Am very excited because I’m going to Aktivix this weekend.
Be in no doubt there will be more on this later.
Was lucky enough to go to the pictures for the first time in ages last night to see the utterly marvelous Unprecedented. Here’s an item I put on the IMC-Sheffield newswire as Unprecedented at The Showroom.
—
Ninety people attended a showing [in association with Sheffield Indymedia] at the Showroom Cinema of Unprecedented: the 2000 Presidential Election. As the name implies, this is a documentary about the chicanery, deceipt and fraudulent behaviour of the rich and [mostly] Republican around the infamous “too close to call” election in the self-styled “great state of Florida”.
Attendees were lucky to have Rick Pérez the film’s co-writer and co-producer in attendance and introducing the screening. After the riveting documentary, Rick fielded questions from forty members of the audience who hung around afterwards for about an hour.
The story is too long to go into here. The bobbings and weavings of Jeb and Dubya Bush, Warren Christopher, supposedly impartial state election officials et al, tell the tale well enough.
So impressions instead: I found myself in an unusual position while watching: I’m an anarchist and don’t believe in parliamentary democracy, but still found myself becoming more and more furious as the story unfolded. That the film could ellicit this response in me about something which I care little about is evidence that this a fine piece of film-making. In a sense the machinations of the career politicians is just a frame to hang this story on – I think the film’s main theme is really the utter contempt, that both the party political and [state and federal] bureacratic apparatuses, hold for the wishes and aspirations of working and oppressed people. Not one of these bunch of criminals had the supposedly sacrosanct vision of “democracy” at the forefront of their thinking or activity.
For more information on Unprecedented, visit their website. The film started as an Los Angeles-Indymedia project and is an excellent example of “becoming the media”. If you didn’t manage to get to the Showroom, never fear – Sheffield-Indymedia now have a video copy of this film [kindly donated by Rick]. If you would like to arrange a showing contact Sheffield Indymedia.
—
As lots of IMC-Sheffield people are away at the Next Five Minutes event in Amsterdam or recovering from the exertions of Disarm DSEi, it fell to me to be liaison person for the collective on this screening.
In concrete terms this meant that I met Rick at the railway station and showed him to his hotel [not too onerous]. After a frantic day of running around—Ben had a craft stall at Sheffield Fair—got to the screening with ten minutes to spare with Ben and Ceils. Did a short introduction about Rick to the assembled throng, a few words from him and then settled into the Showroom’s luxurious seats and prepared to be entertained.
I think it’s apparent from the review that I liked the film a lot, and I haven’t really got a lots else to say [short of a very long analysis style essay].
I was really excited by the fact that so may people turning up for the Q&A session after the film. The questions were intelligent [for example: “How are [black, Democrat voting] people who were robbed of their franchise approaching the next round of elections? How is that anger being channeled?”]. Now that gives you something to get your teeth into. Rick told me that this film has been his life for over two years now. This was apparent in his answers [not in a ‘world-weary, I’m sorta bored’ kinda way—but rather in a ‘I know my way around this subject matter well and I can convey what’s a really complex story in an accessible and understandable kinda way’ kinda way].
Over an average/slightly above average curry in the curry house next door [competent though unexciting veg balti and naan, not enough salt in the salt lassi] with Rick, fellow Sheffield IMC-Sheffielder Steve and my family, we had what can be only be described as a broad-ranging discussion. Topics included the relative merits of the UK and US educational systems, the history of the Yemeni community in Sheffield [including the totally amazing Yemeni Steelworkers’ Union story, which I’ll post up here when I remember], Sheffield-IMC, LA-IMC, DSEi, anarchist federations in the UK and US, Sheffield’s recent and not so recent political history, consensus decision making, the Barbara Streisand Foundation, patterns of Mexican immigration in the US [and California specifically] over the last 80 years and many more.
All in all a fantastic evening—and see the damn film if you can.
My frantic week calmed down a bit today, so I had chance to catch up on a bit of stuff, including uploading the rest of the IMC-Sheffield radio show mp3s to Radio4All [aka The A-Infos Radio Project].
Here’s a complete list of the programme pages on Radio4All.
imc-sheffield radio 20030708 | 1:00:27
imc-sheffield radio 20030715 | 0:58:09
imc-sheffield radio 20030722 | 0:59:06
imc-sheffield radio 20030729 | 2:05:47
Please give them a listen. I’m fairly confident that we’ll be doing more of this kind of thing in the future—though weekly was a heavy commitment for a first attempt.
We [the IMC-Sheffield radio crew] did our second programme on Sheffield Live! last night [Tuesday].
Very enjoyable again, but mighty shambolic for the first ten minutes or so.
Good content though, including a live interview with Deacon Dave who was part of a Christian Peacekeepers mission to Iraq during the recent war. Now I don’t hold with religion [being an anarchist and all that], but I can’t help but like Dave. He plays with the Sheffield Samba Band which is a definite point in his favour and he shaved his bright blue mohican off for his trip to Iraq. How can you not like a peacenik vicar with a blue mohican? [And did I mention brave—anyone who goes into a situation like that, whatever their motivations has got to be worthy of respect.] So another addition to my [short] list of religious professionals that are worth the time of day.
Earlier in the day I had the pleasure of a doing a great interview with Helen and Nick [also IMC-Sheffield bods] about their trip to Evian for the G8. Not only was the content of the interview good, but we did the interview al fresco in a secluded green spot only 50 metres from a major road in hot sunshine [with sun protection I might add]. You can even hear birds singing in the background of the recording. Lovely experience.
We should be able to get a downloadable recording out a little earlier this week. Stay tuned.
Things are moving apace with Sheffield Indymedia.
As this is my first post on this site about IMC-Sheffield, I suppose I ought to clarify a little. I’m a member of the collective that runs the Sheffield section of the UK site. We only got together as a group in March of this year, but since then we’ve got together a Sheffield page, some members have been instrumental in the technical implementation of the new UK Indymedia site and tonight we did our first radio broadcast!
The show went out on Sheffield Live!, which is broadcasting 03–30 July on 106.6FM in additional to the usual webcast. We’ll be there every Tuesday evening from 1900–2000BST [UTC+1] throughout July.
A small group of folk got the show together which went rather well I thought. Respect and love to Bill, Christina, Dan, Lucy, Matt and Steve.
My small part of this endeavour? Doing an interview with oi and muke from the trollyd soundsystem—good mates of mine—who went to Evian for the G8 at the beginning of June. Editing was a collaborative process, many thanks to oi, muke and tso especially for help on this. I’m also did a bit of link/anchor style stuff during the programme itself. I’ll update this post when the mp3 makes it onto the site. We also plan to post an mp3 on The a-infos Radio Project.
It was a blast!
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updates
20:15 10 July 2003
A link to the newswire article: Radio Sheffield Indymedia is on air!.
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17:00 15 July 2003
You can now listen to the show. It’s Realmedia unfortunately. So here’s the stream. You can also get eleven mp3s of the show. I hope to upload the whole mp3 to The a-infos Radio Project tonight.
—
18:50 17 July 2003
It’s up on The a-infos Radio Project at last.
Sheffield Indymedia have got a radio programme.
As part of Sheffield Live!’s month [03–30 July] of FM broadcasts [on 106.6FM], IMC-Sheffield will be doing an hour’s programme every Tuesday evening during July, from 1900, starting tomorrow [08 July].
We’re trying to have a mix of local, national and global news with reports on local folks involvement in everything from community campaigns to the G8 at Evian.
Please tune in and let us know what you think.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
Inspired by my Drupal experiences and also by my recent playing around with rss/xml feeds I’ve decided to have a go at converting my existing rising7 website into a combination of static and weblog pages.
My motivations are multiple:
We’ve talked about expanding what burngreave.net can do and here’s another option for potential users to utilize.
I want to expand my own knowledge in this area, as I’m very excited by it.
I’m feeling inspired to be creative at the moment. I’m in the fortunate position of being involved in some great stuff and would like to record it.
Please feel free to comment either here or there.
I apologise in advance for the initial high percentage of test and rubbish postings, but these will be weeded out eventually.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
This started as a comment on a comment of aland’s about my suggestion that he posted his piece on Sheffield Indymedia. It ended up being too long for a comment and turned in a blog entry. I hope all that made sense.
Mmmm. Not sure I agree with aland’s comment. IMC UK’s mission statement is the relevant document here.
First para reads:
The Indymedia UK website provides an interactive platform for reports from the struggles for a world based on freedom, cooperation, justice and solidarity, and against environmental degradation, neoliberal exploitation, racism and patriarchy. The reports cover a wide range of issues and social movements – from neighbourhood campaigns to grassroots mobilisations, from critical analysis to direct action. [my emphasis]
Now, I don’t think that arguing for better facilities for children and saying that Sheffield City Council should be doing what they take Council Tax for is outside this at all.
The Sheffield-IMC group have said that one of the good things about working on a small geographical area [rather than nationwide] is that we can have content that isn’t all big actions and demos in London, but is much more community based. Having a legitimate concern about the enviroment in the area where you live and your children play is intensely political as far as I’m concerned.
I would love to see reports of Tenants’ & Residents’ Associations [random example] activities on IMC-Sheffield, because it is people doing for themselves rather than being told what to do by bureaucrats and politicians. The great thing for me about Indymedia is that it is bottom-up, non-hierarchical and breaks the rules about what is political or not. It makes no sense to me to then have a “is it political [enough]” hurdle.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
After much hard work and four months’ planning, Sheffield Indymedia [or IMC: Independent Media Centre] is up and running. This is part of a relaunched UK Indymedia site, running new Open Source software called MIR.
I have also added the Sheffield site to our site cloud.
Just like burngreave.net, Indymedia is only as good as its content. Please feel free to contribute.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
Saturday 26 July at 4.00pm (replacing Nicholas Nickleby).
Tickets are £3/£2 concs
Director: J T S Moore
USA (2002)
85 minutes
Sheffield Indymedia is showing Revolution OS—the inside story of the
computer hackers who rebelled against the proprietary software model and
Microsoft to create GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement. Sheffield
Indymedia is part of Indymedia UK—a network of individuals,
independent and alternative media activists and organisations offering
grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social
and political issues.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
Just posted this to UK IndyMedia:
what happens in Sheffield when war breaks out.
I’m going to reproduced it in full here because the IMC site seems to have mangled my beautiful HTML:
===============================================
what happens in Sheffield when war breaks out
by pault 9:05pm Thu Mar 20 ‘03
pault@burngreave.net
Striking Sheffielder reflects on a day of stopping the traffic, being inspired by teenagers and dancing a lot.
————————–
Damn, it feels good to be on strike! Just got home after walking out of work 11 hours ago, with tired legs and no voice.
It’s really difficult to put this in any kind of order because so much of today was about spontaneity. Coppers were a little bewildered and decided to be “nice” to us for most of the day.
I walked out of work feeling low, angry and upset. The bastards have started this unjustified slaughter. I’ve been overwhelmed all week with a strange mix of rage and sorrow.
So what did we do? Amongst other things:
Hundreds of school (and college) students (including my daughter, bless her) walked out at about 11 and walked into the city centre, reclaiming major roundabouts on the way. The school students (who’ve been an absolute inspiration for anyone who’s been paying attention) were fantastic today – absolutely up for it, angry, vocal and confident. Once again the Sheffield students have demonstrated their opposition to this monstrosity being committed in out names. Many of them did all this after being threatened by their schools with suspension or worse.
Once assembled in town, we set off to try and acheived our stated aim: Stop Sheffield. We spent most of the next nine hours walking (and running (I thought coppers had some basic fitness test… not very apparent in some cases)) pretty much at will.
We went on a lovely winding walk around Sheffield taking in such major attractions as a sit down outside the main police station, most of the major roundabouts and dual carriagesways, disrupting business for quite some time at a major petrol station, forcing BBC Sheffield to get off their arses and filming some of what was going on under their noses (and being prevented from getting in by police horses).
After our afternoon stroll, we assembled back outside the Town Hall for an hour or so to allow more people to arrive, have a bit of a rest and take the piss out of the bored looking coppers. trollyd arrived to entertain the assembled throng with their usual mix of crushing beatz and spot on political samples. Some time later the Sheffield Samba Band marching into the space in front of the Town Hall to keep the dancing going.
It soon seemed time to go walkabout again, so the Samba Band lead us dancing down Fargate, stopping the buses and trams all the way down High Street and then onto Park Square. Park Square is a huge roundabout with five major roads (including the main route into town from the M1) all converging just at the edge of the centre.
We’d already been there as one of our early visits on our afternoon walk. We stopped traffic for a good twenty minutes, having a pleasant sit down in the sun, chatting with friends and making new ones.
This visit had a smaller number of folks, but the Samba Band were going strong, the chanting was loud and another sit down at the end of the Parkway was called for.
Back into town only to meet the trollyd crew with a bunch of traffic disruptors. Coincidently this was outside McDonalds so we made some noise while the South Yorkshire Constabulary guarded the Golden Arches. So the Samba crowd did an about face and off we went to shut down the major roundabout in Sheffield for the third time in less than twelve hours. It took a long time to get round this time (funny how that happens some times). The boys in blue were getting a bit fractious by this time (I think it was because they were wanting some tea by this stage and we just wouldn’t shut up and go home) and a bit of pushing and shoving took place. Nothing too serious though.
After a nifty bit of wrong footing the cops we samba’d our way past the railway station. The band played a tune outside the main station taxi rauk to the rapturous applause of the Asian taxi drivers. A quick sit down at the next roundabout and back to the Peace Gardens. Samba Band at the front, trollyd towards the back and lots of dancing people all around. A magic moment.
By this time, the band were shagged out (after drumming flat out for nigh on four hours), gracefully finished to yet another rousing cheer and trollyd took it up again. I left (to come and do this report) at about nine with a still sizeable crowd dancing and relaxing in the Peace Gardens to the sound of a Ronnie Reagan “Government is the problem…” sample colliding with Roni Size.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
Attended this previously publicized meeting this afternoon. [Note IMC: Independent Media Centre aka IndyMedia.]
Chris reports:
—————-
10 people turned up today to discuss establishing a Sheffield IMC (though due to other commitments not all 10 where there for the whole meeting) and there was a friendly, positive discussion.
People introduced themselves, explained why they were interested and there was a general discussion about the nature of Indymedia.
People who had not used the Publish facility had a look/play with that.
The conclusions of the meeting were that:
- We should ask imc-uk-network about the setting up of a Sheffield section like the Manchester one.
- We should all try and report anti-war activity in Sheffield this week and at Menwith Hill on Saturday.
- Having an open, public, meeting on a monthly basis would be good and that the details of this could be arranged on the imc-sheffield list.
There is probably lots of things I have forgotten – please post additions/corrections to the imc-sheffield list :-)
———————————————————
For the second time this week I have been fortunate to be with a group of people who are seriously talking about IT as an emancipatory tool.
I intend to keep reporting progress of this group/project. In part this is because it is my intention to use my blog as my own record of my computer/IT activities/adventures. This will be interesting for me and I hope will have some use for others. Choose your own level of participation as you see fit.
The other aspect that I think is important in all this is the cross-over. Not only in terms of skills (I’m sure that what I learn about administering Drupal, contributing to burngreave.net, learning Linux et al will be useful with IMC and vice versa), but also in models of collaboration (“how we get the critical mass?” idea we’ve been throwing about a bit this week).
Originally posted to burngreave.net.
The Drum has been booked from 2pm to 4pm for doing some Indymedia training on Sunday 16th March.
There are around 10 networked computers there, it is located in the former NCPM which is just near the train station.
It is located on Paternoster Row, just off Sheaf Square.
All we need now is:
1. Someone with some Indymedia experience from outside Sheffield to come and show us the ropes—help!
2. Some punters!
Originally posted on burngreave.net.