Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the SixtiesWelcome to the social and environmental devastation that is Britain in 1996. Welcome to interchangeable political parties and their chattering media jesters pulling together to make Johnny Rotten's dream come true: no future. But despite their best efforts, fear, cynicism and the National Lottery aren't the whole story. Protest hasn't disappeared during the last twenty years, and nor have solidarity and imagination. They have simply taken new forms; they have moved out and moved on. More and more people, young people especially, are making a virtue of necessity and living outside Britain's rotting institutional fabric. Travellers, tribes, ravers or squatters, direct-action protesters of every kind, DIYers. This book is the first attempt to write their history, to explore and celebrate their endlessly creative senselessness. George McKay looks back at the hippies of the sixties and punks of the seventies, and shows hot their legacies have been transformed into what he calls cultures of resistance. His journey through the undergrounds of the last two decades takes us from the Windsor Free Festival of 1972 to the Castlemorton Free Rave Megaparty exactly twenty years later, from the anarchopunk band Crass via Teepee Valley and Glastonbury to today's ever-intensifying anti-road protests, and to the widespread opposition to the Criminal Justice Act. Drawing on fanzines and free papers, record lyrics, interviews and diaries, Senseless Acts of Beauty gives a vivid, insider account of countercultures, networks and movements that until now have remained largely unrecorded. At the same time, George McKay analyses their effects, and gives his own answers to the questions they pose: what are their politics, their aspirations, their consequences? One thing is certain, he argues: if there is resistance anywhere in Britain today, then it is here, in the beat-up buses, beleaguered squats and tree-top barricades, that we should start to look for it. |
Contents
The free festivals and Fairs of Albion | 11 |
O life unlike to ours Go for it New Age travellers | 45 |
CRASS 621984 ANOK4U2 | 73 |
Copyright | |
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Other editions - View all
Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties George McKay Limited preview - 1996 |
Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistence Since the Sixties George McKay No preview available - 1996 |
Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistence Since the Sixties George McKay No preview available - 1996 |
Common terms and phrases
activists Age travellers Alan Beam Albion Fairs Albion Free album alternative anarchist Anarchy anti-roads Aufheben band Barsham Beanfield benders Britain British Bruce Garrard campaign Castlemorton celebrate Claremont Road counterculture Crass Criminal Justice Act cultures of resistance dance direct action DIY culture Dongas Dongas Tribe drugs early East Anglian fairs eco-rads Ecstasy environmental eviction Exodus free parties fucking Glastonbury Green Greenham Common groups gypsies hippy Jon Savage land lifestyle living London Love Lowe and Shaw majority culture movement nomadic organization peace camp Peace Convoy Penny Rimbaud personal letter police politics punk radical Rainbow Fields Village rave culture ravers record rhetoric riot road protest rock Rushkoff Schnews Sex Pistols sixties slogans social sound space Spiral Tribe squatted squatters Stonehenge Free Festival strategy style subcultural summer Temporary Autonomous Zone There's things Tipi Tipi Valley traditional Tree trespass Twyford underground utopian vehicles Wally Hope Wanstonia Windsor Free youth