This is a list of resources for migrants and refugees in the UK and Europe, and related organisations, originally crowd-sourced and storified on twitter by the redoubtable Daniel Trilling (@trillingual) and various excellent people in his timeline. It seems like a helpful moment to put the information into a user-friendly form. Some are charities, some are activist non-profits: quite apart from all the people who desperately need help, the official laws, techniques and institutions being developed to police borders and harm refugees and migrants will be quickly be exported to the rest of society, the poor and the vulnerable in particular, the establishment of border-patrol politics at all levels of daily life.

Order is alphabetic, in sections: UK-wide first, then UK local, then a scattering of Europe-wide orgs and some US ones too. Some are self-explanatory, some I’ve given a very brief description. It’s nowhere near exhaustive, obviously — just a start. I’ll probably give it a page of its own shortly — this is just my blog after all — but it seemed the common-sense place to start. If you can, donate or give your time and energy. And circulate this.

UK NATIONAL

Against Borders for Children, against border regimes within schools @Schools_ABC

Association of Visitors to Immigrant Detainees @AVIDdetention 

Asylum Aid, @AsylumAid

Asylum Support Appeals Project helps people appeal their cases, get housing, avoid destitution   

Bail for Immigration Detainees

Christian/Muslim refugee initiatives, local and national

City of Sanctuary network (UK & Ireland), encouraging communities to welcome refugees, branches nationwide (see below for a few of them) @cityofsanctuary

Counterpoints Arts, engaging with refugee and grant experiences @CounterArts

Detention Action supports people in UK immigration detention @DetentionAction

Doctors of the World: campaigning for refugees in UK to access healthcare, @DOTW_UK 

Help Refugees UK @HelpRefugeesUK 

Homes Not Borders @Homesnotborders

Homes for Syrians @homesforsyrians 

Hope for the Young (formerly OMID International) @hopefortheyoung

Hope not Hate @hopenothate

Housing Rights (not just migrants and refugees)

How to ask your MP to expand UK refugee resettlement 

Legal action for women 

Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants

Lobby your MP

Lorraine Ayensu Refugee Arts fund @LARAfund

Médecin Sans Frontières @MSF, @MSF_Sea, @MSF_uk 

Medical Justice: health rights for UK immigration detainees @MedicalJustice

Migrants’ Law Project offers strategic litigation against immigration detention @MigrantsLawProj

Migrant Voice, for migrant voices to be heard in the UK media @MigrantVoiceUK 

Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary @followMFJ 

Music in Detention @MIDdetention

PlatformaArts and Refugee Network @PlatformaArts 

Red Cross UK refugee support @britishredcross

Refugee Action @RefugeeAction

Refugees at Home, seeking hosts for refugees and asylum seekers in the UK @RefugeesAtHome,

Refugee Council @refugeecouncil 

Safe Passage works to bring vulnerable refugees in Europe to Britain @Safepassageuk

UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group @uklgig

We Are Chatterbox: language and cultural training service by refugees @wearechatterbox

Women for Refugee Women campaigns (Yarl’s Wood and elsewhere) @4refugeewomen

Yarl’s Wood Befrienders @YWBefrienders 

UK LOCAL

A useful map for local links @RefugeeWeek

London:

Croydon and NW London: 
Young Roots: supporting young refugees and asylum seekers @weareyoungroots

East London:
Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex and London @RAMFELcharity

Greenwich:
Greenwich Migrant Hub @GreenwichMH

Hackney:
Akwaaba social centre for asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants @akwaabahackney

Hackney Migrant Centre 

Haringey:
Haringey Migrant Support Centre haringeymsc.org

Islington:
Islington Centre for Refugees and Migrants: English lessons, support, workshops, hot meals @IslingtonCentre

Lewisham:
Action for Refugees in Lewisham @Afril 

North East London:
North East London Migrant Action: people left destitute by local council policies @NELMAcampaigns

Walthamstow:
Walthamstow Migrants’ Action Group 

London-wide:
English for Action: English lessons in London @EFALondon

New North London Synagogue Drop-In Centre for Destitute Asylum Seekers

Praxis: advice, support, meeting place for migrants and refugees

Refugee Connection: helping refugees and Londoners get to know one another @RefConnection

SOAS detainee support

Support network for people stranded in London by the #MuslimBan

Bradford: 
Bradford City of Sanctuary @bradfordCoS

Brighton, Sussex and Surrey: 
Brighton Voices in Exile @brightonvoices

Brighton Migrant Solidarity @BriMigSol

Bristol: 
Bristol Refugee Rights @bristolrefugeer

Huddersfield:
Destitute Asylum Seekers Huddersfield 

Hull:
Hull Help for Refugees @hullforrefugees

Leeds: 
Leeds Asylum Seekers Support Network @lassnleeds 

Leeds No Borders @leedsnoborders 

Positive Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers @PAFRAS_Leeds 

Leicester: 
After 18, a resource for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers entering adulthood @after18uk

Liverpool and Merseyside: 
Asylum Link @asylumlink

Manchester:
Boaz Trust, serving destitute asylum seekers

Manchester Refugee Support Network 

Newcastle:
Action Foundation provides housing and language support @actionFdn

Notts:
Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum @NNRF1

Oxford: 
Asylum Welcome @asylumwelcome

Reading: 
Reading Refugee Support Group

South Yorkshire:
South Yorkshire Migrants and Asylum Action Group @SYMAAG

Sheffield:
Assist Sheffield: challenging asylum destitution

Tyneside:
Newcastle Law Centre @NewcastleLC 
North of England Refugee Service @NERSRefugee
West End Refugee Service

York:
Refugee Action York @refactyork

NORTHERN IRELAND: 
Housing4All campaigns against destitution in Belfast @h4allni

Northern Ireland Community of Refugees & Asylum Seekers @NICRAScharity (refugee-led)

Horn of Africa People’s Aid Northern Ireland @HAPANI1 (refugee-led)

SCOTLAND:

Edinburgh: 
Edinburgh City of Sanctuary @edinCoS

Welcoming Edinburgh @WelcomingEdi

Refugee Action Scotland: delivering aid to migrants freezing in the Balkans: @re_act_scotland

Glasgow: 
Refuweegee: “we’re all fae somewhere”

Glasgow Unity Centre, which monitors and challenges deportations: @unitycentreglas

Positive Action: accommodation for destitute refugees @PositiveActionH

WALES:

Swansea:
Unity in Diversity: helping refugees and asylum seekers @uidswansea 

REPUBLIC OF IRELAND:
Migrant Rights Centre Ireland @MigrantRightsIR

Contact your TD to ask them to oppose Trump’s ban 

EUROPE
European Council of Refugees and Exiles @ecre

Welcome 2 Europe: information and contact lists country by country

Advice on Individual Rights in Europe @AIRECentre 

Refugee Community Kitchen: food for migrants and the homeless in Dunkirk, Paris, Calais, London @RefugeeCkitchen

Refugee Rights Data Project @refugeedata

Red Cross EU @RedCrossEU

Caritas, “the helping hand of the Catholic Church” @iamcaritas

Food for migrants in the Balkans HERE and HERE

Connect Refugee: Phone credit for refugees in Europe, vital lifeline, sometimes literally
 

UNITED STATES

American Civil Liberties Union @ACLU

Southern Poverty Law Centre @splcenter

“During the Conservative government of Edward Heath there were five declarations of emergency under this Act [viz the Emergency Powers Act 1920], by far the most any government. The first was in July 1970 over a dockers strike, the second in December 1970 over an electricians strike, the third in February 1972 over a miners strike, the fourth in August 1972 over another dockers strike and the fifth time in October 1973, which lasted for four months”

So for last 18 months, my plan had been to launch the kickstarter for the book of the conference I ran at Birkbeck on the politics of UK rockwriting (1968-85). That’s a mock-up of the cover on the left (illustrations by the marvellous Savage Pencil): you can click on it to see a larger version, but if you don’t the title and subtitle read A HIDDEN LANDSCAPE ONCE A WEEK: how UK music-writing became a space for unruly curiousity, in the words of those who made it happen. Originally I had the kickstarter launch scheduled for May, exactly 12 months on from the symposium itself — but there were a lot of things to get ready, and, well, events intervened (it went live on Monday 27 June, just four days after the results of the eurovote sent everything in the UK into spiralling chaos). No one’s said so directly — most people have been very supportive — but if someone were to suggest it was frivolous or decadent or impertinent to be promoting such a project during such a crisis, well, I wouldn’t be entirely startled. And I wouldn’t feel they were entirely wrong.

Despite this, I still think it’s right to carry on: and here’s why. The book will be an anthology — meaning that a variety of voices will speak (it will contain extracts from the panels on the day, with additional essays from those involved). It is a regathering of people involved in an informal, improvised cultural space that came into being at some point in the 60s (perhaps even earlier), coalescing around 1970 out the counterculture and other existing sources, some radical, some fannish — which existed in real time for some years, with ripples that continued to travel long after that. In its multiform, provocative, naive way, it was something that stood somewhat athwart the grim turbulences of the 70s, even if (from time to time) it also reacted to them and expressed them. It was about possibility, and about community: about how a community gets to define itself and to move out into the wider world.

The kickstarter is here: and what I say about it on that page is this (click through for further detail, and to support it to make it happen):

Once upon a time — for a surprisingly long time— the UK music-press was a lot more than just the place to catch up with singles or album release news, with interviews with chart-topping figures and the antics of gobby rockstars. Week on week in its heyday — the mid 60s to the early 80s — a young reader could also go to it to find out about everything from comics to cult films to radical politics, as well as an extremely wide range of non-chart musics from all over the world. Hiding in plain sight, it was the communal improvisation of ways to process an unprecedented tumult from every quarter, of new sounds and dances, startling ideas and visions all battling for attention. It took place in such high-street titles as NME, Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Mirror, Echoes, Street Life, Let It Rock, Zigzag, Black Music; but it had fermented in the undergrounds — Oz, IT, Frendz, Ink — and a significant alt/free/listings press including Time Out, City Limits, the anti-racist agit-prop paper Temporary Hoarding, and the redoubtable feminist magazine Spare Rib. As well, from the mid-70s, there was a burgeoning underfelt of fanzines, notably Nick Kimberley and Penny Reel’s legendary reggae zine Pressure Drop, plus Bam Balam, Sniffin’ Glue, Ripped and Torn, London’s Burning, London’s Outrage, Out There, and many many more.

It would be absurd to argue that its ideals — insofar as it even understood them clearly — have come to be irrevocably enacted: incorrect, if sometimes tempting, in the late 90s; simply fatuous in the light of recent weeks, when everything that it was not has broken back hard against it. It was always fragile: a serendipity, a moment. I want to argue that it was something more. That something useful to us right now can be drawn out of it. I’m not even sure yet what this is — I have ideas, which I might write more about, but for now I just want to make it possible to re-open the conversation.

“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was’. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger… The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”

PˆNK S LORD SÜKRÅT CUNCTØR ON 30 MAR 2014:

“Queen Queen Caroline washed her hair in turpentine”

I don’t at all buy that strong emotional response to the death of someone you didn’t personally know is *necessarily* fake or silly. To jump sideways into it, here’s something I wrote on another website when the mass social-media lament for the death of Steve Jobs was being discussed, similarly scornfully:

“My mum wept when Willie Rushton died. She never remotely knew him, except as a face on telly or a voice on radio she enjoyed; he was a few years younger than her, a celebrity of a fairly niche type — and his death hit home.

“I was puzzled at the time, as I found him vaguely annoying, but afterwards it seemed pretty obvious she was weeping — as much as anything — for her own youth; for the bright cast of a particular hoped-for world she’d envisioned when young, and this was as much as anything a lament for the way things hadn’t turned out the way she imagined, for her and for the world. Rushton — in some small, almost private way — was bound up in this (memories of she and my dad when first married, bright semi-innocent young things reading Private Eye in its very early day and caught up in the early 60s notion that things were moving on away from the dreary stifling past, opening up, changing… something like this).

“Seems to me the Apple story can easily be fitted into a similar narrative, on a larger scale: a widely shared naive utopianism that felt like the air you were breathing at a particular time — and now, with the death of someone apparently central to it, you suddenly face not only your own mortality (that happens with any death), but also the sense of the foolishness of the optimism with which you set out on your current journey long ago; the degree to which, yes, you’ve wised up since (you’ve had to) and you recognise how much more flawed and perhaps even empty were the things you once invested so much in than you saw at the time; and above all you see the contrast with where you’ve ended up; where — if you have this kind of empathy — we’ve all ended up, given how abrupt the recent economic pull-up will have been, for many. Obviously there’s a lot more actually being mourned than simply this guy; it’s a public outlet for endless private griefs — hence its inchoate, oversimplified intensity — but also I think for a kind of vague youthful solidarity of outlook and temperament and hope; a recognition that it’s gone, and that it was maybe never worth as much as you hoped, and that nevertheless you preferred yourself when caught up in its fevers and deliriums than yourself today.”

I was awake and watching the story of Diana’s death unfold in real time on TV in the early hours of that sunday: a friend had called to let me know, and we stayed on the phone as we watched, wrapped in blankets and talking it through. She had been awakened by an acquaintance who slept with the telly blaring (an acquaintance who had something of an annoying and obsessive crush on my friend; rather than stay talking to her, or sitting through it alone, she’d thought “Mark is a journalist, he needs to know…”). This meant I knew very early, and then missed most of the daylight sunday you’ve all described (I went back to bed and slept in). It also meant that the news was marked with dreamstate oddity and even unreality for me — and nothing about it afterwards surprised me. I was in Amsterdam on holidaythe rest of the week, away from even Dutch TV; Dutch newspaper billboards were the closest I came to enduring blanket coverage, and actually it was far from blanket, just a few screamer posts on kiosks, and headlines on magazine covers on shop counters.

Two people I knew well were really upset — I was already in the process of terminally falling out with one (for unrelated reasons) and never got to quiz her on it. The other is someone who’s unusually self-aware and self-critical: when I interrogated her, she was straightforward: “It’s not really about Diana, Mark, really I think I’m mourning myself.” (Actually this is probably where the insight for the Rushton quote comes from, if insight it is.) I’m hesitant to generalise about the two of them — quite apart from anything else, they disliked each other intensely — but I suspect a complicated and fraught sense of who they were in relationship to their own families and backgrounds is part of the story; there was a lot of anger there. If Di’s luck in the early 80s had been the very opposite of meritocracy, this too might have its attractions: after all, happiness of all things shouldn’t actually be something you have to EARN, via superior mind or talent. Everyone deserves it; this I take to be a root for some of the vague shared idealism apparently torrented onto her, however contorted the connection seems. It surely can’t be very surprising that a family relentlessly presented to us as a social and political symbol of cohesion and continuity gets a fvckton of private symbol projected onto it — and that apparent rifts in that unity and continuity take on intensely personal meaning.

Nor are such vast events at all a new thing. I’m old enough to remember my dad travelling to London in 1965 to be part of the (vast) crowd for Winston Churchill’s funeral. I watched it on (black and white) TV and painted a picture of it — all dark brown smeary colours as I recall (I was five). Typically — this very much fit in with family lore — Dad had arrived in London only to realise he had flu; so he spent the day itself feeling sorry for himself in bed at my grandparents’ house. Thirty-odd years before that they had taken him out to view the parades for the coronation of Edward VIII — oddly enough, since I’m pretty sure they were both still in the communist party at that point — and he had spent the entire time squatted on the ground putting gravel into his cap, and missed the horse and the carriages and everything (he was five).

But more to the point, two centuries ago, another Prince of Wales set aside a wife, Caroline of Brunswick — and relentlessly smeared and scorned her in order to force a divorce. At his coronation, in 1820 (he became George IV), she arrived on the steps to claim her crown. Security barred her from entering the ceremony; she died three weeks later (of grief or exhaustion or disappointment or possibly just ordinary pre-modernity illness). During all this time enormous public sympathy, among the middle and artisanal classes, swelled and swelled — to the point that she was functioning as a symbolic rallying point for radical anti-establishment voices like Cobbett. Absurdly enough, no doubt — I doubt she much admired the Jacobins, though the prince’s pet press often laid this charge. Her woeful tale — or lurid versions thereof — was excitedly taken up the nascent yellow press based round Seven Dials…

A little while after Diana’s funeral, the writer Christopher Hitchens made a TV polemic mocking Dianamania. It wasn’t a good programme: for a start, TV never really suited him, he always seemed stiff and anxious and sweaty, and his undeniable gift for a sentence on the page rarely translates — said out loud it could come across orotund and pompous. He didn’t really trust or respect the medium, and inevitably it turned this contempt back on him. I’d always liked him as a writer because he seemed strong on ambiguous subjects, in particular the subtle complexities of the reliably middlebrow — on Larkin’s private politics for example, or on the former leftist and intellectual turncoat Conor Cruise O’Brien. He was never great on popular culture (my personal theory here was that Hitchens always relied on his pal Martin Amis for insight into UK popular culture; Amis being a man whose entire body is made of tin ear). But this — to me, as someone who had admired him — was worse; scornfully simplistic and hectoring and smug in its mockery of the phenomenon of public emotion: a shock and a foreshadowing. Of course, the “stiff upper lip” is a semi-modern invention itself, a device fashioned in dozens of efficiently ghastly schools up and down the land, to firm up the maintenance and management of a vast empire — to demonstrate “our” fitness to govern the world’s chaotic masses. Seriously, there was no stiff upper lip in 17th or 18th century Britain; quite the opposite. And sure enough, four years later, Hitch would accelerate his transition across the political spectrum and gleefully throw himself into the cheerleading for all-out war; a lurch back into empire-think, the self-regard of the idea of a heroically civilised “we” put here in the world to punish the barbarians; to violently force on them the gift of civilisation. This too was an atavism, whatever its more-rational-than-thou demeanour and complacent mansplainy privilege.

All of which is perhaps a way of saying we live in a strange and ancient land — with several peoples and languages and all kinds of subterranean currents and blockages surging through its history and across its terrains. I’m prepared to accept that mass delusions and folk panics are a social fact, and sometimes a scary one, which we should try and sidestep — but I also believe that sat goblinish among them is the idea that we educated moderns at least have made our way out onto the calm cool uplands of reason and sensible ordered life. Of course we haven’t: quite apart from anything else we are all of us still battling family demons; and of course we respond to subterrean historical forces as we would to a book or film: we’re genuinely moved by things that aren’t at all present in our physical lives, which nevertheless have enormous force in our inner landscapes. In the 1930s, when the civilised European space as he saw it was threatened by the rise of fascism, T.H.White wrote The Sword in the Stone, a book about the soon-to-be King Arthur being trained in anachronistic democratic theory by Merlin, a wizard who lived backwards through time; White based much of his story on a romance written by one Thomas Malory, in the last ghastly decades of the Wars of the Roses. The fragile just and chivalrous space that Malory imagined Arthur creating was called Camelot; it would be shattered in later books by Arthur’s vengeful bastard son Mordred forcing a legalistic war with Arthur’s best friend, Lancelot. White doesn’t call this land England or Albion or Britain: he calls it Gramarye (as in “Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye”, from the last verse of Kipling’s poem “Puck’s Song”). Gramarye is a strange old english word which has given us the modern words grammar and grimoire (meaning a texbook of magic) and — of course, bringing it all back to Diana — GLAMOUR. White’s books would be gathered in 1958 into a single volume, called The Once and Future King; the fourth book, bleak and poetic and never published separately, in which Arthur dies and Camelot falls and Malory steps into view, is called The Candle in the Wind.

Little essay for FT on art, class and autodidacts: featuring Oasis, Joseph Beuys, Arthur Scargill and Richard Jobson, among others. Tom Ewing and Frank Kogan are already arrived in the comments on excellent form: my fantasy thread would eventually also include Mark E. Smith, Robin Carmody and Robert Christgau duking it out with Liam and Noel Gallagher and maybe even one of the Appleton sisters…

The media momentum in the mid-80s was very much towards the elective affinity niche: people who took themselves to be anti-system dissenters* had pioneered the communication micro-cluster as a supposed zone of resistance (the indie label, the avant-garde movements, the specialist journal, the theoretico-critical discipline), but the system they declared they were resisting was actually not at all unhappy with this development. Self-balkanised geometries relocate (and quickly muffle) dissent. Freedoms of choice; freedoms of association: knowledge and intelligence arrive and evolve as a consequence — of course — of a degree of unfreedom in both choice and association. There was a knot here, a contradiction inside a conflict inside a conundrum: fuzzily but very strongly, I wanted start from the established reactive niche to push in another, much wider direction, against the encroaching self-quarantine around me; to shake up all the little comfort zones of specialisation. What would a magazine look like that covered everything, from every perspective? What would its production routines and technical shortcuts be? How would this ethos shape its editorial tactics and strategies?

(I should write this whole story up properly. Actually I have been writing it up properly, in the guise of a review of a record no one likes, including me and its makers. Read it when I finish it aka THE INDEFINITE FAR FUTURE dot dot sigh #smh)

Anyway, like Paul I too left The Wire, my project not at all finished — luckily with a few professional skills I could barter into a (much less ambitious) working life. For a decade or so, from c.2000, I had been giving a good part of my time — and surely more significantly my emotional energy — to my parents’ welfare: they were increasingly old and increasingly ill, and I owed them the best of me. Now that this duty is properly discharged, I’ve been returning to the projects of my youth, and wondering again — pretty ludicrously, given all the changes in media and how you get paid — about running some kind of magazine. Knowing full well that I have neither the resources (time/money) nor (in certain basic ways) the temperament, lessons I learnt the hard way the first time round. What should I be doing instead? The internet very much suits my temperament and habits, in good and bad ways. How can I shape these into a thing that’s useful — or anyway beguiling — for others (as I like to believe I briefly did, long ago, in the aftermath of Virtual Space issue zero, which helped get me an editorial role at The Wire).

At a minimum, I’d like to be pointing readers to the various writers that I routinely turn to, and see what transpires. If I could even get people squabbling debating in the comments-threads here, and attract traffic as a consequence of the smell of blood in the water quality of the discussion…

Have fun starting arguments? Light the blue touchpaper and lean in? No: those may have been my mottos at The Wire more than 20 years ago, but I don’t think they helpfully apply any more. Firestarting is hardly the problem on the internet: it’s how to bring together mutually inflammatory material and not set off exhausting flamewars. It’s something patiently grown-up, not something cheekily adolescent. Grown-up but enticing; catching, even. Hmmmm.

Let’s pick a scatter of who I might mean, and you the reader can do the math. Bearing in mind that my attentions will shift from month to month — I read a lot, and I likeread more a lot more than I hateread (though as you’ll see this somewhat means I merely hateread vicaroiously). I’m a magazine journalist: by definition I honour my boredom as hidden critique. If the butterfly-brained refusal to settle is the manifestation of one kind of symptom, incessant re-appearance at the same spot is another. This would be a very rough sketch of a possible ground; let’s just say that, and not pay attention to the clangour of everything that isn’t here.

• Marcello Carlin (here being nice about me). We are pals, of course. Whatever the thing is that I’m building, it can’t be hostile to fellowship or intimacy; and so must take into account the issues that can arise from this.

• Frank Kogan: here with an oldie that adverts to a tradition of writing and thinking which is not so distant from what I have in mind. Aside from the late Richard Cook, the two figures whose aesthetic I most wanted to fuse at The Wire (or clatter against each other, as a way to talk about all kinds of music) were Greil Marcus and Frank. I wasn’t really there long enough (and also hadn’t entirely had my head round Frank’s thinking, I suspect).

• Seth Edenbaum, and a PDF of a work-in-progress. In some form this should already have been a published book (for several years). As with Marcello and Frank, a friend — and I feel a slight squirmy degree of embarassment that I’ve haven’t been able to do more to draw proper attention to his work, and to him. I used to be good at this; or at least, I once briefly had a platform I hoped to do this kind of broadcasting with. Which some people remember fondly.

(Already we possibly recognise an underlying question: what is wrong with the cultural world we face, that these three are all basically outlier minds, their marginality less a function of their own often daunting rigour than of the failure of what — further up — I termed the routines and shortcuts and tactics and strategies of editorial practice and production?)

Plus some more (rather younger) names: outsider I’d guess more by choice than unspoken decree.

• Alex Harrowell, the Yorkshire Ranter.

• That Tasmanian Devil of prose Hazel Robinson (who is also my extremely close friend off the net as well as on).

• isabelthespy, writing a streak on Britney just before xmas.

And for now I’m stopping at just six. Because I’m imagining even just these guys in a room, debating I don’t know what, and I can no longer hear myself think >:D >:D >:D Though the project would certainly also include the blog I started with Tallita Dyllen, if we work out a way to encompass doing it while living in London and Beirut respectively; and any material that Victoria DeRijke writes, once she frees herself from the horrible clutches of academia. sadface emoticon.

I’d only want to do it — but do what? I literally have no idea how to realise this practicably — if it could be a space bending towards curiosity, generosity, mischief and so on. Is it doable? Is it something you’d like to see, or be part of?

(we are very close, except she’s not on the internet much at all and i’m never off it) (possibly this helps us stay so close!)

I was also Bob Stanley‘s editorial consultant for Yeah Yeah Yeah, which I loved working on and heartily recommend, even if I seem to have failed to convince him that Def Leppard are tremendous.

(courtesy jamie at blood and treasure, naturally)

Adding: I say the piece discusses Meltzer, but (I’m a bit disappointed to have to note) really all it does is mention him. He’s introduced as a symptom of the failure of the critical conversation round classical music and the compositional avant-garde to interest or excite the best minds of the 60s generation. But Taruskin doesn’t give much sense of what might be interesting about Meltzer as a writer or thinker, which is a pity — or (which is surely relevant) that he was clearly in the process of wriggling out from under Hegel and Quine (both mentioned at best fleetingly in book-version of The Aesthetics of Rock; Quine just once, in the same sentence as one of the Hegels). Over to Frank Kogan for an all-too-brief primer.