Wildewire

A great guy, a dancer for whom I have huge respect was moved to have a rant-ette on facebook about the fact that Newcastle City Council has proposed a total cut of arts funding towards a saving of £90m in their "Austerity Measures" response. It prompted the following response from me... "The Arts" continue to be the first lamb for sacrifice. I think we 'arts workers' are often complicit in what happens to us. All those reasonable arguments about protecting essential services ARE reasonable. Present a paediatric cardiac unit next to a picture of a performer and ask the public to choose which to cut and its a done deal. But I don't think we should have EVER thought of ourselves as anything but ESSENTIAL. I have witnessed and read and contributed to countless consultations and research that identify the contribution of arts and culture to this region's economy. Doesn't anybody READ this stuff? If they did how can the council be contemplating a TOT

I had the misfortune of enduring a meeting about Black arts policy with a couple of white women earlier this week. One of them is... well-meaning, the other... isn't.  I had taken steps to avoid this encounter- going as far as getting answers to the questions that needed to be asked in advance and suggesting there was no need to physically meet, but they were having none of it. The venue chosen for this meeting spoke volumes: the cafe of the building where 'the one who isn't' has her office. Clearly: the discussion wasn't viewed as worthy of a business setting. I survived the first 100 minutes pretty well with 'the one who isn't' interrupting and talking over me until one point where she accused me of "shouting" and asked why I was raising my voice. I continued in a quieter tone which elicited a sarcastic "Are you unwell?"  to which I retaliated "Don't patronise ME, woman!" which I happily repeated in response to &qu

When I was in my teens I learned that in gay slang; "trolling" meant being on the lookout for a (usually) sexual partner. I was told it derived from patrolling. I've always felt that "cruising" better described many hunting homosexual men. The most successful hunters projected an air of relaxed disinterest as they scanned and assessed potential prey; dismissing some and homing in on others. More recently "Trolling" is about being rude and nasty online- derived from the trolls of childhood stories I expect... here's a wikipedia definition . I've recently had my first encounters with tolls: I stumbled across a You Tube clip of a guy playing funk bass in Northumberland Street, in Newcastle. I'd seen him once and was happy to put cash in his hat. I 'liked' the clip and was about to make a comment when I read a surprisingly hateful, racist comment that entirely ignored the musician's talent, labelled him a vagrant and claimed

LOL: Jenny Harris has a lot to answer for! She was my first boss and she set a standard that NONE of the people for whom I subsequently worked achieved. I went to work at The Albany Empire, (now called The Deptford Albany ) on December 19th 1984 as the Drama Animateur, for the Basement Youth Arts Project. I'd graduated from Bristol 'Old Vic' Theatre School with naive ideas about "giving something back" before charging off to carve my career and end up directing at the National... ahem. Jenny was Artistic Director of The Combination Ltd which I think started in Brighton, but had come to Deptford to work in the old Albany Empire that had been burned down, rebuilt and then demolished for a road-widening scheme before the new building was built in about 1981. By the time I got there, Jenny was a veteran of community development. She could be abrupt and abrasive to some. I saw this as someone who knew what they were doing and didn't need short-cuts or to puss

Few people outside Uganda might ever have heard the name David Bahati or Rebecca Kadaga were it not for the former's "Kill the Gays" bill. And that bill might never have been drafted were it not for the money of American "Evangelical Christians" who showed up in Kampala in 2009 to deliver a 3 day workshop where they convinced Ugandan Christians of the existence of a sinister plot involving foreign homosexuals infiltrating Uganda preying on young people, offering them laptops and other indulgences in return for (homo)sexual favours. It is not known how much money Bahati has received to "sponsor" his bill. Though the American Evangelists:Scott Lively, Caleb Lee and Don Schmeierer [you have blood on your hands!] claim to be shocked that the bill actually calls for the death penalty. But there has already been death as a result of their interference. David Kato was bludgeoned to death at his home in January 2011 after a Ugandan newspaper printed a "