Alien Invasion 4

Rally at Sydney Town Hall, 10am, Saturday September 8
The Stop Bush Coalition has decided to organise a rally at Sydney Town
Hall, 10am, Saturday September 8 to protest the APEC meetings. more info

If you don't want to protest in the city there are a HEAP of other events and actions in which you can join other people pissed off at th neoliberal paranoid syconphancy of our city leaders....

Counter-APEC events

#6pm, Wed 29th Aug
Trajectories of Dissent Exhibition Opening: Little Fish Gallery, 22 Enmore Road Enmore

# 6.30pm, Thurs 30 Aug
The People vs Bush - put George Bush on trial
Parramatta Town Hall. Prosecution witnesses include: Mamdouh Habib (former Guantanamo detainee), Kamala Emanuel (Socialist Alliance global warming spokesperson), Ninos Tooma (Iraqi activist)

# 5.30 for 6.30pm, Fri 31 Aug
APPEC public forum
Sydney Masonic Centre Banquet Hall, 66 Goulburn St, city. Featuring: Sharon Burrow (ACTU), Don Henry (ACF), Yuri Munsayac (Philippines)

# 9.30am-4pm, Sat 1 Sept
Asia Pacific People for Environment & Community (APPEC) conference
Guthrie Theatre, University of Technology, Sydney, Harris St.

# Tues 4 Sept @ 5pm,
George Bush is NOT welcome here
Sydney Town Hall. Action to mark the arrival of George Bush in Sydney.

Wed 5 Sept
# 8.30am,
Anti-war court action
Waverley Court, 151 Bronte Rd, Waverley. Support action for anti-war activist Peter McGregor who was arrested in connection with his citizen's arrest of Philip Ruddock for war crimes.
# 1pm,Walkout Against George (student walkout) Belmore Park.
# 6pm,
Exhibition Opening and Activist dialogue
Mori Gallery, 168 Day Street sydney, with members from the Asia Pacific Research Network.

# 11am-2pm, Fri 7 Sept
All People for Environment & Community Festival
Hyde Park North.
# 6pm, Fri 7 Sept
Convergence meeting
Venue to be notified. This meeting will include a briefing on the latest rally details and will make any final decisions about the Saturday rally
# evening, Fri 7 Sept
Ghost dance Hyde Park North.

# 10am, Sat 8 Sept
Stop Bush - Make Howard History rally
Sydney Town Hall. Protest to end the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan; stop global warming; & defend workers' rights.

# 3pm, Sat 8 Sept
Rally de-brief
Taylors on Central, 84-86 Mary St, Surry Hills. Regroup and discuss the day's events before the Stop Bush gig!

# 4pm, Sat 8 Sept
Protest gig
Taylors on Central, 84-86 Mary St, Surry Hills. Protest gig with Chaosmaths, Social Progression System, Wire MC, Jakalene Xtreme (and more)
Other counter-APEC events

Alien Invasion 3

Protestors

Will people be allowed to protest during APEC?
Groups and individuals that choose to express their views peacefully can be assured they will be able to do so.

There is no objection to people expressing their views through the lawful and democratic means of peaceful assembly.

The NSW Police Force is actively involved in a mediation process to provide liaison between potential protest groups and APEC security officials. People wishing to protest in Sydney during APEC should contact the NSW Police. You can attend your local police station and obtain a notice of intention to hold a public assembly. This is generally referred to as a Form 1. If you can't attend a police station, you can call your local police for advice.

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Will the police lock up protestors?
Groups and individuals that choose to express their views peacefully can be assured they will be able to do so.

However, demonstrators must also respect the right of others, including representatives of both foreign and domestic governments, to get on with their business in Australia free from violence.

Those who encourage or participate in violence or criminal activity, and put the safety of themselves or others at risk, will be apprehended by police and dealt with appropriately.

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from: http://www.apec2007.org/

Alien Invasion 2

Sydney Peoples Alternative Rally & Festival
Friday September 7, 11am-2pm

Hyde Park North
YES for a nuclear-free, peaceful, and democratic
Asia-Pacific! Fair Trade not Free Trade!
NO TO APEC!
performances, speakers, information stalls, food
no marching to or from the peaceful rally / festival


Many thousands of people in Sydney do not welcome the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in our city. Their alternative view will be expressed at a colourful festival to be held on Friday, September 7 in Hyde Park North from 11am to 2pm.
The official APEC is treating Sydney citizens as suspects and evicting them from beautiful parts of their city.
The official APEC is here to push nuclear power, free trade with all its privatisations and deregulation, and to assert that big business can run the world better than democratic citizens. That’s also why APEC promotes repression in our region.
That’s why we are protesting and projecting an alternative people’s agenda.

The Peoples Alternative Festival will promote the values of peace, security
and harmony, and the use of diplomacy and dialogue to replace force as a
means of resolving conflicts.

ALL WELCOME!

Men from U.N.C.L.E; Bolivarian Band; Korean drummers
Scenes from previous APEC protests:
clockwise - Manila ‘96, Kuala Lumpur
‘98, Manila ‘96, Vancouver ‘97
Organised by: All People for Environment & Community: Anti-Bases Campaign;
Sydney Peace & Justice Coalition; Migrante Philippines Australia; Bolivarian Circle;
Chilean Socialist Party / Oceania; Construction Forestry Mining & Energy Union;
Australian Services Union; Maritime Union of Australia (Sydney Branch); SEARCH
Foundation; Korean Resource Centre; Communist Party of Australia; Inner-West Your
Rights at Work; Aust Fair Trade & Investmetn Network. Contact: Peter Murphy 0418
312 301. Jane Brock 0410 453 459. Email: pmurphy@search.org.au
Sydney Peoples Alternative to APEC
All People for Environment & Community

All People for Environment and Community, a wide coalition of community
groups who have come together to organise the Peoples Alternative Festival,
is creating a venue for the views of every Sydney citizen who puts the rights
of people and the environment before the interests of corporations.
Music, performance, speakers, and information and food stalls will combine
to offer an inclusive peaceful people’s vision for the future, in stark contrast
with the secretive, repressive big business agenda of the 21 APEC leaders
behind their concrete barricades.
Our Festival will promote the people’s alternative of fair trade, real action on
global warming, genuine development to alleviate poverty, opposition to war,
and respect for the labour rights and human rights of all the peoples of our
vast Asia Pacific region.
We oppose the presence in our city of Sydney of United States President
George Bush. He is the architect of the brutal invasion and occupation of
Iraq which has cost so many thousands of human lives and so much pain
and misery.

Alien Invasion

I was pondering the doom and gloom of the impending APEC circus and wondering if I should maybe offer myself up lemming like to the spectacle of state sponsored terrorism - or if I should somehow miraculously organise a mass mobilisation in CROYDON - and then the missive below landed in my inbox.

a bit bloody full on.... err... anyone got any media /pollie contacts?

It also reminds me that being able to choose our exposure to police brutality is a bit of a privilege innit?


> > Subject: house raids without warrants in NT

FYI- This has gone to the 7.30 report and several newspapers. please circulate.

Dear Kerry O'Brien and 7.30 researchers,

I have just returned from the Northern Territory. I want John Howard to explain why house to house raids without warrants are being conducted by the AFP in all the Alice Springs town camps.

I also want to know why at least two of the senior women who toured major cities speaking out against a uranium waste dump on their traditional lands have been raided by the AFP on warrants issued by a Federal Magistrate in Canberra, their furniture slashed with knives, belongings damages, laptops and mobile phones seized, and phones tapped. I was told by one of the women that the warrant gave 12 hours access to her home, and that she was told that the measures were justified because of the security crackdown for APEC ministers. One of those women is an elderly grandmother.

I have also been told by town camp residents that the AFP has set up surveillance on all households in the town camps,and have photographed without consent, every Aboriginal child in those town camps. In the 1990s the AFP were successfully taken to court for exactly the same violations in Redfern.
Please report on this disgraceful conduct, and pursue a full explanation from the Howard Government.
regards,
Jennifer Martiniello
Member, Advisory Board
Australian Centre for Indigenous History,
Australian National University

Lost in space

the universe is telling me to focus on the thesis.

for some random reason - my yahoo email account wouldn't accept my password for most of yesterday...

I spent an hour doing enforced 'heartmath' meditation to avoid intense panic attacks. i'm so addicted to email - I always imagine my dying words if I passed on would be my email password -

hoo hoo WHAT A DRAMA QUEEN.

Decided this year must be the year that I'm meant to learn NOT TO Be SO ATTACHED TO THINGS. Realised for most of yesterday that I'd be fine without my email address... but... i'm still relieved to have it back.

anyway - I'm still finding it hard to focus on the thesis. Still haven't done any work today - spent the afternoon on the phone and on the internet - and nhow I'm off ot yoga to stretch the impossible stretches, and forget about pain, heartbreak and misery.

Vintage GD: sense in the logic

Alcoholism does not seem to be a search for pleasure, but a search for an effect which consists mainly in an extraordinary hardening of the present. One lives in two lives, of two moments at once, but not at all in the Proustian manner. The other moment may refer to projects as much as to memories of sober life; it nevertheless exists in an entirely different and profoundly modified way, held fast inside the hardened present which surrounds it like a tender pimple surrounded by indurate flesh. In this soft centre of the other moment, the alcoholic may identify himself wit the object of his love, or the objects of his “horror and compassion,” whereas the lived and willed hardness of the present moment permits him to hold reality at a distance.

The alcoholic does not like this rigidity which overtakes him any less than the softness that it surrounds and conceals. One of the moments is inside the other, and the present is hardened and tetanized, to this extent, only in order to invest this soft point which is ready to burst.

The two simultaneous moments are strangely organized; the alcoholic does not live at all in the imperfect or the future; the alcoholic has only a past perfect (passé composé ) – albeit a very special one. In drunkenness the alcoholic puts together an imaginary past, as if the softness of the past participle came to be combined with the hardness of the present auxiliary: I have – loved, I have-done, I have-seen. The conjunction of the two moments is expressed here, as much as the manner in which the alcoholic experiences on in the other, as one enjoys a manic omnipotence. Here the past perfect does not at all express a distance or a completion. The present moment belongs to the verb “to have”, whereas all being is “past” in the other simultaneous moment, the moment of participation and of the identification of the participle.

But what a strange, almost unbearable tension there is here… this embrace, this manner in which the present surrounds, invests, and encloses the other moment. The present has become a circle of crystal or of granite, formed about a soft core, a core of lava, of liquid or viscous glass.

From Gilles Deleuze, the Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester. (Columbia university Press, New york 1990) p 158

Becoming intense, becoming animal

Goddam!
sometimes things get so shit that all you can do is steal chapter titles from Deleuze and Guattari.

things are so shit that I've forgotten how to talk. almost. I managed a couple of tear sodden phone calls and booked a doctors appointment - but mostly I've been hibernating. subsisting off chocolate, codeine, wasabi peas. trips next door to empty bladder and refill water bottle.

no this isn't a plea for phone calls, offers of events or distractions. And please no phone calls. Please! No more demands of 'how are you?'

I'm shithouse.
I'm heartbroken
I wish I'd never met abel. I wish I could erase her memory. I wish that by burning her photographs, letters, and any objects I could find that reminded me of her that I could have burnt 9 years of love, of attachment, of fantasy, of desire.

I wish I could burn, or bleed or vomit or breathe or shit out my feelings, this horrible feeling of being kicked in the guts, of having some kind of spike lodged in my thorax.

and people don't seem to be able to help me at all. The sounds of people, of masticating, rummaging - these little human sounds, echo like chainsaws inside... scrape along my skin. Each touch - each offer of touch feels like a blow.

I would really like to run very far away from this.

After 5 hours in shittyrail purgatory yesterday (don't ask - it was a failed attempt at escape) i retreated to my doona and whatever atavistic dysfunctional coping mechanisms I could summon. Eating disorders, pill popping, novel reading, thumbsucking, compulsive masturbating....

I don't know where to go from here
I don't know where to escape to.
I don't know what to do
I don't know who to.... I don't know what to say

Alcohol doesn't work, most hugs feel like a vacuum pump applied to my soul. the thought of fucking makes me want to vomit, I'm frightened of words, of voices, of my own words, of other words, I don't want to hear anyone, anything, anymore.

I assume this will pass eventually.

When I was in London I was having a great chat with an old friend about heartbreak, and we were quoting bits of A Thousands Plateaus to each other, and I thought "What kind of nutter reads Deleuze and Guattari as Self help?"

A desperate one obviously.

Ok. somewhere deep down - I can regard this as not *me* and not happening to *me* so much as a condition of sheer total hell whih is completely consuming and overwhelming, but temporary.

at the moment i'm experiencing an intensity, some form of acute pain and misery... but not all of me is experiencing it even - I mean I don't have haemmorhoids or cancer or even thrush... just a broken heart and a migraine.

and even the migraine seems to be wearing off...

2 weeks ago - i staggered into uni in a similar state of stricken emotional meltdown - and someone gave a lovely talk on derrida's ideas on the animal, on hospitality, on admitting the unknown, and possibly fatal, and the knife edge of risking complete annhilation, of losing the self, and of (de)fin(d)ing the self in the act of self defence.....

that to open up to becoming, to the other, to face the other, means to face monstrosity - the sheer terror of being taken and transformed and lost within a new encounter, and new becoming - and in using academic jargon this already sounds like a like a cliche doesn't it?

I was terrified of Abel when we first met, terrified of my desire and what it would do to me. With good reason I might add. Bioboy breakups never did never could come anywhere near this level of total fucking hell. Bioboys usually don't have me singing arias after sex though. And now - the thought of fucking most of my bioboy exes makes me laugh.... 'you call that sex? that's not even touching the sides!' Queer sex isn't just about size, or duration or gymnastics. Queer sex doesn't fill the box so much as smash it apart. In fucking women I've lost my head, lost my centre and felt like we were reinventing the world.

ADD tends to make me an optimist. I just don't have the attention span to be depressed for long periods of time - and I do believe deep down in my own capacity for surprise - for the world to be bigger and stranger and better than my understanding of it at any particular time.

but sometimes I just don't think I have the courage to face it. to get out of bed, to look past my own prejudices and habits and safety nets. To move beyond my old reflexes of caring, of being nice and open and listening to others instead of myself. Of letting others words fill me until I'm choking on my own silence. And so often I do find myself letting others words fill me until I'm choking on my own silence.

so i retreat. to my own space of dumbness. hollow silent hell. familiar pain. unspeakable tedium of sameness. My own monotony, my own script. My own smell makes me sick, each cell disgusts me. I lie still and I breathe.