Liverpool Dérive: The Blue Coats, The Rope Works and The Black Rights

Back to passport central but with a green light on the slightly non-regulation photo it's a case of hitting the streets again. The Bluecoat, where a particular memory is seeing the Artangel and Brian Eno-promoted Moscow art-punksters Zvuki Mu (I put their sister act AVIA of Leningrad on in Manchester Town Hall) is sort of closed for refurbishment but there's still a craft gallery open at the back of the building site, and an overspill across the road. Some interesting work in both spaces. Not inexpensive.

Onwards to Ropeworks where we, IDEA, had an early interest and which at around "half done" has some good models for urban living and small public spaces.

Garage spaces, and family homes, and odds and ends of terraces in this area, probably indicate a much softer land market than applies in the centre of Manchester. A "private estate" remains permeable to the hoi polloi - but no dogs, no kids, no ball games, no noise the signs say. And finally a CPO on some of the largest merchants houses. There is still a lot to go at.

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) is the next call. FACT were one of the main collaborators, along with Manchester Metropolitan University and Liverpool John Moore's, with IDEA, in the 1998 International Symposium of Electronic Arts which was themed Revolution and Terror. And actually shared between the two cities! On the basis as I recall of a Revolution/Terror dichotomy between the two. Manchester was Terror. We at IDEA hosted "Revolting" and "36MC" which were the best bits of the whole thing.

An hour or two now is spent absorbing some of the work in the Black Audio Film Collective retrospective "The Ghosts of Songs". In many cases just a few moments with a particular film or programme reminds of the whole.

Catching some journalist explaining how Docklands got moving: building without planning consent; accepting the international Dollar, Krone and Yen from all comers. There's something there for Liverpool to learn from; though I'd wager this was not the way the displaced and disrupted communities looked on the process at the time.

More enthralling though were snatches of the life and death stories of Martin Luther King and Malcolm Little aka Malcolm X. I will certainly aim to go back soon - the show runs until 01 April 2007 in Liverpool and then tours - as there is too much for an hour or two.

But reading today's Guardian Weekend piece on Barack Obama I am frankly amazed that Gary Younge distances Barack so far from the tradition of these two vital civil rights, and indeed human rights, campaigners.

At one point Younge quotes at length from a speech Barack gave at the Democratic Party Convention in August 2004. The construction and content of this - to my ears - mirrored the King/X speechcraft. Not for the first time I believe that Younge has got it just a little bit wrong.

Of course white people in the USA now are much more comfortable with Obama than they were with King and X, say in 1960. Clearly this advance would not have been gained without King and X. And the speechcraft and even the ideas within are remarkably similar. Even if circumstances are 50 years apart. How would Malcolm X have fared if born instead of shot dead in the 1960s? Or King? Around when Barack Obama first arrived on the planet? I think Younge has missed the story.

In the Ropeworks link above my old friend Andy Lovatt suggested some years ago that the name Ropeworks was unfortunate because it reminded us of Liverpool's part in the slave trade. That doesn't seem like a problem now, if it ever was. Though the fact a google search for "Ropeworks" brings little or no sign of this "Soho of Liverpool" is perhaps more of a problem.