<nettime> Pie News (Vienna/Vancouver)

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The following was received by the BBB through an anonymously remailed
message. We will post more info when we have it. 

Speaking pie to power,

Agent Eclair
BBB--Continental Europe Cell

------------------------------------

Austrian FPO politician pied in Vienna.

This article was taken from "der standard" one of austrias daily
newspapers.  For your information: the Freedom Party (FPO) is a extreme
right wing party and is part of a government coalition with the austrian
people's party (ovp). Joerg Haider the leader of the FPO became "famous"
for saying "the third reich had a very good employment policy" and for
speaking and openly supporting austrian SS veterans.  Over the last few
months austria some of the biggest protests in its history (and a lot of
police intimidation against activists) against the government. 

Title: The leader of the FPO-Vienna was pied in the face with a chocolate
cake. 

Text: On Tuesday (April 18) Hilmar Kabas, the leader of vienna's FPO party
was attacked by an unknown man while he was giving a TV-interview for the
program "the Report" on the Favoritenstraþe (street name). The man
attacked him from behind with a chocolate cake.  FPO secretary Michael
Kreiþl said it was a violent interruption.  Kabas himself said in an
interview: " The man approached me from behind and pressed the cake into
my face with full force. I was seeing stars." After the attack Kabas said
he was suffering from headaches and had problems with his eyes. A doctor
will look after him on Wednesday.  "I have headache because the man really
hit the cake very hard in my face."  The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation
(ORF) was interviewing Kabas at an information event of the FPO in a
pedestrian zone when the incident occurred.  The culprit escaped. "This
was lucky for him he would have been beaten up really badly if he would
have been caught." said Kabas who said that the people in the area were on
his side.  But, he said, it should not be too difficult to find the man,
who is about 25 years old, since the ORF camera was filming the whole
time.  when and if the ORF will broadcast the incident is still being
discussed. 

<ends>
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PRESS RELEASE

Vancouver, BC, Canada -- At approximately 1:37 pm today, British
anti-semitic conspiracy theorist and author David Icke was pied during a
press conference/book-signing at the Granville Book Company bookstore. 

Amongst other things, ex-soccer goalie and sportscaster David Icke is
known for proclaiming himself the Son-of-God during a 1991 BBC interview. 
Since that time he has published three books, detailing an intricate and
ever-evolving World Conspiracy. As well as claiming that the world is run
by shape-shifting reptilian bloodlines, (possibly from Mars), Icke uses
historical right-wing anti-semitic theories like The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. He has also praised the research of British Holocaust
denier David Irving. 

Today's book-signing/press conference was interrupted when three
protestors, two dressed as lizards, one with an alien hand puppet, entered
the store and proceeded to ridicule Icke.  While being heckled for his
anti-semitic views by the alien hand puppet, Icke was suddenly creamed by
two lemon-meringue pies. The two pies were thrown by agents of a local
pie-brigade, the Meringue Marauders. While the pie-tossers fled, the
lizards and hand-puppet were aggressively confronted by Ickes Followers, a
combination of pot-addled new-age flakes, right-wing militia supporters,
and other confused individuals. 

While Icke consistently tries to silence criticism of his paranoid
ramblings by labeling any opposition as an attack on free speech, his
Followers chose to shout down, assault, and briefly detain the lizards and
hand puppet. All escaped unscathed, leaving a cream covered mess of
bigotry and nuttiness behind. 

David Icke is an arrogant windbag who uses scapegoating, hate and neo-nazi
materials to promote his confused, fringe-fascist world view. The Meringue
Marauders felt it was time to pop his balloon. The pies were selected for
their flaky crusts. Flaky pies for a flaky guy. 

The Meringue Marauders can be reached c/o Anti-Racist Action:
aravancouver@tao.ca
(604) 682-3269  box 9677
_________________________________________________

The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, April 18, 2000 globeandmail.com

Cream and punishment
Who are the Entartistes and their pie-throwing comrades,
and what do they want?
By Heather Mallick

Do we not feel as helpless as a hamster in the modern world, crushed by
pompous politicians, bullied by bosses and force-fed Frankenfood by
multinationals gone mad with power? And when we climb off our little
exercise wheel to protest, are we not doused with pepper spray and our
inert bodies dragged away by police officers disguised as Daleks? 

The entartistes have a solution. It began decades ago in the fevered mind
of a Belgian named Noel Godin as "a match jammed in a Yale lock, an error
in the accounts, a bomb threat, a drop of tar in a surveillance camera."
In the intervening years, it mutated into pastry. The cream pies
multiplied until the Internationale des Anarcho-patisseurs, or
International Pie Anarchists, was born, its dream to gently press cream
pies into the faces of the pompous and the authoritarian around the world. 

Quebec leads the nation this time. In the past two years, its cream-pie
anarchists "entarted" (basically, flanned) Montreal Mayor Pierre Bourque,
former Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau and Montreal mayoral candidate
Jacques Duchesneau. Federal Intergovernmental Affairs Minister StÈphane
Dion was flanned last year as he handed out pieces of cake at a homeless
shelter. 

And just over a week ago, Quebec Finance Minister Bernard Landry got it,
only to be forced to explain why the Quebec government, in its blind
keenness to throw money at anything that sounds like French culture, had
just given $112,000 to Symfolium, a Montreal symposium of international
comic activists that included the demon seed himself, Noel Godin, and was
run by FranÁois Gourd, the chief Quebec entartiste. 

Gourd, the 49-year-old co-founder of the defunct Rhinoceros Party, is into
entartisme big-time. After a lifetime of creative anarchy, he has found
his niche, even if he shares it with a ragtag bunch of people who rarely
agree or even meet. 

The entartistes, marginal types all, are just like the rest of us in one
respect. They form factions, and the faction that flanned Landry
immediately declared it had boycotted the Symfolium, "which was organized
by a former member of our disorganization." Not only would it not take
bribes to flan, it sniffed, but it would not accept handouts from the
flannable. So there. 

Most of the pastried accept their fate and slink away. As the entartistes
point out, they are monied people who can afford dry-cleaning. And
besides, with the entartistes' Web site now giving citizens a vote on whom
they most wish to see entarted, it has sunk in that being creamed is not
necessarily a one-time-only event. 

Jean Charest leads with 44 votes and Conrad Black has 10, only one less
than had the pitiable Landry. Once you're flanned, your tally goes back to
zero but Dion is back up there now in third place. 

It cannot be pleasant to be photographed being blinded by pie in public.
It is as shocking to one's system as slipping on ice and sitting on the
sidewalk with the breath knocked out of you while people stare. It is
profoundly humiliating. But of all the pied, only Dion (no relation to
Celine, who's also on the list) and Parizeau have filed criminal charges. 
This is proof, say the entartistes, that the federalists and the
sovereignists "sont comme cul et chemise" ("cut from the same cloth"). 

They say Dion was targeted for "making political capital on the backs of
the poor," but it must be said that the soup kitchen had been happy to
have him that day. "These pie throwers are really bullies, and not funny
at all," said Christine Fortin, a volunteer at the kitchen. The
commentator Pierre Bourgault called them "germs." Two men, Patrick (Pop
Tart) Robert and BenoÓt (D'Artagnan) Foisy, have been charged. 

Nevertheless, charges against entartistes haven't fared well in other
courts. In Belgium, one entartiste was acquitted after he claimed he was
following an "ancient Belgian tradition." Parizeau's pie man, Bruno Caron,
19, showed up in court wearing a red rubber nose and pleaded not guilty to
"assault with a pastry." Even if Parizeau wins, he may end up looking even
more petulant than he usually does. 

Entartisme has a history, though not necessarily a glorious one. 

It is part of a tradition that began with the Feast of Fools, a clerical
saturnalia popular in the Middle Ages that was stamped out by the
Reformation. The central feature was the ass. The mass would be burlesqued
and the responses would be brayed. Dirty songs were sung, that sort of
thing. 

Basically, it's anarchy, which did very well for itself during the
Industrial Revolution when working people became the pawns of brand-new
industrial elites. Some have suggested that if today's Information
Revolution allied to globalization is indeed as significant as was the
Industrial Revolution -- as disruptive to workers' lives and as the basis
for a pervasive feeling of helplessness among citizens -- then we are ripe
for a new wave of anarchy. 

That means organized protests disrupting the 1997 APEC summit in
Vancouver, the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle last November,
and this week's World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings in
Washington.  It means hackers thumbing their noses at Internet monoliths.
It means a resurgence in fringe humour and pointless installation art. Why
would a man seal himself in a see-through coffin under a New York sidewalk
for a week?  Why would Canadian comedian Tom Green hump a dead moose by
the side of the road? It makes no sense. But what else makes sense these
days? Bill Gates having a personal worth of $75-billion (U.S.)? 

Squeezing a pie into Gates's face in 1998 was Noel Godin's proudest
moment. 

Flanning is the modern equivalent of the Dadaist tactic of sending abusive
letters to worthless celebrities, says Godin, 54. "If I sent Gates a
letter, only he would see it," Godin told Britain's The Observer. "Instead
I communicate via tarts, in a sort of visual Esperanto." 

Why would Noel Godin have flanned a French philosopher named Bernard-Henri
Levy more than five times? 

Well, why not? Levy, who wears his white silk shirts unbuttoned to the
navel to display his chest hair, once said he disliked seeing women pay in
restaurants. "I think that money does not suit a woman, or rather that I
would not fall in love with such a woman." He rates himself as so clever
that his talents form "a landscape which does not have a fixed place in
the classic topography of culture." 

Levy, who boasts of his reasonableness and tolerance, was forced to endure
film being repeatedly shown on French TV of himself, post-pie in Nice,
trying to strangle Godin and shouting, "Get up, or I'll kick your head
in."  Godin cackles as he watches films of his agents flanning Levy
point-blank in LiËge while another agent decorates Levy's snooty
girlfriend with a layered chocolate g'teau topped with crËme chantilly. 

"Levy was flanned in Reims by a mysterious splinter group," Godin reports,
"and recently he also ran into difficulties in a bakery at Montpellier." 
Godin, whose autobiography is titled Cream and Punishment, now plans to
use performing dogs to bear pies. "I like the thought of Levy experiencing
a feeling of slight unease every times he sees a dog at a public
function." 

As The Observer points out, this is no longer Godin and Levy, it is
Herbert Lom trying to trap his bÍte noire, Inspector Clouseau. 

The trick is to flan only those whose pomposity is widely known, lest the
victim garner public sympathy. As the cream "gloup gloups" (as well as
being a characteristic of cream, this is also the battle cry of the
entartistes) from the victim's face, his true character emerges. At
Cannes, Jean-Luc Godard took out his cigar, tasted the cream and praised
Godin's homage to silent film. The entartistes like Godard now. 

As the visitor to http://www.entartistes.ca will see, pie-throwing goes
way back. It was a staple in Laurel and Hardy films, a glorious but
discarded scene in Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove, a favourite of the
Keystone Kops, Three Stooges, Wile E. Coyote, the Marx Brothers and that
famous comedian beloved of the French, Jerry Lewis. It has international
appeal, which is why there are branches of the Internationale des
Anarcho-patisseurs in Melbourne, New York, Holland and Quebec, among other
places. For some reason, it has not caught on in English Canada -- it may
be that Anglos wince at watching public humiliation -- though this may
change. 

In San Francisco, they call themselves the Biotic Baking Brigade, and
their pies are vegan: Tofu cream, organic cherry and pumpkin are favoured.
They, along with their previous incarnation, the Yippies, have creamed the
CEOs of Monsanto and Novartis (two kings of genetically modified food),
economist Milton Friedman, anti-abortionist Randall Terry, Sylvester
Stallone, the late Andy Warhol and many many others since the 1960s. 

What does an entartiste do if he doesn't have a pie to hand? Godin is a
filmmaker and one of his three short films (strangely, not the one called
Strike and Farts) won a Belgian national film competition. The award was
presented by a mayor, and Godin detests mayors on principle. "I said,
'Thank you, thank you, thank you, my mayor.' " He kissed him and licked
him, pushed him over and rolled around the stage with him with their legs
intertwined. "Every time he tried to get up, I hauled him back by the
buttocks." 

It seems considerably worse than getting a cream pie in the face,
especially since there is a strict code of ethics for flanning posted on
the Web site, and it doesn't mention buttock-fondling. 

Entartistes must not throw the pie, but must deposit it lovingly. They
must appear ridiculous i.e, red-nosed, so as to distinguish themselves
from CIA hitmen. The cream must be of good quality and the plate cannot
injure. The flanning must be filmed or photographed. It cannot be
partisan. "Please, no pies that are separatist, federalist, communist,
sexist, racist, etc. We are against all power, whether economic, political
or media, but we are definitely in favour of free human beings." 

The irony is that as flanning becomes more frequent, the entartistes, no
matter how disorganized and disparate they are, gain a power of their own. 
Will Quebec, already eccentric in its language laws, become an even more
anarchic place when it is run by the pastry terrorists? 

-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------
"The great appear great because we are on our knees. Let us now pie!" 
--Max Stirner, 19th century German anarchist & author

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