Military vehicles have always been popular with men of a certain disposition, especially when women in skimpy outfits are also involved. Curiously enough, along with the survivalists, rugby players, and suburban mouth-breathers who glaze over at the sight of any copy of Guns & Ammo, hippies also seem to adore tanks. The KLF used to drive to raves in a particularly garish pink tank, there are almost as many APCs as camper vans at California’s ‘Burning Man’ festival and now London’s own mild-mannered activists The Space Hijackers are joining the party: every Nuts-reading man’s dreams came true at the ‘Defence Systems & Equipment International Exhibition’ (the London Arms Fair) when a tank rolled up to the ExCel centre, with a leggy redhead in a PVC nurse’s outfit perched on the turret.
It was a cracking little stunt, whose military-style planning involved Facebook groups and a decoy tank rolling through the Channel Tunnel. Altogether, it showed a lateral thinking and sense of humour that was sadly lacking in the worthy but rather dull Heathrow Climate Camp last month. Certainly, I would have had absolutely no idea there was an arms fair happening in my city if they hadn’t done it.
But the question remains: why do hippies love their tanks so much? Why should these peaceable types be so very excited by a four-tonne killing machine? Partly, of course, it’s because it allows them to get into the kind of arguments that make bureaucrats look really silly (in this case, it was to do with the complicated question of whether it was illegal to sell a tank at an arms fair), but there’s something deeper at work. The cuddly activists, whose previous events have included such terrifying protests as the Trafalgar Square Pillow Fight, and the Circle Line Parties, sat on top of that tank with expressions of pure glee.
The answer, of course, is that they were discovering a pleasure normally denied to those who lead a moral existence: the simple happiness that comes with getting behind the wheel of an enormous, extravagantly polluting vehicle. A tank is the ultimate extension of the bull-barred ‘Chelsea tractor’: a 4 x 4 with a massive gun stuck on the front, able to take up both lanes of the road, impossible to overtake, and ending every journey with the remains of other people’s Smart Cars needing to be picked from between the tracks. It’s a taste of the lads’ mag lifestyle, the ultimate tester for the soul of anyone who is used to the chill and terror of riding a bicycle through the London traffic, and I suspect there may be a few of those boys and girls scanning e-bay for a cheap Range Rover this week.
We’re all to be grateful to the Space Hijackers for their selfless gestures in raising our consciousness, but I do worry that in saving our souls, they may have damned their own.
One More Drink and I'll Be...
Bemoaning your desperate need for a holiday over a bottle of wine after work takes on a whole new meaning when you can actually see the places you’d rather be! This is the concept from new trendy members bar twentyfour:london, near Carnaby Street, which projects films of worldwide locations around the walls. No need to leave London, you can just pretend you’re sipping your cocktail in Hawaii and then get a cab home.
Forget the Olympic Torch, London’s got Art
The 2012 Olympics is a good excuse to throw some more money (not taxpayers’ cash I hasten to add) at great big (possibly steel) sculptures for people to gawp at. I’d hate to call it competing but it has been casually thrown in that there’ll be something as big as the Angel of the North, Antony Gormley’s creation overlooking the A1 in Gateshead. Maybe Gormley can make a replica angel for the M25…
All the world’s a platform
I thought the Tube had reached the dizzy heights of its creative side with its ‘Poems on the Underground’ campaign but never underestimate the determination of marketing people to popularise art. The latest inspiration from the Royal Shakespeare Company is the Shakespeare Tube Map (coming to a mug or T shirt near you), which plots the Bard’s characters onto an interconnecting diagram like the famous Underground map. Starting at Richard III and making it to Prospero is only for the serious Shakespeare traveller.
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