roadworks magazine

1 ART CULTURE ADVICE SPORT LIFESTYLE

ROADWORKSPaulette Hall, sister of Mark Duggan, tells the true story

URbAn ARTS & CULTURE MAgAzInE

ART, POLITICS AnD gOLDFISH An ExCLUSIVE InTERVIEW WITH

CHInA MíEVILLE

RACISM In SPORTSCOULD FOOTbALL bE THE VAngUARD FOR SOCIAL CHAngE?

FInD nO EnEMYUK HIP HOP ARTISTAKALA

ALIEn InVASIOn? A bRIEF HISTORY OF IMMIgRATIOn TO LOnDOn

FEMInIST FASHIOn! HOW TO LOOK gOOD

WITHOUT FUELLIng THE CORPORATE

HATE-MACHInE

Issue #01

Dear Reader,Welcome to the first issue of RoadWorks, the Urban Arts and Culture magazine that is made by your minds and with you in mind. When we think about our futures, we imagine a long road that stretches from our moments of birth to our even-tual deaths. We all know that the road is windy and splits off into bumpier or smoother paths based on our choices. Some people’s mission on their journey through life is to avoid all the rough patches and never fail to choose the shortest and most tended path, but here at RoadWorks we believe that if we are able to smooth out the ground beneath our own feet with positivity and determination, then no matter what path we choose it will be the right one. It’s all good to make mistakes. Every road needs a bit of work.

Within our pages you’ll find socially conscious content, such as our candid interviews with Paulette Hall and China Miéville as well articles about the job centre, the Queen’s Jubilee, feminism in fashion, racism in football and immigration in Eng-land. The issues that affect your neighbourhood affect all of London and what concerns London defines the health of the entire United Kingdom.

RoadWorks’ objective is to entertain and inspire the young people of the London and the UK. We endeavour to put voice to the issues that concern them. If your views vibe with ours, send us your articles, photos, movies, music, opinions or ideas. But if you just need a team to be a part of, we’re here to help you on your road to success and satisfaction.What starts here, continues with you and only ends when the world has changed to fit our image of how things should be. Perhaps you can tell: we’re pretty determined.Sincerely,

Joseph Cesare

Editor’s Letter

[email protected]

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WELCOME

286b Studio 11 Kennington Road London SE11 5DU

Akala, Nick Azinas, Nicola Bellinfantie, Giulio Blason, Matthew Cameron, Sam Dodd, Quince Garcia, Julien Bernard Grau, Rebecca Hobbs, Shamma Iqbal, Danielle Jawando, Erica Masserano, Ian O’Reilly, James Ousley, Graínne Patterson, Dan Peters, Elaine Price,

Luana Rodriguez, Un-Hae Schweitzer

WRITERS

PHOTOGRAPHERS / HAIR AND MAKE-UP

ILLUSTRATORS

DISCLAIMER

ADDRESS

JULIEnQUInCEManagement Editor-In-Chief P.R. Art Director

JOSEPH STEPHEnKYRAn

The opinions, photographs and overall content displayed in this publicationdo not represent the views of the authors or any other member of the

production team involved in this publication. The content is sourced from impartial material, and any potential bias is mere coincidence.

Keira Cullinane, Luke Giles, Louis Leeson, Stephen Cameron Mark, Daniel Patteri, Selina Norbal

Matthew Cameron, Quince Garcia, Luke Giles, Stephen Cameron Mark

TO THE ROADWORKS MAgAzInE

TEAM

Management

Sub-editor: Erica Masserano

WELCOME

w w w. r oad w or k smed ia . co . uk 3

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ROADWORKSOnLInE

COnTEnTSCOnTEnTS AUg 2012

F E A T U R E S

C U L T U R E

Paulette Hall:The London riots revisited

28-3313Feminist Fashion:AdDRESSing the truth

42-43Art Politics &goldfish

Could football be the vanguard for social change?

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A R T S

A D V I C E

8-9 Immigration in the UK A short history10-11 Akala: Find no enemy16-17 Being Irish in England18-21 Vangurard for social change22-23 A day at the Racists

book Review44-45 Picaresque: A Confederacy of Dunces46 10 Famous banned books47 Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error

Film Review49 Marley50 Jubilee Downtown 8151 Movie characters who mucked up52-53 Don’t say I didn’t call it: Matt Hoffman

24-25 Diamond Jubilee26-31 London Riots Revisited: Paulette Hall32-33 Afterthoughts: The London Riots34 The Olympics are here35 Afterthoughts: the Diamond Jubilee

56-57 Five things every girl should realise before befriending an ex58-59 Find the work you want... 60-61 Find the work you want... maybe?63 Roads that Work: E-zine Editor64-65 Elle Taylor: Make Me Gorgeous66-67 Education is just an idea!


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OUR TEAM

Illustration by Stephen Cameron Mark

Quince Garcia ROADWORKS MEDIA IS THE BRAIN CHILD Of QUINCE GARCIA. THE JOURNEy THAT QUINCE HAS BEEN ON AND THE BARRIERS HE OvERCAME ARE A TESTAMENT TO THE COMPANy’S STRENGTH AND HIS OWN SURvIvAL SKILLS. THE NEWEST PRODUCT Of THESE EffORTS IS THE ROADWORKS MAGAzINE. QUINCE HAS A HUGE AMOUNT Of ExPERIENCE IN THE MEDIA INDUSTRy AND HAS A DEEP INTEREST IN fILM AND ANIMATION. HE QUALIfIED WITH A DEGREE AT THE UNIvERSITy Of EAST LONDON. QUINCE’S vISION fOR ROADWORKS MEDIA IS TO SERvE A COMMUNITy INTEREST: INSPIRE, EDUCATE, ENLIGHTEN AND PROvIDE SUPPORT TO THOSE MOST vULNERABLE IN SOCIETy.

Culture CULTURE

Culture


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ImmIgratIon In the UK – a short hIstory

Here is a quick and easy to read breakdown of immigration to the UK, starting as far back as the Celt and Pict tribes in the late sixth century.The first historically recorded empire on what today is British

territory was the Roman civilisation, with the first significant conquest taking place in 43AD, under Roman Emperor Claudius. The Romans originated from Rome in Italy, and by this time had already successfully conquered several areas in Europe and Northern Africa, before moving on to Britain and forcing the Celts and Picts to relinquish their control. These two tribes, the former originating in Eastern Europe and the latter in Western Europe, had created the first known communities on British soil.The Roman rule over Britain came to an end in approximately 410AD, when the empire was defeated by Germanic tribes that had been fast approaching the British Isles. following this was the colonisation of Britain by the Angle, Saxon and Jute tribes, between the sixth century and the year 1066. This is when viking conquest overthrew the Anglo-Saxon empire in England to impose Norman law and society upon the UK. During this era, Jewish people were also encouraged to settle in Britain due to their perceived talents in commerce, finance and trade, in order to improve the economy.At the end of the fifteenth century, the Ro-manichal began to arrive in Britain, originating

from parts of what are now called North India and Pakistan. Their language was Romani. In 1670, these people were followed by the Huguenots, french Protestants facing deep persecution due to their religion and no longer safe in france. The number of Hugue-nots seeking refuge at this time was estimated to have been forty to fifty thousand. A largely held opinion is that this was the largest wave of immigration of a single community into the UK to date.In the sixteenth century, when trade lines began to open between England and West Africa, African people began to arrive in London. During the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, there was a steep increase in black immigration to the United Kingdom, due to the rise of the slave trade. By around 1770, the approximate number of black people in Britain had reached between 10,000 and 15,000. In post-war Britain, during the summer of 1948, the ship “Empire Windrush” arrived from Jamaica, carrying nearly 500 passengers seeking to start a new life in the UK. This influx in particular was the first and largest group of West Indian immigrants to the UK since World War II, though during World War I there were also communities developing in London through the arrival of merchant seamen and soldiers, as well as Caribbean and African students and migrants.In the seventeenth century, thousands of South Asians, particularly Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, began their immigration

by Sam Dodd

In the multicultural, multi-ethnic society of the modern day united Kingdom, how do we trace the roots of our ancestry bacK to the first recorded communities and up until the present day?

into the United Kingdom. This was mainly through the British-owned East India Compa-ny who recruited them as crew members on their ships whilst on trading voyages in India.In the early 1700s, thousands of Germans suf-fering invasion from the french in theRhineland-Palatinate region arrived in England, invited by Queen Anne. Since this time, the number of German-born people in London has risen, with the Office for National Statistics telling us that in 2009, there were 295,000 in the UK.Ireland is the source of one of the largest im-migration flows towards the United Kingdom. In the last two hundred years, the numbers have been higher, though they were smaller but constant before then as well, with the most significant mass migration following the Potato famine in the 1840s. There were estimated to have been almost one million Irish migrants who arrived in the UK during this time.After the aforementioned post war immigra-tion period and approaching the early 1980s, the United Kingdom also saw mass migrations of the following people: Poles and Ukrainians, due to the Soviet-controlled regimes they originated from; Indians, after gaining inde-pendence from Britain in 1947; around 30,000 Ugandan Asians, due to their mass expulsion by dictator Idi Amin, and over twenty thou-sand Hungarians following the 1956 Hungar-ian Revolution.When the European Union was expanded in 2004, the United Kingdom began to accept immigrants from Cyprus, Malta, and Cen-tral and Eastern Europe. Around 1.5 million people flocked to Britain from the new EU member states.Today, in the United Kingdom, there are over 200 nationalities living, working and co-existing side by side. Immigration has been the building blocks of the Britain we know today, and part of the country since the very beginning – although society’s views on it has changed over the centuries.

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AKALA:

ApparentlyI’m second generation, black Caribbean, and half-white ScottishWhatever that meansSee lately I feel confused with the boxes,‘Cause to me all they do

is breed conflict,It’s not that I’ve lost touch with reality of rac-ism, sexism and nationality,Just to me it all seems like insanity,Why must I rob you of your humanityTo feel good about mine,It’s all about crime, dehumanizing is how I justify ‘em,So I must keep on lying about the history of Africa,So I can live the with massacresAnd repeat my mantra: Muslim, terrorist,So I can sleep at night as bombs take flight,Eyes open wide but I’m blind to the sightToo busy chasing the perfect life.And the working class keep them unedu-cated

Truly educated man could never be a racist,To educate is to draw out what is withinAre we not all the same under the skin?

I got a heart like yours that pumps blood and oxygenAnd insecurities, a whole lot of them,I’m scared like you deep down,I really do care that the world is not fair like you,But I don’t even believe my own prayers like you,Chasing career going nowhere like you,Lost in a fog of my own insecurities I hold myself up as a image of purity,And I judge everybody else by the colour of their skin or the size of their wealthBut it’s not good for my health as the only one I ever really judge is myselfThe oppressor must suffer like the oppressed though I pretend I’m in control of this messBy inflating my ego, puffing my chestI see a weakness and need to show strengthfor what we think strong is, ‘cause if we’re honest,

FInd no enemy

Photography by Keira Cullinane

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True strength is the strength to be honest And if I’m honest, I am just tiredIf I’m honest, I am just tired,Tired of every day filling up my car and know-ing that I’m paying for the bombs in Iraq;Tired of pretending it don’t hurt my heart, of wanting change, not knowing where to start;Tired of listening to all the conditioning and all the forms they got me filling in.

Next time you see what you think is a thug and despise him,Please know, I was just like him,‘Cause I was like eight first time I saw crack, same time I first smoked weed choking on blowbacks,first time I saw knives penetrate flesh it was meat cleavers to the back of the head,As I grew and teenage years passed many more knives pierced and the shots blastAnd I ain’t saying I had the worst upbringing but there’s a million young men just like me in prisonWe complain about racism and elevate clowns with their trousers down swinging their dick round,Maybe that is not quite literal but everything they do is just as stereotypical,To my real fans I feel your pain and I get the messages but don’t complainThat we ain’t got more fame we’re playing our part,They can keep the charts all I want is your hearts,They can keep the charts all I want is your hearts,They can keep the charts all I want is your hearts,

Call it black radio, don’t make laugh, so is black music all about tits and arse?you don’t represent nothing, you’re just pretending,When was the last time you ever played Hendrix?Or Miles Davis, or John Coltrane, or Ella

fitzgerald, or Billie Holliday;We can call it urban, to me that’s cool,If urban means street, that includes jazz too, and rock for that matterGo ask Mick Jagger or Jimmy Page what they were listening to - the bluesNot discrediting love zeppelin too; just giving credit where credit is due

That blood soaked word rappers still use,All it really shows is we still self abuse,That was the word that was used to kill Kelso Cochrane and Emmett TillThat was the word that the conscience eased,

And made people pleased to hang you from treesThat was the word that let the whips crackNo matter what you say you can’t take it back

And I can say they’re black so I feel their pain easier but 1915 look at Armenia,Is the whole world this human stupidity that we choke ourselves to death quite literally?And I can talk with my comfort-able mouth,With my comfortable clothes in my comfortable house

The tables will turn, we can not stall themEvery empire on this earth has fallen

So unless we can find another wayMaybe not today but it will come one day,And it may sound like I’m bitter but in fact truth be told I am quite the opposite,I wake every day and I’m overwhelmed just to be alive and be like no one elseAnd the sheer weight of the thought of space is enough to keep my little ego in placeAll that we chase and try to replaceAll along it was right in our face,The only we the only way we can ever change anythingIs to look in the mirror and to find no enemy,The only way we can ever change anything,Look in the mirror and to find no enemy.

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[email protected]

OUR TEAMJoseph cesare JOSEPH POSSESSES A COMBINATION Of WRITING/PUBLISHING SKILLS AND HAS A PENCHANT fOR CREATING AND GUIDING NEW PROJECTS. CURRENTLy, HE IS STUDyING PUBLISHING AT THE LONDON COLLEGE Of COMMUNICATIONS. JOSEPH IS IN THE PROCESS Of CREATING AN ONLINE AND PRINTED PUBLICATION TO fURTHER THE SOCIAL OUTREACH OBJECTIvES Of ROADWORKS MEDIA. HE ACTS AS EDITOR-IN-CHIEf Of THE PUBLICATION, AND AS ROAD-WORKS’ JACK Of ALL TRADES. RECENTLy, HE HAS BEEN POURING HIS ENERGIES INTO GETTING THE APPRENTICESHIP WORKSHOPS AT ROADWORKS UP AND RUNNING, WITH THE AIM Of GUARANTEEING yOUNG PEOPLE LIKE HIMSELf fRESH CAREER OPPORTUNITIES AND AN ENvI-RONMENT THAT RECOGNIzES AND fEEDS THEIR CREATIvE SPARK.


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That word alone conjures up images of angry, ‘masculine’ women who hate all men and lack the ability to laugh at a joke. It is safe to say that even today,

feminism still has a bad reputation. But fear not! This is what the vagenda team is intel-ligently and hilariously resisting. The blog is written by male and female feminists who criticise modern day society. Their aim is to reach out to PEOPLE (not just women) to demonstrate that we still have a long way to go and not just in terms of gen-der equality, but by also making us more aware of the ridiculous, hypocritical and self-esteem crushing messages that the me-dia is consistently perpetuating to people of all ages and sexes. What makes this blog so important is that its greatest weapon is humour; that’s right, feminists can be funny. The writers laugh at society, at themselves and in doing so they force you to laugh at yourself. When my inspirationally independent, yet confused female friend asked me if she is a feminist even though she loves fashion, I exclaimed that of course she damn well is, and proceeded to rant at her about why she is for approximately four minutes. What makes a person a feminist is treating people of all sexes with equal respect, while at the same time being who they are and not apologising to anyone for it. See, feminism is not so very scary at all. Check it out and laugh at yourself at vagendamag.blogspot.co.uk

AdDRESSing the TRUTH

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by Rebecca Hobbs

feminism.

Phot

ogra

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by S

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All countries have their stereotypes. Some stem from racism and hate, others from relatively innocent ignorance. I’m an Irish person living in London and not a week goes by that I

don’t hear a joke about how I must be able to drink more than everyone else or some wise crack about my name or the IRA or the existence of Leprechauns. Most of the digs are harmless enough and I can shrug them off pretty easily. What I struggle to get past, how-ever, is when I have the all too familiar conversation: -Ireland is in the UK.-No, it’s not.-Ah well, same thing. It’s not the same thing.yes, Northern Ireland is made up of 6 counties owned and ruled by the UK but the other 26 counties form the Republic of Ireland. This may seem pedantic to point out, but it’s not, and here’s why. In short, the reason Northern Ireland is still controlled by the British government is because of an 800 year long invasion of Ireland by Britain. Millions of Irish people have been massacred and enslaved in the name of profit and growth for the British Empire. So for me to hear an English person being completely oblivious to the facts or dismissing them as ancient history, it often hits a nerve. If you read enough news, you’ll know that it’s not history. Northern Ireland is not yet at peace and people are still dying every year in bombings and kill-

by Graínne Patterson

Photography by Luke Giles

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As An IrIsh person lIvIng here, It’s hArd to wAlk pAst pArlIAment And see A proud stAtue of olIver Cromwell, A mAn who Is to blAme for the murder of thousAnds of IrIsh people.

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ings across the country.It’s a massively complicated and delicate subject which needs to be taken more seriously, espe-cially by English people. for too long the British government has contradicted itself, condemn-ing anyone who acts violently in Northern Ireland, and casually refusing to discuss the centuries of invasion and suffering which have caused this apparent need for violence. It is this distrac-tion from the whole truth which causes ordinary people to make quick judgements about Ireland. As an Irish person living here, it’s hard to walk past Parliament and see a proud statue of Oliver Cromwell, a man who is to blame for the murder of thousands of Irish people. It’s also hard to hear David Cameron condemn the IRA but never condemn the British army who have terrorised the Irish people for centuries. But I do live here because as much as I don’t want to recognise the British government’s power over Northern Ireland, I also don’t want to give in to the power it has over me. I chose to live here and have a right to be here.

The ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland continue and are a daily threat to life for the people of Ireland. The best thing that can be done to help is to learn the truth; re-search, read, and talk to people. Take a look at these helpful links to get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His-tory_of_Ireland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_troubles

http://www.historyireland.com

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the time you are reading this, the weekend of 28th-29th January will have passed, and hopefully without much inci-dent. Better still, the behaviour of players and fans alike will have football being

viewed in a new and respectable light. Could football be the vanguard for social change?On 28th January 2012 thousands of viewers witnessed Chelsea take on Queen’s Park Rangers and Manchester United against Liver-pool in the fA Cup fourth round. It will be the first time both sets of teams have faced each other following accusations of racist incidents between players in their previous meetings in the league.After a match at QPR’s Loftus Road in Octo-ber, videos started to circulate of television footage from the match allegedly showing Chelsea and England captain John Terry in-sulting Rangers defender Anton ferdinand us-ing racist language. In a statement released by Terry on the same night, he said: “I’ve seen that there’s a lot of comments on the internet with regards to some video footage of me in today’s game.“I’m disappointed that people have leapt

to the wrong conclusions about the context of what I was seen to be saying to Anton ferdinand.“I thought Anton was accusing me of using a racist slur against him. I responded aggres-sively, saying that I never used that term. I would never say such a thing, and I’m sad-dened that people would think so.”So Terry was basically maintaining he did use the words he was being accused of but not in an abusive way, or actually even deny-ing to have used them in the first place. The problem with Terry’s explanation is that ferdi-nand knew nothing about the incident until he heard about it on the radio driving home from the match. That would suggest that ferdinand had not accused Terry of racism at all. The video clip is widely available if you want to see it for yourself, andit is pretty easy to lip read what he’s saying too.A member of the public complained about the incident to the Metropolitan Police and Terry has a court date on february 1st. He will no doubt plead not guilty on the day and the case will be dragged out a little longer. The

FOOTBALL: VANGUARD FOR SOCIAL CHANGE?

Illustration by Luke Giles

by Ian O’Reilly

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fA appears to be waiting for the outcome of his trial before taking any action against the England captain. Terry will hold on to his cap-taincy of club and country for the foreseeable future, but that might change, and rightfully so, if he is found guilty.Liverpool’s Uruguayan forward Luis Suarez is one man the fA has charged and sub-sequently found guilty of using racist and insulting language towards an opponent. Manchester United’s Patrice Evra accused Suarez of making racist remarks to him during Liverpool’s 1-1 draw with United at Anfield on 15th October last year. It took a three person independent commission two months to resolve the complex case, which resulted in a 115-page report and plenty of incident and accusation in between. There weren’t any witnesses and it was Evra’s word against Suarez’s.Evra stated he asked Suarez why he had kicked him, referring to a foul five minutes earlier, and that Suarez replied, in Spanish: “Because you are black”. Evra testimonies he responded: “Say it to me again, I’m going to punch you”. Suarez answered, again in Spanish: “I don’t speak to blacks”. Evra repeated that he was going to punch Suarez, to which the Uruguayan retorted: “Dale, negro, negro, negro”, mean-ing: “Okay, blackie, blackie, blackie”. He then touched Evra’s arm and gestured to his skin, at which point the referee blew his whistle and called the players over to him and Evra told him: “Ref, ref, he just called me a fucking black”.In Suarez’s account, he agreed that the play-ers spoke to each other in Spanish, butwhen Evra asked him why he had kicked himback and Suarez told him to shut up. Whereas Evra accused Suarez of using the word “ne-gro” five times, Suarez said that he did not use the word until Evra said “Don’t touch me,

South American”, to which Suarez replied “Por que, negro?” meaning “Why, black?” Suarez claimed that he used the word “negro” in the friendly way it was used to address people of black or brown skin during his upbringing in South America.Even if the word could be used in a friendly or inoffensive manner, if the incident happened the way Evra claimed it did, it certainly wasn’t received in a friendly way. The commission was in favour of Evra and Suarez was sub-sequently banned for eight games. The fA made it clear that they did not think Suarez was a racist and neither did Evra. Suarez said that he would not use the word “negro” again on a football pitch in England.Liverpool was roundly criticised for their han-dling of the case. Before a game in the lead-

up to the verdict, Liverpool players and manager Kenny Dalglish appeared on the pitch wear-ing t-shirts in support of Suarez. Both clubs had been asked not to speak about the incident while the enquiry was ongo-ing, but Liverpool continued to do so with Dalglish, accus-ing the fA of having

an agenda against them and criticising the time it was taking to come to a verdict. Dal-glish talks a lot about the tradition of his club and its history and values, but the club did their reputation no favours with their handling of the case.Unfortunately the two cases above were not isolated incidents. A week after the verdict in the Suarez case, a Liverpool fan allegedly racially abused Oldham full-back Tom Adey-emi during an fA Cup tie at Anfield. After the Terry-ferdinand incident a section of Chel-sea supporters were heard singing “Anton ferdinand, you know what you are” during a Champions’ League game. ferdinand claims to have also suffered racial abuse on his Twitter account. Everton striker Louis Saha has made similar claims, as has former Liverpool

Institutional racism is a current topic and an issue that needs to be confronted in the UK


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Photography by Stephen Cameron Mark

striker Stan Collymore. Nine Charlton Athletic fans have been arrested by police investigat-ing supposed racist chanting on a train follow-ing their team’s fA Cup match at fulham on January 7th.Institutional racism is a current topic and an issue that needs to be confronted in the UK. football is a big industry and the Premier League has millions of viewers every week. Whether they like it or not, footballers are role models for millions of kids andhave a responsibility to those kids. Politicians, and in many cases teachers and parents, are out of touch and many young people pay more attention and are more likely to listen to footballers than they are to any of them. It is a shame, then, when footballers behave so poorly. They should be themselves educated to the fact that they have this responsibility and clubs should be ensuring that they be-have appropriately.British football has a blatant and upsetting lack of black and Asian managers and match officials and a striking absence of Asian play-ers. In 2008, a survey found just five British Asian players playing professionally in the UK, and in 2004 there were only ten British Asian players in Premier League academies. Despite the work

of organisations such as Kick Racism Out of football and the common acceptance that the situation has improved in recent decades and is not as bad as in other major leagues (i.e. in Italy and Spain), there is a problem with racism in British football and it needs to be addressed. A good way to start would be if players were aware and responsible in their behaviour and used the influence they have over fans for the better. A footballer who speaks out against racism or homophobia can have a bigger impact on society than many of the people whose job it actually is to high-light and improve these issues. Hopefully, then, these current problems can at least prove to be a catalyst for improving the games’ image - no more diving, abuse of referees, institution-al corruption, violence and racism; and moreopenly gay players, equality for black and Asian managers, players, and officials… you name it. Maybe football is not the vanguard for social change yet. But, one day, it could be.

PHOTO GOES HERE

Phototography by Daniel Patteri


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A day at the Racists

Luton, Birmingham, Stoke, Parliament Square, Bolton and then Dudley. They grew fast, moved faster than the National front and were uglier than Combat 18. I was skeptical at first, but

I plucked up the courage. My skin colour might be a problem? But no, not if they wanted to prove that they weren’t another bunch of boring, racist hooligans, which the left claimed they were. It was nearly ten. The cameras were set. The busy streets outside Parliament had no idea that in a couple of

hours, it was about to witness a disturbance London had long forgotten, but there was still no sign of Geert Wilders, the Dutch police-man who claimed that the Quran promoted extremism and violence. Myself and many others anxiously waited for his arrival, and then the news broke out that he had ar-rived at eight in the morning through a back entrance. My attention was soon drawn to a group of protesters outside Parliament Square. I walked up to a guy who was holding a purple sign which read, “EDL = Nazis.’ This was

by Shamma Iqbal


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odd. Well, alarming, to say the least.The English Defence League were Nazis? I was yet to discover this disturbing notion. There were at least a hundred anti-fascist protesters. They seemed angry: their chants were of equality and justice. They cared for the Muslims, and they stood there to defend them. Why were they defending them? I didn’t know. I observed the protesters for a while until I was approached by a colleague who claimed that a group of EDL members were drinking at a nearby pub, close to vaux-hall station.There were a few of them, not many. Still, it was early. They seemed jolly and excited, but the air seemed full of bitterness. As I walked closer, the small crowds fell silent. Bald heads and tracksuits, and lots of missing teeth.“I don’t hate Muslims, I hate Sharia law,” a thirty-two year old guy from Stoke claimed as he took a big gulp of early afternoon beer. “I mean, this is our country, we can happily live with the Muslims, but they have to live by the law of the land.” He looked up at me, waiting for a reac-tion. I gave him nothing but a silent stare. As the hours passed the atmosphere was chang-ing: it felt misty and drunk and the crowd was starting to grow. The chants made little sense as to what message they supposedly were carrying out: “Who the fuck is Allah?” a guy yelled out from the crowd. The rest of them just laughed. There was something uncomfortable about their banners that read, ‘Close down East London mosque’ and, ‘Ban the burkha.’ If this bunch of loyalists weren’t against Muslims, then why were they against essential Islamic beliefs? Surely mosques and burkhas were not that extreme?The police presence was not enough to contain the hooliganism of the EDL members walking towards the Tate Britain. The chants of about four hundred EDL members echoed through the city: “Stop the spread of Islami-

fication, we want our country back,” they yelled with triumph. The protesters were then met with one of the leading members of the EDL: Guranj Singh, a bald-headed Sikh man. He looked young but full of passion. He was dressed smartly with tattoos of tears going down his hand. He ordered silence as he took a piece of paper out of his pocket. He spoke of Islam promoting terrorism and those that had died because of Sharia law. He spoke of wild hate with such passion it took me by sur-prise: was this really allowed? A single religion was attacked by opinions and very little fact. Isn’t this what Hitler did, when he spoke out against the Jews and claimed that they were evil? The speech lasted for fifteen minutes and his last words echoed in my mind like a

sharp pain: “God bless the Christians, the Jews, the Hindus, the Sikhs and even the Muslims cos they’ll need it when they burn in fucking hell.”A silence fell through the air and the ground seemed like it had shaken. The disbelief made my eyes water,

but my mind knew better. The protesters of the English Defence League reached Parlia-ment quite rapidly. However, they were not greeted as expected by the anti-fascist pro-testers, who chanted angrily as they spotted the EDL on the opposite side to them: “Nazi scum off our streets.” And there I was, in the middle of a chaotic battle between the left and the right. The police were too busy arrest-ing the anti-fascist protesters to care about the abuse and discriminating language that was thrown at anyone who wasn’t partici-pating in their demonstration. Why was this happening, I didn’t understand. What I did understand was that the EDL were so cleverly disguised that to see behind their mask you had to give them a pint or two.

And there I wAs, In the mIddle oF A chAotIc bAttle between the leFt And the

rIght


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I have decided, after little deliberation, that the Jubilee weekend was a bit balls. Most of it did not affect my plans. Most of it was mildly irritating, yet pretty avoidable, while some of it was much more inescapable.

The Tourist Board think that the weather will put people off visiting from abroad. I can see why they may think this. It puts me off going out and I live here. Lovely-bank-holiday-in-June quickly turned into miserable-sideways-rain-day. That choir that sang on one of the boats, in the rain, showed a will and determi-nation that mystified and disturbed me. I sat in a hedge with a gin and tonic, I still got wet and I was not smiling. Although, truth be told, I generally have very little to smile about. This choir was on a floating vessel constructed entirely from cheap bunting, and was not wearing coats or hats; they looked as though they were in full-on evening wear. They had smelly, London rain pissing all over them and they still managed to sing with a smile that said: ‘Oh my God, we love you Elizabeth, we’re so proud, we’re singing and we’re wet but we don’t care, blah, blah, blah.’ They smiled, yet the Queen, for whom this all had been, pulled her usual expression of what I like to think of as painful indifference. I don’t think they should bother next time. Why couldn’t

they have just put JLS on that fucking boat and then crashed it into a skip filled with bro-ken glass? This, I would pay my taxes to see.

I still reckon that Phillip’s bladder infection was a bit too conveniently timed. Either way, it meant that he missed all the fun. I’m sure he was gutted. Or had he woken up that morn-ing turned to Liz and said: “Darling, I just can’t do it. I can’t watch that group of sub-human miscreants prancing about like they’re worth a crap. I’m going to sit in the cellar and listen to Wagner until all this has blown over.”

Acts that featured at the Jubilee Concert were:Grace Jones: Her usual pelvis-shatteringly-obtuse self, hula-hooping her way through entire songs (what is the benefit of this?), wearing hats that look as though infants with head injuries designed them and just gener-ally embodying the spirit of everything that is awful and tragic in the modern world. Well done, Grace. Elton John: yes, he is still Elton John. flamboy-ant, self-assured and irritating in a way only massively successful, rich ball-bags can be. He didn’t sing ‘Candle in the Wind’. What a let-down.

DIAMOND JUBILEE:A cynic’s perspectiveby James Ousley

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Paul McCartney: If Paul McCartney and Cold-play formed a super-group, I would kill myself. No, wait, that’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t kill myself; I’d kill other people, with half a brick and a length of flex, slowly. I don’t see how that many people can stand that close together, for that amount of time, in the rain, in London, pretending they are happy listening to Paul McCartney mumble his way through ‘Live and Let Die.’ Why were they waving flags? Where did the flags come from? Why am I watching this?It was on in the pub. On repeat. for a whole day.Madness: Not terribly happy. Look, guys, the last person to play on that roof was Brian May. When I saw him up there, with his ridiculous perm and toilet-seat guitar, my soul got sick. Not seriously sick, something like bronchitis or athlete’s foot. Irritating but not life threatening. It does seem as though it has never properly cleared up. Ten years on and I’m still wheezy and my feet are still sore. Take note, Madness.famous Pop Stars: They were shit, all of them, every single one, no exceptions.Gary Barlow: Shifty eyes, shit song about the world and unity and so forth, should have stayed at home. Curiously enough, the song he recorded with all of those people all over the world features Prince Harry drunkenly

smashing a tambourine into peasants’ faces, thus making him the first Royal to perform on a chart-topping single. The pride. I think I’m welling up.

I enjoyed the fact that it was a bank holiday, not that it was the Jubilee. What is it that we’re celebrating? She had a Jubilee not long ago and a big party then too. Surely we don’t need to keep funding this. fifty years was a milestone, that’s half a century, but sixty is nothing. It’s just another ten years on top of half a century. Let’s face it, we have just thrown a party to celebrate the fact that the Queen is still alive and that has a name: it’s called a birthday. The Queen already has two birthdays; she doesn’t need a massive street party every ten years as well. Couldn’t she just have kept it low-key? She should have invited a few friends over, got some tinnies in, maybe some crisps and dips and watched Taken. forget the bunting, the flotillas, the concerts, the fireworks, and the massive ball-ache. Have a chilled one, you can still get wrecked if you want but just play it by ear. It would save all that planning and the effort it takes to smile every couple of years.In short, I think the whole event was woefully underwhelming.



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...whAt does A peACeful demonstrAtIon by A

grIevIng fAmIly hAve to do wIth the vIolent rIots thAt spAnned

the Country? ...The London Riots Revisited: A Candid and Exclusive Interview with Paulette Hallby Erica Masserano

Photo by Louis Leeson

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by Erica Masserano

I’m interviewing Paulette Hall about the charity programme she is running. In the last six months, she has been working with Change Up with the aim to take the youth away from the streets. In the wake of the

London riots, she offers support and coun-sels the youth, as well as giving them tools to channel their energy into media-related projects. “Most of these youth are just being thrown to the side a lot”, she tells me. “Hope-fully we can let them know that they are worthy, no matter what’s been put into their heads, no matter how old they are, what colour, what size, they are worthy. Getting these thoughts into their heads, that is what we’re building on,” she says. “Even though I’m an adult, I’m still crying out to be heard. If I feel like that, I can imagine how youth feel.” Paulette has set up this youth programme after having lost her brother to a police shooting in August of last year. We have an understanding that we are not going to talk about it unless she wants to, but we are both feeling a tad uneasy. The name of her brother was Mark Duggan.

Paulette hall:the london riots revisiteda candid and exclusive interview with paulette hall


Hair and Make-up by Selina Norbal

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On the 4th August 2011, Mark Duggan was stopped by the Metropolitan Police while riding a minicab in his neighbourhood of Tottenham. Duggan was under investigation by the black gun crime unit Operation Trident, which suspected he intended to commit gun crime. While they were trying to arrest him, they opened fire on him twice, and Duggan died of a chest wound. The hours, days, and months that followed found the bereaved Duggan family in the eye of the storm.

family members learned about the fate of their son, brother, partner and father from the news. It took about two weeks from the day of his demise before anyone from the Met talked to the family in their own home. The police and the Independent Police Complaint Commission, to which Duggan’s family had made its case for not having been informed of the facts, discussed back and forth who was supposed to have talked to them until the 4th of March 2012. finally, they issued a joint apology to the family.While this process took seven months, police spokespeople had found talking to the media much more immediate. Some of their statements were dramatically incor-rect; others have, as of yet, not been sup-ported by hard evidence.It was reported that Duggan had fired at the officers before they shot him on the 4th of August. However, it was clear that, though a weapon had been found at the scene, he had not fired a single shot. By the 12th of August, news about Duggan’s

connections with gang crime was all over the free papers in London; to this day, his family has not endorsed the claims as true.“Not even a dog deserves to be treated the way that he was treated and we, my mom, my dad, were treated. It seemed like nobody wanted justice, because he was said to be a gangster,” Paulette says.In short, an unarmed man

was killed, his grieving family was treated without a shred of respect, and the main-stream media did little else than portray him as just another black criminal. Meanwhile,

London rose up in anger.On the 6th of August, Duggan’s family and friends led a peaceful march from Broad-water farm to Tottenham Police Station to demand answers about the shooting. for five and a half hours, they were repeatedly told to wait for a high-ranking officer to an-swer their queries. As the tension mounted, the gathering attracted a growing number of locals, and eventually kicked off. Did the demonstration, then, become a catalyst for the youth’s anger? Paulette was there, and she doesn’t think so. “Broadwater farm is a big community. We are like a big family; everybody has just grown up as one. Everybody knew that all the facts that they were saying about my brother were untrue. So it wasn’t only us that wanted an answer. Everybody that knew him wanted an answer as well, because he’d been labelled, and the label was not right.” And the police’s handling of the situation was far from exemplary. “They were at the windows taking pictures of the youth and they were on the roof laughing. A man has been killed

“even though I’m an adult, I’m still crying out to be heard. If I feel like that, I can imagine how the youth feel.”


30

by the police and they were up on the roof laughing.”from the 6th to the 10th of August 2011, a wave of riots swept Tottenham, then the city, then spread to the rest of the country.Prime Minister David Cameron had a pretty straightforward picture of what was hap-pening. After four days of unrest in London, Birmingham, Manchester and several other British cities and towns, Cameron issued an official statement. The riots were condemned as “criminality, pure and simple”. The Met was praised for showing “incredible bravery on our streets in confronting these thugs”. To the youth, the message was: “you will feel the full force of the law, and if you are old enough to commit these crimes, you are old enough to face the punishment”.Paulette has her own opinion. “Politicians put pen to paper and don’t try to find out what exactly is happening, what ex-actly is wrong, or how they’re actually going to affect the youth. Politicians talk about wanting to rebuild the community, but how are they going to do it? What is their way? The youth are not heard. And what the politi-cians need to remember is that the youth are the up and coming adults, so they will be the ones voting for them, but they’re not thinking about that.”Obviously the law which, full force the youth are supposed to feel, is the same law which shot Mark Duggan and did not contact his family about it, or produce an authoritative response to their queries when they were standing in front of Tottenham Police Sta-tion. It is the same law which released wrong information to the media, leading the public opinion to be that a gangster got payback for shooting at the police, and not that the police killed a man during a preventive arrest.Moreover, this is the same law which stops and searches black Tottenham youth six to seven times more often than it does their white counterparts, as stated by Claudia

Webbe, independent advisor to Operation Trident, and a voice against institutional rac-ism. It has recently been noted that after the riots the proportion increased to thirty times more often.Paulette defines the searches as an everyday situation. “The stop and searches are done so aggressively. They’re so provoking when they do it, it’s so belittling. I don’t disagree with stop and search, but there’s got to be a motive for it. you can’t just look at someone and say: ‘OK, you’ve been in trouble before, let me stop and search you’, because that comes down under harassment. But the youth don’t know they should file it under harass-ment. The police are the biggest gangsters of all. They think that because they’ve got their back-up and their badge, they can go

around harass-ing the youth. It’s wrong, and I think a lot of the youth have had enough.”But what does a peaceful dem-onstration by a grieving family

have to do with the violent riots that spanned the country? Nothing. Duggan’s family has distanced itself from the violence. Rioters did not steal Tvs to ask for justice.At least, not directly.Those media which did not paint a picture of a whole generation as crazy thieves and arsonists have been gathering data on the riots since last August. The composition of the rioting population has been analysed and discussed into staggering complexity, and factors such as background, ethnicity and age may vary widely between areas. In the same way, studies are discussing how the spending cuts to the educational system, the rising unemployment and the closing of youth clubs have hit these youth and contributed to their exasperation. Britain is facing old issues, such as racial profiling, and new issues, such as the recession. All of these claims are valid.However, if we are willing to lay the papers down for a moment and consult community

“what the politicians need to remember is that the youth are the up and coming adults, so they will be the ones voting for them, but they’re not thinking about that.”

CULTURE

members and witnesses, like Paulette Hall her-self, they’ll conflate this multi-layered analysis for us no problem. Their picture is as simple as the one depicted by David Cameron, but diametrically opposite.They’ll tell you that the riots catalysed the wrath of a generation of disenfranchised youth. And that, mostly, these youth were responding to the authorities’ attitude towards them in the only way they knew.By taking what is not freely given. fighting fire with fire.“Most of the people I spoke to after the riots have a lot of anger in them. And that anger has not come all of a sudden, it has built up. My brother’s situation was a spark. I don’t approve of what happened at the riots, but I know how it feels to be angry and not be able to let out and say what you feel,” Paulette tells me. She knows everything about grow-ing up in institutions where the people who are supposed to be role models believe that black youth are never going to amount to anything, and constantly tell them so. “you go to school and your teacher tells you you’re never going to turn out to be anything, you go through your life thinking that you’re never going to be anything, and by the time you get to be a teenager, you’ve got the police on you telling you that you are never going to be anything, you’re just a wannabe gangster… That just sticks in your head. If these are the people who are supposed to be helping you, and

they are not showing you the way, then what roads do you have left to go down?”She also knows what it means to be lied to and disrespected by the authorities in a mo-ment of extreme pain and vulnerability. It is a terrible knowledge to have. And it is with this knowledge she has decided to be on the front line of a fight to give the youth their self-worth back.To be sure, her words are more powerful than a thousand molotovs, but reducing her work to a dream of turning violence into beauty would be reductive. She lives in the real world. And in the real world, London has the worst international rate of stop and search related discrimination. This is why her project is about teaching the youth to speak out for them-selves, to find a voice in the community to articulate their wants and needs. But if they have to be taught how to speak, whoever

is at the other end must learn to listen, as Paulette is doing: “We want to go along each step of the way with these youths, so that they’re not alone and they have got some-one to talk to, because

most of the time it’s just what they need.”The community’s indignation at the senseless killing of Mark Duggan and the self-righteous-ness of the vandalizing youth have been ignited by the same spark. They have been a reaction to the same uncomfortable issue, a one-word dilemma no civil society ever wants to look in the face. t’s called inequality.

“Politicians talk about wanting to rebuild the community, but how are they going

to do it? what is their way?”

Mark Duggan 1982 - 2011 R.I.Pw w w. r oad w or k smed ia . co . uk 31

32 w w w. r oad w or k smed ia . co . uk

CULTURE

The summer looting of London was an experience I witnessed and a time frame I captured on my camera. An image that stuck in my head is a red bus burnt outside of Oliver Goldsmith

Primary. This is the school of Damilola Taylor, who was killed on a stairway in 2000, at the age of 10.It seems a cliché to mention how anger spilled onto the streets; in fact, what I also wit-nessed was a hopelessness I found extremely sad.There was conspicuous police activity almost everywhere when me and Julien entered Peckham. The police’s interpretation of its job description, “to protect and serve”, doesn’t live up to the expectations of a large portion of the public. But it is interesting to try and understand what was going on from a police perspective.I know I am treading a fine line here: as soon as I say that, I could be easily perceived as being in favour of police brutality, police injustice and police hostility. I stand against all that. But is the police force to blame, or is it tarnished by the ones among them that

don’t serve their duty to the public?Well, some may answer a resounding yES to the former, and some may recognise the dif-ficulty inherent in enforcing the law.I believe there has been corruption in the po-lice force, and I believe we, the public, have been disserviced and let down. If something villainous were to happen to any member of my family, or to anybody else, the right to a full investigation and enquiry would have to be respected, so justice for the criminal act could be delivered.But, even though I have a history with the law, that does not make me automatically unwilling to praise police efforts. I find it rel-evant to recognise it’s taking a shot at solving gang affiliated crimes, and protecting the public from terrorism and from more every-day crimes like robberies and burglaries.Whatever our perception or belief about them, the police force remains an integral part of British society and upholds a funda-mental common decency, maintaining the law we as citizens under a monarchy abide with. No one has to like the police, but surely we can acknowledge the role they play.

by Quince GarciaAFterthoUghts: the london rIots


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It has been a big deal for the UK, the sport-ing event of the year that has re-sculpted East London is closing roads for millions of commuters and threatens to cause havoc on our public transport system. We’ve

watched billions being spent on a sporting event that in its infancy didn’t even budget clothes for the athletes. Now with our tax money well and truly spent and the growing anticipation being forced on us over every tannoy and billboard in the city, I can’t help thinking of the competitors. Sporting men and women from the four corners of the globe, only the fastest and strongest have been selected and sent to compete in an event dating back to the seventh century BC. They have put themselves through intensive training and strict diets to be the best that is humanly possible in a variety of physical dis-ciplines. The regime of food intake is carefully monitored by experts who are at the cutting edge of sports science and employ only the most sophisticated methods, using new and secret techniques to seek out every last bit of power. I wonder what it must be for this sporting elite to be surrounded by food and drinks brands that sell possibly some of the unhealthiest substances on the planet? Why would an artery clogging fast food corpora-tion want anything to do with funding a sport-ing event, especially when you consider that the participants wouldn’t be allowed within a pole-vault of one of their eateries? Surely the likes of the British Heart foundation or fitness first should be spearheading the Olympic campaign, not soft drinks, fast food, beer and drug manufacturers. It is only when we bring in other factors that the inherent contradiction of this advertising campaign becomes clear. Great Britain is a nation with heart disease its biggest killer and watching sport on Tv has

no correlation with being healthy. Beer and football seem to have become one. I know that England does not have a high sporting success rate; we seem to have lots of very qualified couch managers but we are a bit thin on the sports fields. But is it any wonder when we have posters that say their product is for: ‘The so close and yet so far-ers’? It’s almost preparing us for failure. It is only then that I can see the strategy. for when we do fail, what will we do? Depression is one of the most common conditions in this nation, affect-ing almost twenty five percent of the popula-tion. Suicide is still the most common cause of death for men under thirty-five. When we’re feeling down there are a few things we all do to make ourselves feel better, and binging on junk foods and taking drugs are some of them. So, in fact, it’s not such a jump tounderstand why the suppliers of our feel good products have latched onto the Olympics and used it as a commercial vehicle. Beer and fries anyone?

by Julien Bernard Grau

the olympics are here


CULTURE

OK, so the Queen of Britain has reigned for 60 years. What the monarchy stands for has so many connotations that it is impossible for judgements and

opinions, both negative and positive, not to arise. Listening to the LBC, I felt like I was lending an ear to the British people’s joy and frustration. It’s always insightful to learn about how people today feel about the state of Brit-ish culture and society as a whole.“What does it mean to be British?” Is the question I heard in the tone of the republi-cans’ voices, who favour an elected head of state, not to forget the angry and frustrated who have had a tough ride within the British system and feel it has let them down.During the reign of this present monarch, there has been much to acknowledge in terms of how Great Britain has changed. Mass immigration, gay rights, a social revolution for fashion, music and art came about. Stigmas and taboos have been challenged, offer-ing British people more rights and greater freedoms.yes, the negative history of the Royals speaks of a murderous elite, of pillaging, torture and slavery. I would never attempt to deny what the Irish suffered in the past. However,despite being a descendant of slaves, I stand proud

of what I live for today, knowing how I be-came me. My Jamaican heritage makes me proud and I’m equally proud to be British.The Jubilee tried to give the people of Britain a celebratory moment for a lasting affair in history. We all have our views of the Royals and of Britain as a state, but one thing we can agree upon is that it the party went really well.

by Quince Garcia

afterthoughts: the diamond Jubilee


36Photography by Stephen Cameron Mark

W e were invited to meet Prince Charles at the Angel to discuss theendeavour of our company to entertain, inspire and enlighten thedisenfranchised youth of London and the United Kingdom through our

“RoadWorkshops.” He was very receptive and interested to see whatwould come of our brainchild in months and years to come.

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F r o m humble beginnings, RoadWorks Media has continued to go fromstrength to strength. We’ve made increasingly regular appearances atthe Houses of Parliament’s many social welfare conferences. Our mostrecent invitation was to attend July 27th’s Talk London event with

Mayor Boris Johnson and Nick ferrari. Wherever issues are discussedthat affect the youth of London, we want to be there. Our most recentfilms, which are a novel exploration of last year’s riots, have beenchosen to be featured at the Brixton film festival, the PortobelloRoad film festival, the Unity faith festival and the WestbourneStudios film festival. We are proud to use our unique position toenlighten the wider public in any way we can! Things are just heatingup, here at RoadWorks Media. Get involved and bring a friend.

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OUR TEAMJulien Bernard-GrauJULIEN IS THE CO-fOUNDER Of ROADWORKS MEDIA. HIS INvOLvEMENT WITH fILM ANDTHEATRE COvERS LIGHTING DESIGN TO WRITING, PRODUCING, PERfORMING ANDDIRECTING. HE HAS ALSO STUDIED THEATRE DIRECTING AT THE LONDON DRAMACENTRE. HE HAS PRODUCED AND DIRECTED NUMEROUS SHORT fILMS TO DATE AND ISCONTINUALLy WORKING ON NEW AND ExCITING PROJECTS, LIKE THE NATIvE SPIRITfOUNDATION’S fILM fESTIvAL. JULIEN THINKS Of fILM AS AN AESTHETIC ANDEDUCATIvE TOOL, AND IS ALWAyS ExPERIMENTING WITH THE POSSIBILITIES Of THEMEDIA. HIS ExPERIENCE IN THE fIELD, HIS KEEN EyE ON REALITy AND HISINQUISITIvE MINDSET ARE ALL TALENTS HE LENDS TO ROADWORKS, AND WHICH MAKEROADWORKS’ PRODUCTIONS DISTINCTIvE IN THEIR LOOK AND THEIR ANGLE.


ARTS ARTS

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Art, Politics, and goldfish An exclusive interview with china miéville

by Graínne Patterson

What if your ideal job means sell-ing out on some of your moral or political values?In an economic climate where decent work is scarce, to make

a career for yourself as a writer seems impos-sible, let alone making one while staying im-maculately obedient to your beliefs. I wanted to know how to achieve this, so I asked a man who has managed it brilliantly and has built a successful career for himself on the back of his socio-political novels. At the fantastically educational UEL and Stratford Circus reading event, Write Now, organised by Tessa Mc-Watt, China read alongside Bonnie Greer, Tim Atkins, Olumide Popoola and Tessa herself. Afterwards, I sat down with China and asked him what young writers can do to make a ca-reer for themselves in writing while still holding on to their political integrity.“In a sense, it’s a non-issue,” he begins, “because it’s like anything. It can be difficult to be a socialist and be a plumber, because what if you get a job to fix the pipes at some

shitbag right-winger’s house?”He’s referring to a problem many people face and one that writers especially must be careful with – needing to make money while sometimes having to question your own beliefs and the implications of working in certain areas. China knows how hard it is to work in this industry, and he has a lot of compassion for people put in awkward posi-tions because of it. “These are valid problems, but making a living as a writer, you’ll need an enormous amount of luck, the stars have to align, you need to practice so much and have so much skill that on top of that, worry-ing about politics, in that arena, is just making trouble for yourself. Of course it’s important, but you can trust yourself to get on with it. If you really want to make a living as a writer, write the best books you can, write the books that you want to write, they will be as political as you want them to be and you just have to hope someone wants to read them. I’m not suggesting that politics isn’t important. I think it’s very important, but that’s not the axis on

... making a living as a writer, you’ll need an enormous amount of luck, the stars have to align ...“ ”

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by S

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which we should agonise.”What he calls the ‘Goldfish point,’ is something he feels is important for writers to remember, “If you have the opportunity to make a living as a writer, you can’t always write articles that are political. One day they might say: ‘you have some really beautiful goldfish, write an article about your goldfish’. It’s for the Evening Standard, a right-wing newspaper. Is that selling out? No more so than a teacher teaching in a school that’s taking a policy that they don’t agree with or a plumber fixing the pipes of a policeman’s house. you can agonise over these things, but there are limits. They can change moment to moment and it just depends on the context. There’s nothing ignoble or reactionary about saying: ‘This is my favourite chocolate bar and I’m going to write about it because someone asked me and I’ll get paid a few quid and it’ll be fun’. you just have to make the decision for your-self. Tying oneself in knots about it is not the productive thing to do. One of the key things is to not make a judgement in isolation. for example, I support the boycott movement of Israel and sometimes an invitation might come to me which is a bit borderline or complicated so rather than sitting and agonising, I contact the people who run the boycott movement and ask them what they think.”Days before this interview, China stepped down from a panel of writers at a sci-fi con-vention because there were no females on

the panel. He is a man of his word but he also knows how hard it is for writers to succeed, which is why he stresses the need for us to know our own limits of what we will stand for.“If your standards for venues for which you’re going to write are that you agree with them politically, in today’s world, you’re not going to have that many venues left to write for, so it’s just a question of where your limit is.”At Write Now, China read ‘The 9 Method’, a short story about techniques of torture used in Guantanamo Bay, proving that his work organically encompasses his political ideas. It was an honour to see this in action and he left me with advice for writers who want to bring their politics into their work:“I don’t think you should be programmatic about it. If you feel like what you’re trying to do is use fiction or art as a medium to send a message, you’re going to be setting yourself up for disappointment. What you want to do is write the best book that you can and if you’re a political person, the way you look at the world is going to be intrinsically political and therefore the way you think about the book will be intrinsically political, among other things. If you try to take that out, you’re going to bleed out the passion that is part of what makes your work whatever it is. If you try and foreground it in a way that isn’t natural, it’s going to feel stilted. In a sense, I think the key thing to do is just relax into your own voice and write the best way you can.”

what if your ideal job means selling out on some of your moral or political values?

If your standards for venues for which you’re going to write are that you agree with them politically, in today’s world,

you’re not going to have that many venues left to write for, so it’s just a question of where your limit is...

”“

”“


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A university professor and minor au-thor based in the American South receives insistent appeals from a mother to read a manuscript

written by her son, a suicide. After having re-fused a number of times, he gives in, mostly hoping that the writing will be so bad he will allow himself to stop reading and put a final stop to the absurd back-and-forth. Instead, the manuscript grabs him by the lapels of his coat and throws him all around with its sur-real choice of characters, its merciless satire, and its boisterous style. The manuscript becomes a modern-day classic. His author will never know.If you have read A Confederacy of Dunces, you know this has every attribute to be a scene from the novel, and you also know it isn’t. It’s the true story of how the manuscript reached publication.The professor is Walker Percy, who provides a foreword to the book. The mother is Thel-ma O’Toole, who found a carbon copy of the manuscript between her son’s personal effects after his suicide. And the son and author of the novel is John Kennedy Toole, who, after seeing his manuscript refused again and again by the publishing houses, committed suicide at the age of 31, leaving us bereft of his picaresque genius.The anti-hero of the novel, Ignatius Reilly, carries the burden of an august Latin name and of a gargantuan body mass. After graduating from college, he mainly spends his days writing musings on life on an endless series of notebooks.In his immodest opinion, the world degener-

ated from the purity of early Catholicism to a cesspit of moral degradation, and he acquiesces the cyclical twists and turns of fate with the resigned attitude of an Ancient Roman philosopher. When not engaged in hateful thinking, Ignatius sometimes cor-responds with his nemesis, the New york Jewish lefty feminist Myrna Minkoff, aka ‘the Minkoff minx’, whose outlook is as radical as his is conservative.The most important ongoing conflict in Igna-tius’ life, however, is the one with his mother, under which roof he still lives, at the age of 31. And Ignatius is adamant: for no reason will he go out and get a job. But the man has to be paid, or he will take the Reillys’ house. And so begins Ignatius’ very-much-less-than-epic quest.Employment is a bane on Ignatius’ self-pro-claimed fragile physical and mental health,

BOOK REVIEWPicaresque: A confederacy of duncesA review by Erica Masserano

and Ignatius is a bane to whoever he encounters on his path, promoting strikes in his own interest, eating the wares he is sup-posed to sell, and generally proving to be completely unmanageable.The parallel story arcs are just as unbeliev-able and feature paranoid McCarthyists, policemen in various disguises, resourceful black vagrants, talentless strippers, cor-respondence course psychologists and ac-countants well past the age of retirement. Ignatius, our working class hero, shambles through offices, factories and streets, jam-ming the machine out of spite, addressing people in his outdated jargon and coming home with the day’s meagre earnings to be met by his screaming mother.On the background is the glorious mess of the city of New Orleans, as all who have seen it before the hurricane and all who have only admired it with the eyes of the imagination know it: bustling, leery, and without an ounce of respect for any rules whatsoever.Language is another protagonist in this novel. New Orleans’ dialects have been reproduced in the novels with the utmost attention, which led critics to claim it is the most vivid and accurate representation of the Big Easy’s linguistic landscape ever. The literary qualities of the language are just as worthy of praise. The variety of its vocabu-lary and the creativity of the writer conspire so that Ignatius moves in a world that is colourful and hilarious. Also, this may be one of the most politically incorrect books you’ve ever read, so brace

yourself. Ignatius’ claims that black people were happier when they worked in the open air of the cotton fields than in today’s factories, or Myrna’s ‘friendship’ with a girl from the Bronx with which she discusses racial issues constantly, even when the girl herself doesn’t feel like it, will make your teeth grit in pain. That is mostly because they are spot-on commentaries on the worst hypocrisies of white people, those attitudes coated in the glaze of tolerance, and filled with the bullshit of racism.The novel had originally been refused publication for being episodic, but the version we’re reading today seems neatly pieced together to me. Though the threads depart from each other and do not inter-twine again for a while, the beginning and end converge to complete the cycle of Ignatius’ fortune. When the tourbillon finally comes to a standstill on the sidewalk of a run-down strip joint on Bourbon Street, we would never imagine there would be hope for Ignatius, but again, salvation has a way of coming from the most unlikely of places. The fight against the bosses of the world is never over, and who knows, our debased hero may get his ride into the sunset yet.Read this book. Read this book and when you’re done rolling on the floor laughing, send me an email and tell me in all sincer-ity you wouldn’t want to have written it yourself.

ARTS

After seeing his manuscript refused again and again by the publishing houses,

he committed suicide at the age of 31.


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by Elaine Price

animal Farm - George OrwellConfiscated in Germany by Allied troops, banned in yugoslavia in 1946, Kenya in 1991 and most recently in the UAE in 2002. Way to go, George! four legs good, two legs bad!

lord of the Flies - William GoldingBanned in several countries due to the level of violence and the way in which it portrays humans as savages. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

Brave new World – Aldous HuxleyBanned in Ireland in 1932 and removed from classrooms in Missouri, US in 1980 primarily on religious grounds. Hux-ley was also challenged by Polish critics who believed it to be plagia-rised from two science fiction novels by a Polish author. Perhaps strange minds think alike!

The Grapes of Wrath – John SteinbeckBanned in parts of America as it was seen to paint its residents in a bad light. Their loss!

ulysses – James JoyceBanned in the UK and the US in the early 1930s for containing obscene material. However, the ban was lifted in 1934. The first edition con-tained over 2000 errors. Now that is obscene!

slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt vonnegutBanned from literature classes and removed from school libraries in parts of the US due to ir-reverent tone and obscene content. How? This book is pure genius! Maybe they just don’t like Tralfamadorians.

alice’s adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll Who would have thought it? This book was banned in one of China’s provinces because of the talking animals. The view was that it put animals on the same level as humans... Per-haps they haven’t had the pleasure of Central London on a Saturday night: conversation with a bunny preferable?

1984 – George OrwellGeorge does it again! Banned by Stalin in 1950 who believed it to be a satire based on his regime, which it isn’t. Clearly... It was, however, pub-lished in the USSR in 1990 after extensive editing.

The da Vinci code – Dan BrownOK, so it’s not really a classic in the convention-al sense but let’s end on a light-hearted read. Better to have banned the film perhaps?

lolita – vladimir NabokovBanned in france for being too ‘obscene’. Nice work!

10 Famous Banned Books

being WrongAdventures in the Margin of Errora review by un-hae schweitzer

Being wrong is the theme of Kathryn Schulz’s book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. Obviously, being wrong is a position we have all experienced more often than we would have liked. Our experience of it can range from unpleasantness to an over-whelming sense of self-loathing that causes us to wish ourselves out of existence. Consid-ering the negative connotations associated with being wrong, it is no wonder we are so averse to the idea. Why do we make such a big deal out of being wrong? And should we? These are the themes of Being Wrong.Schulz approaches the subject in the first person and in an almost conversational manner. The way the book is laid out gives you the feeling that you are discovering be-ing wrong together with the author. The book then goes on to expand on this idea with supporting theories that encompass philoso-phy, science, religion and some remarkably surprising personal insights. Unfortunately, you have to sometimes wade through a barrage of self-inserts that in my opinion interrupt you at the most annoying moments, like an unwelcome distraction during a cliffhanger on your favourite programme. There is also a lot of repetition of ideas in the first part and

in the majority of the second part of the book, to the extent that you are sometimes left with a feeling of déjà vu as you are reading. Thank-fully, the repetition and self-inserts reduce enough that by the time you have gotten into the book you come to appreciate the repetitions as helpful reminders of what you have learnt so far, and the self-inserts start to feel like an accompaniment rather than an interruption. But all of these are minor com-plaints that pale into insignificance when you consider Schulz’ dialectic skills.Schulz explores in her book the idea of wrongness by taking us through the idea of error, its origins, how we experience error and ultimately explaining that we should embrace error. you will be forgiven for think-ing that this is just another self-help book about how embracing your errors will make you a better person. Schulz herself states at the very beginning that this is not a self-help book; let me assure you it’s not. It is instead a philosophical and personal journey of discov-ery on why error is a very human trait. Some of the insights that you pick up cause you to re-evaluate yourself and your own approach to error and by the end you have re-discov-ered your fallibility and feel okay with it. As a recommended read, it fails to get full marks due to what I feel are errors within the book. But they are minor enough that it does not detract from what the book is: a well written accessible exploration of an often forgotten aspect of human nature.

ARTSBOOK REVIEW


To ensure that the message of our films reaches as wide an audience as possible we will be exhibiting our short documentary films at various film festivals:

Brixton Film Festival, the portobello road Film Festival, the unity of Faith Festival and Westbourne studios.

The films which we are to exhibit are variously focused and hard-hitting explorations of the riots which began in Tottenham and spread across Great Britain.

Mark Duggan: Untold.Mark Duggan is the face that sparked the riots and there is still a cloak of mystery that surrounds

the events leading up to his death. “Untold” follows his sister Paulette Hall who reflects on her personalturmoil and anxiety following Mark’s death and the public fallout that followed.

Anthony

When there is chaos, lives are lost. One of those lives was that of Trevor Ellis, who was shot in the head after a suspected altercation with a group who was taking part in the riots. His death left four children fatherless. The film follows one of his children, the title character Anthony, and his quest to forge a future for himself without the guidance of a father. “Anthony” also delves into the fact that many victims of gun crime are young fathers and the long-term implications this

has on the families left behind.

Civil Unrest“Civil Unrest” is a flashback to what happened on the streets during the riots. The videos taken capture the violence and looting that took place on the streets of London. However, behind

the anarchy, it is clear that that there was an undercurrent of anger and frustration. “Civil Unrest” also chronicles the courage shown by the filmmakers themselves in documenting the

unrest despite the dangers.

Mindless‘Mindless’ was a term that was banded around like an anthem to describe the participants of the riots. Defined, it means “marked by a lack of mind” or “displaying no use of the powers of intellect”. To anyone who either witnessed or was a victim of the ensuing mayhem “mindless” would be a fair description. However, the producers felt that the term dehumanised the rioters

and ignored deeper underlying issues. The film questions what it means to be mindless.

RoADWoRks FilMs

Anthony Civil Unrest Mindless

Mark Duggan: Untold

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FILM REVIEW ARTS

As I took my ticket from the counter before entering the cinema arena, I thought it would be best to brace myself. My anticipations had me set for an experience.

I have already had lots of encounters with Bob Marley’s life, but I felt that this time new emotions towards him would be evoked. Im-ages of my parental and family background on the island of Jamaica surrounded my mind with nostalgia. The vibrancy that I felt forced to acknowledge had an impact so profound.If you love Bob Marley’s philosophy, outlook,

the image he portrayed with his timeless mu-sic or any other quality of his admirable work, then gaining more insight into this marvellous and charismatic man’s life will offer you a glimpse into a world of one people having one love for each other. The beautiful music he seemed to create so effortlessly provides an amazing contrast to the documentary. This journey makes you want to listen and grab more insight into Bob’s amazing philosophy, embracing and embodying the yearnings of not just where he came from, but of humanity as a whole.

A review by Quince Garcia



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FILM REVIEW

Jubilee

If you thought that the Diamond Jubilee was a little too calm and carried on a bit too long, you might con-sider a raucously retro jump back in time for a couple of hours. Jubilee is a 1978 satirical movie about Queen Elizabeth I being transported forward in time and facing the shattered 1970s Britain and its punk-dwellers. How?

giulio blason

Downtown 81

Downtown 81 is the kind of movie that makes you wander where reality ends and fiction begins. Based on the pre-fame life of the art superstar Jean-Michel

Obviously with the help of the spirit guide Ariel from The Tempest. Unfortunate-ly, the good old queen cannot even count on help from her super-great-eventual-granddaughter, as she is already dead. We all know that some-times a simple mugging can take an unexpected turn. So Elizabeth I finds herself moving through a bleak scenario of urban decay and wandering groups of nihilists, through which a keen eye won’t miss some punk icons of the era (including Adam Ant and Siouxsie and the Banshees). The score – composed by Brian Eno – is the icing on the cake of a movie that is already a cult classic.

Basquiat, who also plays the main character, the movie gives wonderful insight into Manhattan’s hipster-post punk culture of the early Eighties... Or at least the illusion of what it might have been. The likes of graffiti artist fab five freddy, musician Arto Lindsay and singer Deb-bie Harry are only a few of the names that young Jean meets while trying to sell his artwork. With a minimal plot, the director follows Andy Warhol’s technique of having the actors playing themselves; something that we can also see in the qual-ity of the paintings, which are painted by Basquiat’s himself, who at the time was a bit of an archetype of the starving artist, homeless and penniless. filmed in 1980-1981, the movie entered in post-production only in 1999, Basquiat’s voice was lost and got dubbed by actor/poet/musician Saul Williams. Punk, rap, graffiti, East village, anyone?

ARTS

Let me set the scene here. The ruler of the galaxy’s right-hand man is visiting where you’re stationed. A group of rag-gedy-ass rebels are jocking you. They’re under-equipped and short-handed, but

there’s still a tiny possibility they blow your fly-ing world-smasher up. It turns out some of your ultimate weapon’s blueprints are missing and may or may not be in the hands of the rebels. The second most powerful being in the known universe assures you that, hey, it’s fine. We’re getting them back right now.Quiz time! What do you do in response to this 7-foot-tall death machine’s claims? Do you a) apologize for doubting him, and instantly cower in fear, b) inform him that it’s your dedi-cation to the Empire that makes you nervous about an attack, and not him, or c) mock his belief system in front of other high-ranking sub-ordinates at the board meeting, making sure to simultaneously use religiously-charged slurs and question his competence.

If your answer is c, take a deep breath and remember: don’t bother grasping your throat because he’s using magic to choke you.

Here’s how the conversation went:

Guy: “Any attack made by the Rebels against this station would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they’ve ob-tained. This station is now the ultimate power in the universe! I suggest we use it.”vader: “Don’t be too proud of this technologi-cal terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet, or even a whole system, is insignificant next to the power of the force”.Guy: “Don’t try to frighten us with your sor-cerer’s ways, Lord vader. your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes or given you clairvoyance enough to find the Rebels’ hid-HURK!” [vader puts the choke on him.]

movIe chArActers who mUcked UPby Dan Peters Illustration by Luke Giles


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don’t sAy I dIdn’t cAll It: mAtt hoFFmAn

I first had the occasion to meet Mat-thew Hoffman through some ridicu-lously cool friends from the School of the Museum of fine Arts in Boston when I was living there way back in

the day. He was a charismatic dude, as multi-talented as he was multifac-eted. He was a film-maker by love, glass blower by trade and traveller by nature. Even before I saw his work, I couldn’t help but think that I’d see him go on to do big things. I’ve since learned he did, and his projects are fascinating, unique and so fucking hip in some indescribable way, that I think the world should probably recognise this shit.

One Halloween I had the pleasure of playing the ‘good cop’ to his ‘bad cop’, so I’ll try and be persuasive. My attempt will be to do justice to a few selected short films through mere description, but only with the goal of gaining your attention enough to get you to actually watch his films. So if I’ve already convinced you, thanks for be-ing easy. Here’s the link:[http://www.vimeo.com/mazel37]Don’t even bother reading on, I won’t

be offended. Mission accomplished.So without further preface, I will try my best to convince you discerning scep-tics or avid readers to jump online and check this guy out.

Argument A: Kids

Kids is, just as it sounds, a journey through childhood as seen through three child characters’ who are rum-maging around a pond for snakes and salamanders. It is shot in a grainy old school film format but the camera angles and post-production leave me only being able to describe the cameraman’s work as being... par-ticipatory. you remember what it was like not giving a shit if you got muddy or bitten by something. If this sweetly simplistic short film doesn’t fascinate you with the complex implications of its imagery, then your heart must surely be forged from silicon and steel, you robot bastard.

A review by Joseph Cesare

ARTS

Argument b: Milk

Classic. Set in front of a black backdrop, hyped up by the tailored and practically narrative soundtrack of famed Justice song ‘Thhee ppaarrttyy’. Matt’s sense of humour and irony are well displayed, along with other things in this video which I can only view as an introduction to his lighter and more irreverent side. I won’t give away the catch... but enjoy.

Argument C: Savage

These two video are not immediately drawn together in my mind, but together with Milk, I believe these films give a fairly clear picture of how Mr. Hoffman sees the world. Savage opens with a might-be tourist taking a photo in the park on a sunny day who is then attacked by a man (Matthew himself) wearing only a loin-cloth and wielding a hatchet with bad intentions. The video then degrades into a beautifully epileptic fit of images and sounds and a story is told ,but more importantly a point is made. What point? Don’t ask me, just watch it.

Final argument:

Matthew Hoffman has a style of his own and isn’t afraid to use it. I’m no film expert, but I don’t need to be to make what seems to me a glaringly obvious assertion: that you all should take the time out of your busy facebooking schedules to give these films a watch. A series of new and quirky experi-ence lay ahead to those that venture into Mr. Hoffman’s world.

Word to the wise: check out Jon’s Birthday...

[http://www.vimeo.com/mazel37]

Or else!!


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oUR TEAMsTephen caMeron MarkSTEPHEN MARK IS A GRAPHIC DESIGNER, ILLUSTRATOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER WITH fIfTEEN yEARS Of ExPERIENCE. HIS CURRENT PROJECT IS THE ROADWORKS MAGAzINE WHICH HE HAS DESIGNED. HE ALSO MENTORS PEOPLE WHO ARE OUT Of WORK AND ARE TRyING TO fIND A WAy INTO THE MEDIA INDUSTRy. fURTHERMORE, HE IS ALWAyS WILLING TO LEND HIS ExPERIENCE TO INITIATIvES AND TO SHARE HIS KNOWLEDGE.

Advice ADVICE

Advice


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2

Five things every girl should realise before befriending an ex

by Danielle Jawando

1It WILL happen. Whether you like it or not, are drunk or sober, in public or in private. Breakup sex is the number one rule of friend-ship with an ex, and 9 times out of 10 you will end up right back at route square one!!! yeah. Sure, you will probably get caught up in all the exciting hotness of it all. But while you’re at it, you might as well just say:“Hey jackass, thanks for the nine months of excruciating pain you put me through when you impregnated my sister/ killed my dog/ realised you were gay. But don’t worry: I totally forgive you! In fact I forgive you so much that I will allow you the honour - even though you hurt me - of having sex with me.”Breakup sex is exactly that! After those two minutes are over you will still have broken up. Probably even more so now you’ve lain down outside his front door and let him wipe his feet all over you. If you have an ounce of respect for yourself, please, keep your legs closed!

Two people + sex = complicated

2. Meow…you know the saying curiosity killed the cat… Well, you may as well just club it to death, skin it, and turn its fur into a hand-bag. ‘friends’ talk about EvERyTHING and at some point, believe me, the conversation will turn to your relationship. If you’re human (which I’m assuming you all are), you will want questions, answers, explanations and you will probably end up finding stuff out that you REALLy won’t like. (Actually I didn’t just sleep with your sister, I slept with your mum too/ I only killed your dog because it tried to stop me killing your grandma/ I knew I was gay the day I saw you with no make-up).you’ve already had one super big helping of pain. Why go back for seconds? There are some things you really don’t need to know... and your ex is one of them.

Two people + sex – a relationship = WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO YOURSELF?

Illustrations by Stephen Cameron Mark

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33. “I’m over it…”you may say this now, but what happens the day he meets his new Heidi Klum lookalike girlfriend? Sure, if you don’t mind hearing how happy he is, how he’s thinking of moving in, proposing to, or going on holiday with the girl who is supposed to be yOU!Go ahead. I’m sure that is physical proof that his life’s moved on and in fact is ten million times better without you in it. It is exactly what you need to boost your confidence. At least if you cut him out your life you can always assume that not only will none of his girlfriends ever match up to you, but his new one is a french prostitute who has given him herpes

5. Happily NEvER after.Let’s face it… Part of you will still love him. Big or small, that part will use the ‘friendship card’ to stay in his life, because it’s only going to be a matter of time before he wakes up and declares his undying love for you! Good on you! It’s the equivalent of being sacked from your job and spending every waking hour just hanging around your old work place hoping they re-hire you. Do you really want to look that pathetic and desperate? When you get sacked, you walk out the door and move on to bigger and better things. How many times do I need to tell you this...? Don’t do it!

If you still think you can be friends with an ex after reading this, then I really do give up. But before you embark on your long tiring journey of self-destruction and depression can I just say one more thing...? DON’T DO IT!!!

4. I owe you NOTHING!Just because you once had some kind of pathetic facsimile of an excuse for friend-ship doesn’t mean you owe it to him now. you were friends BEfORE (he was a Pratt). Don’t think that this means you can go back to the ‘way you were’. you’re no Bar-bara Streisand and he’s definitely no Robert Redford.you need to think long and hard, because, generally when you choose friends I’m sure you don’t make a habit of opting for the ones who have made you cry yourself to sleep at night. Let him befriend whoever he wants, just as long as it’s not you!

fr

iendship card

SEX

SEX

NO Sex

ADVICE


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The tube from Kennington was pleas-antly calm around midday, without the usual commuters rushing to work. A bus from outside Archway tube station continued the journey to the yMCA

Hornsey, where upon arrival a stocky young man greeted me with a nervous smile. Ashton Bellafonte, 23 years old, has been finding it hard to find a permanent job and say good-bye to the job centre once and for all.After leaving his family home in December 2009, Ashton was housed in the yMCA Horn-sey. The hostel houses people from various walks of life in vulnerable circumstances. Photo identification is required to access the fully furnished rooms and communal area where there is a mini library and games. “At first it was quite challenging. Getting to know the surroundings by talking to other people and observing situations helped me”, Ashton says. “It was OK after a while”, he says whilst letting out a deep breath.April 2010 came with a job opportunity at

Haringey Council as a Park force Operative. Duties included gardening and cleaning all the parks within the area. Ashton’s face lit up with an excitement I can only imagine was felt while doing this job. “It was the first job I properly enjoyed. It felt like a proper job because I’d go there every week, Monday to friday, and get paid weekly”, he tells me. “Agency work was on and off, so I didn’t see those as proper jobs and you have to call them to get work. There is no comparison. Because of cut-backs, they could not extend my job [with the council]... even though I was a good worker for them. I was working with two other people and by myself sometimes”.Although Ashton only worked for Haringey council for six months, he remains positive he can find long-term employment. “I didn’t feel like I lost a job. I felt slightly disappointed but they explained the situation. I was grateful I had credible references. It felt good knowing that I could have someone vouch for me if future employers wanted to know whether I

an interview With… Ashton Bellafonte

by Nicola Bellinfantie

Find the work you want...

could do a good job. After that, I just started looking for other jobs,” he recounts.Ashton’s search for employment began again in October. It wasn’t until february 2011 that he found work through Hays Recruitment Agency, as a part-time catering assistant in the Arsenal Emirates stadium. “The idea of working at the stadium was excit-ing for me because I’m a football fan”, he says. Ashton soon got used to manning the tills within a pressured environment, while keeping track of customer orders for hot food and drinks. “We were only open before a game and at half-time”, he explains. When asked why they would not open after a game, Ashton replied, “I felt it would be a good idea to keep them open after the game, but that’s the rules”.Arsenal was playing Barcelona in the Cham-pions League during Ashton’s first shift. “It was surreal to me. Even though I couldn’t see the game, I was in the atmosphere and could feel the buzz of the fans”, he remembers. Ashton continues to work five hours a week at the Emirates stadium and although the buzz has died down, he still enjoys his job. He agrees he needs to work harder to be aware of more opportunities. Regular use of the machines in the job centre helps to keep him motivated towards finding a permanent job. Ashton made a point of improving job centre facilities to allow people to use the phones to call employers. “It would save time and increase the chances of getting a job”, he evaluates.In the next five years Ashton hopes to be-come an actor and entertainer. “I’m a big

fan of Susan Boyle. She’s a prime example of someone who believes in herself and she had the guts to go on x-factor!”, states Ashton as he points out the poster of his role model hanging proudly on his wall. “Eminem as well - to me, he personifies determination at its best”.Ashton is also working voluntarily with Road-Works Media to produce a film script for screening. The film has an Olympic theme, focusing on a table tennis player who is torn between his career goals and peer pressure to avenge his brother’s innocent death.“Doing voluntary work is important to me because I’ve seen the benefits that it presents when finding paid work. Mentoring children with life difficulties also interests me”, he says. Gathering experience in numerous fields will increase the possibility of securing long-term employment. Employers like people who are capable of stepping in when someone else is unavailable. Presenting these capabilities can also lead to promotions within the company. Remember it is better to have a skill and not need to use it, rather than need a skill and not have it.

ADVICE


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youth unemployment has hit its highest levels since the early 1980s, with 25% of university graduates aged 21 without a job. Appar-ently, older graduates find it easier to get work. Although from my

experiences over the last few months, I would have to say that I disagree.My local Job Centre closed down a couple of years ago. Not helpful, considering the nearest one is the next town over, a bus and train journey that eats in to a couple of hours of my day. The new, all singing, all danc-ing Job Centre Plus is bright lights and bold colour schemes, the sort of bright, well lit design that would have Grand Designs’ Kevin McLeod twisting your ears about the use of space and the light, welcoming atmosphere. Big, green banners that proclaim “we will find you the work that you want” like some sort of Action for Employment prayer. They really try to drive the positivity home. Some suggested slogans of my own would be; “Work or die”, “Poor people go to Hell”, “Job Centre Plus; like the Gestapo without the beatings” or “Our dream is to smash yours.” I’m not sure what the ‘Plus’ part is referring

to. It certainly isn’t a place that offers you anything more than a painfully dissatisfying microcosm of the world of job-seeking. They don’t offer childcare or to clear out your garage for you. They don’t even have a vending machine and the toilet is guarded by suited security with ear-pieces and dark glasses. Still, I’m sure if Mr. Cameron had his way it would resemble the prison from Alien 3. If you survive a lambasting from humanoid doctors and manage to fight your way past acid spitting, reptilian desk wardens you may just win a job shovelling the corpses of those who have failed into a large fiery pit that used to be the car park, that, or you get six weeks of unpaid labour in a supermarket of your choice. I’m twenty five years old; I do not need to work for free, stacking shelves for a multi-billion pound company to prove that I am motivated to get a job. Not having a job is my motivation for having a job.A friend of mine once suggested to me that blind people with Alzheimer’s could run the Job Centre better than those currently em-ployed to do so. I say: let them have a crack at it; I’m beginning to believe they would ask more relevant and appropriate questions.


Find the work you want...Maybe?by James Ousley

ADVICE

On one of my previous appointments it was assumed I had just come from an interview because I was wearing a tie. I informed them that there had been no such meeting. However, that it was my understanding that in order to get a job, you had to look like you wanted a job. “We don’t see many of them in here”, no, of course you don’t, who would have thought you would see someone wearing a tie in a Job Centre? What utter madness? There are plenty of things I would not expect to see in a Job Centre; unicycles, talking dogs, a scale replica of Apollo 11, but ties I thought would be normal. In all fairness, a vast majority of the people arriving for their appointments look like they have slept beside a bottle-bank and smell like a farmer’s overcoat. A new feature of Job Centre Plus is that not only must you apply for jobs you think you are suitable for but also ones that you are not and that make you no money. During my latest appointment I was asked why I hadn’t had an interview. My perplexed silence obvi-ously was not the answer Mark, a grey-haired, pleasant but somewhat simple chap, was looking for. “I don’t know, maybe I’m just not the droid they are looking for.” After he had printed me off several jobs, one of which was for a rental car company (he neglected the idea that I would probably need a driving licence for this job), and other jobs that had been on the system for six weeks, all of which I had already applied for, he then gave me a printout of a job as a warehouse assistant. When I enquired about what a CCfTO was, he said, without a smile or giggle, that it was a forklift truck driver’s certificate.“Do you not have one?”

“No, I have a degree in writing.” Mark must have taken offence to this and retaliated by signing me up for a course on Cv writing and career advice. I made it plainly clear to him what I wanted to do and the jobs that I was prepared to take on, even if they were part of my preferred career path or not. I also told him that I thought my Cv was quite strong for somebody of my age; I have good levels of experience in a variety of sectors and a high level of education. I have even studied the practise of Cv writing whilst at university and was probably well qualified to give myself pointers on how best to present myself on paper. “Well, I still think it could be better.”Well, Mark, you obviously know best. I’m beginning to believe it may be part of the Job Centre’s strategy, to make you hate them so much that if forces you to take a job, any job, just so you can be blessed with the relief of signing off. I’m on to you, Job Centre; I know what makes you tick. Please, just trust me when I say that I want to find work and believe me when I say that if I could have avoided this situation I would have done. I went to school, I went to college, I went to university and I’ve been working since I was fourteen years old. Not everyone on JSA is attempting to exploit the system; some of us are just down on our luck. I’m not expecting to get my dream job overnight, the position of Angelina Jolie’s personal masseuse has already been filled, and I’m fine with that, re-ally, I am. All I ask is that people work with me, that they use the blessings of common sense to appreciate and understand the difficulties of the current economic climate, and that they believe me when I say: I want to work.

some of us are just down on our luck


62

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Get in touch and get involved! Write to:

[email protected],

Kennington offices: Unit 11 286B Kennington Road London SE11 5DU

RoadWorks Media: entertain, inspire, educate and enlighten.

RoadWorks Media is an award-win-

ning film production company that

offers visual media services, events

management and venue hire. We

aim to establish a new, fresh look

at the media and entertainment

industry.

WHAT WE OFFER

We are opening our doors to urban adults

of age 18-24 who have chosen not to

attend university and offering Pre-Appren-

ticeship Workshops. If you are unemployed

and subscribe through your job center, the

classes are free of charge.

Practical training classes are held in:

Journalism - Creative Writing - Animation

- Stop Motion - Graphic Design - Photogra-

phy film Production - Hair and Beauty - Mu-

sic Production - Radio -Theatre Production

- Acting -Events Management

The workshops have a duration of two

weeks and run for a total of xx hours. New

workshops start every two weeks.

WHAT YOU GET

If you want to be a student, our workshops

will give you the tools of the trade to offer a

service in the media and entertainment

industry and the skills to set up your own

projects. The workshops are government

recognized and you will earn an official

certification to better your employment

perspectives.

If you want to be a teacher, you will add to

your knowledge the experience of being

able to communicate it, and your collabo-

ration with RoadWorks to your Cv, giving a

new twist to your professional skills.

And if you just want to give a hand in a

more generic fashion, you can train your

competences in your field of choice, or

simply help out with some practical matters.

In any case, rest assured. you’ll have done

something that matters.

To everyone, we offer references to future

employers, the possibility of an ongoing col-

laboration and work placements as subject

to availability.

WHERE WE ARE

We are based in South London, so you should

ideally be living in the area or able to reach it.

If for any reason you are not, we can offer you

correspondence classes as well.

WHO WE ARE

WHO YOU ARE

Our workshops are open to anyone who wants

to learn creative skills for the job market, or just

to try their hand at something new. Our teach-

ing and mentoring team can always use more

energetic professionals with knowledge to

share Help and support of whatever nature are

always more than welcome. Any skill you have

that can be used in the context of our projects,

be it in marketing or catering, has a place with

us. There is always something you can do.

MEDIA AND

ENTERTAINMENT CLASSES,

VOLUNTEERING OPPORTUNITIES AT

ROADWORKS MEDIA

are you a creative young person with an eye on the media and enter-

tainment industry?

do you want to learn? do you want to teach? do you want to make a

difference?

ADVICEroAds thAt work

how did it all start?It all started with some internet research, some fortunate meetings and a few emails. Also a lot of determination and passion for the genre. Without those, nothing would have been possible.During my 2nd year studying my music indus-try management degree, I started contem-plating an internship with a record label in order to acquire some professional experi-ence and enhance my Cv. A couple of years before that, while studying for the Master Performance Diploma at Tech Music School, I had a tutor who was already a record label owner and was well known in the field. I contacted him in order to get some tips on how to get an internship and he replied with a website link with 10 tips on how to make it. One of those tips was to create a blog so that your potential employer would have the opportunity to see what kind of person you are and in what ways your thinking process works. Basing myself on that idea and letting it evolve in my mind, I figured out that instead of just writing about random things happening to me, I should start reviewing gigs, since this was related to the kind of internship I wanted and also because I already went to many gigs anyway. I organised a monthly budget of £100 that would pay for gig tickets and start-ed attending as many gigs as I could. Soon enough I had a good amount of gig reviews and the blog was starting to shape up nicely and get some activity. However, the money wasn’t coming in, it was only going out, so I had to either find a way to make it come in, or stop it from going out. I went for the latter just because it’s way easier to do. I started contacting a few labels and a few emails later I was at the first gig where my name was actually on the guest list!

What does it take?It’s all about the contacts and how you use them. Just having the contacts is not enough. you need to be able to utilize them in the best possible way and prove to them that you are worth their time. Things which can prove to be very hard.Then, you need to be brave and aggressive too. Of course, when I say aggressive, I mean it in the most passive way possible. you need to claim your right to prove yourself and to get the jobs you want. Sometimes it’s hard to get what you want with just one mail, and that’s why you need to push. However, be careful because there is a very fine line be-tween being aggressive and being annoying. They don’t mind aggressive. They do mind annoying though. Also be positive whatever happens and don’t hold grudges.

how to make it?Be true to yourself and try not to copy other people but instead learn from them and innovate. Do things your way, while at the same time being open to new options and new methods of doing things. Metal is a very diverse genre, so be open to every sub-genre that exists and try to face every new music with a clear mind and with the maximum degree of musicianship possible. Of course a good knowledge of music theory and har-mony is very helpful, although not necessary. If it sounds good to you, it is good! Also be aware that people will not always agree with you, so don’t get discouraged if you get some different opinions. As long as you’ve been true to what you believe, you have nothing to be afraid of.

by Nick Azinas

ADAM D. fROM KILLSWITCH ENGAGE vINNIE PAUL fROM PANTERA

COREy TAyLOR fROM SLIPKNOT MICHAEL ANGELO BATIO


64

Elle Taylor always wanted to be in the fashion industry. When she was 16 years old she started her apprentice-ship and now, in her mid-twenties, she’s a successful hair and make-up

artist running her own business.“I was doing my A levels at school and I hated it. I always liked to do more creative things, hands-on, instead of spending all day writing, so I thought: ‘This is something I enjoy’ and decided to do it. I didn’t know then that it would turn out to be a long-term career. In life you have to start with something, there’s no point sitting at home saying ‘I don’t know what to do’. you’ll be there thinking forever. Instead, choose something that you fancy giving a go, it might open a door for you and become your passion, or if it’s rubbish you just go and try something else. That’s what I did and it ended up being my career.” During her studies at one of the top salons in the country she had to learn how to deal with very strict rules and expectations, which gave her a good foundation of behaviour and work ethic. “Hairdressing is a form of art, you can be very creative. But it’s important that you get a good understanding of technical skills so you can play with the creative part after”, she explains. Make Me Gorgeous is her mobile company and it is now in the process of

expansion. “I travel to my client’s house and provide a vast range of services, such as hair-cuts and colouring, make-up and styling for any kind of party or photo shoots. I also offer wardrobe styling, which helps you to get rid of the clothes that don’t work for you, as well as personal shopping, catering to people with busy lifestyles”.Another project for the near future is the six-week hair and make-up course for young people and the unemployed. “If you have an interest in hair and make-up, the course will give you an insight into the industry and what is really expected of you if you want to be the best. It’s all about hands-on practical experience. The aim is for the attendees to complete the course having a mini portfolio with professional pictures. It’s good to have a qualification but not essential; in the fashion industry it’s all about being creative and knowing how to do it. That’s what colleges, schools and the government who push col-lege courses don’t tell you. When you go for a job in Hair and Make-up in the fashion industry, they want to see evidence of your work, i.e. a portfolio to demonstrate the ex-perience you have already gained or what you are capable of”.young people are her passion. She is very concerned about how little attention is paid to young individuals. “People don’t want

Elle Taylor Make me Gorgeous

by Luana Rodriguez

to know or care what’s happening to our youth, they are only concerned with their own lives”. She observes how lack of communica-tion between the kids and parents can be harmful: “At that age you are very impres-sionable. you still don’t understand who you are and it’s easy to be moulded into anything according to the company you keep. Also you don’t think much about consequences. I used to think I was invincible. When I was 19, I was charged with drug trafficking and sent to prison while I was in Australia, and I spent three years incarcerated. I wasn’t a terrible person, I was working and contrib-uting to society, but I did that to make extra money without thinking of the consequences. That was the biggest turning point in my life and when I was released three years ago I realised: ‘It’s time for reality now’. ” The fact that her family was suffering due to the choices she made and realising that she was ruining her own life this made her want to change. “The main point is, anybody can get into trouble, it doesn’t have to be someone who has had a bad upbring-ing. I have very loving parents, I come from a middle class background, I haven’t grown up in a council estate, I didn’t have a drug ad-dict mother, but I still chose the wrong path. Anybody is capable of going to prison. When crap things happen to you, the only person who has the power to turn things around is you. you have to believe in yourself and what you want to do and anything is possible, the sky is your limit! you have to make the decision that you want to change and have a better life and everything else will fall into place. It takes courage and determination and unfor-tunately it might not be easy, but you have to work hard for anything worth having in this world”. Open-mindedness, being positive about your

own life and not being negative towards others are the small things we can all do. And they make such a difference. As Elle advises: “Know that there’s a way out, that things will get better: you just need to sort them out one at the time. Speak to the right people. One of the best solutions is to talk to someone. When I was in prison I had counselling and that was very helpful for me. At first I didn’t care, I thought I had nothing left to lose. When they offered me counselling my first response was

to say: ‘No, I’m fine. Are they trying to say that I’m crazy?’ After about a year I calmed down. It’s just good I talked about everything. Before I knew it, I was crying, and I didn’t even know why. Some-times you have emotions that you don’t even realise you have because they’re locked away somewhere in the back of your mind. If you start talking and just get them out, it does help.” If you are willing to get in-volved in the fashion indus-try, here are some helpful tips: “It’s important to get a qualification but it’s essential

to get experience, for example a job on the make-up counter in a department store. Then, approach and offer to assist a make-up artist: they will be doing the work and you will be watching it and helping them. Experience in this industry comes a way over qualification”.“Being self-employed can be the hardest and the most rewarding thing”, Elle concludes. “you have to keep yourself motivated, no one is going to push you to do your work. On the other hand, I never wake up in the morn-ing feeling that I don’t want to go to work, because I’m not going to do it for anybody else, I’m doing it for myself. I really enjoy work-ing with people. The best thing is when I finish the work and see how happy my client is with themselves and their confidence goes up by 100%”.

when I was in prison I had counselling and that was very helpful for me.

ADVICE


66

! !A + D -

I remember the first time I received an ‘A’. I was 22 and returning back to school to complete my vCE (victorian Certificate of Educa-tion). It was for an English assign-

ment I’d handed in and couldn’t believe after all these years I’d finally received an ‘A’. I’ve got to say it felt great, However, I remember thinking: ‘What does it mean?’ In other words: ‘What does it mean to be graded?I’d been pondering this ever since I was 6 years old. I was handed back a story I’d written and received a ‘B’ and couldn’t understand why some had an ‘A’ and others a ‘C’ when we’d all completed the same task but in different ways. I couldn’t see any logic in it. We were all just having fun and being creative, and I remember thinking: ‘I’m not good enough and never will be.’ I wonder now how many other children felt like this. This feeling of confusion was one of the main reasons I didn’t finish school. I never got what it meant to receive a ‘letter’ on my test and then receive a report at the end of the year saying I was a nice child, popular amongst peers, needs to improve her maths and is not the best at painting. At 6 years of age I had no interest in maths and painting didn’t tickle my fancy. But thinking about how the universe worked and playing ‘jump rope’ at lunchtime certainly did, though these things never got a mention. And, as I got older, the things I loved most were listening to others, giving advice and uncovering people’s gifts and talents and making them aware of it. It gave me a real buzz. But there was no subject for this and teachers considered me a distraction. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that ‘education is just an idea, a combination of thoughts

and opinions on how we should be taught and why on earth was I wasting my time on what other people thought? So how does a teacher decide what score to give, when no two people are the same, and one person’s work will be different from the next? What it all comes down to is ‘opinion.’ Depending on how they interpret the information you regurgitate back to them, you will get a certain score. And what if you get an ‘E’ in maths? Does that mean you’re

not good? Or does it mean you’re notinterested in the subject and the teachershould be encouraging you to do whatyou love? Which brings us to the ques-tion: how much opportunity is there in the school for teachers to encourage your passions? Will it leave them out of a job? Or will it create new ones? I believe the latter is true. In Sir Ken Robinson’s world famous talk at the RSA, ‘Changing Education Para-digms’, he explains that schools were invented to meet the needs of industrial-ism, which is ‘an organization of society characterized by large-scale mecha-nized manufacturing industry rather

DepenDingon how they interpret the

informationyou regurgitate back to

them, you willget a certain score


Illustrations by Matthew Cameronby Lisa Watson

67

CULTURE

than trade, farming, etc..’ He also shows how at the top of the subject hierarchy are maths and English and arts and music are at the bottom. This is because ‘art’ has no place in the industrial world. It can’t be measured and doesn’t guaran-tee a career in our current day, but neither does a degree. So where does this leave people’s passions?Everybody has a gift (Grand Intelligence flowing through you) or talent and we all have something we’re passionate about. We all have a role to

play in this world and our gifts serve a greater purpose. We’re not here to be defined by the scores we receive for our work, we are here to live our passions and make a dif-ference. Some may say that being considered ‘intelligent’ is far more important then following your heart, but education is not intelligence: we are intelligence. Just being alive, breathing, thinking, walking, talking is intelligence and every-thing else we do after that is genius! Of course I’m talking about things you’re positively aligned with, be it art, music, maths, science, cook-ing... Whatever it is it’s all creation and if you love it, god damn you should be doing it!Although I went back to school I never finished. I still didn’t under-stand the grading and spent a lot of time focusing on what I really enjoyed doing. It took me a while but I became a Life Coach and have never looked back.So I wonder what would happen if the education system did focus on encouraging everyone’s gifts and talents. What would the world be like? And would we as a society embrace people who followed their hearts or would we be afraid of it? Nobody knows the answer, but one thing is certain: we have the power to change our thinking and the actions we take. We can make our school systems better by encourag-ing people to live their passions and trusting that everything will be okay. Because at the end of the day ‘A’s and ‘D’s’ are just opinions and edu-cation is just an idea! And we are so much more than that!


OUR TEAMkYran MehTaKyRAN IS A BUBBLy yET HIGHLy PRAGMATIC NEW ADDITION TO THE ROADWORKS TEAM. HER BACKGROUND IN BUSINESS AND MARKETING MAKES HER A PERfECT CANDIDATE TO GET ROADWORKS’ MESSAGE TO OUR AUDIENCE AND MANAGE OUR WEB PRESENCE. HOWEvER, HER LEvEL HEAD AND PRACTICAL NATURE MAKES KyRAN A DIPLOMATIC LEADER IN THE OfTEN HECTIC SITUATIONS WE ENCOUNTER.

JoiN THE TEAM The roadworks magazine is looking for writers, journalists, photographers, illustrators, marketing and

advertisement professionals.WHo WE ARE

Roadworks Media is an award-winning film production company that offers visual media services, events management and venue hire. We aim to establish a new, fresh look at the media and

entertainment industry, and we are doing so by widening our range.WHAT WE Do

We are opening our doors to young urban adults who have chosen not to attend university and of-fering them a variety of pre-apprenticeship Workshops. To support the students in our

Journalism and creative Writing workshops, we are issuing the roadWorks magazine, a bi-monthly magazine which publishes or promotes their work next to that of fully qualified journalists.

WHo YoU AREroadworks magazine is looking for writers and journalists as well as photographers and

illustrators to provide content for the magazine. We also welcome professionals in the marketing and advertisement department to work on promotion.

WHAT WE oFFERWe can offer you a 6-week internship, as well as publication and a chance of an ongoing

collaboration. Moreover, we will provide work placements as subject to availability and officially certified references to future employers. You will work on an urban news publication with an edge and raise your profile, while helping others to raise theirs. You will be given space for your creative

talent, and be part of a team of young professionals.WHERE WE ARE

We are based in south london, so you should ideally be able to reach it. if you are interested but unable to join us at our offices, we can arrange a long-distance collaboration.

WHAT YoU CAN Do

Send a sample of your work or a pitch to: [email protected]

at

RoADWoRks MAgAziNE

Unit 11 286B kennington Road london sE11 5DU.

iNTERNsHiPs

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roadworks magazine

Documents

long road

kennington road london

concerns london

issue of roadworks

roadworks objective

stephen cameron markto

selina norbalmatthew

quince garcia