Violence against tattooists

It’s unusual to hear of a large tattooed man with a gun being assaulted. But tattooists in Scotland are experiencing an increase in assaults at work.

Produced January 2009 for Edinburgh Napier News

Ceasefire in Gaza protest

Thousands marched in Edinburgh on Saturday to show solidarity with the Palestinian people. Catie Guitart reports.

Produced January 2009 for Edinburgh Napier Rolling News

Be the change you want to see in the world

 

Photo: flickr.com/photos/vrampersad

MSPs, meetings, memos… These meaningless ways of engaging with the institutions which govern our everyday existence cannot possibly foster any type of change in the fundamental structure of our society.

The brainwash begins when we enter formal education. Not only are we conditioned to accept a highly regimented schedule as the best way to organize the day, preparing us like rats for the ‘adult’ world of a full time job, but that polite hand-raising and quiet agreement with policy is enough to affect change.

Antiquated styles of protest, such as marches, hand-held signs, and gatherings, are now powerless to effect real change because they have become such a predictable part of the status quo.

Those yearning for change, who cannot accept this bruised-apple version of the world, who will not wait the many years for legislation to be approved, seek more immediate solutions through direct action.

Direct action involves activities like sabotage, strikes, workplace occupation, sit-ins, street demonstrations, spray painting, and squatting. Contrast this with indirect action, such as electing representatives to spew half-truths and inconsistencies.

Direct action can become violent and thus a form of civil disobedience, but many famous incidents of direct action have been non-violent in nature.

Mahatma Gandhi pioneered the philosophy of Satyagraha, “resistance to evil through active, non-violent resistance”. His methods of non-cooperation, peaceful resistances and fasting brought attention to India and its strife, both externally and internally. Would the same result have been produced by petitions and pamphlets?

Hunger: Movie review

 

Photo: Studio Promotional Material

“There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence.”

With two simple sentences, Thatcher’s monotone articulation condemned ten Irish Republican hunger strikers to death during the summer of 1981. Hunger, directed by Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen, focuses on Bobby Sands, the first prisoner to initiate the hunger strike in 1981 in power struggle between the paramilitary prisoners and the Prime Minister.

Cinematically, the film is engrossing. McQueen uses unconventional angles to convey very conventional actions. Rather than watching a mouth chew breakfast, the camera concentrates on a lap being showered with toast crumbs. Instead of a face wincing in pain, we are shown blood trailing out of battered knuckles immersed in a basin of water.

Although Hunger’s focal point is the prisoners and their use of the body as a political weapon, the film also attempts to humanize the prison guards as well. The everyday routine of getting ready for work includes one of the guards checking underneath his car for a bomb while his wife peers fearfully through lace curtains.

The film’s violence is extremely realistic, which makes it more disquieting. Far removed from slasher gore, the brutality inflicted on the prisoners in the movie will elicit gasps. Michael Fassbender, who plays the role of Sands, achieved his skeletal figure through a medically monitored crash diet, and his wizened frame spotted with sores is disconcerting.

What is most striking are the levels of silence and noise. The senses are soothed by a shot of a guard quietly smoking in the snow, then barraged by a scene filled with riot police bashing their batons against their shields.

McQueen won the Camera d’Or (for first-time directors) at Cannes this year for Hunger, and it’s an impressive debut. 

Published in Veritas December 2008 Issue 101

The Days Run Like Wild Horses Over the Hills: Book review

Photo: Graziano Orgia (Wikicommons)

Charles Bukowski

The Days Run Like Wild Horses Over the Hills: A Collection of Poems

Open the page of any Bukowski book and his voice jumps off the page, slurring slightly in your ear, moist beer-breath raining spittle on your cheeks. Like a functionally alcoholic friend, he dispenses skid-row advice and train-hopping stories; his stark, minimal prose conveying more than any sonnet could even aspire to.

Although published in 1968, this collection of poems is modern and fresh, their energy leaping off the page to grab your collar, wild-eyed and slightly desperate. Bukowski’s constant regurgitation of bleak moments and quiet triumphs provide a peek at the inner workings of an individual similar to those around him, but more aware of the crushing defeats and surprising beauty which compose life.

Bukowski’s alter ego Henry Chinaski does not appear and many of the poems visit his familiar stomping grounds: the racecourse, whores, girlfriends, bar fights and late-night bottles of wine. That is not to say they are merely reheated leftover accounts of a whirlwind year of madness before he settled down to use his adventures as experience to draw poetry from. The title ‘Poet Laureate of Skid Row’ which has been bestowed on him is something he has earned.

The book must be read twice. As with much of his work, the temptation is to guzzle it all in one sitting, reading until 2 am, sipping fortified wine. But the rush to immerse yourself completely into his itinerant world will cause you to miss the elegant turn of words which characterizes his work, lifting it out of a mere description of the lifestyle of one on the edges of society.

These collected poems are more esoteric than his later works, and on the first reading, can seem slightly obscure simply for the sake of obscurity. However, the second reading recommended above will allow time to leisurely dissect his carefully chosen words. 

Although some critics dismiss his work as simply a depiction of a taboo male fantasy, the slobby, anti-social bachelor who drops out of society, analysis of any situation is more clear when standing on the outside looking in. “It’s when you’re on skid row / you realize that everything/ belongs to someone/ and there are locks everywhere”.

Bukowski is like the local drunk leaning against the bar attempting to create eye contact from everyone’s downcast stare. Many overlook the genius of his thought, be it due to subject matter or his sparse, statacco style. Lift your gaze, walk over, and let him regale you with tales of ordinary madness, sometimes love poems and hard-knock advice. “Van, whores don’t want/ ears/ they want/ money.”

Hey… This is a box! We’ve been watching a box!

Photo: Hana Kirana (Wikicommons)

Every night, millions of people become slack-jawed, almost drooling, with glassy blank eyes and a thousand-yard stare. Attack of the Bodysnatchers? No, it’s just prime-time TV. (Originally published in impulse May 2008).

Have you ever been in conversation with someone and in an attempt to describe something they say ‘…And it was just like a scene from the Sopranos!’? As if there was no other reference that could better convey the event? As if television was the best way to experience life?

The average Scot aged over four will watch 27.9 hours of television a week. If you grow up with a television in your house, this means you will spend around ten years of your life staring motionless at a screen, without adding in any time spent at a computer.

Walk into most homes with a television set and it takes centre stage in whatever room it’s in, with all other furniture arranged around it. We also organize our daily routines around it, watching it at set times. TV demands our complete frozen attention, which the media industry then sells on to advertisers. The filmmaker Godard suggested that viewers should be paid for watching considering the labour time involved and the money created from them.

TV isn’t a meeting place to exchange ideas and thoughts, but a barrage of one-way communication. If you disagree with something, there is no chance to go back and reconsider it. Viewers become lulled into uncritical consumption, passive and still. Your only right is the right to turn the TV off.

A soldier’s view

 

Photo: Anthony LLoyd (Wiki Commons)

This piece was originally written for impulse, but cut at the last minute by our previous module leader as he felt the topic was sensitive. Later published in Veritas, Napier student newspaper, it is an oral history of a day in the life of a soldier who served in Bosnia. Although his name was published in the print version of this story, he prefers to remain anonymous when posting on the internet. The format is similar to that of the Economist, who publish first hand accounts of interesting stories. NB: The piece contains swearing. Just a heads up for those who don’t care for that sort of thing.

 

There wasn’t much action in Bosnia, and most of the stuff we dealt with was underground crime. There’s a big Mafia scene in Kosovo and one of the main guys owned a hotel just near where we were stationed. We had to do this raid on the hotel and we were told that there would be hundreds of armed guards there. A team were camping out watching the place for fucking days and days, which is were we got our information from, about how many guards were there.

So we were training for about two weeks to do an assault on the hotel. The whole battalion was involved in the operation, so that’s about 500 men. Everyone got really worked up about it. We were shitting ourselves actually.

We rocked up to this hotel with all our vehicles and tanks and shit, and fucking just bashed through the gates. There were about five armed guards at the time who fucking threw their rifles down and ran like fuck. We all jumped out and raided the whole hotel.

We were bashing each door in at a time and the first door we bashed in there was this woman; I think she was Slovakian, and she went into a seizure because she got such a fucking fright. She went totally pale and white and actually had a seizure from shock.

I did it on an impulse

Last academic year I was the deputy editor of a glossy Napier student magazine as part of a Magazine Production module. While it totally gave me an ulcer, it was excellent hands-on experience. Below is a blurb written for the Napier Creative Industries pamphlet about the class. The next few posts will showcase some of the work I created for the class.

The phrase ‘like herding cats’ always springs to my mind whenever group projects are mentioned. Creating impulse, the 3^rd year Napier Journalism magazine, was no different from shepherding a flock of tabbies.

impulse magazine is produced by 3^rd year journalism students every year. A practical exercise in publishing, students are responsible for the creation of a real magazine, from deciding on a target audience and creating copy to funding publication by selling advertising.

Under the gruff but concerned watch of David McMurray, Dave Mclusky and Derek Allen, we laughed, we cried and we almost battered each other, but we produced a 32-page glossy magazine.

As deputy editor, I was directly underneath the editor. Like the cool uncle, I had the authority of an editor, but less of the responsibility to dish out discipline. Sarah Hunter, the editor, and I, oversaw all of Group 2’s activities, from deciding features done to whether impulse should be spelt with an upper or lower case i.

impulse was a labour of love, with the emphasis on labour. Requiring every skill learned I have ever learned, the project never left my mind the whole semester. But the feeling of actually holding the magazine in my grubby hands can’t be beaten.

They’re coming for you Barbara…

 

Photo: Public domain (no copyright)

Zombie movies kick ass. There is just something about the undead I find riveting. I’m contemplating jacking in this uni lark and becoming a zombie preacher, traveling from town to town spreading the gospel. I thought I would begin by sharing with the brothers and sisters of the congregation the Five Commandments of Zombie Revelations. (Originally published in Veritas, Napier student newspaper.)

 

Night of the Living Dead

A beautiful movie. Made in 1968, the original zombie movie created a template for all horror movies which is still used today. Every classic element is here: the average Joe shoved into a life-or-death situation who takes control, the coward who jeopardizes everyone’s safety, the female whose compassion leads to her demise and the most perfectly bleak ending. Watch out for the zombie in his boxers.

Carnival of Souls

While the undead do not feast on the flesh of the living in this 1962 classic, its surreal trance sequence with twirling spectres is purported to have inspired George A. Romero of Night of the Living Dead fame. 

Dawn of the Dead (Remake)

This remake of Romero’s sequel to Night of the Living Dead is a refinement of the zombie movie. First time director Zack Snyder unleashes carnage even before the opening credits blast across the screen. One to watch through an Xbox 360 so you can rewind and re-watch the best bits in slow motion.

28 Weeks Later

As the screenplay writer reputably snaps, they aren’t zombies but rage-infected humans. But labels are meaningless; violence, blood and death are. Frenetically paced, watching this flick feels as though someone is sitting on your chest compressing your lungs.

Zombie Holocaust

There was a spate of horror movies filmed in Italy with Italian actors and then badly dubbed over with Bobby-and-Peggy-Sue all-American accents in a money-saving gesture. In this gem, a girl goes scuba diving topless in a thong, is attacked underwater by a zombie and escapes by the skin of her titties. The zombie then proceeds to attack what appears to be a real shark in a continuous 2-minute underwater sequence without any visible air tank. Intense.

Published in Veritas December 2008 Issue 101

How many punks does it take to change a lightbulb?

 

Photo: Jamie Greig

It doesn’t matter, punk never changed anything…

a manifesto – scrawled by nips

It must be about 6am, maybe a little later. My phone has run out of batteries and there are no clocks in the room. My only way of gauging the time is from the fresh sunlight that’s highlighting the window frame. The curtains are still drawn from the night before, although I could guess they were probably drawn long before that.

The room isn’t empty. It’s quite small, but full of enough guitars, records and general shit to fill a space twice the size. There are about ten people sitting around, some on the bed, most crammed on the floor. They’re all trying to get comfortable, while dealing with the impracticalities of their mohawks and studs.  Some are engaged in listless conversation, others are just keeping to themselves. Either tired or completely wired, they probably mulling over some problem waiting for them in the outside world. For now though, it’s distant and separate. We’re all off the clock here.

If someone was looking in, casting their eye through those little gaps at the sides of the curtain, they would probably think it was a sorry sight. The night before has left an air of defeat hanging around the room. Sure enough, there’s laughter and jokes circulating, but there’s nothing really going on. This is a group of kids that align themselves with radicalism and protest, yet here they’re sitting doing nothing. Time is being spent and minds are switched off. To the man at the window, there’s nothing happening. There’s certainly no revolution going on.