Short stories..

i am trying to write some short stories. i'm going to put them together into an audio book, with sound effects, like an audio play, but without any people or words. They're a bit war focussed because of the course, but i have others (including monkey tennis). One of the stories will hopefully be about pursuading everyone in the west to give £1 if isreal & palestine stop fighting; then everyone who lives there can have new cars. something like that.

Story about the first televison in the village and how it killed the sense of community and shared culture. everyone says the world is going to end. the same thing happens when cities were invented, now more people live in them every year.

Story about starting the great war in Latin America that will lead to the first genuine South American Unions, plotted by the same people who took the paintbrush out of hitlers hand.

Story about the physical high graound and metaphorical. A soldier discovers he only has to change the actions of his comrades and the batlefield changes. He comes up with a brilliant alternative to partitioning countires and ensuring more wars - he focusses on creating more civil wars..

and on..

Guayaquil..

We went to Guayaquil last weekend for our birthdays. It’s a hot port city which in any other country in South America would be the capital; huge inward migration, slums, drugs and gangs. The distribution port of large amounts of a rich countries natural resources sent overseas for peanuts (either 1500 or now, take your pick). The people have lazy accents, everything is ferociously air conditioned and there's not much to do. All is all a splendid weekend..

But it was interesting to see what they have done with regeneration. with the crime levels as high as they were the local publicity hunting mayor came up with some schemes. He privatised large parts of the city. which keeps out the scumbags. and it works. If you a look past the armed guards (and I the only brit who always wants to grab any gun he walks past?? just to see what would happen?) and the tarted up 'historic' streets. I'm not sure it would work in libertarian Europe or the US but is it really so far from standard gentrification??? I posted this to the guardian:

With highly competitive local authorities, it’s not surprising that gentrification means poor families will move out of an area; either because they are forced to, or because families grow and they can't afford a bigger house in the same area. So people in Leeds move to Bradford, this happened before gentrification. The only difference is people now have someone to blame..

The alternative is sink estates where only the hopeless are concentrated together. They may have knocked down Tinsley Cooling towers in Sheffield, but the alternative was to leave them there - not great options either way. If the community can come up with viable alternatives I hope the LA is brave enough to try them. How different is this situation from the indigenous tribes fighting against oil companies in the heart of the Amazon jungle? What constitutes progress? How can to have a collective response to individual ownership???