June 30th 2011 will see a general strike of sorts in England, teachers, public sector workers (upto 750,000) will walk off the job. Open Democracy analyse whether this June 30 strike can go beyond the failure of the March 26 strike.
Here the postal workers legislated back to work by the government were seen back at work today. It reminded me of the ambulance/paramedic strike which the govt also broke if I recall. One thing that has struck me about the postal strike was hearing the lack of solidarity at times from other union workers and reading such warbling on comments section of news reports. It’s dismaying. I was walking with a friend when we saw a postwoman today and called out support to her. Then as we carried on we were both remarking on how much we like our individual post people and how some of the posties we know are also musicians and are an eclectic, vibrant bunch.
Bodily other
This journal — Physical Culture and Sport. Studies and Research — I caught by a fluke 2 second glance on a twitter stream. I began reading an article on the anthropology of bodily otherness, but dug a bit further and became engrossed in this:
The Football Fan Community as a Determinant Stakeholder in Value co-Creation
Note the breakdown of the demographic of team supporters, their ages, social class and habits. I was intrigued by this idea of a system of relationships and within it, the fans as stakeholders (not least economic, emotively led economic stakeholders?) . What of this transaction? Its ramifications? Its dependence? It also strikes me when examined thus, the incredible power that remains with the fanbase should they chose to subvert that pattern of sustenance. The return, the repetition.
John Sparks reports from Xintang for Channel 4 on the recent story of 4 days of riots and unrest among workers.
Rereading the Riot Act II. Vancouver June 15, 2011
Signage installation by Jeremy Isao Speier.
Rereading the Riot Act II. Vancouver June 15, 2011
Unit/Pitt residency project.
Rereading the Riot Act II. Vancouver, June 15, 2011
Lori Weidenhammer performing one of two of her responses at the Performance Art Cabaret @ The Waldorf.
My Unit/Pitt residency project: Rereading the Riot Act. Vancouver 2011.
In other compelling news, my garden plot and I are engaged in a whole new tension. The polyamorous slug community are eating the living daylights out of everything. 200 have been removed by hand, but they morph new recruits before my very eyes. The lack of sun is doing little to charm the slithers of green up out of the ground, even if the predators weren’t swooping on them.
But the nastursium (sp?) has a flower! My first. Yellow. And the geraniums are purple.
It’s an ongoing cycle of disappointment my garden. And yet it sustains me … there’s something of the chronic reoffender in it, that endeavouring to find hope in it and yet it is such a bruiser!
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Summer is here. Myself and the small male are singing Green Day songs and the odd mashed up attempt at opera. Tonight a ukelele player serenaded us at the bus stop. She had a lovely voice and sang You and I for us. Aaah. Dotey. She said she’d been playing ukelele for only 2 days.
I find it sinister that the Business Improvement Association were early on the riot scene, commenting alongside the Mayor and Premier (both of whom spoke in comic book “bad guy” terminology which shed no light on the situation beyond “gasp, this is bad, and we gotta put the bad guys in jail). Yesterday I saw Mr Business Improvement Association on the news commenting on being consulted on appropriate punishment through the community court system (which is likely to be employed as a route for dealing with people who were charged with the disturbances).
How did the Business Approvement Association manage to inject themselves into the justice system? Why are they being consulted? Why are they giving comments? They are not elected by anyone. They’re self appointed one assumes and their knowledge if they have any is utterly irrelevant in this context.
If the Mayor is rolling out anyone for insight should it not be sociologists or social scientists or community leaders or youth workers? I find the sinsister presence of “business interests” so consistently represented in community affairs disturbing. If the business interests should be meeting with anyone it is with their fellow business interested at Rogers Arena, the owners of the hockey team who should be offering some financial reparation from their profits towards the repairs and who likewise should have had to fork out a contribution towards the security costs.
Since when is a privately owned sports franchise and the expenses incurred related to securing an income of $112 million dollars for it, the responsibility of the tax payers? If we look at cultural funding and the return on it we see a dollar invested brings triple to the economy in return and there’s little to no security costs incurred through the hosting of cultural events.
This leads me to another question: why did the rioters not inflict havoc on the very thing that is understood to have angered them? Why did they not vandalize the stadium where the match took place?
Rereading the Riot Act @ London Review of Books
Unit/Pitt and Rereading the Riot Act II makes the London Review of Books. Move over Elvis impersonators & gardening hour, our event got no local coverage at all. Grateful to the “incomparably lively and thoughtful” LRB for embracing it.
I’ll be writing more about the Cabaret (consumed with my novel edit) on this blog and am touched by the messages I’ve received from the small population who came out and supported it. Thanks also to the performance/visual artists Leannej, Carol Sawyer, My Name Is Scot, Jeremy Isao Speier and Lori Weidenhammer for engaging with my project and for their thoughtful, robust responses. And for the writers/artists/performers/activists and the Solidarity Notes Labour Choir who participated in the first Rereading the Riot Act event on April 23, 2011 at Victory Square & Woodwards.
We are instigating a panel discussion in conjunction with SFU Humanities I hope and there will be a publication from the project published this Fall by Publication Studio.
I’m still coming across people who insist the riot was orchestrated by anarchists. I find this a very odd premise that I thought had already been debunked. My curiousity about gauging people’s thoughts has led me to solicit young people’s opinions and hear their interpretations on what took place and on the question of rage and the urge to participate overall in the entire hockey playoffs. I also had an interesting chat with a friend who teaches in a High School who had a neurological perspective that in such a circumstance the brain of such young men especially needs a shock and instruction to divert them. I found his thinking plausible and asked him to explain to me how he deals with this in his teaching practice. He gave me examples on involving individuals and diverting them and tasking them with things to do.
I’ve also been reading on violence and how it can relate to being “visible” without necessarily having anything further to say beyond I am here. I noted the other night in the video footage a certain repetition, not only was there definate I am here, but sometimes I am back. Or I am here again.