ei: Seeing the land as one: Raja Shehadeh interviewed

I don't normally use this blog for plugging articles I've written elsewhere, but this one I'm a bit proud of and the interview itself was very exciting to do - because I love Raja Shehadeh's work, and because it was the same day Sharyn and I appeared at Edinburgh International Book Festival ourselves with an almost sell-out audience for Gaza: Beneath the Bombs.

ei: Seeing the land as one: Raja Shehadeh interviewed

Manchester Anarchist Bookfair

Message from Dave at Manchester Anarchist Bookfair:

We can now announce that the Manchester Anarchist Bookfair will take
place from 11.00am until 5.00pm on Saturday 2nd October 2010 at The
Dancehouse Theatre, Oxford Road (opposite the BBC).
The venue is bigger and more importantly brighter than last year!
Are you interested in having a stall at the next Manchester Anarchist
Bookfair?
Stalls cost £10 per table.
If you are a bookstore or distributor and require more you can book
more tables at £10 per table.
Let us know how many you need.
We'll be posting details of stalls as they are confirmed at:
http://www.bookfair.org.uk
Follow us on twitter
If you live in Manchester and want to get involved in organising
things get in touch.

Ivor Dembina at Manchester Peace Festival

Tickets for anti-Zionist Jewish comic Ivor Dembina's show 'This is Not a Subject for Comedy', running in Manchester for one night only as part of Manchester Peace Festival, are now on sale. The show will be on Wednesday September 22nd at 7.30pm.

According to The Independent, the show tells “the story of how Dembina, 58, had his own unconditional support for the Jewish state challenged when he visited Israel and the West Bank between 2003 and 2005, and the hostility he faced from friends and family for his views.” A review of the show can be seen here, and an interview with Dembina here.

All proceeds from this event will be split between the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and the Free Gaza movement.

Manchester Peace Festival will be launched with an opening concert on September 18th, headed by folk singer Leon Rosselson.

Full details of how to buy tickets for Ivor Dembina, as well as information on the many other events taking place during Manchester Peace Festival, can be found at http://manchesterpeacefestival.wordpress.com/whats-on-at-the-peace-festival/

The Daily Mail Song

Gaza art exhibition at Manchester Cathedral

Image converted to jpg from pdf by the wonderful zamzar.com

Creative Co-operatives

The Creative Co-ops website I was commissioned to copywrite by Co-operatives UK is finally up, after a few technical blips. It includes a collection of information and case studies on the benefits of co-operation for creative workers - writers, artists, musicians, web designers, actors, journalists etc etc etc. Not featured, because I only found them today, are a very cute Glossop-based co-op of textile geeks called Moot Fibre Arts Co-op. They're having a garden party at Glossop Labour Club this Sunday...

Gaza flotilla; Mahmoud Darwish & Trio Joubran

Below is a YouTube video of the wonderful Trio Joubran setting of Mahmoud Darwish reading 'Wait for her.' Lovely.



Today is a tense one for anyone caring about the fate of the flotilla of aid, human rights workers, journalists, parliamentarians and others trying to enter Gaza by sea again. The State of Israel has been threatening all sorts of hi-tech and savage ways to prevent them reaching Gaza, whilst making disingenuous statements about its 'inability' to control shipping in Gazan waters. Follow the flotilla's progress on http://twitter.com/freegazaorg or http://www.witnessgaza.com/

Manchester Peace Festival benefit gig

10th May 2010
Benefit night for Manchester Peace Festival
Sand Bar, Grosvenor Street (off Oxford Road) 7.30-late
Music from Vanessa Lewis, Black Jack Barnet, Uncle Meat and the Highway Children, and poetry from Lauren Bolger. And cake. All proceeds to Manchester Peace Festival

The deeply disturbing photoshop genius

of Mr Marc Roberts.
'Nuff said.

Banksy and the Bethlehem Donkey

Last weekend, at a symposium to accompany the opening of the Contemporary Art Iraq exhibition at the Cornerhouse in Manchester, I encountered someone who was possibly the most breathtakingly rude, arrogant and self-aggrandising journalist I have ever had the misfortune to meet. Which was a pity, because the symposium was fairly interesting (although the speaker count was pretty much halved by the effects of the Icelandic ash cloud) and this woman's aggressive, narrow-focused interrogation of the presenters racked up the tension amongst speakers and audience so much that little real debate seemed possible. It was also a pity because she had some really useful insights and very interesting experiences and information - she just chose to present them in such an exclusionary way that engaging with her was impossible. She is on the editorial team of a magazine I've long respected and have written for in the past; I suspect I won't be going near it again, and from the conversations I've had subsequently, she comprehensively alienated a room full of people who should have been amongst her publication's target market.
However, I should be grateful to her for one thing. She reminded me that I should write up a little anecdote I've been trotting out for a while as an example of the confusions which can plague political art.
On a return visit to the West Bank in spring 2009, my friend Samer pointed out to me the places near Bethlehem checkpoint where graffiti artist Banksy had left his mark. Several of Banksy's wittier contributions to the many murals, stencils and tags on the Israeli military's Separation Wall remained but, as reported widely in December 2007, an image depicting a donkey being id'd by an Israeli soldier had been painted over by irate locals.
According to Samer, Banksy's images had heightened debates amongst locals over whether drawing, painting and spray-painting on the Wall was an act of defiance or a beautification of the unforgivable, something to make the Wall easier to live with and detract from its role in wrecking the Palestinian economy, cutting people off from jobs and hospitals and educational opportunities, and stealing large areas of Palestinian land.
But the donkey cartoon had been singled out for particular criticism by some Bethlehemites. To call someone a donkey the Middle East is excruciatingly insulting, and locals felt that the image compared them with the creature depicted. Hence the mural's fate under a layer of new paint. And, on the roundabout heading into Bethlehem from the checkpoint, even fourteen months later in 2009 and unnoticed by the reporters who initially recorded the story, several concrete blocks bore the sinister message 'R.I.P. Banksy.'

Blog also posted at Menassat, the Arab media community.

Playing this morning...

Now Playing...

Algerian-French musician Rachid Taha covering The Clash's Rock the Casbah. Genius...

Email etiquette and political spikings?

Generally speaking, it's been quite a good few weeks. After an initial new year's panic when it looked like the recession was finally going to give me a good slapping, I've got a decent amount of work in (actually that's not completely true; I've got far too much work, as it's coming up to the financial year end and various grant-funded organisations, on the Use It Or Lose It principle, are buying in my services). I got my first Guardian by-line (albeit unpaid and online only, but hey). And Gaza: Beneath the Bombs book stuff is going pretty well, especially when we get lovely reviews like this one.
But obviously I couldn't possibly be that upbeat, so here are a few minor trivialities which have hacked me off recently.
Firstly, it's 2010. Email has been fairly common in the UK for the best part of a decade. Especially amongst campaigners. And surely there must be few Young Folk out there who've managed to evade some computer training at school. But it seems like using the BCC field on a bulk email is still beyond some people's capacity.
First, there was the eejit from the Energy Saving Trust (I promise it's the last time I'm going to whinge about the Boiler Scrappage Scheme and its incompetent administration). He managed to send an email confirming receipt of my voucher and claim - and several hundred other people's - to all of us, in the CC field. Then, in an attempt to rectify the fuckup, he sent one of those pathetic 'Recall Email' messages that civil servants use - but again to all X hundred of us. So if anyone on that list has a mate who works in boiler servicing, they have one very valuable little marketing list there... And then, in the same week, some twonk from the newly-formed Unemployed Workers Union which has been set up in Salford did exactly the same thing, with an absolutely vast (and by the look of it, at least 50% totally unrelated) press list. I emailed them back suggesting that they might annoy people if they carried on like that and got no reply... but got another press release off them slightly later doing exactly the same thing. How to alienate potential supporters and sources of coverage, in one fell swoop. Idiot.
Next thing to piss me off was City Library's Manchester Lit List blog, which supposedly covers all events book-related in Manchester. I sent the announcement for the Gaza: Beneath the Bombs launch to them well in advance, and got no reply. I chased the email, and got a reply saying it would be listed on the blog in the week preceding the event. Which it was - very briefly. I know this because I have a Google Alert on 'Gaza beneath the bombs,' and the Lit List came up on it. But by the time I clicked on the link, it had been taken down. I can only assume that this was a political spiking, since this was a bona fide Manchester book launch, in Manchester, with one Manchester author involved. Which is... interesting.

Slingshot Hip Hop

This is the trailer for Slingshot Hip Hop, one of the films shown at the UNRWA fundraiser Sharyn & I did book readings at last Saturday. I've been meaning to see the movie for ages so nice to be presented with the opportunity. A must-see...

Brave John MacLean has come hame tae the Clyde!

Ten days ago I was privileged to be invited to the Christmas party for people who've contributed to the work of the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. The afternoon included a range of fascinating readings and songs from some of Greater Manchester's left-wing greats, including the mighty Ewan MacColl, and songs performed by Aidan Jolly (who did a great rendition of a part of Leon Rosselson's very funny Ballad of Spycatcher), Bernie Murphy and a fantastic pair whose names I caught only as Ben(?) and Emily.
One of the songs covered by the latter was the haunting, deeply moving John MacLean March, a song to the Clydeside trade unionist who was the origin of the phrase 'a bayonet is a weapon with a working man at boths ends.' The song itself, written by Alistair Hulett, relates to his imprisonment for three years for sedition in urging the working men of Glasgow to see that fighting in the First World War was not in their interests as a class and that the empty nationalism of the war was a matter for the ruling classes and not those who would simply become their cannon fodder. The song, performed by Dick Gaughan, is here:

Moss Witch

I keep saying I've reached the end of my tether with the BBC - particularly with its repulsive and growing tendency to report the views of scum like Migration Watch and the Taxpayers' Alliance as if these loons are purveyors of reliable research data - but then Auntie keeps doing something to vaguely redeem itself. This time it's support for the National Short Story Awards, which I probably wouldn't have taken an awful lot of notice of if it wasn't for the presence of the marvellous Sara Maitland on the shortlist. And her story, Moss Witch, which touches on some very pertinent tensions between maintaining wild places vs studying them, can be downloaded here (beware, it's nearly half an hour long and the file is 26mb). Sara's three decades of writing seem to manage to touch on many of the Big Questions - gender, sex, nature, religion - with humour and breathtaking lightness and sadness. Personal favourites - novels Virgin Territory and Brittle Joys, and one of my current reads, A Book of Silence. There's something terrifically, terrifyingly wise about much of her writing, especially the last-named book, although it also makes me want to up sticks and become a hermit in the Sinai (if such a thing is possible. I suppose it is in the desert proper, albeit that's still peppered with landmines, but last time I was on Mount Sinai itself the experience was somewhat marred by a Belgian evangelical Christian accordionist who insisted on playing in the dawn with deeply unspiritual wheezings and blarings, despite the other people on the mountain trying to appreciate the heartbreaking wonder of the sun rising over the desert mountains.)

Nice things, for once

At the risk of spoiling my great track record of depressing posts, here are a couple of positive initiatives which made me smile.
The first is the Kufiyeh Project, an American initiative to promote kufiyehs generally (or at least, proper ones, not the overpriced 'anti-war scarves' sold without a trace of irony in Marks & Sparks and Urban Outfitters). It's been set up to sell the products of one of the few remaining factories in the West Bank producing kufiyehs, the Hirbawi workshop in Hebron, which Olive Co-op has been sourcing its kufiyehs from for some time. They make the lovely multicoloured ones as well as the traditional black & white.
The second is a little webpage by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre, which is simply a list of nicely-written, simple Palestinian recipes. A good resource since Sahtain, a lovely Palestinian cookbook which I have a copy of, has now gone out of print, according to the guys at the Educational Bookshop on Salah ed-Din Street. The JMCC page is great though, and I do particularly like the recipe for Shakshoukeh, which should apparently be served with 'warm Palestinian.' Yummm... ;-)

Moss Side graffiti

Al Baker & the Dole Queue, Roadhouse, 5th March

Last time I was in the Roadhouse, I'm pretty sure I left early because of the dense cloud of cigarette smoke that made by eyes water and obscured whatever I was trying to see onstage. I don't think there was even a mention of a smoking ban, so I guess it was a while ago.
Tonight it was Al Baker and the Dole Queue who lured me back. I've seen this talented young singer-songwriter in various settings – with a couple of members of his band supporting David Rovics and the mighty Attila the Stockbroker at the late lamented Basement, and solo, accompanied only by his guitar, at my own wedding. The band has one album, 'On the Use of Jackboots,' available through Four Dogs Music. They combine a punky-folky sound (think the Levellers, but less cheesy/twiddly, or the Pogues, but with better teeth) with clever, funny, observational lyrics that range from the fierily political to bittersweet observations of the pains of young love (when the wrong haircut's involved).
This gig was billed as one of the first outings for the new version of the Dole Queue's 'troubacore' sound, bringing together some of the folky instruments (which have attracted accusations of sounding like a ceilidh band in the past) with rockier electric guitars and bass.
Sometimes it worked. On the pacier, punkier numbers like Grandad was an Anarchist and This Machine the greater volume and gutsier sound really lifted the songs, and combined with Baker's grinning yet sarcastic enthusiasm made for an infectiously fun live set. A cover of REM's It's the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine) also took well to this treatment. These are all talented performers, and their tight sound deserved something much better than a three-quarters-empty Roadhouse on the Thursday night.
But the stronger sound doesn't suit all of Baker's tracks, and the clever, funny, poignant lyrics of, for instance, Till the Fences Fall, got kind of lost in the louder music. Which, given that one of the big attractions of Baker's music is his wry, intelligent songwriting, is definitely a pity. Hopefully with more outings the new sound will get a little finessing and some of those lovely lyrics will re-emerge.
That said, this was still a cracking set, and I look forward to Al Baker and the Dole Queue's upcoming sets, listed on the band's Myspace page. These include a TBC support slot with the fantastic Robb Johnson.

Hulme graffiti