Anarchist Writers

Way back around 1993 I co-hosted a political slot on a pirate radio station for a few weeks, that was my first experiment with audio rather than writing as a way of transmitting ideas. The experiment was brief and it was a decade later in 2005 before I returned to audio, this time online.  As well as talking a little about Radioactive this post looks at the technology I've used and methodology I've developed since then in the course of recording some 100 audio segments.  I include sample recordings so you can see how different equipment gives different results.

I got home from a WSM meeting last night to discover via Facebook that Howard Zinn had just died.  In the twelve hours since hundreds of my FB friends have posted reactions to this enormous loss and links to his material.  Reproducing these spontaneous and often heartfelt reactions here seems a fitting way of marking the death of the man who wrote "We don't have to engage in grand, heroic

This audio is a recording of Ronit Lentin's talk on 'Race and State in contemporary Ireland' given as part of the Better Questions seminar series in Seomra Spraoi which I went to last Tuesday. I've also made a brief comment on me not getting the Foucault / biopower stuff the theoretical end of this talk was based on.  This was the first in a sequence of planned meetings which I think has a relationship with the stalled series last year where I made a brief contribution on social centre type spaces in North America I'd come across in order to suggest that term did not in itself define a consistent practice.

If you want to escape from the misery of the Irish winter the warmest, cheapest and most direct destination is the Canary islands far to the south off the coast of Africa. It is a tourism entirely build around cheap flights bringing affordable holidays in the sun to millions of European workers. But has it any future on a planet threatened by Climate Change? When I visited Lanzarote in January 2010 I was escaping one of the coldest winters that Ireland had seen in decades, a coldness perhaps created in part by the very mechanism I was using to escape from it.

Haiti is of enormous significance as the site of one of the world’s first republican revolutions and the first successful revolution against slavery that aimed at something beyond a return to an older order. The earthquake that has killed tens of thousands threatens to further enslave the descendants of those who fought for and won their freedom over 200 years ago.

These audio files are 11 interviews conducted via mobile phone with Irish protesters at the Gleneagles G8 summit in June 2005 and an interview with Tobie about the launch of RAG 1, the publication of the Revolutionary Anarcho-Feminist Group.  I'm adding them to the blog as part of the process of re discovering old audio I recorded and archiving it, in these cases I'd forgotten recording these at all until the point where I was writing the other two blogs on the topic.

 I've recovered some more of the first audio I recorded back in 2006/7.  These consist of two pro-Choice audio's recorded at protests in Dublin and several Rossport ones.  The pro-choice ones are a picket of a rogue pregnancy advice agency and a solidarity rally with 'D' who had been injuncted to prevent her traveling to England for an abortion. There are also 7 audio's related to the Rossport struggle, mostly done by Skype and mobile phone with people on the ground in Erris during protests.

Yestereday while replying to a query from a friend about audio recording devices I realised that I'd none of the recordings I did before the North American tour on this site.  So I'm going to start seeking them out and posting them here.

 I've just listened to a rather good introduction to some of the major issues of Climate Change from someone I normally have little time for, George Monbiot.  In this audio though he scores some points in terms of the dangerous distraction of peak oil panic and the economics of climate change.  He also lays out why fossil fuels have been so incredibly useful in the development of civilisation to date and why the COP strategy is no strategy at all when you look at the underlying science.

I was half listening to the radio at breakfast this morning when some priest came on to defend a handshake. Which sounded strange so I started to pay attention. And suddenly found myself back in the dark days of Ireland of the 1980's. The story on the news was simple if a little unbelievable. The previous day, Danny Foley, a nightclub bouncer had been sentenced for a sexual assault outside the club in Listowel where he worked. He'd been caught lying to the court and there was even CCTV evidence of his guilt. The Judge noted that "little or no remorse had been shown, nor any apology given to the victim" yet on conviction at least 40 or 50 men including the local priest had lined up to shake his hand.