Comments on: What side of the beard you’ve been lying on

By: Garden Fountain Freak

Garden Fountain Freak — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:35:49 +0000

Garden Fountain Freak…

Why would you say that, when you can see that what you sy is not correct….

By: Singularly Crass

Singularly Crass — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 10:35:48 +0000

[…] band Crass had a big effect on some of us Free Associator’s lives. Indeed we’ve had a bit of talk about them here of the years. We’ve discussed the chances of a Crass revival, or whether, in […]

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 02:59:00 +0000

From the point of view of the market(!) a fairly dreadful book about Crass came out the other year and sank without trace. Surely this demonstrates that some things just can't be commodified and remain pure statements abou...sorry, wrong blog.

Fantastic Fred Hampson quote.

Not much to comment. Have been reading Teenage all bloody night again.

By: David

David — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 21:48:00 +0000

Yeah, this quote is great. And this ‘something else’ that politics becomes when we stretch it: it’s that question we keep returning to, isn’t it? ‘What sort of life do we want to live?’

By: Keir

Keir — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:17:00 +0000

What a fucking great quote from Fred Hampton. That is going to be used again. In fact I can’t believe you didn’t make it into a post of its own. What a geeat excuse to also post up a pic of him looking cool.

By: brian

brian — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:09:00 +0000

Well, actually I was thinking of something much more ambitious than Timotei. Not just Zounds flogging Vodafone or Intel (ah, so that’s where we heard those Mockney tones first), but national exhibitions of artwork for Flux of Pink Indians, and Lloyd Webber doing Christ The Musical in the West End. I give it five years...

Anyway, I am intrigued by this idea of plunder, how we can (or could) take something from the past and make the present into something else. Twist it. Fuck up time. I came across this great speech by Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, which seems to speak to some of this.
“A lot of us running around talking about politics don't even know what politics is. Did you ever see something and pull it and you take it as far as you can and it almost outstretches itself and it goes into something else? If you take it so far that it is two things? As a matter of fact, some things if you stretch it so far, it’ll be another thing. Did you ever cook something so long that it turns into something else? Ain’t that right?
That's what we’re talking about with politics.”

When you put it like that, politics doesn’t seem such a hateful notion.

By: Keir

Keir — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:02:00 +0000

Perhaps you are right I can even imagine a Timotei advert with Andie Macdowell singing “Shaved Women.”
Are you tired of screaming babies?
Are you fed up with collaborating and shaving underarm hair?

By: brian

brian — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:14:00 +0000

Good post, well put. You might be right about Crass being ripe for a re-packaging, but weren’t they ripe a few years ago? I think it’s been tried and found wanting. There’s a more serious point though about our ability to plunder the past. Punk re-worked so much of hippy's original attitude (without of course acknowledging it), which is how it made sense to a wider audience than itself (the more turned-on hippies were among the first to get it, just as the more turned-on punks were among the first to get rave etc etc). But that sort of re-appropriation just doesn't seem possible any more. Think of an era, a song, an attitude, and you can bet some suit from an ad agency will have got there first. This also leads on to stuff about irony, detachment and cynicism as a post-modern survival strategy. It’s liberating in its own way, but it means we can't simply use tactics from an earlier game. But enough of these generalities, I’m getting back to growing my beard.