lake of my tears. I held onto them as they passed. They were indifferent to my using them as a raft. They didn't even say moo. We floated towards eternity. Towards the inevitable waterfall that no one is strong enough to paddle against with their pathetic puny human limbs. I drank as we fell as we tumbled through the sky as the milk painted my clothes and hair and got up my nose and charged into my lungs. I drank and I drank. I drank all the milk we were drowning in, to save us, and then cried it right back out again, so we started all over again, the flapping the gasping the screaming for someone to save us and the drinking the endless drinking of the milk

Exclusive: A Tough Diet for Tough Times.

Government cuts are causing people to eat their own walls, a new study had shown. The politically central think tank, the Institute for Political Structural Integrity (IPSI) has found that increasing numbers of lower to middle class families are finding food too expensive, as wages stop rising, and are using the walls in their homes for extra food. But the consequences can be dire. 

Says Anne Brickton, spokesperson at the IPSI, 'the problem gets worse the lower down the wage spectrum you go. Those on minimum wage, for example, are eating particularly malnutritious walls, and those living in flats built in the Thatcher era are eating downright poisonous ones.'

Another consequence which seems to be too oft ignored is the importance a wall has in keeping up a roof. Anne says 'many walls have a variety of purposes – partitioning rooms and keeping ceilings up. Exterior walls also keep in heat, meaning that with every extra wall eaten, the fuel bills rise, and many of these people are already in fuel poverty. Without walls many roofs will fall down, causing the whole structure to collapse.' Food has never been part of the intended purpose of walls, says wall expert Peter Clockers, and in fact cause more harm than good. Anne declined to comment in any detail on whether the walls of the rich keep up ceilings up. 'We would not want to speculate on that at the moment,' she said, 'as far as we know the rich have not taken to wall-eating so hopefully the problem will not arise.' 

The walls of the rich are especially thick and a diet of thick wall is certainly a risk. However, GP Mark Darkwood says it is possible that the genetic constitution of wealthier people allows them to digest such walls, but this is yet to be verified. 'At the moment we are treating less well-off people,' he says, 'who's walls are lacking in any nutritional value whatsoever.' 

It is unlikely that more affluent families will turn to wall-eating because of the preferential treatment given to the wealthier under the coalitions policies. 'The tax revenues from the wealthiest in our country is invaluable to the UK's income,' said David Cameron. 'These are the wealth generators of our country and we should be supporting them as they support us towards recovery. Damaging the foundational integrity of wealthy families' homes will simply drive them overseas.' Labour have yet to develop a serious policy that goes beyond criticism of the Government, who reply to Labour's accusations of incompetence by saying that for every eight walls currently eaten by the poor, it would be only be reduced to seven under Labour. The Government stand by their commitment to lower the deficit even of it means a few months or even years of wall-eating. Cameron says, 'it's tough for everyone now but with hard work and a stuff upper lip we will once again thrive as the prosperous, magnificent and imposing nation that we once were, and on that day the poor (at least, the one who have survived) can re-upgrade to the ready meals and canned goods that they so enjoy.' 

So, 'hang in there' is the message right now but for an increasing number of families around the country, it is fast becoming a question of all for one and one for wall. 

Boredopolis: a city tour in fourteen indistinguishable bits.

1.

The city bores. There they go, preoccupying themselves with the Evening Standard, and sometimes the Metro. More often a phone: the hope that the beep of an incoming message was unheard and lays there waiting; some profound news to jumpstart life somehow. The noise is shielded out with headphones. I look around at the couple who appear not to know each other, yet sit next to each other. This is inexplicable behaviour on public transport where the rule is to not encroach on other's personal travelling space until the last possible moment. They must know each other.

2.

Encounters are brief and unprepared. The lurch of the train pushes me into someone and I sputter an apology. Nothing comes back. Together we sway. The rail at London Bridge grinds and grates like an ship scraping the ocean floor, below which streets of painful significance sit there mocking, harbouring memories. People cross the streets but fail to overwrite the past. A woman's face etched to the back of my eyelids burns and I panic. I'M NOT LISTENING I'M NOT LISTENING. And I cloud my head with images that have no place in my world: war, lunar colonies, pirates... These things can find no way back to my life, no connection at all. They are things for soldiers, scientists, pirates...

4.

When the train stops we all, without knowing why, get off. We all file through the ticket barriers and disseminate into the city like a fart in the wind. My eyes dart around in the hope that something is there at this arbitrary destination; the hope that maybe the smile I practice in the shower can be tested on another human. Looking around for victims, I see everyone is busy, all so full of purpose. They cut through the lanes where the cars can't fit. They cautiously ease out into the road between busses. They spill mayonnaise from the bagel they bought down their tops. All the while, the ghoulish angelic statuettes which are carved into the buildings, with their doleful eyes and creamy smooth cheeks, look down on us, as bored as can be in their unending architectural prison. Bored with what they see: the ant-like people going across town, then returning with supplies; the same bus doing the same route; the same people taking the same photos of the same things; the occasional political demonstration; the occasional beating in of someone's head. 

5.

Everything that means something is meaningless to someone else. I fill the boredom with pathetic fantasies which should never be realised, but inevitably do. Their profundity is in the sheer magnitude of their bathos. Only the movement towards something has any purchase on reality; experience itself, being in a moment, is the event horizon into which you can only fall. From there, where backwards no longer exists, the singularity of who you are and what you do can no longer be ambiguous, and all that's beyond you, beyond reach, impresses upon you like an unending catalogue of things that you are not, of the things that have been and have now gone, or the things that you don't even have the audacity to hope for. All that remains is the pitiful thing that you are doing.

6.

I leave before she wakes up, promising myself to never go back. Some days, the boredom dresses itself in a nihilistic hedonism to be overcome with indulgence. Other days, it appears more spectral, floating and long-term, the imminence of existence stretched out indefinitely, where one need only wait... If life was an infinite Tetris game, sooner or later the blocks would just fall into place. On the remaining days, boredom comes shrouded in heavy lead coats - warm but pinned to the ground. Which version will appear the next day is anyone's guess, and the arbitrary promises I make myself only have relevance on some of these days, on the ones where promises and newly redefined worldviews coincide.

7.

Something only means something with this coincidence - the advance of meaning met with its acknowledgement, its insertion into a system which grounds it. I leave the cinema, teach myself how to blink again, finding myself let down by language's inability to convey anything following the spectacle. But the real world beckons, with the need to have dinner at a respectable hour and ensure the last train is not missed. She had never left this world, as I had, in those two hours. Her smile was one of sympathy rather than affection. It was a badly translated communication of gazes.

8.

The medication ruins my appetite. It makes me jumpy and awkward, unable to hold anything down. I walk past a diner with workmen on a break, an all day breakfast with all the colours of a coral reef - soaking in the yellow of the egg, the red and brown of the sauces, the orange of beans. Speckled in salt and pepper. I swallow the lump in my throat, withhold a burp, and keep walking. Should I wind up having a meal in a restaurant with some girl, my affection for her can be accurately determined by how much I enjoy the meal. An enjoyable meal would mean indifference towards this person. Alternatively, if I simply cannot stomach it, and have to leave most of it, then I am in love. 

The appetite is gone, and I am paralysed. I cling to the chair as it threatens to shake me off. And in this moment, in this limbo, eternity in an elevator that never stops but just shuttles up and down seems preferable to the conversation I am offering.

'Sometimes I walk to the end of the road and sit in the park.'

'Right.' 

9.

My brain lacks content. Like air rushes into a vacuum I drown in another oppressive scenario in which I converse with the woman who is probably best described as 'you'. You of marked silence; you of few words. I go back and forth between different personae: the coolly aloof, the pathetic whinge, the perplexed, the angry. You don't even consider your persona, so secure it is, unflappable. Not easy to deal with, in my little made-up conversations we have: not easy to imagine your half. 

'What's happened to you then?' she asks.

My eyebrows have never worked so well, they convey just enough mystery.

'What has happened to me,' I rhetorically ask myself. I ponder on this for a moment.

'How is work?'

At this point, without answering the question about work, I lay out the finest, most poetic, not gratuitous, not indulgent, but biting, yet charming, concise and complete evaluation of the pain that I feel. Some magical combination of words falls effortlessly, like liquid, from my cool, steady lips. And she knows, despite me not saying it, that it is her, and that she has transformed somebody, as someone's life is vicariously but undeniably changed by the actions of another. Say, for example, one day, a man throws a cigarette from a car in a suburban neighbourhood. It lands in a plastic dumper truck toy, which, one hour later, is picked up by its owner, a small boy. With curiosity, and encouraged by a half-forgotten image of Humphrey Bogart deep in his unconscious from some nameless Sunday movie, he feigns a quick drag, sucks it in, and chokes.

10. 

I wind up on another train platform. Everyone stands in their chosen spot, reading something, listening to something. When the train arrives, just as it's approaching, they start restlessly shimmying around. Some move up the platform, some down. Why hadn't they moved there already, I wonder, why wait until the final moment? They are like a herd of disoriented cattle, who  linger until food approaches, and then can't contain themselves as it arrives, even though the trough is on the other side of the fence.

11.

On the Overground we sit in pews. The modern train makes fluid, wispy sounds and the air vents breathe on us in a continuous belch. More people read newspapers and listen to music. No one talks. The women in front of me have huge Jamaican flags. They sit there pouring words out at each other in giant waves, and rearranging their swollen breasts in their skin tight lycra tops. Behind them, the sun is setting. I look through them into the sky which occasionally gets obscured by buildings or an overzealous arm. The clouds take rays of sun from the right and scatter them out to the left in deep orange; orange blotches that stretch the sky, then seamlessly become the pixelated windows on blocks of flats. 

12.

Two songs about boredom include Deftones' Bored and Daniel Johnston's Held the Hand. 'Oh Lord, I am so bored,' he cries. I scroll through iTunes seeking something to listen to, an attempt to add some ingredients to the mulch of brain that is stewing up there. But the mulch devours all that goes in, the concoction is too strong, the flavours too overpowering in their incessant neutrality. I hear white noise, and sometimes a distant tinnitus.

13. 

Between the numerous transportation machines, ingeniously devised to connect the city in a network of vacancy - tubes and containers of nothingness - lie the pockets of life. They swarm through shops or argue in offices. They drink from 10:30am in Wetherspoons. In here I go for a cheap coffee. The room is an archipelago of aged solitary menfolk, drinking pints extremely slowly, eyes fastened to the sport on the TV or a newspaper. The age of telecommunications came to late to save these types, to late to continually remind them of the people that are only a phonecall away. Instead, sports pundits keep their company, and the occasional passing waitress.

14. 

The city spins, a metropolitan passenger on a global vehicle, going at 652 miles per hour. I keep the travel sickness at bay by leaping from handrail to handrail, and avoiding the eye contact that jettisons my sense of self. I pause near the crossroads, and my field of vision becomes fixed. Through this field march pedestrians. They swim through the air with their enthusiastic swinging arms, covering every inch of ground in the residue of their passage, like the slime of a snail. A man drops a cigarette. Two women pass each other, each talking to some faceless being somewhere else. The wandering bored chop time up into manageable chunks and distil these moments into the sustenance that pushes them forward. The future, carefully planned in electronic diaries and mental notes, promises that the fog will disperse, just as soon as the next thing arrives.

What a Week

what a week it has been. firstly, by gosh, how about those olympics hey? what's this? china? only gone and won it already hey, what cheek. by golly, what a regeneration strategy that was. east london, flooded with tourists, all spending their money in olympic restaurants, the locals didn't know what hit'em, its like '97 all over again. blur, they're there on the old countup to 2012 in music . yep what culture we have it's amazing. i cant get enough. they run. they swim. sometimes they even throw things. meanwhile, i met a man in the sainsbury's near waterloo who told me that he had killed his family. he had a reebok bag, i recall, in which, so he said, was his wife's head. as with all people that i meet, i remained polite and nonchalant, unable as i am to convey emotions. of course i had my doubts, people say those kinds of things to you of an evening in a sainsbury's, it's best to nod and smile. but there it was, only the next day, on the news: man kills family, goes shopping. only most of us didn't hear about it because of the olympics. such are the priorities of the press. the one person who i've found who was completely disinterested in the olympics was a refugee from syria. she had different concerns. maybe syria, but also the rain. met her in a bus stop, where both of us were sheltering from the rain. when the bus stopped we both fanned it away and she said, are you taking the bus or are you afraid of the rain? afraid was a too strong a word, i thought, but, i answered, the rain. she concurred. all these folks, misappropriating bus stops , i thought. we talked while the rain pelted on the roof. we talked about the security council and the departure of kofi annan. we talked about why we, us, the west, think about going in, we at least consider such things, whilst completely ignoring places like the congo where big things go down. finally we talked about giving up our plan to go to the respective places we had planned to go to and go back to my house, which eventually we did. 

A Cow in a Space Shuttle. Or, To an Udder World.

November. 

Cloudless and windless.
The quickest stars to shine,
The most enthused,
Appear above the mountains.

A lonely cow.

Takes the seat of opportunity,
Clasp the joystick of redemption, 
Flicks bitter buttons of bad times.

Seizing the bull by the horns,

As they say. 

Gas - check, 
Oxygen - check, 
Navigation - check, 
Gravity - check, 
Water - check, 
Pressure - check, 
Altimeter - check, 

Radar - check,
Comms - check, 
Grass - check, 

A thumb. A wink. 
'So long, world. 
I'm mooooving away.' 

Reflections on writing for/about charity, day 28

I'm almost half way through the fundraising period. Gofundme.com only allow 60 days to raise your funds. The £500 target looks like something akin to a mountaintop peeking over a distant horizon. In the meantime, I've been thinking about things like ideological reproduction, complicity and epistemic violence. Great words, but what does it all mean?

During the documentary film Black Gold I wondered whether it was appropriate or not for me to have a coffee. On one level it seemed to be a blatant disregard for the messages in this film (which explores the injustices of the coffee trade). My coffee is not Fair Trade, after all. Am I not the very beacon of hypocrisy as I tut at the cruelty of the coffee trade while my slow roast arabica blend quietly brews on the table before me? Yet to righteously disavow coffee for the duration of the film only to inevitably have a cup later on anyway seemed doubly hypocritical. The answer is that it really doesn't matter. Both options are shrouded in a symbolism that only serves to justify my complicity. Yet these unspoken gestures of righteousness have a pretty big presence in our ideological stance towards the Other. Whereas recently the subject has been taken to be formed through ideology and discourse, in a manner relatively autonomous from the Marxist economically-determined construction of the subject (Althusser, Foucault, etc., etc.,), the developments of Fair Trade and human rights show that the economic has entered the realm of the ideological. 25 years ago Spivak was trying to address a refusal to acknowledge this in the intellectual academy which instead relied on a "'nationalist' view of 'productivity'" (In Other Worlds, 167) and a "'culuralism' that disavows the economic" (168). Nowadays, we are (on some problematic level) only too aware of how things are produced, and 'ethical consumption' is all the rage. It seems barmy to exclude this knowledge from the identities we have. Yet, the 'ghostly presence of labour' in the commodity (Marx) still seems obscured, and the nature of the economic relationship with the third world still seems impenetrable to the consumer who finds their knowledge in outbursts from charities and the haphazard guesswork of economists on Newsnight seeking a solution to the Euro crisis. What we can alleviate, however, is peace of mind. Perhaps Fair Trade, charity, or foregoing a coffee while I watch Black Gold, can do this. 

So considering the amount of ethical consumption we engage in, acts which hope to alleviate some undesireable by-products caused by big industry for the world (ecology) or the third world (poverty), then something is evidently working. It may not work to save the world from global warming or the pull the third world towards the first, but it's getting us westerners moving, doing stuff. How do we translate these plighti (plural of plight, made up by me just now) into values that allow us to express them through consumption?

To donate, see http://fallinginpublic.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/writing-for-charitychangecoffee.html

Reflections on writing for/about charity, day 26

"She would deny the workers their cappuccino!" Such was the reaction to Gayatri Spivak as she pointed out the connection between western consumer culture and 'third world' production. How can one escape this trap? By purchasing coffee off the Zapatistas? Does that not just slip into a form of enlightened do-goodery which sets itself apart from regular charity by being somehow less ignorant of the situation, finding another gap in the market of conscientious western liberals? Or does it actively participate in an alternative relation which evades exploitation? Does it express solidarity? 

'Solidarity', a keyword form the dissenter's dictionary, seems to be opposed to the word 'support', which is more at home in the handbook of Aid. The former suggests equivalence, shared visions and the dismantling of hierarchies; the latter dependency, distance, a token or a gesture. Solidarity evokes The Internationale, support evokes LiveAid. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman says solidarity is "the recognition of other people's misery and suffering as one's own responsibility, and the alleviation and eventually the removal of misery as one's own task." Costas Douzinas says this implies that human rights are based on the always already existing pain and suffering of the Other. Our obligation is thus to make this suffering our own. 'Support' on the other hand seems to suggest the managing of such misery, but not a path out of it. This path out of it would involve the two parties finding common direction, making their hierarchal relationship obsolete, to envisage a globalised world in which economics no longer determines global relations of production. Do we cappuccino drinkers 'support' those who produce coffee when we give to charity or buy Fair Trade, or are we 'in solidarity' with them? Might solidarity risk denying ourselves our cappuccinos? Surely, to make suffering our own sounds inadvisable to he who prefers not to suffer, and risking the comforts of western culture in a gesture of solidarity to those who have been producing the things we consume sounds equally dangerous. Maybe this is why we prefer to support them.

...

Writing for Charity/Change/Coffee

This is an alternative to the Facebook page here which is presented in a fairly complicated way (such is Facebook's layout system).

I am asking for pledges for the gruelling struggle that is writing a thesis and I'm doing it on behalf of two causes, listed below, and you can donate to one or both. Think of it along the lines of a sponsored run, but swap running for writing. I am writing about charity and our relationship with those in distant lands whom we hope to help.


Oxfam charity: http://www.justgiving.com/Adam-Hutchings
Zapatista coffee: http://www.gofundme.com/otpss

In 1953 Ramón Rivero walked 80 miles to raise money for the Puerto Rican League Against Cancer. This became the first known charity walkathon in history and has since inspired sponsored fundraising in its many forms - climbing, fasting, running, cycling etc.

I am using my dissertation. Just like climbing, fasting, running, cycling a dissertation is a big struggle, and quite a mountain to climb. Indeed I am sacrificing my summer for this.

I am fundraising for two causes, listed below. Feel free to sponsor one or both, and please leave comments either way. If you don't want to pledge any cash, comments on your thoughts are still welcome.

So sponsor my dissertation and help change the world!

1. Oxfam.
A well known humanitarian international aid non-governmental organisation (NGO), that states that 'We stand against poverty. For humanity.'
For every pound they get, 36p goes to emergency response, 7p to fundraising costs, 10p to support and running costs, 40p to development work, and 7p for campaigning for change (http://www.oxfam.org.uk/donate/how-we-spend-your-money).

Fund this here: http://www.justgiving.com/Adam-Hutchings

2. Zapatista coffee.
Trade with cooperatively run coffee farmers in a Mexican state called Chiapas which is autonomously run by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. The Zapatistas oppose economic globalisation, North American-style Free Trade, and the Mexican state's embrace of capitalism. The Zapatistas synthesise 'traditional Mayan practices with elements of libertarian socialism, anarchism and Marxism' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation).
Your money goes into a pot which, at the end of the 60 days, will be used to purchase an equivalent amount of coffee from the Chiapas co-operative coffee producers.
Your money will go towards the income of the farmers in Zapatista communities, and towards 'the autonomous programs of education, health, and to other social structures.' According to this Wikipedia page, 'the coffee cooperatives operate as a driving force of the Zapatista movememt' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_coffee_cooperatives).

Fund this here: http://www.gofundme.com/otpss


Thanks! Comments will help too, almost as much as cash.

Dissertation Challenge!

A few days ago I started a sponsored fundraiser. Where some may run marathons or climb mountains for charity, I decided to do my dissertation. I am hoping people will support this challenge and give me cash. The cash will go to a good cause, of which I have picked out two. The first is Oxfam, a very well known NGO that strives to end global poverty and injustice. The second is not an organisation of this sort, and lacks the promotional material to summarise in the way Oxfam allows. It 'supports' the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico, which fights (largely nonviolently) for a different mode of production and governance from the capitalist one endorsed by the Mexican State.

Where money can be raised quite simply and passed on to Oxfam, this is not the case for the Zapatistas. I cannot use JustGiving.com to support the Zapatistas as they are not a charity. So I tried to figure out a way of financially supporting them by other means, and realised that purchasing coffee from the co-operative coffee producers in Chiapas, the state run autonomously by the Zapatistas, would be the best means. To use a platform similar to JustGiving.com (instead of asking people to pay me direct) gives the two causes an equal presence on the internet, and a certain legitimacy- PayPal is used for both, for example.

Purchasing coffee gives a new emphasis on the support that differentiates it from the Oxfam cause. It brings up issues such as 'Trade or Aid?' and the nature of the involvement of NGOs. If both causes are working towards 'change', then do we advocate change from the bottom up or the top down? Do we trust the type of change that these two organisations are attempting to provide? Do we have adequate ideas about the organisations' respective histories and the histories of the lands in which they are operating?

Then there is the websites I am using to do this stuff. JustGiving.com is pretty simple to use, and has good connectivity to things like Facebook and Twitter, and it's easy to publish my page on there. I can also do JustTextGiving with Vodafone which asks people in my phone book for donations. It works like this...
It's simple: you share your JustTextGiving code, your sponsor sends a text message from their mobile phone, and you see their donation and message on your fundraising page.

I haven't done that (yet) so I can't report on how simple or effective (or irritating for people) it might turn out to be.

The Zapatista cause uses a 'crowdfunding' website which is simply a space for people to promote something that needs funding. I tried numerous sites but came up against a need to make a promotional video (which I don't have the time and resources to do) or having the money in dollars which might put people off. I have ended up with GoFundMe.com which unfortuately has a £5 limit for the smallest donation (compared to any price for JustGiving). JustGiving also use Gift Aid which, because of Taxation laws, adds extra to the donation, so a 50p donation is worth 63p.

To promote my GoFundMe page on Facebook would mean that I would have to use an 'App' that would receive certain details from Facebook. These are: My basic info, my email address, my photos, my videos, and photos shared with me. I have not (yet) consented to this, meaning that I have not promoted the Zapatista cause on Facebook in this way. With Twitter, on the other hand, a 'tweet' is simply done no problem, no info exchanged.

Twitter allows me to reach other people with similar interests, using the # system. On Facebook, I had to create a page to explain what I am doing. This page has numerous restrictions. It works with the 'Timeline' model and thus straddles the posts I make down the page, meaning that the important info that I want to convey is stuck in the (fairly hidden away) 'About' section, or gets pushed down the page as I update it. My sense is that it appears confusing and doesn't invite a huge amount of interaction apart from 'liking' the page itself. Thus, where I have had only one donation (excluding my own), I have seven 'likes.' I wanted to upload a 'cover photo' to this page to tell people to click on 'about' but was told that this would go against the Facebook rules of a cover photo, which cannot be primarily text-based or contain...

• Price or purchase information, such as "40% off" or "Download it at our website"
• Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page's About section
• References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as "Get it now" or "Tell your friends"

One more concern is the way people's objections or support is expressed. Does a 'like' on my Facebook page express support for me, my dissertation, the Zapatistas, Oxfam, or all the above? Does the lack of a 'like' mean indifference or objection? Will people's problems with my project, if there are any, ever be heard? Thus far, only one comment has been received...

Viva Zapatista, all power to co-ops and communes!

So, with £35 in the bank for the coffee co-ops of Chiapas, Mexico, and £2 in the bank for Oxfam, the journey continues.

To support the coffee producers in Chiapas and by extension the Zapatista anti-capitalist struggle, go here: http://www.gofundme.com/otpss

To support Oxfam and their struggle against poverty and injustice; for food aid, irrigation and schools for the world's poor, go here: http://www.justgiving.com/Adam-Hutchings

For the Facebook page, see: http://www.facebook.com/DissertationChallenge

My twitter is @ad_hutchings

Thanks!

NUC: Thorncombe Village Shop, Dorset.

For the past few days and for a few more to come, I have been falling before the public of Dorset, on a Jammatology expedition with Chris Sav. As far as I can tell there is one café within a hundred miles and it doubles up as a village shop. Notes on this café can be found here, or on the Grounds for Discussion page.

All coming café reviews should make there way to this particular spot. Spawning from the cafés will be a mutating map that links up London by espresso shots so that no one might get lost again, just so long as it is only coffee that they seek. Jammatology also includes other endeavours, which can be found by pointing and clicking. For this is how discovery works in the internet age.

NUC: Double Shot, Covent Garden

On this drizzling, miserable day I followed the unknown backstreets near the Strand to this dark green café. Unknown to me, that is; it's not exactly a wilderness. Alighting at Charing Cross had I ventured into Victoria Embankment to stare at some statues of people I did not know. Back on the Strand I saw a café which I took note of for another day. Towards Covent Garden I went, shielded from the rain by a hat that makes me look like a hobo (so I am told). As I was peering into a restaurant, I turned to see Double Shot staring me down. The awning was enough to get me in, very nice awning indeed. I hadn't seen an awning all morning.

Inside, it's kind of plush. Dark wood and green like a Mini. Long vertical mirrors bounce the light around,  and people sit around small tables or on armchairs. I am one of the armchair bunch, sitting on one of three armchairs in front of a small table. Rows of Teapigs tea stare down at me from a shelf fixed high up on the wall a yonder. The flat white I got isn't as smooth as others that I have come across, it's rather fluffy but still quite effective. The man who served it to me excelled at indifference. I sit listening to boring music, wondering whether I should stop writing this and instead work on the dissertation like I had planned. I sense a quiet resistance from my clouded brain and watch the people instead.

It seems to be a place for shoppers and business types, for refuelling between two small fashion stores or for an 'informal' interview. One cannot deny how pleasant it is, very convivial indeed, loungey with a touch of gentleman-with-a-cigar class. A man joins me on the adjacent armchair and reads the evening standard. Twenty minutes go by and then a vase with some small red flowers gets positioned between us. Sure, we both ignore this innocent gesture, but the romantic tension has been raised and we both know it. A wonderful accordion song takes over the radio.

NUC: Fork Deli, St. Pancras

It's quarter past five and Summer and I, whilst charging towards the epicentre of London, have fallen upon Fork Deli. We've been to the British Library. It was something of a role reversal as I had never been there and a Taiwanese person was my tour guide. There were certain access points for which I did not have the necessary clearance codes. At the entrance you just walk through and men in aviator sunglasses check your bags. After saying 'move along, sir,' a secretarial looking woman checks your identification: passport, drivers license, both are required. Then comes the retina scan, for which you have to look briefly at an advert for the London Olympics, and a fingerprint test which checks your library record throughout London's libraries. Any fines and you're out. They then ask that you remove any telecommunications devices and writing instruments, any revolutionary literature or movies in foreign languages, ask you to sign a declaration pledging allegiance to the crown and upload your location on Facebook... and you're in.

I fell at the literature hurdle. I waited outside and read Walter Benjamin while Summer attempted to get out some books. Unfortunately she failed one of the tests that is required for loaning books: she was unable to recite the numbers on the barcode for her library card while the staff threw screaming cats at her.

So we left and headed South, meandering through the pleasant streets that are commonplace around this My Fair Lady part of London. We ended up in here. I learnt some Chinese swear words and how to say 'I live in London.'

Allow me to indulge in some pompous language and say, oh how this café is a delight. We have a delightful raisin danish, and my coffee is fine, just fine. Fine meaning good, like 'the weather is fine'; not fine like OK. Summer's hot chocolate is 'too sweet'; she's a very difficult person to please. A quarter of the room is dedicated to shelves of stuff - Teapigs tea, bowls of olives, jams and peanut butter. I have managed to pluck a chilli and ginger recipe from the side which will no doubt serve as a bookmark someday, rather than mutating into a tasty dish.

The Flaming Lips is on the stereo. The room is never empty but never busy. The guy behind the bar is never overwhelmed and is quite the convivial gent. People sit in twos and talk about things. Try as I might I cannot hear what they are talking about, I guess its private. One might write a novel in cafés such as this, and if I lived closer and had the time and intelligence to write one then I would stop by here for that.

Box Junction: a review from the Northern Line.

On April 5th, The Wind-up Collective performed an immersive piece of theatre, Box Junction, at Camden People's Theatre. The play is set on a train, where the audience sit amongst the players. This review comes from another train, where I sat alone amongst the other midnight tuberiders.

The night is over and I'm on the train, bound towards home. I am listening to music through miniature speakers, ergonomically designed to fit an ear. The world before me takes an offbeat hue, coloured by the music I'm listening to. I look around. Six people sit opposite, four of whom have headphones. Like mine, they are all designed for ear-insertion, to simultaneously block out unwanted noise and deliver instead a noise chosen by careful selection from a music playing gadget. We are connected solely by this isolating practice.

No man is an island said John Donne. If only he was. Indeed he tries to be. We get close; we attempt to make small planets of ourselves with our own self-centres of gravity. From there we try to control the amount of traffic threatening to burst though our atmospheres, only to land on us and steal our resources. 'Just as the planet still circles around its sun yet at the same time rotates on its own axis,' said Freud, 'so the individual partakes in the development of humanity while making his own way through life.' We cut off the realm beyond with earphones and faces so impenetrably stern that only a fool would broach them.

My protective coat of music is brutally pierced and ripped by a young drunk woman, one of a group of young drunk women who are attempting to keep balance as they stand at the end of the carriage. She gesticulates with lunges, her whole body used to emphasise whatever point she is making. Her shrieks break through my blanket of musical security when the song takes a dramatic step back into a more solemn, quiet moment. The faces of those sitting in front of me are despondent and glossed over. The tube is an inescapable necessity which delivers them home; it doesn't really count as a part of their life. But the drunk woman is addressing them, addressing us, addressing me.

I look up and half remove one of the two headphones. 'I want to sit down,' she says - 'Oh,' I reply. With callous indifference, I replace my headphone and throw a knowing glance at the man opposite, victorious. My song ends and in the gap before the next one I get an idea of what's driving the passions of the young drunk woman: '1,2,3,4,5,6... Twelve men! And none of them stand up to let us sit down!' The imminent critique of her observation was no less than a biting indictment of contemporary western society. Yes, as we demonstrate, the chivalric construct of the civilised gent has fallen beneath the rug of history, as has, as she succinctly demonstrates with her language and exposed arse cheeks, the corresponding construct of the dignified lady. To whom do we mourn, I wonder?

In unison, everyone in the carriage who has music playing in their ears racks up the volume. Once again we are alone. But this isolation we willingly force upon ourselves is not enough, for soon we realise that it is ourselves we find ourselves alone with. If there's anything worse than other people's company, it's our own company. The problem with ourselves is that we internalise the baggage handed to us by the baggage handler of society, and we're not content until this baggage has been categorised and safely compartmentalised in an appropriate manner which makes this baggage understandable. Until then, the outside world keeps on bugging us. Problem is, this process never ends.

So while drunken social critic woman concerns herself with the end of recognisable civilisation, epitomised by her inability to find a seat, I have my own issues. Right now I am seething over the audacity that the pub - the Bree Louise - had to charge me £4.50 for a Kronenbourg, the most middle-of-the-range beers, and then to imply that I was somehow out of place in questioning this. Not 'London prices,''rising inflation,' nor a 'need to lower the deficit' will suffice to excuse this particular scandal. I was cheated, and it ground away at me deep within.

Yes, we all have problems. And this reminded me of the tube ride I had taken earlier on this night, somewhere between Camden and Warren Street. Twenty or so people boarded an innocuous train in Camden People's Theatre, after being invited on by a small group of choreographed commuters. I've been on this train before, I thought, twice perhaps. The first trip etched a mere scratch in the theatrical landscape compared to the cavern carved out by this journey. It was confusing and disorientated, ad libbed and full of primal urges. The second trip had all the urges, now under a small amount of control and slipped in between poetic moments of reflection. This third trip has moved on again, and become a more mature accomplishment. It's as if we've gone from tram, to tube, to steam engine, on the quality scale.

We sit anonymously on the train and the same old eyes wander and glaze over, as is customary on public transport. But into this banality erupts self-doubt, self-conscious sexual urges, rejection, domination, paranoia, exclusion, and liberation. Innocent passengers might find themselves victims of these outbursts; the rest watch on with a mix of amusement and anticipation. The resident busker/minstrel picks on the unfortunate characters until he gets whipped up in the story himself.

Now it's grown up, Box Junction needs to be taken a bit more seriously. It might need to package its polemic slightly differently, more subtly perhaps, or more succinctly, to avoid implicating the unfortunate commuters of this world who have no control over the fragile and pathetic situation that has been bestowed upon them. And what about the fact that the creatures you come across on the tube are far more feral than anything dramatised in theatre? Immersion in reality is where the real confusion starts. Box Junction makes you think, though, about these places that are so banal so as to ordinarily escape our attention, but which seem to epitomise our condition, and somehow expose a brutal truth about us. At which point are we most real I wonder: around the dinner table with our family, or squeezed into a tunnelling worm under the city, pressed into an armpit?

NUC: Caffè Vergnano, Charing Cross

Today I went to London's Tin Pan Alley to buy a plectrum. I met my trusty plectrum hunting comrade, Summer, had a salami sandwhich and went to peruse some guitar shops. The first had a welcoming young man - 'Hello!' he said, 'feel free to play anything you like.' A ukulele was as adventurous as we got. The next shop had a walking talking stereotype running it: long hair but balding, jean jacket and man-jewellery. He pulls a guitar off the wall, extends a leg onto a chair, and retunes the strings at a rapid pace, talking to us all the while: 'Today mate, second hand electrics, hundred-ten pounds; 'cept these, eighty-nine, and the Squires, ninety-nine. Now if you're willing to push out for a more top-notch high-grade instrument, I could direct you to the...'

On we went to Caffè Vergnano. Strictly speaking it's a small coffee chain, and so it is written about with some hesitance. You can't locate the specificity of a certain style or aura when the same place is reproduced in a whole variety of locations, but Vergnano isn't yet global, and does have something that makes it distinctive. I would say, however, that the chainness of this café is exemplified by the vacancy in the eyes of the women who work here. They're happiest when talking to each other, which they continue to do while they robotically take my order.

I get a mocha. It's brutally thick, such is their trademark. They have a very nice silver coffee machine on the bar. It looks like a Dalek, after a good scrub, reprogrammed to work in Wonka's chocolate factory. Summer has a hot chocolate which is too sweet for her. They think they can handle it, but rarely can in my experience. I remember how the chocolate beat Alex from Singapore a few months back. But for every person beaten there is a convert. A few months ago, I converted a sceptical James to the ways of the mocha. 'You people with your art seminars, pseudo-revolutionary ideals and cappachapchini coffees,' he would say with disgust. Not after he met the Caffè Vergnano mocha. There was no going back for James, who is now in a sanatorium in Poland hoping to combat his mocha addiction. We all wish him the best.

Summer and I sit in the corner, sharing a ham and cheese croissant flattened by a toaster into a 2D version of its previous, plump self. We practice Chinese and talk about our misgivings and anxieties about dating humans. Outside, the unceasing passage of endless people continues. They're undeterred by the greyness of the clouds of the futility of their condition: Londoners powering through the absurd, with stiff upper lips at the ready.

Vergnano is nice but lacking any meaningful character. It's clean-cut, black n wood, very dignified. I like the cups. They sprinkle an 1886 on your coffee in chocolate. Do I like that? 'What you're doing there is you're drinking an advert, ain't ya, shithead,' as Super Hans eloquently put it.

NUC: Café Rio, Goodge Street

Today Summer and I went to the Goodge Street vicinity to develop some photos and exchange the language of Chinese with the language of English. The Holga camera that I recently procured from a Hong Kong-based camera dealer took some great photos, up until the moment at which I dropped it whilst administering a hug to a close friend. The exact moment when this hug happened is documented by the camera insofar as all photos taken post-hug ended up as black as my soul.

In brighter news, Summer and I, after failing to get into one fairly trendy looking café, ended up here at the more down-to-earth Café Rio. The lady who welcomed us in could not have been more accommodating. She shuffled a table a few inches for us, even though this wasn't really required. She gave an indecisive Summer ample time to consider the variety of cakes on offer. We got a bouncy banana cake and some good-looking coffees delivered in elegant cups, with a complimentary biscuit. (See pic above for proof). My coffee looked a bit like tea, but it was good.

I learnt how to ask a question in Mandarin. I brought with me a notebook which came all the way from Malaysia given to me by Chris a few months ago. The Chinese characters on the front state a very powerful kung fu move. Inside I write down the things I learn in Mandarin, using a bad self-styled phonetics. Then we talk about Abba, the Beatles, and our dissertations. The table next to us had some kind of dried past embedded into it, like a preserved relic in a case in a museum. Something tells me that the real pasta that they would serve up would be a fine thing. Other occupants of this small and busy room have meals - it's lunchtime - and they look good (the food and the people). This is one of those places that needs no posturing or gimmicks, it just humbly goes about its thing in its friendly Latin way.

Worth Noting: the Placard Parade

It's been a year or so since the big March march in London (named the 'March for the Alternative'), in which thousands of people people attempted to show the strength of support against the coalition government's impending programme of cuts and austerity. These people - along with many others elsewhere - were not convinced that the programme would give the promised 'growth,' the 'holy growth,' as it were, that we are told to pray for. And, just as some primitive civilisations would sacrifice humans after a natural disaster, our economic disaster (also deemed to be natural) would be saved by sacrificing the (loosely defined) working class and public ownership in general.

Media coverage was extensive and debates were had concerning reckless behaviour (although, not by politicians, but by protesters) (and not by police, but by protesters). The days pass and the media lose interest. The bills pass and one is left questioning why we bother marching. Protesting is, as is often said, one of the precious 'rights' that we have in this liberal democracy of ours. Such people who say this usually follow it up with 'but with these rights of freedom, come responsibility.' Responsibility to ensure that the actions we take don't actually go as far as to actually be threatening. It is indeed our right to protest, under certain conditions at certain times, through certain routes with certain clothes. 'This way, you can protest, we can ignore it, and everyone's happy.' Life goes on, and events like this become mere memories.

Some students from Goldsmiths College collected as many placards from the day as they could. This became the Save Our Placards projects, and plays with the physicality of these potentially political objects. The name itself is a slogan imitative of those that appear on placards. Perhaps it is an attempt to possess some kind of authority over the way we collectively remember these events, or to address some kind of problem concerning the conventional cataloguing of such memories in a supposedly neutral discourse.

The media tend to forget things once the initial rabble-rousing has sold enough papers, or gathered enough viewing figures. With this decline in their interest comes a sort of acknowledgement that the matter is now less important, that it doesn't need to be addressed. Thus, Syria matters; Bahrain less so. And a few days after the top flight of the Conservative party comes into question concerning its dealings with big ugly money, contextualising the recent budget, the agenda changes to focus on a more tasty story about pasties and the upper classes. Apparently even pasty scandals can't bring our government into disrepute. Our attentions and passions seem to be so carefully manipulated, and its the same with the legacies of things like protests - their significance, meaning, ownership.

The Placard Parade challenges this media tendency, but also works through it by producing a media-interest event, in producing a spectacle which is politically attractive to sympathetic publications (the Guardian) and is playfully provocative. It invites a slightly confused involvement. We set off in small groups - I was with two others - along the South Bank, over Blackfriars Bridge, along Victoria Embankment, back across the Hungerford Bridge. The small group was somehow remarkable, somehow amusing. It intermittently punctured the normative landscape, unsettling it with signs (in the literal and linguistic senses) that cause alarm: Politically-motivated individuals are upon us, they're dangerous and/or annoying! They should get off their high horses. So how would these hippies run the country? What gives them the right to tell me to 'wake up'? Why don't they get a job and get on with it? There will soon be riots. Where are the police? (Read the patronising reflection of last March's protest by Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan for an example of this type of reaction).

But without the usual strength-in-numbers we were somewhat pathetic, apparently having lost our comrades, now outnumbered and swamped by tourists, families, people enjoying the sun, people running for trains... The publicity of a huge march gives people a clear-cut choice to either be in it or not, to be involved or detached, to be in the kettle or watching the news while the kettle boils. But these lines of division are today averted, we are amongst an unremarkable cross-section of society, not channelled down a prescribed route by the police. They find us confusing; we find us confusing. What is this - A protest? A homage? A vigil of sorts? Are we keeping the fight going or accepting defeat? 'What are the cuts'? 'What's happening to the NHS?' Indeed, perhaps nobody really knows.

We're invited to question the protest, the established modes of going about it which are tried, true, and harmless. The slogans we pick and their supposed force or arbitrariness - it seems we might as well chant whatever comes to mind. Is it our lack of conviction in an alternative or an inability to gain a distinctive voice within political discourse which makes our demands seem hollow?

On another level, something else is at stake. The placard parade's critique of the institutional recollection of events extends into a critique of the management of the events themselves. Save Our Placards seeks to situate the anti-cuts discourse into areas in which it sits uncomfortably. The parade presents itself as 'not quite a protest' but is yet not innocent. As such, a route was indeed agreed, along with a time and a warning by the police not to widely advertise the event.

Save Our Placards have also approached other institutions. At the Turner Contemporary, a commemorative exhibition was to be shown in the Nothing In the World But Youth. However, at the last minute the exhibition was cancelled. Having made the agreement with the gallery long before, one might understandably wonder why the plug was pulled and put down to a rather tedious health and safety excuse.

The project continues, and it's managed to get into a different exhibition in Cornwall. It serves to question the documentation of anti-government projects, the political and economic alliances between institutions and the tactics used by protesters themselves. Ultimately, I think it continues to invite us to imagine new methods of protest for an age in which the lines of division are more complex than was previously assumed.

Check out Save Our Placards: http://www.saveourplacards.blogspot.co.uk/