Author J.G. Ballard Dies After Lengthy Illness Ben Hoyle, London Times Arts Correspondent Pinteresque, Dickensian, Shakespearean. Not many writers are so distinctive and influential that their name becomes an adjective in its own right. J. G. Ballard, who died yesterday morning after a long battle with cancer at the age of 79, was one of them. “Ballardian” is defined in the Collins English Dictionary as: “adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (born 1930), the British novelist, or his works (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels and stories, esp dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.” His influence stretched across a modern world that he seemed to see coming years in advance. His dark, often shocking fiction predicted the melting of the ice caps, the rise of Ronald Reagan, terrorism against tourists and the alienation of a society obsessed with new technology.

Pirate Bay Defendants to Fight On Mats Lewan, CNet The verdict has been handed down in the Pirate Bay file-sharing case, but the legal actions are far from done. "The prosecutor leads 1-0 after the first round, but this will of course be appealed," said Per E. Samuelsson, defense lawyer for Carl Lundström, one of the four individuals sentenced in the Pirate Bay trial, according to the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Samuelsson calls the verdict a scandal. He also claims that his client will have to pay the damages ruled by the court--a total of $3.6 million--because the other three sentenced lack economic resources.

Announcing the Free Music Archive Dave Mandl The Free Music Archive is a social music website built around a curated library of free, legal audio. It's spearheaded by WFMU, but the freeform radio station is just one of several major curators collaborating on this project. WFMU is joined by fellow radio stations like KEXP (Seattle), webcasters like DUBLAB (Los Angeles), netlabels (Comfort Stand), venues (ISSUE Project Room), and amazing online collectives like CASH Music.

Life After the G20 Rampart Collective On the Thursday following the G20 protests, two squatted social centres in East London were raided by riot police, apparently looking for instigators of the attacks on the Royal Bank of Scotland. RampART Social Centre, which has existed for more than four years, and a newly opened Convergence Centre in Earl Street were both being used to house and feed protesters throughout the period of the G20 summit. In both cases, the police acted illegally but, other than a brief report in the Independent which referred to unwarranted violence, the raids remained largely unreported. In both buildings, people were subjected to physical violence and verbal abuse and those that were arrested were later 'de-arrested' for lack of any supporting evidence. Our only 'crime', it seems, is that we are political activists and squatters and thus deemed to be suitable targets. If only we had kept our heads down and stayed away from these kinds of activities, the logic goes, we would not deserve what we had coming. It is right and proper that the events leading up to the death of Ian Tomlinson should be the subject of a criminal investigation but the danger, as we see it, is that it will be seen as an isolated incident and will be dealt with simply by disciplining individual officers, only serving to further obscure the role of the police in perpetuating a climate of fear. Under the terms of the global surveillance state, citizenship has become an exercise in evading a charge of deviance. In fact, the proliferation of forms of deviance is the flip side of the supposed 'lifestyle choices' available under the terms of consumer citizenship. You can 'choose' to spend your money on home improvements, high fashion and high-tech gadgets and are applauded for making the 'right' choices. But if you choose to occupy an unused building for the purposes of providing space for political discussion, self-education and creative activities without the intrusion of CCTV cameras, health and safety monitoring or access restrictions, and particularly if you refuse to levy a charge which situates these activities in terms of market forces, then you effectively become outlaw.. And, if you choose to express your outrage at a system that produces inequalities and then condemns those that become unemployed and homeless, you become a target for repression. The differences between Tomlinson and the people who went to the Bank of England to demonstrate against the iniquitous excesses of neoliberal capitalism are marginal, despite attempts to distinguish between 'innocent' bystanders and 'guilty' protesters. Tomlinson was on his way home from work. The demonstrators were exercising their lawful right to protest. Both were exercising their right to the city as citizens of a supposed democracy

Franklin Rosemont RIP April 12th, 2009 David Roediger, Paul Garon, and Kate Khatib Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12 in Chicago. He was 65 years old. With his partner and comrade, Penelope Rosemont, and lifelong friend Paul Garon, he co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group, an enduring and adventuresome collection of characters that would make the city a center for the reemergence of that movement of artistic and political revolt. Over the course of the following four decades, Franklin and his Chicago comrades produced a body of work, of declarations, manifestos, poetry, collage, hidden histories, and other interventions that has, without doubt, inspired an entirely new generation of revolution in the service of the marvelous. Franklin Rosemont was born in Chicago on October 2, 1943 to two of the area’s more significant rank-and-file labor activists, the printer Henry Rosemont and the jazz musician Sally Rosemont. Dropping out of Maywood schools after his third year of high school (and instead spending countless hours in the Art Institute of Chicago’s library learning about surrealism), he managed nonetheless to enter Roosevelt University in 1962. Already radicalized through family tradition, and his own investigation of political comics, the Freedom Rides, and the Cuban Revolution, Franklin was immediately drawn into the stormy student movement at Roosevelt. Looking back on those days, Franklin would tell anyone who asked that he had “majored in St. Clair Drake” at Roosevelt. Under the mentorship of the great African American scholar, he began to explore much wider worlds of the urban experience, of racial politics, and of historical scholarship—all concerns that would remain central for him throughout the rest of his life. He also continued his investigations into surrealism, and soon, with Penelope, he traveled to Paris in the winter of 1965 where he found André Breton and the remaining members of the Paris Surrealist Group. The Parisians were just as taken with the young Americans as Franklin and Penelope were with them, as it turned out, and their encounter that summer was a turning point in the lives of both Rosemonts. With the support of the Paris group, they returned to the United States later that year and founded America’s first and most enduring indigenous surrealist group, characterized by close study and passionate activity and dedicated equally to artistic production and political organizing. When Breton died in 1966, Franklin worked with his wife, Elisa, to put together the first collection of André’s writings in English.

Human Strike After Human Strike Johann Kaspar From Voices from Occupied London Silently, and without much notice until recently, a series of collective, anonymous French texts appeared between 1999 and 2007 that effectively slashed open a gap into the seamless fabric of banal political critique. Packed within the two issues of the journal Tiqqun—subtitled, at one point, Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party—is a minefield of ideas barely tapped and hardly translated, including: Theory of Bloom, Theses on the Imaginary Party, Man-Machine: Directions for Use, First Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl, Introduction to Civil War, The Cybernetic Hypothesis, Theses on the Terrible Community, This is Not a Program, and How is it to be Done? Subsequently, an anonymous Call surfaced which responded to Tiqqun’s provocations, laying out more clearly just how it is to be done. Finally, in 2007 the Insurrection to Come emerged, that searing text by the “Invisible Committee” which the French government has recently described as a “manual for insurrection.” Using it as their only evidence, the Minister of Interior has accused the alleged writers of “conspiracy to terrorism” in relation to the recent rail sabotages. Perhaps, at the risk of becoming accomplices in a thoughtcrime, it is time to seriously look at this family of texts. For as we will see, although the government is wrong to accuse them of terrorism, they are right to be afraid of the ideas housed within. For if they are to be thought through, then what they are describing is nothing less than the dissolution of the modern world as such. But this goal is nothing to fear for all those who desire worlds other than this one, worlds in which our ability to collectively exist outstrips any governmental, capitalist, or societal attempt to capture our desires. What follows is a skeleton that emerges from a reading of four of those texts—Introduction to Civil War, How is it to be done?, Call, and Insurrection to Come—which can hopefully guide one through the shifting fields of meaning that are produced therein.

"Getting the Rich in London and Strasbourg" Alex Foti dear girls and guys, i don't know how to put it adequately, but i was witness in London vs the G20 and in Strasbourg vs NATO of momentous developments in european radicalism which cannot but be called historical. In London we fought the inequality and immorality of financial capitalism that started the crisis (as the economist titles: "get the rich!" is a slogan gaining momentum all over europe), and in Strasbourg we went to urban war against the securitization of internal politics and the militarization of external politics.