FreeRange

So we say!

After years of trying to cloud the public mind by calling it “piracy” instead of “unauthorised downloading,” key copyright industry reps are starting to realize that “piracy” actually sounds kind of cool. So now they’re lobbying for the even less intellectually rigorous term “theft,” which describes an entirely different offence, enumerated in an altogether different section of the lawbooks. This has all the dishonesty of calling everything you don’t like “terrorism” (or as my friend Ian Brown says, it’s like rebranding jaywalking as “road rape”).

link to full boing boing article.

I’m not quite sure why, but there is definately something very cool about pirates.  (and ninjas) Those sexy subversive bastards!

Remarkable Breaking news: The Leasons

quite amazing!  So three people break into a top secret facility, do something like a million dollars worth of damage as a protest, they get caught (on purpose), they get told of by the prime minister. Two years later the high court in Wellington finds them not-guilty.  I’m fascinated to see how this decision was come to. But in the mean time here’s to civil protest and independent courts!

read the short stuff article here

below is the interview the family of one of the defendants from freerange vol.2:

Extract from Freerange Vol.2: Gardening and Violence

WARNING for Aucklanders

Dear Aucklanders

Here at freerange we are concerned with things urban, designy and political. So the current changes to the governance of the greater Auckland region are of great concern.  As residence of this region I hope you are actively taking note of the corporate takeover that is happening to your fine city.  While Wellingtonian’s are wrestling to avoid another mayorally induced embarrassment, and the citizens of Melbourne are protesting about threats to their god given right to party loud and late, the young residents of Auckland seem asleep while billions of dollars of rate payed assets are been quietly shuffled over to corporate governance.

If there’s ever been a time to get angry and start protesting, this is it.  75% of Aucklanders hard earned resources, thats the water, the roads, council run facilities are about to be handed over to corporate styled entities that have no democratic control whatsoever.  Consider that for a moment, all the billions of wealth and future planning of it will be run by government appointed boards of directors with no oversight from Auckland Councilors or Mayors.   This is been pushed by a party that received 3.75% of the vote last election, the same folks that sold Telecom, sold the Railways and sold BNZ.   Add to this the fact that the current National governments promise not to sell any assets finishes in about 15 months,  these new entities will already be packaged and ready to sell by then.  Over half of the rate payers annual income will be given to these new entities and will have no responsibility to the citizens of Auckland. Whats going on with this process is ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT, and only some significant protest and disapproval from the people of auckland is going to slow them down.  So Aucklanders, time to sit up straight, take heed, and get stuck into this one.

Here’s a bunch of links from the past few days:

Russell Brown on Auckland Leaky Council

Joyce the truck lobbyiest lovers dream

Mike Lee outlines the details of the takeover

Archimetecture

I was in Samoa recently chatting to someone about my favourite architects that actually build stuff and decided to write a list of my top ten. Given that I’ve studied architecture for a number of years that is really to scary to write down I was quite surprised how hard this list was to write. I don’t know if this means that my memory really is appalling or whether architects are just a bit shit at their jobs. Anyway without any doubt here’s ten that definately are not shit… in no particular order.

1. Geoffery Bawa (Sri Lanka)
2. Gerald Melling (NZ)
3. Peter Rich (South Africa)
4. Donovan Hill (Brisbane)
5. Laurie Baker (India)
6. Herzog de Meuron (Swiss)
7. Sumangala Jayatillaka (Sri Lanka)
8. John Scott (NZ)
9. Paulo Solari (America)
10. I guess I have to put Gaudi in there.

I’d be very interested to know what other people think.

ps. I’m well aware that there are no women on this list which is a devastating comment on something.  I’m not sure if its my tastes, the architecture profession, the media, the institutions…

Supporting the questioners…

In the lastest edition of freerange there is an excellent interview with the family The Leasons. Pg 20-26.  This article is a lovely background to a family that has raised some very timely questions about what is the right way to protest in today complex global environment.   Otaki organic gardener Adrian Leason is one of three individuals charged with crimes related to a non-violent and quite successful attack on the American led spy base in Waihopai.  After a long wait the three appeared in court yesterday and were accompanied by some 50 protestors outside of court. The Dominion Post in Wellington has the following article about the first day of the trial.  The author of the freerange article Ruth Hill introduces the family with the following:

“A small organic holding in sunny Otaki, New Zealand, sprouting kids and pigs and walnut trees, seems a world away from the devastation of war-torn Iraq. But for Adrian and Shelley Leason, the two are intimately connected.”

I’d have thought that most of the world is a world away from the devastation of war-torn Iraq, and this I guess is the point.  In our highly choreographed democracies it takes  something special to remind us of the devastation that war actually is.  The three individuals readily admit to committing the acts, but argue however that it was an act of self defense on behalf of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

My personal view falls a few different ways on this: On one hand the war in Iraq was and is an absolute travesty of the worst sort of lies and distorted politics, and the Blair’s and Bushes who created it should be locked away forever. There is no crime worse than the fabrication of lies to a population and an army which then leads to all out and very one sided war.  On the other hand we have to ask if the breaking of more laws is a suitable way to draw attention to this matter?  And on another hand we have to ask if attacking a spy base in New Zealand is the appropriate means to protest a war in another part of the world?   It does strike me as a remarkably daring and effective display of activism, and given the absolute and utter devastation acted upon the people of Iraq, this was a pretty small scale act of protest.  I draw the readers to Nicky Hagar’s book Absolute Power for an indepth background to the role of the Waihopai spy base in the international ‘intelligence’ network.

What does everyone else feel about all this?  Given that we are about to start investigating the role of the trickster in todays world its seems a good place to start a conversation about how to respond to violent power.

The Love of Money

In the spirit of encouraging some subversiveness here is some great alterations to paper bills from around the globe.   It’d be easy enough to make some intellectual comment about the currency of cultural production and the nature of critique on iconic form by the artist but I think it speaks for itself.  Dollar bill y’all! Care of MoneyMumboJumbo, click on the link for more amazing examples.

Objects Without Property

hola comrades,

On March 13, there will be a worldwide launch of the ‘Objects Without Property‘ project, a fundraiser to make it possible for others to make things happen during their residency at PAF (=PerformingArtsForum).

PAF is located in a ginormous ex-convent school (since apocolyptic cult dwelling then german inhabited then aspiring ice hockey museum) now artists’ residence in a small village in northern France.

This is a truly magical place. Forget about quaint French village. Other than the cherry trees, wild poppies and the fact that the village consists of little more than two bakeries and a fete hall, there is nothing quaint about this place at all. It’s a wild rumpus where anything can happen. Where there is only one rule: “The doer decides.” Read the rest of this entry »

Freedom and Walls

In all the popular talk of globalization and social networking and the like it is easy to get the sense that there is this inevitable process of increasing inter-connectivity occurring around the globe, and to a large extent this is true for the swollen middle and upper classes of the developed and parts of the developing world.  The dark side of this story is the increasing prevalence of the simple but brutal entity called the wall and its divisive and violent application against certain peoples.  The Wall with a capital double u is increasingly used and increasingly applied as a devise of division and oppression.  Most obviously in places like Palestine, but also in a thousand other walled sub-divisions, shopping malls, and prisons.  Please spare a moment to watch this short clip on the wall in Palestine and the remarkable artistic responses to its daily intrusion.

Airport Security?

I’ve been doing my fair share of flying lately, and have become a little slack with my attempts to make sure I’m not carrying prohibited objects.  Amazingly in the past week, and on international flights I managed to take: 1 swiss army pocket knife, 1 leatherman, and 1 sharp shard of glass around 100mm long.  All these objects were picked up when I went to get on connecting domestics flights.  While all this is rather comic from my point of view (apart from getting my leatherman confiscated), I can’t help it reveals the pointlessness of this whole scare mongering security exercise.

In the first instance its obviously pretty easy to get sharp or dangerous good onto a plane: pens, pencils, duty freeglass bottles, etc.  They even give out steel knifes and forks!  The reality is that anyone with any military or martial arts training can do violent and fatal damage if they want.

The primary ways that terrorist attacks are stopped through a. a few simple security features like locking the pilots away. b. training airline staff well. It is remarkable how few successful terrorist attempts are carried out on plans and this on the most part because of the huge resources put into surveillance and observation long before anyone gets of the ground.

It strikes me that all this security bizzo is really about making governments look like they are doing something by making us do something for them.  Its a similar logic to environmental behavior like household water and recycling, which are good in principle, but almost entirely pointless if industry is allowed to pollute and externalize its environmental destruction.

Graffiti education

This speaks for itself really, made me think about there seems to be a dangerous creeping complacency about this issue…