looks fun! what a great idea.

Bring back the Route masters and bring back back the funny conductors now those were the days when we get to have a laugh then.

I'll get you Butler! - Blakey from 'On the Buses'

for fuck's sake, are we paroding ourselves, and ridiculing protest?

Do so-called samba bands have to wear pink? Do they now have to dress as clowns too?

Why oh why do you call yourselves sambaistas? Do you really think pink clowns are a revolutionary force? Are you taking the piss out of Mexican social struggles? And why pink (I hope you're not misunderstanding the pink & silver block at the World Bank protests in Prague; this was not a pacifist block).

Hi FFS - would be interested in giving answers to your questions and hearing more of your point of view - if you want to get in touch via this email.

Cheers
RORS

thanks for your reply - if you're up for it, it'd be good to hear your views here, so others can read 'em too. I've heard these criticisms, or rather critiques, in various places over the last years, not directed particularly at Sheffield folk, so it'd be interesting for more than just me to read your ideas.

...a day or so and I will put something up. Cheers

Ok, I don’t think Indymedia is the place for long discussion, being a news thingy, but a quick response since I said I would…

The starting question for me is “how do we live in modern times?” and the starting answer is “by doing anything rather than nothing”. By that I mean the current orthodoxy takes for granted the capitalist-consumerist-territorial-authoritarian norm and unless you say or do something to the contrary it is presumed you are signing up to it. If the long term goal is to overturn that orthodoxy then the short term tactics need to include challenging it, questioning it, ridiculing it. And the greater variety these forms of dissent can take the better. The worst thing that can happen is for supposed dissent to be sucked in to the accepted pattern of things – maybe Stop the War Marches are an example of this.

Well, what has this got to do with samba bands? You mentioned the pink & silver block at the World Bank protests in Prague from which developed the idea of tactical frivolity (see  http://www.rhythmsofresistance.co.uk/?lid=116) – “a space that exists in the gap between total compliance and violent confrontation”. We need that gap because constant violent confrontation is not going to happen right here right now and, more importantly, when it happens in small doses it will pretty surely be a loser in these oppressive times. (Incidentally, the ROR network is not by default pacifist – having adopted PGA Hallmarks and worked out by the way it has operated in cooperation with other groupings in recent times). So, if we have a thread to contribute to the web of dissent it is to do with surprising people, confronting power, and not being predictable.

The grumpy old city of Sheffield is mardy about First Buses repeatedly putting up fares, cutting services and being answerable to no one – a silly, noisy cardboard bus cooking a snook at First might briefly turn a moan into a smile and a smile into a bit more confidence to make a fuss. ROR people working with a local pensioners’ action group achieved a similar thing recently (see news report here:  http://tinyurl.com/oswkq).

Ok – I don’t really want to go nit-picking but you might think I’m not responding to you properly unless I say:

“sambista” – not a word used by us in the report above but I think it means “person who takes part into the activities of a samba group or a samba school”
“samba” - ROR bands don’t call themselves “samba bands” but “drum band that plays at demonstrations and direct actions” – we inevitably get called samba bands
“clowns” – CIRCA can speak for themselves if they wish (www.clownarmy.org)

So, FFS, we do what we do – I guess as different people we do loads of other things too. We do what we have the imagination for here and now – tomorrow it will be different.