aaamusic | On 08, Oct 2010

THE HACKNEY DISSENTING ACADEMY

FIRST IN A SERIES OF QUARTERLY LIVE BULLETINS

THE HACKNEY DISSENTING ACADEMY.

A NON ALIGNMENT PACT.

AN ARTISTIC POLTERGEIST.

A COUNTER CULTURE COUNTERPOINT TO THE OLYMPIAN EARTHMOVERS

(RE) BLITZING US ALL IN THIS THE NEW AGE OF INSTABILITY.

“FASTER, HIGHER, STRONGER”…REALLY?

SATURDAY 23^RD OCTOBER

THROBBING GRISTLE

Hackney’s 1980 pioneering electronic sound “terrorists” return to their old neighbourhood as the THDA’s Rectors of Sound.

Their promise, to present a predominately new set (with a few old faves) wrestled from a range of new electronic instruments they are developing and testing.

SUNDAY 24^TH OCTOBER 2010

IAIN SINCLAIR, WILL SELF, ALAN MOORE

+ soundscapes by Susan Stenger & Simon Fisher-Turner

Iain Sinclair, London’s hidden voice, has lived in Hackney since the 60’s.

Alan Moore is from (and still lives in) Northampton, and has NEVER lived in Hackney.

Will Self lives…. and dreams of a drowned London.

These three writers ARE the bleeding blackened point of writing today.

We welcome them one and all as esteemed principal faculty members of the THDA.

VENUE & TICKET LINKS   VILLAGEUNDERGROUND.CO.UK

BACKSTORY

Banned in Hackney – for going off-message about the Olympics

The Guardian, Wednesday 22 October 2008

A warning to any innocent Hackney writer: question the coming triumph of the 2012 Olympics and, like me, you could achieve the dubious glamour of becoming a banned author.

A year or so ago I was allowed into the library in Stoke Newington, east London. I was part of a panel celebrating a raft of local authors, from Harold Pinter to Patrick Wright, by way of Alexander Baron. A small and enthusiastic audience moved our discussion from past to present – and the knowledge that, just down the road in the council offices, a wall of surveillance screens had been positioned in a secure basement to monitor the renegade comings and goings of the borough. Some of the funding for this Orwellian system was coming straight out of library funds and the rest from council taxes.

Hackney Libraries invited me to come back in February 2009 to launch a book I had been working on for more years than I care to remember: Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire. I was happy to accept, believing that a work researched, contrived and constructed in this place should have its first reading right here. A small return on my part for 40 years of madness and inspiration, painting the white lines of football pitches on Hackney Marshes or trawling for used books in Kingsland Waste Market.

Then, last Friday night, I had a call to say sorry, but the invitation was withdrawn. It seemed a diktat had come down from above that I was a non-person and should be barred from the library for the crime of writing an off-message piece on the Olympics. This essay, published in the London Review of Books, responded to aspects of the creation of the Olympic Park in the Lower Lea Valley: the destruction of the Manor Garden allotments, the eviction of travellers, and the famous “legacy” revealed as nothing more than a gigantic shopping mall in Stratford.

The essay had very little to do with the book I was invited to launch. Challenged, the council shifted its ground: I was controversial. Controversy was not allowed in libraries. There could, presumably, be no discussion of stem-cell research or Afghanistan. And Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire fell into that category. A conclusion Hackney was miraculously able to reach without reading a line of a book that won’t be published for another three months.

While researching my memoir, I walked back to the Stoke Newington Library and asked for the local history section. They told me that there wasn’t one. History had been declared redundant. All that was left were half a dozen pamphlets in a box kept under the desk.