I was at Angela Porter’s Ghost Forest installation outside of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square this afternoon. Brilliant. The 10 Ghanaian tree stumps really made an impression, not easy in such a space. Here are some photos and I’ve copied the official blurb below. Show’s over now but it moves on to Copenhagen in time for COP-15.

[BTW, hit the full screen on the bottom of the player below, they look a lot better that way.]

Ghost Forest is an original and ambitious project by Angela Palmer that seeks to raise public awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change. It involves taking a series of 10 rainforest tree stumps, most with their buttress roots still attached, from a regulated, commercially logged tropical rainforest in Ghana.

The tree stumps will be presented as a “ghost forest” firstly in Trafalgar Square in London, and then in Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Cop15 Climate Change Conference in December.

Ghost Forest is a carbon neutral project – following input from Climate Care, Ghost Forest’s carbon footprint will be offset, see here for details.

Ghost Forest Art Installation – Trafalgar Square, London, U.K. 16-22 November 2009

Ghost Forest Art Installation – Thorvaldsens Plads, Copenhagen, Denmark 7-18 December 2009

I’m involved in organizing a screening of Age of Stupid next Saturday 22nd August. 8pm.

Here’s the official blurb:

The Age of Stupid is the new four-year epic from McLibel director Franny Armstrong. Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? MORE

If you can come please do, it’s free in, we’ll have a cheap bar and the movie itself shouldn’t be missed.

It’s taking place on the roof of The Printworks, Ashwin St, Dalston (E8 3DL) and it will look something like this:

Copey and company bow down to the Greatest Briton (image cc Lloyd Davis)

I’ve just come across this personal account of the April 1st G20 protests from none other than Julian Cope, Liverpool post punk leftover, Krautrock boffin and the original Megalithic European.

Sorry I’m a day late with this Drudion, but I was in London yesterday at the G20 anti-Kapitalist protests that focused on the Bank of England. Unfortunately, I totally fucked up my plans through sheer yokel paranoia and came away empty handed. Intending to meet up with my dear friends, the writer Gyrus and U-Know editor Merrick, at Liverpool Street Station, at 10.30am, I left our W. Country home at 6am and was in central London just before nine. Nervous that there would be thousands of people milling about, I arrived on foot at Liverpool Street a full hour early, to be confronted by hundreds of police already in place. Of course, I was dressed extremely dodgily, with my hair up in a black wig and dressed in the kind of all-purpose rural chic that couldn’t have been further from my regular Rock God image (!). The police, however, were so fucking paranoid that they conducted a Stop & Search on me at the top of the escalators at 10.20; a full 40 minutes before the march had even started. Of course, I declined to give my name and address and, having no ID or cards on me, they detained me and wrote down a description. Unfortunately, when the main cop read on the report that I was wearing a stab vest, he came over personally and demanded to look at it. I just about managed to take the thing off without disturbing my wig, but the cop told me he believed the vest was part of a stolen consignment of police uniforms and gear, and that I’d taken off the labels to hide this fact. Kiddies, I’ve had this stab vest at least two years and wear it any time I’m in the city, but the cops just used this as an excuse to do a full body search and they soon confiscated my burka, a pair of women’s tights and all of my (expensive) police body armour. All of this occurred in full view of the general public and was clearly done just to make a show of me. When I still didn’t give my name, they sat me in a van to think about it for hours and the fucking protest went off with me detained. In the meantime, dammit, an exultant Merrick was texting me from Bishopsgate telling me the Climate Camp have taken over, while Gyrus had been penned in at the Bank of England. With hindsight, I’ll admit I looked extremely dodgy. But what got me most was how the police discovered all of my gear but still didn’t realize I was wearing a 99p black eBay wig! On the Stop & Search report I’m even described as having ‘Hair: black, short.’ I can’t show you my face on the self-portrait I took as I plan to use this disguise again in the future, but Holy McGrail referred to it as Scargill Chic and pointed out that there are clearly blonde tufts visible from underneath the rug. If McGrail could suss it from the crappy mobile phone photo (shown above), then so much for the West’s so-called War on Terror. What the fuck!

That one of England’s true rock (and I mean ‘rock’ in all senses of the word) heroes was detained at the Met’s pleasure for hours on end is galling enough but that he was recognized by none of his captors is truly an indictment on the state of policing in Britain today.

I don’t work for the government (they work for me). But if I did I’d have been at UK Government barcamp at the weekend. My good friend Faheyr was there though and his overview is must-read material if you, like me, are all about open government, killing abstraction and simple transparency. Go check it out now.

I meant to put link these up last week. Photos from FLAGS. 39 Flags by 41 artists curated by Lewis Ronald, Adam Gibbons and Jesper List Thomsen.

As you’ll see if you take a look over on TrashBlanc.com right now I was up early this morning visiting what I believe is London’s only annual Potato Fair. I was with four longtime patrons of the event who provided plenty of advice, but the most important piece was “get there early”. They weren’t wrong, by 10.30am I was in a bustling school féte scene straight out of the Archers.

I could write for hours about the great varieties on display, from the bog standard Golden Wonder to the brilliantly named Skerry Blue and my own personal favourite the Sharpe’s Express, but it was the sheer fact that this was taking place in the middle of London that impressed me most. George Monbiot wrote a lighthearted piece recently about his love forapple varieties. Well and good I thought at the time. But attending something like the Potato Fair and seeing the variety of potatoes alone we have in our soil is simply amazing. And it’s also terribly depressing. 95% of these varieties will never hit the shops. Tesco, Lidl and Aldi have no interest in small lots with smaller margins and the vast majority of the population don’t know what they’re missing. Shame.

Here are some photos from my Flickr account.

Sam: I want to take photos of trees.

Lewis: Photos of trees are over. A photographer comes out of the forest with the same photos on film that were in his head on the way in.

Sam’s photos are at Corbridge Crescent, E2, London.

-edit-
Lewis Ronald has been kind enough to clarify exactly what he’s talking about above (from an essay by Andy Grundberg):