Monday Blues

Spotted  by Dollis Brook while walking part of the Capital Ring this weekend

 

Skibadee remembered on home turf

The great junglist/drum & bass MC Skibadee died last month and fittingly is the subject of lots of memorial graffiti around Waterloo in South London where he was born, particularly in the graffiti tunnels under the station (Leake Street)

Alphonso Bondzie (his real name)

'Skibadee, 1.2.1975 - 27.2.2022'

'inspired, loved, taught and pioneered, world's no.1 jungle and D&B Emcee Skibadee'

See also - Ukraine war graffiti around Waterloo today

MF Doom murals

There was a similar outpouring on the death of MF Doom in late 2020 - these examples from Deptford Creekside:

Extinction Rebellion Animal Murals

I love snowy owls, so obviously love this Extinction Rebellion mural in Brighton.

In nearby Lewes a mural highlights the extinction of Spix's Macaws (think there may be a few left in captivity, but more or less gone in the wild)

Also in Brighton a bear looks out from a cage in this International Animal Rescue mural:

 

The Butterfly Dream

(Bristol Temple Meads Station, October 2019)

'Long ago, a certain Zhuang Zi dreamed he was a butterfly – a butterfly fluttering here and there on a whim, happy and carefree, knowing nothing of Zhuang Zi. Then all of a sudden he woke up to find that he was, beyond all doubt Zhuang Zi. Who knows if it was Zhuang Zi dreaming a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming Zhuang Zi? Zhuang Zi and butterfly: clearly there’s a difference. This is called the transformation of things” Zhuang Zi,The Inner Chapters [Zhuang Zi/Chuang-tzu is said to have lived from 369 BCE to 286 BCE]

'To dream of a butterfly is to imagine a life of flying, freedom, and blissful ignorance of all human sorrows. Zhuang Zi’s evocation of such a happy dream feeling drew out of his intuitive recognition of the experiential power of people’s actual dreams of flying. To this widely experienced and deeply felt dream theme Zhuang Zi added the specific figure of the butterfly, a creature whose life-cycle involves a radical transformation of physical structure, from larva to chrysalis to butterfly. Dreaming of this particular creature not only means the power to fly; it also means the experience of transformation itself, life moving effortlessly from one mode of been to another, the Dao made manifest’ (Kelly Bulkeley, Dreaming in the World's Religions – a Comparative History, New York University Press 2008)

Athens Protest and Street Art - December 2014

Some pictures from Athens last weekend:

Demonstrators gather outside the university on 6 December, the 6th anniversary of the killing of 15 year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos by police. Thousands took to the streets to remember Alexis and to express solidarity with his friend Nikos Romanos,  on hunger strike in prison (the hunger strike has now ended).

Later there were clashes, with tear gas and petrol bombs (from BBC News)

Syrian refugees protesting at their camp in Syntagma Square, opposite the parliament building
'We faced death passing the sea, now we're sleeping at Greek streets'

Sunday December 7th - an art students banner on  protest outside Parliament against the setting of a new austerity budget

At least 5,000 (my estimate) took part in the Sunday evening protest
(image from here of a trade union contingent on demo)

Some street art from the Exarchia area:

London Political Graffiti 1968

From the excellent Oz Magazine archive, here's some images of London graffiti from Oz number 13 (June 1968), photographs apparently from 'a series of postcards being prepared by JLTY, 49 Kensington Park Road, W11'

'Pop is Dead'
'Crime is the highest form of sensuality'
'Burn Baby Burn'
'A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief'
(Coleridge quote in Moorhouse Road W2)
'All you need is dynamite'
'Burn it all down'
'Cars are dead' (from Denbigh Terrace W11)

Someday all the Adults will Die!: Punk Graphics 1971-84

'Some day all the adults will die!: punk graphics 1971-1984' is a free exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, on until 4th November 2012.

I wonder sometimes whether anything else useful can be said about punk, feels like we have been reliving that moment endlessly for the last 30 years. Ageing collapses time in unexpected ways. At school in the late 1970s and reading about May 1968 it felt as remote to me as the First World War. Now the late 1970s feel not so far away, even if the equivalent of this exhibition in 1977 would have been a show about early 1940s style. So an exhibition like this is essentially a kind of nostalgia for some ('ooh I've got that original 7 inch of Scritti Politti's Hegemony') and ancient history for others.  

The exihibition, curated by Jon Savage and Johan Kugelberg, is less a coherent take on graphics and more a very good collection of memoribilia - zines, flyers and record sleeves. But in subtle ways it does undermine some simplistic versions of the punk story.

After Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, everyone knows about the parallels between Situationist attitude/style (if not always politics) and some strands of punk, but the exhibition shows this directly with some material from that milieu such as a King Mob poster from the late 1960s:

Likewise, and contrary to the notion of punk as a straightforward negation of the preceding period, the influence of the pre-punk UK counter culture (Oz magazine etc.) is acknowledged: 'design forerunners included the proto-pop mail art movement, counter-culture protest graphics and the underground press of the 1960s'.

The exhibition gives space to the American punk scene, with its parallel but distinct aesthetic. Who knew that Wayne County's backing band in 1976 was the Back Street Boys? Surely more interesting than the later outfit with the same name.

It recognises that punk in the UK was about much more than The Clash and The Sex Pistols, and gives due recognition to anarcho-punk - including Crass's graffiti stencils:

There are some interesting radical perspectives on music, including a remarkable flyer given out when The Rolling Stones played at the Hollywood Bowl in 1966 that hallucinates the band's music as some kind of radical rallying cry: 'Greetings and welcome Rolling Stones, our comrades in the desperate battle against the maniacs who hold power. The revolutionary youth of the world hears your music and is inspired to ever more deadly acts... We will play your music in rock'n'roll marching bands as we tear down the jails and free the prisoners'.

Less optimistic/tongue in cheek is an earnest critique of The Clash, put out by Art in Revolution in Holland in  the late 1970s: ''London's buying your crap... this is what is left of the '77 punx, a bunch of junkies and a bunch of drunks'

The zines on display are frustrating as they are behind plastic so you can only look at the covers when really you want to flick through them. The record sleeves are evocative, but you really want to listen to the music (though some of this is being played in the exhibition). The flyers and posters though don't hold anything back, or nothing that can be accessed now. They simply record a series of singular moments in history:. 

Manchester 1977: 'Punk rock rules!' at The Squat with The Drones, Warsaw (later Joy Division) and others - interesting discussion about this poster here

Los Angeles 1979: The Last and The Go-Go at Gazzarri's on Sunset Strip

Crass at Acklam Hall, Portobello Road, September 1979

New Cross Street Art

Took this last week in Laurie Grove, New Cross (that's South London for you out of town people). Just around the corner from Goldsmiths College with its many art students, so you'd hope for some decent street art. This example isn't graffiti as such, it's actually done on paper and pasted on to the wall.

Naked man is saying 'cos the 20th century people took it all away from me', plus a Zizek reference with part of his anatomy labelled 'Big Other'.

Camberwell Street Art

The pictures on the Camberwell Snooker Club in South London (junction of Camberwell New Rd and Camberwell Passage) are a bit past their best, peeling and graffiti'd over in turn. But something of their grandeur remains. Seemingly this is the work of the 'WCA Free University of Stencil Art'

Rockingham Estate Street Art

These murals are on the Rockingham Estate, near the Elephant and Castle in South London. They were done in 2009 by Morganico with local youth (click on images to enlarge).