The Bohemian

Welcome to the SPACE Issue. We have taken The Bohemian Empire up a couple ofnotches since you last saw us. We now have an awesome HQ in Marine Court (the im-mense ship-shaped building on sunny St. Leonards seafront). This is where you can nowfind our office. We are also selling a wide range of interesting scientific, volumetric glass-ware, psychedelic home-wares and other assorted vintage tat. I’d like to take this opportu-nity to say thank you to a great friend of The Bohemian - the charming Graham Jones –who donated all the scientific glassware to The Bohemian cause, from his old Jaytec factory,which was once-upon-a-time housed up at the former Turkish bath on West Hill Road. Wereally appreciate your generosity Graham, and we look forward to a day when all residentsof St. Leonards are storing a wide variety of their liquids in your stylish laboratory wares.

So many excellent things are going to happen this year. We are getting ready for our COS-MIC SPRING PARTY at Herstmonceaux Observatory on Sunday, 22nd of April. We willhopefully see the Lyrid meteor shower, but if not, we will have Alexander Tucker, The Os-cillation, Jason Williams, Blue Pin and Jennie Howell to entertain us. We’d like to thankMr. Bradford Gross (The Observatory’s Outreach/Child-Inspirer Extraordinaire for hook-ing us up with this). Thanks Brad, you’re RAD!

More thanks go to Michael and Kris Quinney for so generously and enthusiastically mak-ing room for The Bohemian in their studio – we’ve also started working with Kris on arange of magickal Bohemian amulets – Kris is a skilled copper craftsman and we’ll havesome beautiful things ready by the time the next issue comes out – June!

Special thanks to the inexhaustible and marvellous Jay Toole for helping out so much, in somany ways and for having a constant stream of (mostly) excellent and inspirational ideas.Extra thanks to Lolly Orbell and Glenn Dunwell for providing us with some awesome pho-tographs this issue, and for spending hours out in the cold focusing on the moon for us.Thanks to wonderful Marie-Louise Miller Lomba for power lunches and other indispensa-ble services, M-L will also be on the team for the production of the next issue:GEOMETRY!

Huge gratitude is due to Ashley Beedle and Darren Morris for providing us with the exclu-sive and totally mesmerizingly brilliant “Afrikanz on Marz: Setting off to Saturn” mix tapefor this issue. There are only 100 copies of the CD out there! Some more thanks to OllieCherer for doing our website. Thanks to Robin Pridy for proof-reading too! We have somany friends, and we live in such a brilliant town! Thank you ALL!

Last, but by no means least, thank you to all our advertisers, this magazine wouldn’t be pos-sible without you, we thank you whole-heartedly and wish you a most prosperous andhappy financial year!UP ST. LEONARDS & HASTINGS ! ! – And see you around.Sarah Janes and Liz Maynard

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Moldavite is an olive to dull-green Tektite (naturally occurring silica glass), which isbelieved to have formed during a meteoric impact with a binary asteroid (two aster-oids orbiting a common centre of mass) – which occurred around 14.5 millionyears ago in the Miocene Period. The resulting Ries Crater in Nördlinger, WesternBavaria has a diameter of around 15 miles. A second, much smaller crater (490ftin diameter) is to be found 26 miles away in Steinheim.

The impact velocity of this explosion has been estimated at 2.4 x 10^21 Joules– or 1.8 Hiroshima bombs – and was apparently sufficient to vaporise the aster-oids. Moldavite was formed when a surface layer of quartz sand in the area fused in a high-pressure shock metamorphism. The heat and pressure of the resulting explosion turned the sandinto plasma and the unusual, rippling, non-crystalline structure of Moldavite is believed to havebeen created as the still molten pieces of glass flew rapidly through the air.

The falling asteroid simultaneously created an estimated 72 000 tonnes of diamonds when itimpacted a local graphite deposit. True cosmic alchemy occurred when the power of the impactinstigated an instantaneous, polymorphous restructuring through compression and intense heat,to change the hexagonal crystalline structure of carbon into an isometric one. Quarried stonefrom this area has been used in nearby Nördlingen, where many buildings today contain mil-lions of tiny diamonds, all less than 0.2 mm across, embedded in their walls.

Moldavite contains lechatelierite, an amorphous silica glass that is a common component of anumber of glassy ejecta resulting from meteoric impacts and volcanic eruptions. It occurs in theCzech Republic, most abundantly in southern Bohemia and Moravia, and isolated pockets havebeen found in Germany and Austria. The structure, or sculpture, of the Moldavite found inthese different regions varies according to the mobility of the sand and gravel subsoil in whichthey occur; for example, Moldavite pieces found in Besednice are called ‘hedgehogs’ by collec-tors, as they have a particularly spiky appearance.

Amulets of Moldavite were discovered in 1908 in Austria, along with the famous Venus ofWillendorf, a purported fertility icon and perhaps the earliest example of human sculptural art.Carved from non-local Oolite limestone and tinted with red ochre, the Venus is believed to havebeen made around 24–22 000 BC. It may be this association that has led to the idea of Mol-davite as a stone of fertility, spiritual rebirth and transformation. Statuettes closely resemblingthe Venus of Willendorf have been found all over Europe and some date back as far as 44 000BC.

Interestingly, 22 000 BC was the Last Glacial Maximum. Much of the world was cold, dry and

inhospitable, with frequent storms and a dust-laden atmosphere. Massive sheets of ice lockedaway water, lowered the sea level, exposed continental shelves, joined land masses, and createdextensive coastal plains. Northern Europe was largely covered by ice, the southern boundary ofthe ice sheets passing through Germany and Poland. Permafrost covered Europe south of theice sheet down to present-day Szeged in southern Hungary. Ice covered the whole of Icelandand almost all of the British Isles but southern England. Britain was no more than a peninsulaof Europe: the north capped in ice; the south, a polar desert.

It is believed that Neanderthal man became extinct around this time, despite faring better in thebleak and freezing wastelands due to a superior physical strength. Evidence suggests there wasmuch interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens during the period in which theyoverlapped, and some scholars hypothesise that the Neanderthal extinction was in fact just agradual absorption. Others propose that those groups that remained exclusively Neanderthalwere out-competed by more mixed groups. The Aurignacian and Gravettian cultures, responsi-ble for advancing tool and weapon making, as well as forming mutually beneficial allegianceswith the grey wolf – ancestor of the domesticated dog, gradually dominated.

A representation of a voluptuous fertile female figure, The Great Earth Mother, was wor-shipped by both Aurignacian and Gravettian societies and is believed to be the earliest form ofreligion and the first religious icon. It may have been apparent to the people of these culturesthat Moldavite was the result of some cosmic, heavenly intervention, it being so very distinctfrom other earthly objects.

Much later some researchers have proposed that Moldavite could be the material of the LapsitExillis or ‘Stone from Heaven’ – the fabled green jewel that fell from Lucifer’s crown and whichwas carved into a bowl by a faithful angel to become the Holy Grail.

Winston Churchill was known to carry a piece of Moldavite around in hispocket, given to him by Richard J. H. De Touche-Skadding, a Latvian baron andsometime diplomat who believed Moldavite to be a type of legendary fire pearl,which bestowed the owner with power. Moldavite was also popular with the Vic-torians, suiting their taste for the occult and melancholic mysticism. Theyachieved world-wide fame more recently when the Swiss government pre-sented Queen Elizabeth II with a platinum jewel at the centre of which wasa raw Czech Moldavite surrounded by diamonds and black pearls. In south-ern Bohemia even certain marriage traditions involve an exchange of mol-davites. It is certainly a rare substance – the total amount of Moldavite isestimated at 275 tons and there are now only four Moldavite mines that are infull operation in the Czech Republic. It is predicted that in less than ten years,commercial Moldavite mining will come to an end. After this time, there will bevirtually no appreciable amount of gem-grade Moldavite left in the ground.

Images: Aerial Photo Nördlinger; Raw Moldavite from Stone Corner , Hastings; Venus of WillendorfSarah Janes 2012

As the closest celestial body to Earth, and our constant nightly companion, the Moonplays an important part in the physical and emotional lives of humans. The fifth largestsatellite in the Solar System and the only natural satellite of the Earth, the Moon’s gravita-tional pull creates the ocean tides and the minute lengthening of the day. The Moon’s peri-ods of waxing and waning form the basis of our oldest calendars, determine the length ofwomen’s menstrual cycles and may even affect their levels of fertility. Language, art andmythology have all been greatly influenced by the Moon, which has come to represent thecycle of life and death.

Each lunar month, and midway through the Moon’s cycle, when the Sun, Earth and Moonare aligned, the Moon becomes fully illuminated by the Sun and appears as a Full Moon.After a period of waning from gibbous to crescent, a New Moon, or Dark Moon, occurs.Now, the Moon is aligned between the Earth and the Sun, with the illuminated portionfacing towards the sun and the darkened portion, towards the Earth. The Dark Moon is in-visible to the naked eye. It’s only when the Moon begins to wax that the first sliver appearsas a thin crescent, growing fatter each night from New Moon to gibbous to full, complet-ing the lunar cycle.

Every 18 years or so, the Moon comes to its closest point to the Earth and is a giant in thenight sky. This Moon is known as the Super Moon, although its scientific name is ‘perigee-syzygy’ (‘perigee’ meaning the closest distance between the Earth and the Moon and‘syzygy’ meaning Full or New Moon). When this event coincides with a Full Moon, it’sknown as an extreme Super Moon. As the pull of the Moon on the Earth’s oceans andcrust creates the tides, with Full and New Moons creating stronger than normal tides,many speculate that Super Moons are responsible for increased risk of earthquakes andvolcanoes, as well as extreme high and low tides. Last year’s Super Moon is believed bysome to have been the cause of the Japanese Tsunami and the grounding of 5 ships in theSolent.

In many cultures, it’s been traditional to name each Full Moon. March’s Full Moon is par-ticularly important as it marks the beginning of spring and new life. It’s known by a varietyof names: Lenten Moon (the word ‘lent’ deriving from the Old English word ‘lencten’meaning ‘spring’, or more literally, ‘the lengthening of days as the sun’s light lingers in thesky’); the Worm Moon (so-called because now is the time that the earth is warming andsoftening and worm casts are appearing);and the Crow Moon (murders of crows scaveng-ing the farmers’ freshly ploughed fields for newly planted seeds and re-emerging worms).

As the names suggest, the Full Moons were a way for people to keep track of the seasonsfor farming and hunting purposes. One name still in common use, in Britain at least, is theHarvest Moon, or Hunter’s Moon. At this time of year the Moon has a shorter-than-usualrising time, meaning there is no long period of darkness between sunset and moonrise.This lasts for several days following the actual date of the Full Moon and makes idealconditions for farmers to work late into the night bringing in crops, and hunters to con-tinue tracking animals well after dusk. In times before supermarkets this Moon was espe-cially welcomed, for as winter approached, larders needed to be stocked for the coming leanperiod.

Throughout history, artists and musicians have been inspired by the Moon. Pink Moon, aNative American name for April’s Full Moon, is also the name given to English folk musi-cian, Nick Drake’s third and final album before his untimely death in 1974, aged just 26.The album is considered by many to be his best work, although at the time of release, soldless than 5000 copies. Drake was a sensitive and introverted musician who shied away fromlive performances, and was in some ways similar to the Romantic painter, Samuel Palmer.Palmer was a disciple of William Blake and was prolific in his paintings of moonlit rusticscenes. Farmers under Harvest Moons and shepherds guarding moonlit flocks were com-mon themes explored again and again in oils, watercolours, and pen and sepia illustrations.For many years, forgotten and dismissed, the Kent based artist has in death, like Drake,gained a much larger and more appreciative audience.

April’s Full Moon, also known as the Seed Moon, Flower Moon, and Growing Moon is onFriday 6th April. May’s Full Moon, sometimes called the Milk Moon, Hare Moon andGrass Moon is on Sunday 6th May.

To find out more about the Full Moon Names and their meanings, try the Farmers’ Al-manac as a good starting point:http://www.farmersalmanac.com/full-moon-names/

Liz Maynard 2012

Herstmonceux Observatory

When the Royal Greenwich Observatory was first built, in the grounds of a royal palace onthe south bank of the Thames, Greenwich was just a small village, well separated from theCity of London. But as urban sprawl accelerated in the early part of the twentieth century,Greenwich was enveloped, and chimney smoke from an increasing number of homes andfactories in the area, and residual light from street lamps as well as a general atmosphere ofpollution and murk, seriously impeded the effectiveness of the astronomer’s sensitive in-struments. In the 1920s, the railway system running through Greenwich was electrified, andthis played havoc with the fine-tuned equipment used to monitor small changes in theEarth’s magnetism.

By the 30s it was very clear that the observatory would have to be moved out of London,but the advent of WWII made such a move impossible. Staff and activities were scaleddown and the expensive optical parts of the telescopes were put into storage.

In 1947 the Herstmonceux estate was purchased by the Admiralty. The site consisted of370 acres of ground, a castle and a group of temporary huts. In 1948 The AstronomerRoyal at the time, Sir Harold Spencer Jones moved into the castle – taking up the north-east corner as his quarters. The brick-built Tudor castle is one of the oldest significantbrick buildings in England -The Herst estate is mentioned in the Domesday Book. Herst-monceux Castle itself is now home to the Bader International Study Centre but for 40years the castle was home to a most prodigious collection of astronomers.

The Observatory is truly a marvel of 20th century engineering and was a masterpiece ofattention to detail and fine finishes – even to the extent that a 90 year-old craftsman fromLewes was pulled out of retirement to clad the walls in knapped flint (a traditional Sussexfinish and ancient skill). Herstmonceux Observatory remains a fantastic hidden portal intoouter space, right here, in rural Sussex. The telescopes work, and the telescope mirrors areeven still re-coated on site. There is a calendar of star-gazing events throughout the year.

The famous INT (Isaac Newton Telescope) has since been moved to a mountain-top sitein the Canary Islands, but in its heyday the incredible facilities at The Observatory createda fertile environment for astronomical discovery, and provided a glorious Earth-bound lo-cation for heavenly observation. In 1971, astronomers at Herstmonceux used the INT tohelp locate the first known black hole – a collapsed star that had become so dense that noteven light could escape its gravity. Then in the early 1980s they helped ‘weigh’ a black holeby observing the effects it had on the stars around it. They discovered that a galaxy knownas NGC-4151 contained at its centre a ‘super-massive’ black hole a thousand million timesheavier than our sun.

Find out all about space at - www.the-observatory.org

Sarah Janes 2012

TICKETS ONLINE at http://thebohemiancosmicspringparty.eventbrite.co.uk/

A T H E R S T M O N C E U X O B S E R V A T O R Y

Dr Who

Doctor Who has brought adventures in time and space into British living rooms for nearly50 years. The ever-changing Doctor has never quite found the time to stop off for an icecream in St Leonards, though, or popped back to 1066 to find out whether King Haroldreally did get an arrow in his eye.

Doctor Who loosely tackled the Battle of Hastings in ‘The Time Meddler’ (1965), whenthe TARDIS landed the first Doctor (William Hartnell) and his companions in 1066. Thetime travellers discover they are somewhere on the North Sea coast, where a mysteriousMonk (Peter Butterworth) is planning to help Harold win at Hastings by disposing of theViking fleet before the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

The late Peter Ling, a Hastings resident with close ties to the Old Town’s Stables Theatre,was best known for creating (with Hazel Adair) the ITV soap Crossroads, but in 1968 hewrote a peculiar fantasy tale for Doctor Who, ‘The Mind Robber’. This charming storywas set in ‘the Land of Fiction’ and saw the second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and hiscompanions encountering numerous characters from literary history. A short sequence inepisode 3 was filmed in East Sussex on the climbing rocks at Bowles Outdoor Centre,Eridge Green, just over the county border from Tunbridge Wells. A few miles away, anotherclimbing attraction, Harrison’s Rocks near Groombridge, turned up in fifth Doctor, PeterDavison’s debut story ‘Castrovalva’ (1982).

‘The Curse of Fenric’ (1989) was a complex and intelligent horror, set (as ‘The TimeMeddler’ had been) on the North Sea coast. As usual, it was easier and cheaper for theDoctor Who team to film closer to London, with locations around Kent and East Sussex(including Crowborough, Cranborough and Hawkhurst) filling in for the north of Eng-land. Several key scenes required isolated beach locations, with sequences involving actorslanding boats, swimming and diving underwater. The stretch of Covehurst Bay, below thecliffs of Hastings Country Park, was earmarked for the filming, and on a miserable day inMarch the production team headed along to Rock-a-Nore to assess the location. As thesurviving footage from the Hastings visit (available among the extras on the BBC DVD of‘The Curse of Fenric’) shows, the sea off Rock-a-Nore was too dangerous, and the tidecame in too high, for the Doctor Who team to film there. The scenes were eventually shotin the calmer waters of Lulworth Cove, Dorset.

One-off specials aside, it would take over 15 years for Doctor Who to return to TV infull. Will the Doctor ever make it back to Hastings? Who knows?

A comprehensive guide to Doctor Who locations can be found at www.doctorwholoca-tions.net

Stuart Huggett 2012

I’ve been thinking a lot about space lately. Not just the dark stuff out there, or the evendarker stuff in there, but the everyday stuff that’s all about us: our streets, parks, disusedbuildings, public squares; the space we move about in every day, sometimes barely noticing,other times acutely aware of; how it makes us feel and how we interact with it; society’srules around who can go where and who can do what in the public domain, be it skate-boarders, graffiti artists, protesters. People, and their attitudes to space, are intriguing.

A few months ago I went to see Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The film is ajourney deep inside the Chauvet cave in the Ardeche region of the south of France – hometo the oldest known cave drawings in the world. The incredible animal depictions drawndeep inside the belly of the cave are thought to be over 30,000 years old. There are noscenes of hunting. The drawings show only the beauty and majesty of the animals thatwould have been in abundance, living together with these early humans. I left the cinemafilled with a sense of awe and wonder. What purpose did these drawings serve? Whatmakes people want to reach the most difficult and dangerous places in order to leave theirmark? And why is it that this wall art is revered and protected, but today’s wall art is stillmostly considered as vandalism and an eyesore? Didn’t we all make our first furtive draw-ings, not on paper, but walls? I remember vividly the enjoyment of drawing on the walls ofmy parents’ maisonette when I was just three or four. So what makes us think that desireleaves us? And why shouldn’t we draw on walls anyway?

Of course, not all of today’s wall art is considered vandalism – some graffiti artists such asBanksy and Ben Eine are world famous and a lot of towns and cities are only too happywhen one of their pieces appears. Banksy’s work is now being protected by sturdy plasticcoverings installed by some councils (Hastings included) keen to treat the political stencilsas exhibits in a gallery, while Ben Eine is being commissioned to undertake huge murals allover the world. Both are following a similar path to the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (fa-mous for his 1970s SAMO graffiti and, later, highly collectible neo-Expressionist paint-ings) in penetrating the high-end art world of New York exhibitions for wealthy collectorsand coffee table books for 30-something trendies. This is the respectable face of street art.But other more underground artists, also with an inbuilt human desire to leave their mark,

Who Owns Space?

face criminalisation and even prison for their artistic pursuits. In August 2004, Tony Blairsigned a charter as part of the Keep Britain Tidy campaign which stated ‘Graffiti is not art,it’s crime. On behalf of my constituents, I will do all I can to rid our community of thisproblem’. But some progressive councils such as Stroud, Gloucestershire and Brighton haveintroduced approved graffiti areas where artists can express themselves without fear of ar-rest. So just how do we decide who gets to use space freely and who doesn’t?

Back in the summer, I was sitting drinking coffee outside, watching a couple of lads withskateboards making good use of the St Leonards promenade. Totally absorbed by theirrepetitive back and forth motion, I was caught in an active meditation; it wasn’t until theymoved on that my spell was broken and I was able to start the walk home. On the way, Ithought about their use of the space and the impact they had on it and me. I wonderedhow many times in the past they’d been told to move on by over-enthusiastic communitypolice officers, or shopping centre security guards more concerned with potential damageto the owners’ new steps than with the beauty of their art. Sometime later, I hear of agroup of skaters who sneak into disused buildings at night and skate the long apocalypticcorridors and stairs. I’m reminded of the Z-boys who, in the 1970s, used to sneak into thegardens of well-to-do properties in Los Angeles to skate their drought-induced emptyswimming pools. It was this innovative use of space that gave birth to the first aerial tricks,and which changed the face of skateboarding forever. Sometimes, you just got to break afew eggs....

Fast forward a little to autumn and I find myself taking part in a temporary occupation ofWellington Square. It’s 30 November, day of the strikes against the public sector cuts.Until fairly recently my political protest happened mainly through the voting booth, and bysigning the odd petition. But the outrageousness of the sweeping cuts to public servicesand welfare benefits coupled with the inspiring events of the Arab Spring and Occupymovement provoke me to take part in my first real act of civil disobedience. A group ofpeople, friends, activists and ordinary disillusioned folk, have come together to occupyWellington Square – a public green space in the town centre of Hastings. Tents are erected,banners displayed, and a general assembly held. There is no leader, and jobs are shared outaccording to ability. Supporters who aren’t able to spend the night bring food and beddingand buoy our spirits through their camaraderie and generousness. There is a feeling of ex-citement and freedom. We are peacefully disobeying. Despite the occupation lasting onlyone night, I find myself deeply affected. It had been exhilarating to ‘take’ the space and getthe camp set up. Although we were not committing any criminal offence by camping on apublic square, we were potentially trespassing (a civil offence). I leave filled with questions– how have we, as a society, arrived at a place where it is even possible to be trespassing onpublicly owned land? And further to that, what right do any of us have to claim ownershipof land anyway? Is claiming ownership of land not like claiming ownership of the sea orthe air or indeed the universe?

When the Europeans, and particularly the English, colonised North America and Canada,there was no concept among the Native American and First Nations people of individual

land ownership. Land, a part of the universe, belonged to all and all could benefit from thefruits of nature. A person could take as much land as they needed to farm on and supporttheir family. When the family no longer needed the land it was free to be used by someoneelse. But in the same way that the English monarchy presumed to own all the English land,portioning it out to the nobility as it saw fit, so it presumed ownership of all ‘discovered’land. Suddenly, the regions the indigenous people had lived, hunted and farmed on for cen-turies were being mapped out, portioned up, and fenced off.

Interestingly, centuries earlier, in England, the Charter of the Forest, which evolved fromthe Magna Carta, and which was sealed by the young King Henry III, re-established rightsof access to the Royal Forests for free men, allowing them to forage for food and fuel,graze animals and make charcoal – the basic means of self-sufficiency. (These rights hadpreviously been removed by William The Conqueror with the introduction of Forest Law,whereby everything in the forest became the property of the king and punishment for tak-ing an animal or firewood was mutilation and even death.) However, generous as this mightsound, only around 10 per cent of the population were considered free men at this time;the rest were locked into some sort of service to a landowner, so couldn’t benefit from thecharter. The Charter of The Forest was eventually eroded away until it existed mainly toprotect the timber in the Royal Forests. ‘Commoners’ still have grazing rights in the NewForest and the Forest of Dean, but if you’ve checked the property prices lately you’ll knowthat these commoners are no peasants!

The 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had this to say on the subject of landownership: ‘The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, “This is mine,” andfound people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes mightnot any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and cry-ing to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forgetthat the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’ Or put anotherway: property is theft and ownership is a human construct!

So, where does this leave the artists, protesters, skateboarders and the like? Do we reallywant to live in a society where we criminalise people for speaking out, painting on walls orcamping on public land? And what of the homeless and dispossessed? Is it right that build-ings, whether privately or publicly owned, sit empty for years while there are people livingon the streets? Maybe, as individuals and as a society, it is time to reconsider our attitudesto space, ownership, crime and creativity, and create the kind of future where we are all freeto live and express ourselves without fear or penalty.

For some great examples of paste-ups and stencils, check out local street artist Tobyuk44on Flickr.com.

Also, check out Luke Brabant’s graffiti-inspired art works here, at: http://drastikproduc-tions.daportfolio.com/.

Liz Maynard 2012

Clockwise from top left:Lennon Wall (Prague); TobyUK44;Luke Brabants

The Bohemia Club

Coming next to The Bohemia Club’s roster of psychedelic party nights is Roy and TheDevil’s Motorcycle. Bringing warped and beautiful garage-blues from across the AlpineMountains, these shamanic voodoo brothers have gained a cult following over the last 20years. Clearly influenced by 60s dirty garage rock, and old dusty blues records about death,love and kicking out, these boys also have a taste for Spacemen 3, Lee Perry, and TheGodz, making their live shows a maelstrom of psychic power!

If you’ve not yet been to a Bohemia Club party night, you are seriously missing out! WithDJs and visuals provided by DJ Dunderhead, Dollboy, and The Warrior Squares, amongstothers, plus brainwave machines, DIY projections, magick spring water, glowstix, and aproper friendly crowd, this is not just another gig.... Recent shows include The Family Elanwith musicologist Ian Nagoski at Hastings Museum’s Durbar Hall, Pontiak and P For Per-sia at The Tubman, and a Green Party Fundraiser with Booze and One Thousand Tons atThe Brass Monkey.

Roy and The Devil’s Motorcycle play in Hastings on Thursday 19th April, Upstairz atFlairz. £5 or ½ price to Bohemia Club members. £3 concessions (students and unwaged).

Liz Maynard 2012

Above: Roy and The Devil’s Motorcycle, Opp page: (clockwise from top) The Family Elan, Booze enjoyinga stroll in Merrie Olde Hastings, Pontiak, The Oscillation and Alexander Tucker.

MelancholiaIf you look at the website for Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, you will find a statementfrom the director in which he writes of his disappointment. The opulent ‘cream on cream’style of his film ‘looks like shit’ and he asks whether it ever ‘elevates matters beyond thetrivial.’ But then this is a film about ambivalence, a film of two halves that intentionally cre-ates an uneasy confrontation between the trivial and narcissistic daily life of a wealthy dys-functional family, and the prospect of a planetary collision that could mean the end of theworld. Watching the film we sit through the slow-paced story of an opulent but disastrouswedding party. The self-destructive bride Justine dispatches with her job and her marriageand enters into a state of catatonic depression. These events recede from significance in thesecond half of the film as Justine and her sister Claire watch the planet Melancholia slowlyloom towards them. The film evoked in me feelings of alienation, distaste and even someboredom, and yet it was strangely seductive. This film has lingered and grown in my mindlike the ominous planet, illuminating a ‘dance of death’ which is both intra-psychic andcosmic in scale. We may like to think of ourselves as rational, creative, pleasure-seeking be-ings. Then why do we share with Justine this capacity for depression and self-destruction?Could it have anything to do with our place in cosmic reality? Here we are focusing onweddings and careers and family life, and yet in a cosmic perspective these are the tiniest ofinsignificant happenings, dwarfed by the infinite, dark, inhuman nothingness of space.Space is the abyss beyond our Earth, much as death is the abyss beyond our life: and bothare beyond our comprehension or our control.

Freud attempted to find an explanation for our ability to self destruct, and he called it‘Thanatos’: ‘a death drive, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimatestate’. Justine displays an erotic attraction to the prospect of death, bathing naked in thelight of the blue planet whose presence recalls Thanatos. If there is a relationship to Freud,then it is via a common intellectual ancestry in German Romanticism, a movement that ex-plored the relationship of science and romance, the everyday and dreamlike creativity. VonTrier tells us: ‘I desired to dive headlong into the abyss of German Romanticism. Wagnerin spades.’ Wagner himself suffered depression and in Shopenhauer he found a philosophyof human suffering. We are ruled by futile desires or ‘will’ that can never be satisfied. Totemporarily escape our pain we can only stop willing, and immerse ourselves in aestheticcontemplation.

The depressive Justine who doesn’t care whether her world ends, sits and contemplates theapproaching planet. This is an uneasy masterpiece in which von Trier succeeds in presenting

us with ‘the bone splinter amongst all the cream.’

Charlotte Potter-Powell 2012

Interview with Maya Evans

A few weeks ago, well-known peace activist Maya Evans found herself confined for twoweeks at Her Majesty’s pleasure. I talked to Maya about protests, prisons, war and peace...

LM: So, Maya, what on earth did you do to end up in prison?

ME: Umm...well... in 2009, I helped organise and took part in a remembrance protest out-side Northwood Military Base, which is the military nerve centre for operations in Iraq andAfghanistan. The protest was to mark the two-year anniversary of the NATO bombing ofa wedding party of an Afghan village which resulted in the deaths of 47 civilians – mainlywomen, children and old people. We dressed as if we were going to a wedding party andmarched from the tube station. Six of us were arrested for obstructing the public highwayand then in November 2009 we went to court and presented our argument that we weretrying to stop war crimes. The judge found us guilty and said that we had to pay £350 eachin court costs and a fine. I wasn’t going to give money to the government to fuel the warmachine in Afghanistan so I went back to court and was sent down for 13 days. I ended upgoing to Her Majesty’s Prison Bronzefield in Middlesex, which is a relatively new prisonbuilt in 2004 and it’s PRIVATE! I think, from what I could make out from other prison-ers, it’s considered quite a nice one. I don’t know if maybe they don’t make prison so badbecause it’s big business now, and they have to rely on people to reoffend! There was a casein the US where a judge was being bribed by a private prison company to send down juve-niles. I guess, psychologically, it wasn’t so bad for me because I knew I was only in there fora week, but if you’re in there for years it’s a different scene. A lot of the younger women arein for shoplifting, stealing, stuff like that, and a lot of those women have children, that’sthe worst part of it – being separated from their kids, and they’re what would be describedas the underclass of Britain. It almost felt as if this prison had been built for a certain classof people and it was just maintaining this cycle of people going into prison and being re-leased.

LM: Maya, before this happened, you had recently returned from Afghanistan...

ME: Yeah, I was there over Christmas and New Year for three weeks and I was workingwith a group called the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, who are from a rural provincecalled Bamyan. It’s a very poor area but probably one of the areas least affected by war interms of actual combat. They’ve got various projects they’re trying to get underway like apeace walk in Kabul and Jalalabad, and having two million candles lit on InternationalHuman Rights Day on the 10 December, and they are also trying to apply pressure on thegovernment to negotiate peace in Afghanistan.

LM: So, what’s the situation out there now?

ME: There is a total lack of basic infrastructure – raw sewage runs down the street, rubbishpiled up everywhere, crop fields destroyed. There are refugee camps everywhere in Kabulwhere people lost their homes through bombing. And there’s massive squandering ofmoney that’s being pumped into the country by NATO – a lot of it being absorbed intocorporations that are over there. NGOs are trying to deal with extreme poverty and hugenumbers of refugees, but the money goes into paying these Western people who are livingin very highly secured compounds. They get driven around in bullet proofed cars, they gointo shopping centres that are just for Westerners and there are these two very differentworlds in Kabul – these pristine compounds that are very, very fancy, and then the realitythat most Afghans live in that is severe deprivation.

LM: So what can people do to get involved?

ME: Well, we’re going to have our first drone base in this country by the end of the sum-mer and there’s a campaign which is gaining momentum around stopping the base fromopening. Locally, there’s Hastings Against War, who meet regularly and who’ve had a lot oflocal success with lobbying their MP, protests and raising awareness about the situation inAfghanistan. And there’s also my campaign, ‘From Hastings To Kabul’, which people canjoin.

http://www.dronecampaignnetwork.org.uk/

http://www.hastingsagainstwar.org/

http://fromhastingstokabul.wordpress.com/ Liz Maynard 2012

AFRIKANZ ON MARZ

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The GEOMETRY Issue

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June/July brings the GEOMETRY Issue.We will be celebrating Alan Turing’s birth-day (23rd June) with a big festival - the de-tails of which are not confirmed as we go toprint, but rest assured, we will find a way ofletting you know. Check our website andFacebook pages for more information. Ifyou would like to get involved get in touch.Have a marvellous Spring!

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