Void dins noon o’clock in the piazza.
A serpent’s last winter rolls around,
as light as a skin.
The prayers went in search of
my friend’s soul. I pour the spirit of ‘now’.
The messages from ‘then’ scrolls
for a lightyear and some thousands miles.
Listen to the clock. The nearby dock
coils around a ship sailed away.
Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor
Donna Snyder was an amazing friend. Life is full of you and Ronna and some others whom I never met physically.
As a huge David Bowie fan, I highly anticipated my reactions to the new film Moonage Daydream directed by Brett Morgan. The film was lauded at Cannes, and close to being over-hyped. I got all dressed up, for David, pulling out my vintage 1970s Harrods Opera coat. I stuffed three tissues in its pocket – for I would surely cry. Morgan has a very romantic style, and I count his Rolling Stones Crossfire Hurricane documentary as the best-ever Rolling Stones portrayal, and there are so many to choose from. Viewing Moonage Daydream at a local theatre, the gorgeous Cheltenham Tivoli, was a real treat, despite the usual 15-minute-plus subjection to previews of the latest, predominantly Hollywood merde. I was audibly moaning as I usually do, and vowed to myself that from now on I am not entering the theatre until the feature I chose to watch is on.
I didn’t need my tissues during the film and only twice came close. I’ll start with praising what is great about this film. Moonage Daydream reminded me of what I hate about nearly all “rockumentary” of the past 30 years, because it isn’t that! I nearly forgot! The MTV style of rock n roll documentaries must be killed, and thrown into the trash heap forevermore, and I pray that Moonage Daydream can be a turning point, or at least a catalyst for banishing the non-artistic, dumbed-down, easy-way-out for a director to splash what should be his artistic expression of a personal (or even for-hire) portrayal of our music idols. The time-line tradition, which I cannot blame MTV for more, with the usual talking heads (yawn), must die. Yes, I myself have been featured doing this and even being an Associate Producer – Rolling Stone: Life and Death of Brian Jones – but I really did “forget”! However, that film is thematically a police/murder story so doesn’t lend itself too much to artistry. Also, I am a fan of Danny Garcia because of the intriguing subjects he pulls out to cover. When the current style of rockumentary, perhaps loosely influenced by 1973’s A Film About Jimi Hendrix, but without that film’s artful scenes, cuts and cast of true artistic characters (Germain Greer, Pat Hartley for example), first emerged, I remember my younger self hating them. Loathing the portrayal of artists in such a simple boring way. So what might disappoint fans, and those of us (all), who are used to the traditional style of the past few decades, is what we need. We need to think, and to feel. We need portrayals of artists to try to capture the essence of what we love about musicians who’ve floated to the top of pop culture. The everyman doesn’t know why he loves David Bowie, or The Rolling Stones, and historical facts have little to do with it, and I think that is, perhaps subconsciously, why we watch these documentaries. There is well-deserved kudos to David Bowie’s wife and family for giving their blessings to a unique documentary for theatrical release. The evidence of not necessarily needing or wanting a safe and fan-friendly, talking- head filled common documentary for publicity, record sales and self-aggrandisement is noticed loud and clear – and appreciated. This is another true testimony to David’s wisdom – in choosing his mate.
There are no narrative mentions of songs, or albums, or collaborators in this film. All of that information is already out there. There is a tour de force of wall to wall music, which astonishingly can’t and doesn’t cover all and most popular Bowie songs, which in itself is telling you something. There are images, including clips from stage and screen. They’re not explained, so to speak, as if to an outsider or hungry fan. The scenes are presented making you an insider, to the psyche of David Bowie. So what we are left with is an impression, in every sense of the word, more than a technical education. Director Peter Whitehead is called to mind instantly, and I’d be sure Brett Morgan is influenced by Whitehead’s work. As a thinker, and an artist myself, I found that the question then is – does this film “Lay The Real Thing On Me”? In its attempt, the film is very much a psychological documentary and a spiritual one. This is a wise an imperative road to take for a documentary on any true artist, not only David Bowie.
The psychological message was clear: self-analysis is key for David, and that it should be for everyone. David speaks about idolizing his older brother. However, I wish there would have been more insight in to the theory that his brother was committed to a mental hospital because of dosing with LSD. I’d love to know why David always ignored this factual truth. I ponder if ignoring the LSD is valid or merely to do with David’s own romanticism with mental illness.
We must remember how difficult it is to make a “great” movie. Great efforts have failed. It takes so much, including the intangible: magic (vs. “magick”—blessings vs. will). Brett Morgan is the King of the ‘montage’. Moonage Daydream I feel has one or two too many. Do we really need to be reminded of the Tina Turner/Bowie Pepsi advertisement? I was happy to forget about it, and no attempt of injecting it into a truly artistic film, is going to make it appealing to The Universe or at least any critical mind. Had Morgan cut this and perhaps one other montage, the film would be that much less montage-heavy. Historical timings are to and fro, which is fine, but then balance has to be achieved somewhere. Order in chaos, Brett? Montage is wonderful, and it definitely lends itself to David Bowie, more so than The Rolling Stones, but none done here can match his LSD montage in Crossfire Hurricane.
Despite several references to “life” and all that life is, and it being declared the main motivator of David Bowie, this film is very dark. It is a spiritual film, yet it is spiritually imbalanced and there is so much evidence that David had that balance. There are mentions of David’s own astrology in his own voice, which I gobbled up. However, there are about four visuals signifying Aleister Crowley in this film. Really? David mentions AC in a lyric, (which makes the cut here in this film), pronouncing his name wrong, so, ummm, no. I had to wonder if this is Brett Morgan injecting his own trip here, as directors do. Oliver Stone heavily includes his own ‘bent’ in his films. Or maybe Brett Morgan thinks the deluded Crowley mystique adds nice touches. In tapping into David’s spiritual psyche, this film comes off as dark, and practically anti-Christian as if deliberately. Is that accurate? No, it isn’t. Personally I’ve always wondered why for example, David Bowie chose 5 minutes before going onstage, in front of one of the largest audiences he ever had (Freddie Mercury Tribute), to recite the Lord’s Prayer on bended knee. “….just before I went on stage, something just told me to say the Lord’s Prayer.” – DB But remarkably you’d never believe he did that, if you didn’t know, and watched this film. What a great opportunity missed there, to have shown that event – even in an unexplained glimpse! The juxtaposition would have been accurate. And there is no allusion to David’s last word and premonition on these subjects: “look up here I’m in Heaven”. A clip of Bowie saying he never asked Jesus for anything makes the cut here, but David forgot that he did ask him to “make him five”. A brilliant poetic queston he might have asked as the elder Bowie, I wouldn’t doubt.
In David Bowie’s own words: “Looking at what I have done in my life, in retrospect so much of what I thought was adventurism was searching for my tenuous connetion with God. I was always investigating, always looking into why religions worked andwhat it was people found in them. And I was always fluctuating from one set of beliefs to another until a very low point in the mid-Seventies where I developed a fascination with black magic… And although I’m sure there was a satanic lead pulling me towards it, it wasn’t a search for evil. It was in the hope that the signs might lead me somewhere.” Arena Magazine 1993
An inaccurate portrayal of an important subject, David’s spirituality (which is a centrepiece in this great film which is equal parts psychological and artistic documentary), didn’t ruin the film for me but it deeply flawed it. Fans may think they dislike this film because it’s unusual, and they want their MTV. But I dare say if fans dislike it, they may not really know why. That is the nature of magic, (just the way they may not know why they love David Bowie). The reason why fans or non-fans may dislike or not love this film, could be because David is presented a tad demonic – who woulda thunk that? Nobody.
My personal two moments of emotion was the well placed ‘Rock n Roll Suicide’ and the ending of the film, which, for me and my spirit, struggled, yet succeeded in making it all right with the spiritual balance issue. A perhaps subliminal or unintended Christ message: “The sun machine is coming down and we’re going to have a party.” What an incredibly poignant and spiritual ending. Of course we are. I will be buying the dvd. As far as the claims that this is Brett Morgan’s best film yet, I conclude it misses the perfection of Crossfire Hurricane.
Roxanne Fontana
September 2022
Alan Dearling offers a few snippets of info on fracking in the UK and how the Conservative government green-light for resuming fracking is likely to unleash local and national protests.
Here in my local Upper Calderdale town, Todmorden in West Yorkshire, the Extinction Rebellion (XR) ‘Change is Now’ bus arrived in the local market area. Talking to a couple of the XR bus crew, they explained that they are on a travelling mission to spread knowledge and information about climate change and the energy crisis. The XR mission is focussing on priming a new ‘rebellion’ in the UK and promoting a Citizens’ Assembly. And crucially, raising opposition around the resumption of ‘fracking’.
In London XR pulled off an audacious publicity ‘performance’ on 7th September. This is the supposed Liz Truss Bus promoting a Citizen’s Assembly. Very British humour, methinks! As XR announced on their Twitter site:
“The bus is of course not a real campaign bus for the new PM. It is a hoax bus from Extinction Rebellion, launched as part of the September Rebellion, starting at Marble Arch on Saturday September 10th, 10am. After holding the bus for nearly 4 hours, the police gave the driver a ticket for an “unsafe carpet” on the stairwell before letting them continue on their tour. Dare we say that it looks a bit like Liz Truss is scared of a bus with better ideas on it than her own!”
So, is ‘fracking’ the UK government’s silver bullet to solve the cost of living and energy crisis? Or, is it a major health and environmental risk?
Here’s the definition of ‘fracking’ from ‘Deutsche Welle (DW)’ a major broadcaster in Germany:
“Fracking is a procedure to extract shale oil and gas from underground by blasting bedrock formations with a mixture of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure to create fractures through which petroleum and gas can flow.
Many environmentalists argue that the method pollutes water supplies, harms fauna and flora and can trigger earthquakes, as well as advancing global warming.”
And, this is a summary of the issues around resumption of fracking in England from a current report by ‘Reuters’:
“Lifting the moratorium will help the shale industry unlock UK onshore natural gas in quantities sufficient to meet the UK’s needs for decades to come,” Cuadrilla CEO Francis Egan said.
Chemicals and energy giant INEOS, which holds several British shale gas exploration licences, said the government should treat shale gas development as ‘a national infrastructure priority’.
Experts say restarting the industry will do nothing to ease energy prices this winter, however, since it would take many years for an industry to develop and it remains unclear whether a significant amount of gas could be extracted.
New Prime Minister Liz Truss said earlier this month that fracking – extracting shale gas from rocks by breaking them up – would be allowed where it was supported by communities.
Business and Energy Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg said on Thursday all sources of energy needed to be explored to increase domestic production, ‘so it’s right that we’ve lifted the pause to realise any potential sources of domestic gas.’
Fracking, which has been opposed by environmental groups and some local communities, was banned after the industry regulator said it was not possible to predict the magnitude of earthquakes it might trigger.
Rees-Mogg, however, said the practice was ‘safe’, and the limits on seismic activity should be re-assessed so it could take place in an ‘effective and efficient way’.
Cuadrilla, 96% owned by Australia’s AJ Lucas (AJL.AX), had the most advanced fracking wells in Britain and found a natural gas resource, but the rules around earth tremors meant its operations had to keep halting, meaning that neither of its two wells could be fully flow-tested.
‘Even if the risks proved to be manageable and acceptable, shale gas would only make a significant impact to UK supply if, over the next decade, thousands of successful wells were to be drilled,’ said Andrew Aplin, Honorary Professor at Durham University.”
It’s fairly obvious that local residents where fracking is likely to be resumed will be somewhere on a scale between ‘concerned’, ‘anxious’ and downright ‘frightened’. It goes beyond Nimby-ism to have a high risk of a seismic event – an earthquake in your own backyard! Relatively nearby to my home, Wakefield, Manchester and Preston, are amongst 151 areas from Sussex and Surrey up to Lancashire and Yorkshire potentially scheduled to resume gas exploration – fracking.
The Friends of the Earth fracking map link: https://friendsoftheearth.uk/climate/england-oil-and-gas-map-where-could-fracking-happen
Extinction Rebellion: https://extinctionrebellion.uk/
The Magic Box: Viewing Britain Through the Rectangular Window, Rob Young
(500pp, £12.99, Faber)
Rob Young’s Electric Eden was a fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of electric folk music; his book on Can was good too, but I’m less convinced by The Magic Box, a look at the way TV depicted Britain over the years since colonizing the corner of our lounges. And films too, though of course they aren’t always part of the title’s magic box.
Young presses all the right buttons, mentions all the usual suspects along with some new obscurities, dips into folk horror and hauntology, and succinctly and intelligently groups material together by theme, but it feels like he is late to the party. He may write about it much better than most – with the exception of Mark Fisher on hauntology – but there is no real argument here, and far too much summary rather than critical analysis.
After an intriguing first chapter, which takes in Village of the Damned, Doctor Who, World in Action and Billy Liar, we get three chapters dealing with English Dystopia. The first deals with the work of Nigel Kneale, including some of his more obscure work alongside Quatermass, the second considers some wider-focussed critiques of England, the third the very real responses to alien invasion and the Cold War, the unknown other, gathering up the likes of Threads and The War Game, alongside Day of the Triffids and Edge of Darkness.
Then it’s a bumper set of four chapters on Folk Horror, which sweeps its way from The Hound of the Baskervilles and Dead of Night to The Owl Service and The Wicker Man, via some Hammer Horror, cult classic Witchfinder General and A Field in England‘s more recent psychedelic version of the Civil War. ‘Cathode Wraiths’ (geddit?) comes next, a somewhat thinner selection of ghost stories along with an exploration of the concept of how buildings might contain (psychic?) traces of their previous inhabitants.
Then we are off to look through ‘The Vintage Lens’, firstly at some children’s programmes and films such as Bagpuss and Mary Poppins, then some reinterpretations of the past, be that King Arthur or Charles Dickens. Chapter 14 is one of the best in the book, gathering together a wide range of material set in country houses, including The Draughtsman’s Contract and Sir Henry at Rawlinson End amongst more obvious country house dramas such as Brideshead, Jane Eyre and Downton Abbey.
‘The Geography of Peace’ rounds up the likes of Fred Dibnah, John Betjeman, Chris Petit and Patrick Keiller, each dealing with place[s] in their own way, and also celebrates the work of British Transport Films. The next chapter is darker and more elegaic as it considers disappearing and remembered traditions and customs, from the Padstow Obby Oss to the demise of the Cornish fishing industry which underpins Mark Jenkin’s marvellous film Bait.
The next section is more political as it juxtaposes the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony with work such as Derek Jarman’s Jubilee and The Stuart Hall Project, before moving on to the ‘Private Dysfunctions’ on show in Scum, Kes, The Wall and Lindsay Anderson’s satirical trilogy If…, O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital. Then after a brief digression about time-shifting dramas, including an attempted rehabilitation of the appalling Sapphire and Steel, it’s time for ‘The Weird Old Albion’ and a closing chapter on ‘English Magic’.
Here, Young traces, or invents, a lineage from A Canterbury Tale through the electrifying Penda’s Fen and its exploration of class, music, mythology and sexuality, and Robin of Sherwood to Detectorists and Worzel Gummidge. It’s an upbeat and celebratory chapter, but also one that highlights the loose groupings of Young’s subject matter : ‘English Magic’ could just as well have included The Stone Tape, the BFI’s Obby Oss and Barley Mow films, The Owl Service and Children of the Stones.
If this review feels like a list, it’s because the book often reads as such. If my review comes across as totally negative, then I’m sorry, it’s not meant to be. Young has produced an enjoyable summary of and revisit to this material, but anyone who has been reading about nostalgia, folk horror, hauntology, film/TV history, even literature and sociology, will already have clocked most of this. If only Young had written The Magic Box a few years back it would be a totally different story, and a totally different review.
Rupert Loydell
Anselm Kiefer in Conversation with Klaus Dermutz
(262pp, £25, hbck, Seagull Books)
Anselm Kiefer is on of those artists who is on my radar but I have never much engaged with. I saw an astonishing show of his massive lead books at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, in 1989 but everything else I have seen since have been self-important over-large canvasses full of stuff: sand, ash, words, straw, metal, tired and tired paint, all striving, it seemed to say something important.
This new book makes it clear that I should have paid more attention, or perhaps that Kiefer and his work should be taken seriously; for Kiefer certainly takes himself seriously. If it’s sometimes hard to see the link between Dermutz and Kiefer’s discussions and the art, the book is nevertheless intriguing in the way it moves from mysticism to symbolism via poetry and profundity.
Dermutz is a theologian (it doesn’t say in what, if any, religion) and many pages in this book cover alchemy, kabbala, gnosticism, Jewish beliefs and Christian ideas, although Kiefer says he doesn’t believe in anything, and is prone to contradicting most of what Dermutz says. It makes for a dense, allusive (and sometimes elusive) series of conversations, ones that often found me googling for many names and philosophies mentioned in the text.
What’s intriguing is that Kiefer thinks these ideas and assertions are what his creative process is based on, and seems to think if viewers pay attention to his art, then they will see its relationship to his thoughts. I’m not so sure, and prefer some of the chapters which talk about the art itself, as constructed sculpture, drawing, installation or canvas; especially in the discussions focussed on his studio complex Barjac, in the South of France. This is now a project that can be visited on guided tours, an artist’s world of towers, tunnels, rooms and chambers, sculptures and paintings; Kiefer has moved away and works in studios elsewhere now.
I’m fascinated by how Keifer often subjects his paintings to the weather, to flooding, to being covered with sand, before ‘rescuing’ them and working with what remains, but still somewhat unengaged with the way the work strives to affect and inform the viewer, to grapple with ‘big themes’ and ideas. The book is full of Kiefer’s declamations and assertions – some of which read as opinion made up in the heat of a moment, or argumentative bullshit – and the artist’s breadth and depth of knowledge is clearly part of a public persona the artist has created. I’m reminded of Joseph Beuys and his story about being rescued by nomads who used fat and felt to keep him safe and warm, thus legitimising and making sacred his chosen materials.
Kiefer weaves a supportive web of mystical and mythical ideas around his own art and materials, offering up knowledge he claims to entirely disbelieve in but which gives him a structure to navigate the world around him by. He talks of formative childhood moments, theatres, renewal, language, spirit, music, landscape, numerous authors and their writing, secret knowledge, the potential of empty spaces, and what art might achieve. It’s an exhausting, exhaustive, challenging and fascinating book, that offers unusual insight into the way an artist’s mind can work.
Rupert Loydell
She spread her fingers
like hugging
and looked at the world with big eyes,
the little seller of smiles…
The crowd surrounded her,
she was in the center of every movement,
the human’s stream led in all directions,
but no one stopped by her…
It was cold
busy morning
but no one understood
that smiles can warm…
Dessy Tsvetkova
Picture Nick Victor
Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column that thinks shorting the pound is the new yoga
READER: What is shorting the pound anyway?
MYSELF: It’s best you don’t know. This is more your up your street…it’s my latest novel in the Inspector Twollet franchise and this paper has bought the serialisation rights.
READER: A new Twollet! Fair play, I can’t wait!
INSPECTOR TWOLLET INVESTIGATES
The curious case of the left-handed knife
Detective Inspector Twollet’s car crunched expensively over gravel imported from Egypt as it negotiated the long tree-lined drive to the imposing curved staircase which was the entrance to Bindlehurst Manor. The huge brass-studded door was opened by the family’s Japanese Sumo-butler Hideo Nagasaki, who led him to the dining room where lay the remains of the late Lord Percival Bindlehurst.
Dressed immaculately in white tie and tails, the body was sprawled across the dining table with an amused expression on its still ruddy face. The enigmatic smile and the Edwardian bone-handled carving knife protruding from the chest, combined to make the victim look gratefully dead, thought the inspector. He turned to the aptly named uniformed officer, Sergeant Rodney Dulle, the first to attend the scene, and raised his eyebrows, inviting comment.
“Even at this early stage in the enquiry,” said Sergeant Dulle as his huge ham-like hands carefully tweezered a tiny piece of evidence into a small plastic bag, “I think there are sufficient grounds to suspect foul play. Probably perpetrated by intruder or intruders unknown.”
“A bungled burglary? said Twollet, popping a polo mint into his mouth, “Wrong. Look at the knife handle.”
Sergeant Dulle gazed at the weapon planted like a tree in Lord Bindlehurst’s immobile chest. He walked around the corpse, first clockwise and then, wearing his reading glasses, anti-clockwise. “I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at sir.” He said finally, “It’s an open and shut case as far as I can see.” As if to emphasise the point, Dulle snapped his spectacle case shut with a loud theatrical flourish and slid it it back into his tunic pocket, next to his police whistle.
The wily inspector was having none of this however and as he stepped forward, leaning very close to Sergeant Dulle’s ruddy face, he bit down hard on the Polo, enveloping them both in a peppermint cloud.
“To you, Dulle, that knife is a murder weapon, possibly covered in the fingerprints and DNA of the assassin, which will lead quickly to his or her arrest, trial and imprisonment; case solved, am I right?”
“That’s more or less the way it looks to me sir” replied the sergeant, failing to conceal his high dudgeon.
“Wrong”, said Twollet, “look more closely, observe the angle of the knife.”
Dulle, looking more closely and, observing the angle of the knife, concluded nothing.
Twollet continued. “Percy Bindlehurst was chairman of Bindlehurst Holdings, the shell company which owns Vladimir Links, an exclusive golf club of which Bindlehurst was an eminent member. A skilful player with a scratch handicap, he played twice a week with his best friend Bunty Gallstone the society channel swimmer and cousin of the submarine heiress Sylvia Gluck, who’s mother Gertie was press secretary to Imelda Marcos in the seventies and later acquired control of a small shipping company based in The Philippines, exporting coconut oil and importing shoes.”
With a magician’s flourish, Twollet produced an ace of spades from Dulle’s helmet band, tore it in half and ate it “And furthermore he was left-handed!” he said triumphantly.
Dulle scratched his chin. “I don’t……” he began, before Twollet butted in. “Of course you don’t sergeant,” he barked, “because the solution is so obvious it has eluded your slow, uniformed police brain.”
Dulle winced at the rebuff as Twollet made an angle with his fingers. “Had his Lordship been stabbed by a right-handed person,” he explained, “the knife would have come to rest thus, but as you can see it does not.”
“You mean…” began Dulle.
I mean I would bet my detective’s pension that the only fingerprints on the handle of this knife belong to a left-handed person…”
Dulle’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Good lord inspector, are you suggesting suicide?”
“Murder by contract,” said Twollet flatly. “Hideo Nagasaki, who falsified his previous employment record in order to get the job as Japanese Sumo-Butler to the Bindlehurst household is, in reality, a freelance hit man hired by the Marcos family from whom Lord B and his best friend Bunty Gallstone have been swindling millions over the years.”
As Dulle struggled to digest the information, the double doors leading to the kitchen crashed open and with a cry of Banzai! Butler Hideo Nagasaki came hurtling through in full Sumo costume riding a motorised drinks trolley and clutching a large meat cleaver in his left hand.
(to be continued)
READER: You can’t just stop there!
MYSELF: I’m not stopping, it’s continued next week.
READER: Can I binge watch it on Netflix?
MYSELF: Sorry, no. You’ll just have to wait like everyone else.
More hysterical feedback from our concerned public
BEAR FACE FACTS
Dear Sausage,
Now that the royal sport of fox-hunting has been banned (bah!), might I suggest the re-introduction of bear-baiting? In the past two years, twenty seven people in my village have been eaten. The culprits? A savage gang of grizzly bears who rampage through our sleepy hamlet whenever they get peckish and fancy biting a face off. Quite frankly, many people are beginning to get fed up. Tighter security on bear farms has been suggested, but in my opinion this would be yet another case of bolting the horses long after the door has been allowed to escape. Most of my long suffering neighbours have been forced to surround their homes with vicious bear traps, which to date have caused the agonizing deaths of 15 postmen going lawfully about the King’s business. Properly licensed bear-baiting pits would serve a dual purpose viz: to keep the rampaging bear population down, and to provide simple, honest entertainment for the bloodthirsty masses.
Bob Hayseed (faarmer)
Hassock-in-the-Wurne
Should chasing foxes on horses, allowing fierce dogs to rip them to pieces and smearing their blood on children’s faces be unbanned? Readers are invited to send in their angry marauding bear stories, either made up or true
PRUNE DREAMS
Dear Sausage Life,
Why do you insist upon printing rambling, boring letters (not unlike this one), which only serve to reinforce the generally held opinion that your readers are pruriently interested only in the absurd views of a cretinous minority of people who, like myself, have been abducted by tiny extraterrestrial ants which gained entrance to my house by disguising themselves as currents in some Dundee Cake, (a type of cake of which I am particularly fond), and after I had innocently eaten the cake, (which was delicious by the way), burst forth from my abdomen one afternoon after I had forgotten to take my medication, and beamed me aboard their huge atomic powered ant spacecraft which they had parked in my front garden, completely flattening my hydrangea and what was worse, demolishing the fence which separates me from my neighbor Frank Sinatra who is trying to electrocute me by magnetising my cutlery using a sophisticated short wave cutlery magnetiser provided by his friends in the CIA who want to have me rubbed out because of what I know about the Kennedy assassination?
R.Sheets
Scalliwag Ward
Pfaff Secure Institutions Inc
The Netherlands
TELL US ABOUT IT
Have any other readers been abducted by insectile aliens or terrorised by cutlery-magnetising dead celebrity neighbours? Your letters, and any other new Kennedy assassination evidence to [email protected] please!
Sausage Life!
Sausage Life!
Colin Gibson • Emmet Ives • Anita Makris
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My face, your face, anyone’s face, is just the residue from endless meetings where anonymous artists argued their fees with the proud and the pious. For all the regicides, restorations, reformations, and rejection of any master but the Market, the iconography stays the same, and we can wear our totes sad emotions with the clarity of an Umbrian fresco: a downturned mouth and a single tear for the poor, poor children, whoever they are; a simple smile for the woman with the fruit and flowers from beyond the lifeless ruins. I click on a sunflower icon, but my face is a near-blank circle with eyes that give nothing away. At this stage, the commission is non-negotiable, but behind me I hear the gabble of priests and princes in echoing chambers, the kiss of coin on coin. After all these centuries, one brushstroke is all it takes to change the narrative. Press your face to the wall.
Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
RIP sweet Niall McDevitt cosmic being.
Photo: Julie Goldsmith
(i.m. Niall McDevitt, 22ND February 1967 – 29th September 2022)
Born with Blake on your lips and the uncommon breath
Of all poets, you slip now from the stanza into the founding
Source of all art. To be immortalised in the earth, gardened
With grace and gain from your shadow, while ordering both
Light and language, the study of which shaped your heart,
The scrutiny of your stare, your intellect and your walking,
As an Avenue-Acolyte, Niall, you led us back across time
To strange streets which were re-lit by the force of your ever
Adventurous spirit, which will be writing now as you watch us,
Side by side with Blake, Gascoyne, Swinburne and all of
The golden ones you now meet. Where are you? We wait,
All who talked and drank with you. Max, Micalef, Robert,
Heathcote, and your family too, whom you’ve graced.
Roddy, Yvonne, your Mother and shining still,
Your lost father, whose hand now grasps your shoulder
And sweetly leads you into a dark and deep, firm embrace.
And then of course, more than all, more even than your friends
Who have gathered, there is your beloved Julie, partner in life
And all time, whose own work looks on worlds separate
To ours, dream constructed; hers is now, Niall, your kingdom,
The towers of which she will climb when she too answers
The call to which you have so bravely responded. Telling no-one
At all but those loved ones who shared each strained hour,
Which played with your measure, but the measure of a man
Like you stays divine, on earth and in air which we will now
Have to complete and breathe for you; those who liked, loved
And learned from you, as you stood in that suit, with those shoes!
Golden trainers, which sport your new Hermes like journey
All of the way to Olympus, from Dublin, Portobello, the Isle of Wight,
And the corners where Barker, Blake, Byron, Marlowe and Yeats
Met their muse. Boy, how you blazed! The Bohran and heart
Drumming! That rich voice! That steeled passion! Undimmed
With the humour that still decorated your smile, right until
A fulfilling Wednesday night and before Thursday’s first hours,
From which sleep’s scent stole you swiftly and bore you towards
The far isle, beloved of all writers when we come to understand
Our words go there, for death’s a translation into the proper tongue
Of the stars. This could be heard in your voice when proclaiming
And expertly explaining, as it becomes memory-music, we will
Listen, ears pressed to love’s bars. It reminds me that these
Scratchings we make, from whim to word, and then paper
Are but the descriptions of gifts we must give to the Gods,
Be they deities, or something else, distant, astral.
Now you know, Niall. You teach us, as we shuffle to fill the space
You once trod. Your trail remains. And it will be our test
And our trial to follow and further the sentence from which
Your brilliance was begat. You were a pure poet, made in total
Dedication to verses, which contained, kept and coloured
All that an unkept Mum will relinquish and all that will not stay
Still under hats. And so, Niall McDevitt, your style, your sense,
Your faith in the poem as prince, and your fervour will be
Remembered as Kensal Rise houses your body and breath
For new air caught in the trees and heard in your next
Earth-stirred poem. Just over one year ago, this was where
You eulogised Michael. and we can all see you now,
Standing there. You were Horovitz’s neighbour, always.
And here you are still, lost heads talking. Discussing the prize
In all poems. Our vow now keeps you with us. In loss
And with love.
This I swear.
David Erdos, 29th September 2022
Photo: Julie Goldsmith
.
Ruth Jarman of Christian Climate Action was arrested and remanded along with 50 other activists for breaking a civil injunction by blocking access to Kingsbury Oil Terminal with the group Just Stop Oil on September 15. The hearing was in Birmingham Crown Court where she was remanded for 5 days after refusing to accept the authority of the court and received a suspended sentence and costs. Freedom spoke with her to discuss the proceedings and why she holds the court culpable:
Ruth Jarman on defying the court’s authority
Interviews, Sep 28th
Look at the world. The whole system in which we live is failing people and planet, but the law particularly – we were trying to shine a light on the fact that the court system is protecting the oil industry which is destroying life on earth. What’s the point of the law if it doesn’t protect life? It’s failing in its primary duty. I was also happy to go on remand because it’s just another way of telling the truth about the seriousness of [climate change]; that we’re prepared to go to prison for it.
How did you reveal your contempt to the judge?
We used different ways to just say that we don’t accept the authority of the court. So I just said
‘I will not do what the court asks and I will go and break the injunction again’, so the judge had to put me on remand. Other people took their t-shirts off to show words written there such as Just Stop Oil or ‘sham justice kills kids’.
Other people just stood on chairs, or refused to stand. I think we all refused to stand, but [the judge] didn’t care about that. In that situation you’re meant to simply say your name and say whether you accept it or not but we all said more than that.
Why was it important for you to carry on the protest within the courtroom?
It’s because we know the government’s failing us, we know business is failing us, the courts have a choice whether to carry on in a blinkered way, ignoring the big picture that the world’s going to hell in a handcart and just do their job, or whether they’re going to stand up to the government and businesses and say this isn’t right, there’s a higher law here. We were trying to encourage the courts to think beyond their blinkered remit and be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
This action was against the oil industry, but it was also against the injunction that was meant to streamline the flow of oil, and against the courts that have yet again revealed their purpose within a system that is built to concentrate wealth and maintain the existing structure.
Si Tex
Ruth’s court mitigation statement
September 25, 2022
Ruth Jarman, mother of three, was in court this week as she was arrested for blocking Kingsbury Oil Terminal. Below is her court mitigation statement…
It has been a privilege to meet some of the women at Foston Hall. But it has made me sad and angry at the dysfunctionality of our society that puts kind, caring people behind bars while those allowing, subsidising and profiting from new oil and gas, people who are knowingly participating in the decimation of life on earth, are living in freedom and luxury.
Where is justice?
As a Christian I believe that I must try to bear responsibly the image of God within me. How do we do that when, as the head of the UN has said, ‘we are firmly on track towards an unlivable world’?
How do we live responsibly when this government and the law is subsidising and protecting the companies who are in the business of destroying life on earth?
The International Energy Agency said there should be no new fossil fuel developments after last year. Our government plans to licence between 40 and 130 new oil and gas fields, knowingly facilitating civilisation, ecological and climate breakdown.
What is the right way to respond to this? To write to my MP as if a billion lives were a pothole in the road?
I think you need to know that I have tried everything else.
Since I first heard about tipping points when pregnant with my first child, who is now 22, I have pretty-much dedicated my life to campaigning on climate. I started a community solar scheme in my village, I co-founded a national Christian climate charity, I have stood for election, marched in the wind and the rain, spoken to hundreds of people, trying to get the message out about the climate and ecological emergency. My family life has suffered because of my obsession with trying to live in a way that does not damage what I believe to be God’s creation.
A crime is taking place here. And the respectable thing to do seems to be to walk by on the other side of the road.
Physically blocking Kingsbury and breaking the injunction was my way of not being a bystander to this man-slaughter version of genocide. I cannot apologise for this.
I have no immediate plans to break the injunction again, but cannot promise never to do so.
•
Interview reprinted from Freedom News: https://freedomnews.org.uk/
Statement from Christian Climate Action: https://christianclimateaction.org
More at Just Stop Oil: https://juststopoil.org/2022/09/15/51-just-stop-oil-supporters-jailed-after-mass-civil-resistance-in-court/
and Church Times: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2022/30-september/comment/opinion/i-have-been-arrested-more-than-30-times-but-this-is-my-first-time-in-prison
11AM October 1st & 2nd: Euston, Paddington & Waterloo Stations or find start location here: https://weallwanttojuststopoil.com/find-your-start-location/
Let’s keep up the pressure!
3rd Onwards meet at Downing Street (Whitehall end) 11AM each day.
We are not prepared to just watch while they destroy everything we love. We’re done with begging. Voting changes nothing. We are going to stop new oil whether those in power agree or not. As citizens, as humans, as parents and children we have every right under British law to protect ourselves and those we love. This is the moment, we are the last generation that can solve this. Will you step up and join us? If we all come together we can do this. We can Just Stop Oil.
We have a plan to stop new oil and we want you to get involved.
WHY?: Our dependence on oil and gas has caused the worst cost of living crisis in 40 years, but this autumn your Government is going to licence NEW fossil fuel extraction adding more fuel to the fire of climate collapse, while on October 1st the the price of energy will be increased again pushing millions more families into fuel poverty. This nightmare will not end until we take matters into our own hands. No one is going to build the world we want other than ourselves, our unions and our movements.
WHAT?: On October 1st thousands of supporters of the Just Stop Oil Coalition will march from different points across London, congregating in Westminster. Will you step up and join us?
On October the 2nd we will return to collectively block Westminster in order to demand that the Government puts an end to new oil.
From October 3rd we will OCCUPY WESTMINSTER, week after week, until we win. Small regional teams will block roads and risk arrest for our actions. If you want to join on the day, we welcome new people. meet at Downing Street (Whitehall end) 11AM each day. We welcome other groups fighting for climate and social justice to hold demonstrations during this time.
More information and updates at https://juststopoil.org/
Those diligent gardeners of fascism
–they plant themselves
in their appointed rows
and finger their potting tools.
They commence to prune.
They pursue their weeding.
Their mechanical motions
are repetitive, frequent, predictable.
And squinting is unnecessary.
Individual aim is irrelevant.
Collective action is pure.
Cock and trigger.
Wait.
Cock and trigger.
Next.
But the roses that sprout
from every bullet hole
will germinate tomorrow’s blight.
And the multiflora will sweep away
the cultivation
and its gardeners.
Duane Vorhees
.
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and time sweats its dispute
in the murky mountains your despair
tearing at the defaults mapped by crazy
histrionics of black & white disaster virgins
trapped between the spreadsheet bedsheets
locked in travel insurrections those daily mail
twisted rancours dissolved in desperate hoodlums
clenched & unclenched with the breath half dressed
in the corner of this burning world where charlie watts
& the trumpets hurled their temperance unblinking at
the hollow limbs secreted in their furnace.
Clive Gresswell
.
Well, it has begun/ everything so suddenly goes wrong/ we tried to hide in the well/small, cold and wet/people were eating pigeons and drinking water from the lakes/the dishes we prepared were great/ all the rest was bad/ we grabbed a white sheet, got into the car just as we were/one can only guess what could happen/we need peace, then we will talk
The David Austin bush roses that I planted last autumn are settling in/ curiously they have grown most this autumn/ and next year I hope they will form five mounds of flowers/ opposite them across the narrow part of grass/ I have removed all my fuchsias (fuchsia mite)/ and planted 5 hybrid tea roses/ so this area of the garden has become a rose area/ we have done very well with our runner beans and raspberries/ the best crop for many years/ my two dwarf peach trees died/ I have now planted new ones/ it looks like this
They have left the cities in their fear cutting through wire/ negotiating tunnels and borders/the outlines of their bodies slumping with the losses/ hiding in laundrettes/ just eat animals/ follow the fairy of fear, trafficking in pain/ humans like ducks are not meant to die/ it’s an undefinable gift from the god of deep wounds/ wounds the size of lemons
This has thrown up another variant with a lot of mutations/ it is therefore causing concern/with immediate action by the government/ but already there is community transmission/ so if it is as ineffective as it is thought this will spread rapidly/ by the time you read this, we will know more/ hopefully it will be a mild disease and be a step to it mutating to a form of cold/ we live in hope
People need to know/ it’s here to stay/ the chants that started so small in the past are now ambitious/ past the point of peace/ there isn’t room for everyone on this safer island/ silence is neutral, so is the sound of civilisation/ so-called followers of freedom/slamming hard/ brick by brick/a mess, a burning echo so close to home/ a door left open in the wreckage/you lock your land, you lose your tongue
Yachting is always eventful and expensive/ we set off for our usual six week sailing trip/Jenny got a clinical fracture of the metatarsal/ we spent a whole day trying to get an ambulance (failing)/ and getting seen in A and E/ I was not allowed in with Jenny/ and they X-rayed the ankle not the foot/ so rather than go home we stayed on the boat
Are you dead or alive/ your confirmation is required/if you are dead or alive/ did you or did you not survive/I am not a code switch, my word is not a code key/ in a world where everyone looks the same/ the camera captures faces from all angles/ with total accuracy/ your face will always betray you, it’s a genre
This has been the best year for my orchids as well/ I have about 100 orchids/ they have never looked so well/ we have always had at least one in flower but often five or six/ there is a slug in my greenhouse that delights/ in taking a chunk out of the orchid flower stalks/ so they collapse over but stay alive
Base stations, poor light/ bad weather, blitzed server racks/ steel girder, splintered like bones/ keep data flowing/ mornings are safest for zombie broadcast intelligence gathering/ hospitals can’t be attacked during war/ they have protected status
Jenny and I get older/ with that comes a lack of strength, stamina, and memory/ Jenny will step down from her parish council work for the church next Spring/we have really missed our winter trips around the world/ and wonder if they will ever return/ the lockdowns were a misery/ I was not allowed to go to my boat to my fury
He shows no sign of remorse/with a face like wax/ pressure mounts, sending electrical impulses in tentacle ribbons/ the temperature in the beehive goes up/ another will be selected if he was to be removed/ most men are no more complex than a single, resinous mass of leaves/what we allowed today is stones and deeper mounds/ a door frame freestanding like teeth in a lost, inflamed jaw/suffering bruises/disused workings struck by lightning/ it’s the bullet in the mouth, really
Our grandchildren are growing rapidly/ Indiana and Arabella are the oldest and have had growth spurts/Indiana seems to grow an inch overnight/for the next three weeks we were on our usual berth/ in our own marina/ an unusual holiday/ we have just had a new deck fitted and that was expensive/ she made a full recovery over about six weeks/ we’re happy and still alive at the age of 78/ we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
It’s not safer to stay in my house with all the windows blown out/I want you to see the video/ there were days when even the kitchenware trembled/ we made Molotov cocktails/ that’s where my knowledge of chemistry was useful/ we took care of the lab animals/in 2025 I think we will win this war/even our windows will be OK
Melisande Fitzsimons
Breathlessness checks in
a little after three,
signs my lungs’ guestbook.
Its scrawl clog the log.
The corridor awash with ageing
sunset phlegm smells like
expired cough syrup.
Someone whispers – Elvis is dead –
probably from another decade.
The hotel’s edifice slow-sinks in
what my friend Nick would nickname
the seabed of pins.
I usher a gust of pain downstairs.
Life’s luggage bends me down.
I recall a few tales from ancient age,
think of the rolling stones.
@amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet
Author Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/KushalTheWriter/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
By Leon Horton
At the height of the recession, a singer-songwriter throws himself at the mercy of the Chicago streets in a class menagerie of workers, graffiti artists, hipsters, hustlers, punks, drunks, poets, grifters, and gangsters. Down but not out on the frontlines of modern America, Westley Heine’s freewheeling novel Busking Blues: Recollections of a Chicago Street Musician & Squatter hits like a shot of neon blue morphine icing through your veins. Provocative and visceral, this book will make your teeth curl and your hair bleed.
Westley Heine is the author of 12 Chicago Cabbies and The Trail of Quetzalcoatl. His poetry and prose has been published in The Chicago Reader, Gravitas, Heroin Love Songs, Beatdom, Dumpster Fire Press, Gasconade, and The Wellington Street Review. Life is always creating new characters inside him, but he is always a writer. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: We are all in the gutter, but Westley Heine is staring at the curb. He grew up in Wisconsin, was lost and found in Chicago, married in Texas, and now resides in Los Angeles. Leon Horton steals a quart of whiskey and listens to the music…
Wes, your new novel Busking Blues was only recently published by Roadside Press and is already garnering some excellent reviews. Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate no less, described it as “a broke down history of the blues. Ain’t no other map of Chicago like this one.” Dan Denton, author of 1000-A-Week Motel, proclaimed it “the underground indie hit of the summer,” and some hack from the UK charged that the book “eviscerates the Chicago streets with a rusty knife.” I’m quite proud of that last one, though I haven’t a clue what I meant. Do you think these accolades are a fair summation of the novel?
Yeah, I’m honoured by the heavy reviews. But I think the book comes on more subtle, accessible. It begins upbeat, like an adventure story, but it will sneak up on you, rip your heart out and stomp on it. My favourite “characters” aren’t around anymore. They didn’t make it. So yeah, you and the poets caught the gritty essence. But it’s like the carnival. The pitchman at the gate is welcoming. It’s all glitter and wholesome bullshit. But what you find at the heart of the show is the Geek biting the head off a chicken. That’s the truth. That’s what people are secretly looking for: that Earthy truth; that mirror, distorted as it may be. They say even humans taste like chicken. Yum yum.
Actually, I have it on good authority that human flesh tastes like pork, but we won’t go there. For the benefit of the reader, how would you describe Busking Blues?
In Busking Blues I use the hook of my experiences as a street musician to muse on such basic existential matters: free will vs. determinism, superstition that living on luck breeds vs. rational scientific thought, race and inequality, capitalism, addiction, heartbreak, the purpose and limits of art, homelessness, crime, and just the plain facts of life – the blues.
A street musician lives on chance encounters. As a person who has a scientific worldview, I found it unsettling during the busking period because I found myself thinking in terms of luck, fate, karma – sometimes, downright superstition. One of the underlining themes I was grappling with in the book is the age-old philosophical problem of Free Will vs. Determinism. How much of what happens in life is fate or from pre-determined forces and how much is from one’s own free will/ mindset/ decisions? Through the first half of the book, I bring up the question; but brush off philosophical questions as basically pointless when one is just trying to survive day to day.
What led you to become a street musician?
After graduating in 2007, as the Great Recession was dawning, I found myself working odd jobs and learning about real life rather than dream life. Chicago quickly kicked a lot of the Art School pretension out of me. After losing jobs, my car, and my mind due to a toxic relationship, by 2010 I decided to give up/go for it and become a street musician. This is where Busking Blues begins. It’s about giving up everything for the muse. Living on art and luck, my only concern was to get enough money each day for a meal.
Let’s get to the emotional crux of the book for a moment. What were you trying to achieve, creatively, when you volunteered yourself into the muttering gutter of the streets?
Creatively, I was expressing gritty realism, writing and singing stories about real life. The stories are about being poor, bad relationships, drinking in alleys… You can see the overlap with many of the Beat Generation’s subjects. Only, I write from the perspective of an ex 1990s garage band kid and a 2000s Art School nerd trying to keep his belly full. Maybe some things never change. Poetic writers always focus on eternal themes.
You served jail time in Wisconsin in 2002 for assaulting a fellow high school student after he sexually molested your then girlfriend. You have my utter respect for that. A criminal record can ruin a person’s life, but for a writer it can be a credential. Does your experience bear that out, or am I just being romantic?
I think you’re right. When it comes down to it, jail ain’t that different from a college dorm. Your roommate is in the way. It smells. The food is bad. A bit like joining the military. Thankfully, I had been accepted to an Art School in Chicago at the time. Based on this, the Judge let me out of jail after five weeks. My jail experiences and the characters are in a book called Little Rooms. I hope that one gets picked up next.
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
It all starts with kid’s stuff: pretending, making up stories, playing army with your buddies in a cornfield, explaining crayon drawings of stickmen over a childhood lisp. Then, in adolescence, you have to deal with all these emotions and coming to terms with identity. Writing little rock songs, poems in spiral notebooks, drawings, making collages with magazines on bedroom walls help a kid figure out life. Back in high school I played in a metal band, did a lot of painting (including word-collage) and, most revealing, when I got my hands on Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I began writing, printing, and publishing my own gonzo newsletter where I would mock the news, and basically spread trouble and insanity throughout the school.
It wasn’t until college that I completely accepted the fact that I could say a lot more and say it faster with literature than with music or visual arts. I accepted this is where any talent I have actually resides. Of course, dabbling in other mediums informs the writing. One reviewer called Busking Blues a lyrical novel. I like that observation. Writing is this giant canvass where you can machinegun images, antidotes, ideas, dialogue, and character sketches into the imagination of a reader. When people find a book that speaks to them it usually cuts deeper than a film, a painting, and perhaps on par with music.
Do you work at a computer or write longhand?
I compose on the computer. If I’m travelling or out for the night and ideas attack me I will stuff my pockets with scribbles, scraps, notes – but those are just seeds to the actual work at the typer.
I find it interesting that you should use the word “compose” there. Are you still making music?
I’m not a musician who writes, I’m a writer who sometimes writes songs. Any new audio, I set free on YouTube under the Heaven’s Heartache project. I’m not Kerouac using words like jazz solos, but the pulse of the blues is under the lines somewhere. It’s more like what Henry Miller said at the beginning of Tropic of Cancer: “This is not a book… This then is a song. I am singing.” Meaning the new forms are open, sparse, poetic – a song unstrained by all the shit they force-feed you in English class.
Why do you write?
Everyone has something to contribute in this imperfect world. Some can fix a car, do your taxes, draw, perform a heart transplant, whatever. So many people have trouble finding the right words to articulate how they feel. When a person has an ear for words and can capture the ethos or a certain sensibility in writing, then everyone with those feelings finds a voice and finds some words. Perhaps those with a different sensibility will find empathy by seeing the world through a different point of view. But let’s get real: I’ve been typing prose and poems for twenty years and only recently have been getting published regularly. There is a reason I’ve been doing it beyond any philanthropic ideals. Any benefits to society from writing are a side effect of the original impulse. The real reason I write is for my own sanity, vanity, to scream in the dark, “Hey, this really happened. If no one reads about this, why did it even happen?”
Busking Blues is a confessional novel in many ways – at times, it reads like a psychiatrist’s wet dream, and for you most of those events are real. Is writing purging?
Is the cure for the blues the blues? I find writing therapeutic, but only to a certain extent. If your goal is to purge your demons with writing, I’d advise you to write it all out, read it to yourself once or twice and then burn that shit. If the goal is to write more professionally, you will quickly find out you aren’t cleansing yourself of the past but wallowing in your own bathwater. This was the main theme of my article in Beatdom#22 this year about Jack Kerouac, To the Things We Can’t Remember. To the Things We Can’t Forget, where I said: “As a writer all I have is my past. As a person, I need to move on. Reflecting on life is healthy but only to a certain extent. There is analyzing and then there is over-analyzing. There is self-awareness and there is being self-conscious. There is learning from the past and then there is dwelling in the past. Lao Tzu warns: ‘If you are depressed you are living in the past.’
A writer always runs the risk of reliving the past ad-nausea; exacerbated by the fact that every writer knows that writing is actually re-writing, draft by draft.” So is writing purging? No, writing is bingeing.
The novel isn’t all down and out – we shouldn’t let people think that – there are some incredibly beautiful and moving moments – moments where you capture the living essence of the passionate, vibrant organism that is Chicago. You’ve written about the city before in 12 Chicago Cabbies. What is it that draws you back there?
I’ve gained material from every place I’ve lived, but my work about Chicago keeps getting picked up for publication. I think people are fascinated by Chicago because they are scared of it. Chicago has a certain gritty noir, a hard-boiled no-nonsense attitude. It’s a very working-class town. The harsh winters weed out the weak. It’s also where I spent my twenties, when I was more adventurous, so I have a wealth of material from that time.
In Chicago there is a community of creative people that help each other. At the end of Busking Blues all the characters come together to hear me play at the Gallery Cabaret. I realized that though I’m a loner I’m not really alone. Here were all these people who cared about an artist sticking his neck out and trying to do something real. Suddenly there was this great community feeling. It was really touching so I closed the book there.
John Guzlowski, author of Echoes of Tattered Tongues, described the prose in Busking Blues as an “honest and rocking and often intensely poetic language that evokes Kerouac and Bukowski at their best.” That’s damn flattering. Has the Beat Generation informed your own writing? I’m thinking in terms of style as much as content…
Yes, it has. It’s all about honesty. Like the blues, tell your truth and people will listen. It’s a sensibility that is important to rediscover right now. As far as style, yes the influence is there. All the art movements a generation before influenced the Beats: Surrealism, Dada, and film solidified into a true art form in the 1920’s. These were all things I studied in art school as well. Burroughs’ work draws from his own life but has a surreal bend. The cut-up technique is, basically, Dadaism with words. The Beats were the first generation of writers weaned on film. In Busking Blues, the prose is full of great imagery, flashbacks, juxtapositions, and the Burroughs montage technique he used in Naked Lunch. I do default to the tight prose and short sentences that Hemmingway, Bukowski, and Vonnegut advised. They proved that you don’t need big words to have big ideas. Yet, when the story calls for it, I will rant, run-on, employ montage, and spin purple prose with the muses.
As far as content, I’d say yes as well. The poetry world has always been accepting of autobiographical material. But when I read the prose of Hunter S. Thompson, the Beats, and proto Beats like Henry Miller and Celine… Eureka! You don’t have to hide behind some contrived fictional world to say what you want to say. You can be yourself. Just be honest. Real life is weird enough, and better than any formulaic genre fiction. Also, you can make the argument that reality is largely subjective and our memories are confabulation. It’s all fiction. Once you accept that fact, it frees you to write. Present the world as you see it. For the most part, I write about my own time. On occasion, I write fiction and period pieces – but my experiences are still there somewhere.
You’ve written numerous essays about the Beats, most notably for the literary journal Beatdom. How and when did you first become aware of those “angel-headed hipsters”?
Literally, the first day of college I found William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch like a dowsing rod on the library shelf. I just got out of jail. I didn’t see any other leather clad metal heads around school. So writers became my imaginary friends. One cold Chicago morning I was on the subway reading the part where the patients escape from Dr. Benway’s mental institution, and I just started laughing out loud. All the quiet commuters moved away from me. I knew at that moment, this was going to be my real education.
If we take On the Road, Howl and Naked Lunch as given, which do you feel are the three most important works by the Beat Generation?
Most important? Well, after the works you mentioned, Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind, and Corso’s Bomb are the heir apparent. I actually think John Clellon Holmes’s Go captures the setting of late 1940’s New York best. It describes the actual synthesis of The Beat Generation, including Ginsberg’s Blake-like visions that sparked things. Personally, I think Burroughs final work The Western Lands is the most underappreciated work. He poetically combines all his edge zone theories and some physics into a narrative where he explores a hypothetical Land of the Dead through his dream state as a way to come to terms with his own impending mortality.
The Beats faced their share of attempted censorship, of course, with the trials of Howl and Naked Lunch. With the rise of so-called Cancel Culture, many writers and their works are once more under attack. What the fuck is going on out there?
The Beats fought and won the battle against censorship. The trials contesting Howl and Naked Lunch as obscene set the bar for what can be published in America.
Right now people are banning books again. Right now free speech is under attack by religious puritans on the right and the politically correct on the left. Be an individual and push back against both sides. Yes, there is a lot of disinformation on the internet – but we don’t need censorship as much as we need individuals who can think for themselves, who can recognize bullshit when they see it. It’s not that hard, because most things are bullshit.
You mentioned the Recession as being an underlying factor in Busking Blues, much like the Great Depression influenced, directly or indirectly, many great writers of the 1930s – specifically John Steinbeck and Jon Dos Passos. Is that fair comparison?
Busking Blues ain’t The Grapes of Wrath. I tried to keep the book buoyant. I am very upfront about how I brought a lot of my troubles on myself. The Recession wasn’t the Dust Bowl. But we were and still are Beat. In the book, booze and babes constantly tempt me, and one can try to blame it on some imaginary devil, but it’s really my own doing. In this sense, the book really isn’t promoting my own ego. It’s self-deprecating. The real main character isn’t myself but Chicago, and the real life people who I interviewed on the street and wrote songs about. It’s about the side-effects of Capitalism. It’s about what an uncompromising artist is willing to do for a buck. I have tried to live simply where I can make my art without the clutter of materialism. Turns out you spend even more time worrying about fucking money. I always knew my music wasn’t for everybody, but I think there is something in this book for everyone.
Where are you going from here?
I’m really looking forward to the small book tour I have lined up with stops in Trinidad, Colorado – Belle, Missouri – Michigan City – and ultimately back in Chicago. The guitar is coming with me. I mean, it has to, I’ve had too many requests; and it fits the busking theme to do multimedia readings for the book. I have readings at Phyllis’s Musical Inn and The Gallery Cabaret, two rooms where the book actually took place. Also, a feature with Fernando Jones, a character in the book, at a Southside jam at the jazz and blues venue Knotty Luxe. It will be like a homecoming. Maybe I won’t come back.
Busking Blues: Recollections of a Chicago Street Musician & Squatter is available now on Amazon or at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/busking/98
Photographs by kind permission ©Alexis Rhone Fancher.
About the Interviewer
Leon Horton is a countercultural writer, interviewer and editor. Published by Beatdom Books, International Times and Beat Scene magazine, his numerous essays and interviews include ‘Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing in Utero’; ‘Charles Bukowski: Only Tough Guys Shit Themselves in Public’; ‘Where Marble Stood and Fell: Gregory Corso in Greece’ and ‘Gerald Nicosia: In Praise of Jack Kerouac in the Bleak Inhuman Loneliness.’
I don’t know
Much about the future
The only certainty I have
Is that
It starts and ends with you.
My heart desires two things
That my dreams come to life
And we live to enjoy it.
Your hazel eyes
Made my heart melt
And now
I refuse
To look at anything else.
From the moment
Our lips touched
My soul felt
Alive,
Lifted,
Fulfilled.
I want to dive
Deep into
You,
Your heart,
Your soul,
Fully,
Wholly,
And never return back.
I am grateful
To cherish the opportunity
To merge in your heart
During the most beautiful adventure.
So I want to tie the knot
My best friend
I can share love
With a soul genuinely.
Monalisa Parida
Painting: Marc Chagall
Bio:- Monalisa Parida is a post graduate student of English literature from India, Odisha and a prolific poetess. She is very active in social media platforms and her poems have also been translated into different languages and publish in various e-journals.
She has got 80 international awards for writing poetry. Her poems have been publishing international e-journals “New York parrot”, “The Writers Club” (USA), “Suriyadoya literary foundation”, “kabita Minar”, “Indian Periodical” (India) and “Offline Thinker “, “The Gorkha Times “ ( Nepal), “The Light House”(Portugal), “Bharatvision”(Romania), “International cultural forum for humanity and creativity”(Aleppo, Syria), “Atunispoetry.com”(Singapore) etc. And also published in various newspapers like “The Punjabi Writer Weekly(USA)”, “News Kashmir (J&K, India)”, Republic of Sungurlu (Turkey)” etc.
One of her poem published an American anthology named “The Literary Parrot Series-1 and series-2 respectively (New York, USA)”. Her poems have been translated in various languages like Hindi, Bengali, Turkish, Persian, Romanian etc. And she is the author of the book “Search For Serenity”, “My Favourite Grammar”, “Paradigm”.
But what about distress that does not have such clear physical causes? Then the misdirected expansion of medical sciences has very different consequences. A recent seminal example from the UK shows how different that can be. This long essay is a cultural and historical analysis with a view to where our society may be heading.
Well how does that happen?
4. The medical model: the regime of the objective
5. The medical model and the consumer society
6. Gender Dysphoria, the medical model and the consumer society
Let’s save our last unemployment checks & have a yard sale & take that cheap midnight budget airline …with four stops … to Paris and have tea where we can see the Eiffel Tower
TERRENCE SYKES
On LOVE AND LET DIE by John Higgs (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022)
John Higgs new book burrows into The Beatles. while unearthing
James Bond as he does so; an ingenious harvest in which
Every chapter reveals and sifts soil from our psyche.
For this is a British born book which seeks to understand
What has happened as the Brexit bound move
From the Love Me Do of The Beatles, to Bond’s love me
Do not, as death strikes. His license to kill contains the Greek
Thanatos death drive, just as John, Paul, George and Ringo
Epitomised the love of Eros. This comprehensive book shows
How these two totems clash to educate and achieve definition,
By both soundtracking and marking how our thrawted journey
And rolling of stones retained moss. People will be enchanted
To hear that the same year brought both to us: 1962.
That first single and then Dr. No’s cinema premiere. Sixty years on
We still exist under the spectre and on the spectrum
Between the twin poles of the Beatles’ need for affection
And Bond’s screed of destruction as he set forth to kill, without care.
Higgs examines these states with his usual clear-eyed gaze
And determines the steps society took after Hugh Gaitskell
Spoke on the European Common Market that year;
Steps that seemed to swell with the tide, revealing at once
Whim as water, whether yielding Ursula near undressed in bikini,
Or those of sense separated from the mainlands abroad,
By fresh tears. From Ringo’s childhood sickness that the Welfare
State cured, Higgs moves onto Ian Fleming’s distemper,
As his reluctance to marry in 1952 begins Bond, whose misogyny
Froths from Fleming’s own background, to make his nearly
Certifiable psycho, just as ten years later, the Fab Four move
Beyond their own middle class/working class, into an avant-garde
Graduation. In just six years they move music and perception itself
Far ahead of where we are now and of where it is we are going.
While Bond, despite re-birth remains too fatalistically bound
To the dead. The connections abound in this book. From Fleming’s
Articles about the red lights of Hamburg in 1960 – when the proto
Fabs were playing there – to Fleming’s wife fucking Gaitskell; to the plot
Of HELP being Bond-like, to the psychedelic and near symphonic
Structure of designer Ken Adam’s sets. The times had a-changed,
And while Dylan called it out, the curators were these Liverpudlian
Legends, who, as in Joe Orton’s unfilmed screenplay
Up Against It, become a four headed hero, with Bond himself
As the villain due to the standards and moraies that Fleming
Could not bring himself to forget. And yet the strands between them
Weave on, from Sean Connery’s violence and wig, to the mania
Of the Mop-tops; from Barbara Bach, an ex Bond-girl marrying
Ringo Starr; to Christopher Lee a cousin of sorts, to Fleming
And Wings cover player, not to mention the theme song
That at the time saved McCartney, as the success of Live and Let Die
Restored favour after Ram and McCartney I revealed competition.
Ringo and George were front runners, so for Paul at least,
This healed all scars. But just as he had struggled solo, so Bond, too,
Had suffered. Waning under Roger Moore, like the women
Who were too young to stay next to him, both mainstays revealed
The uncertainties of a country which was already stumbling,
As its so called ideals were worn thin. Higgs shows the bass-line
Beneath the frequencies four friends charted as well as the currents
That those who once led tried to spark; from Fleming’s upper crust,
Which left a bad taste, once tested, with racism and sexism lurking
Like mould on the meat, or brand mark. After those bright mid-60s
Days, Bond soon ballooned into the parodic, from Casino Royale,
Damned by Sellers, to Lee’s three nippled man with the gun.
All while The Beatles progressed, from Sgt Pepper,
Through to All Things Must Pass and Imagine, and eventually
Paul’s celebrated Band on the run. Strawberry Fields is the name
Of a Brosnian Bond-girl, the venn-diagram flexing to contain
Reference to the worlds we would make if we had either
The time or the talent. Which the Beatles did, while those
Bonded, or branded forsook for commercial means, relevance.
By telling each tale, from the life of Lennon and Lee to that
Of Desmond Llwellyn, to the deaths of John and George,
Whose assailants could well have been KGB. And indeed,
We see Putin parade in Red Square watching a McCartney gig
In the 90s. Born in the year Bond was started this, as with
All the digs Higgs describes, is so much more, and much deeper
Than just cultural history. Higgs works the room and the loom,
Sewing the strands, guiding colours; exploring the details,
Even as he relates common fact. An expert teacher with gags,
He blows the Paul is Dead blag from the water, as if they did
Replace him, then it was the most effective piece of recasting
To find someone who wrote and played as well as McCartney:
As even their hoaxes had standards, as high as clouds, or the astral
And part of a clearly God-given contract! As with all of Higgs books,
Be they on Bill Blake or Bill Drummond, this scrutiny of the forces
That have had the greatest impact is wonderfully done by this erudite,
And more importantly, accessible author. Time itself is the thesis,
Primed for the white-boarded page where he writes,
Which is a pulpit, too, from which he can preach about populism
And reveal how behind it, the powers we need reconnect
To primal forces; to fame, as well as survival. What we choose
To be fans of, or follow is part of the way we reflect
And try to live life, while dealing with the dreams and desires
That we do not understand or determine. Love and Let Die.
The pun pin us. But by combining two titles and two diverse
Approaches to art Higgs inspects the hidden motive and howl
That first made Lizzy dizzy and Lennon scream for his mother,
On every day since her death. Just as we did for him, or just as
James did when in George Lazenby’s mouth Bond got married.
Only to lose his wife in a car-crash, and just as Roger, Sean
And George lost their breath. Well, life is all car-crash now.
But this book is a rich ride and journey. From Avatars to Song Angels,
We see both exit and entrance. The times are exchanging.
But the glory goes on.
So, who’s left?
David Erdos 18/9/22
4 bands, two nights – much mayhem, wildness interspersed with a few quieter moments – Alan Dearling reflects on the experiences
Lounge Society first album launch party
Velvet Underground intensity from the off! The young lads in the Lounge Society returned to their local venue, the Golden Lion, to thank their friends and family for all the love and nurture. They look like young rock gods, they play with confidence and shed loads of charisma. I had first seen them at the Lion when, I think, they were still at the Todmorden High School. Now, they are hugely fancied as one of the next big things in the music biz. In fact, they’ve already ‘arrived’ with their ‘Tired of Liberty’ album.
In advance of the launch gig, I’d been watching the new videos to support the album. They are really very atmospheric, capturing the ‘local’ feel of the Pennines, the home area of the Lounge Society. There’s even a jangling, Byrds-like feel to some of their music. Live, they are something else. It’s an incendiary affair. Indie-new wave punk. Band mates striking poses just like Wilko Johnson, Lou Reed, Jim Morrison and Chris Spedding in past eras. One senses that they’ve grown up on a diet of the sounds and sustenance of their families’ record collections. There’s a little whiff of the Stooges and MC5, Television, staccato attacks of Talking Heads. The speed and energy of the likes of Eddie and the Hot Rods and Dr Feelgood. In fact, with a bit of luck, a run of good reviews, and a fair level of industry support, plus some good international festies, they may well become the stuff of legends. Remember, this is where the Legend started! They were signed up for record deal at 15, and now their album is produced by Speedy Underground label. As they told us at the launch party: “It’s a very special day for all of us, this is a record that we’ve poured our souls into – each lyric, each melody is the result of these last few years we’ve spent gambling our ‘Youth’ on this band.”
Here are three of the tracks from the new album:
Upheaval: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiBG06pjsHU
Cain’s Heresy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiBG06pjsHU
No Driver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Y9ATGzKso
And Blood Money live in Manchester: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK8U177ohWY
Inner Terrestrials and Buff
The punk freaks came out in force. Old Skool Traveller folk, tattoos, dreads a-flowing, the bands and audience blended as a bouncing tribe of loud, raucous humanity. This was a punk-version of a ‘communion’, celebrating the oppressed, the under-class, and doing so in full-on, unrepentant noisesome majesty. Buff, with Saul fronting them, are loud and fun. They thoroughly enjoyed themselves stirring up the punters. Getting them in just the right having-it mood for London’s Inner Terrestials.
Here’s ‘Class War’ from Buff: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=660594824494147
Inner Terrestrials (iT!)
Nearly 30 years on the road. One of the legendary Traveller, outsider bands along with RDF, Tofus, Conflict and more. This was a great performance as ever. One of the voices and sounds of punk—dub-f*ck-off-f*lk. A privilege to once again see Jay, Fran and Ben, live, close up and personal.
Get your DMs on and dance. Infectious stuff. Their music, in fact their very existence, is a celebration for the voices of the under-dogs. And given the current political, social and economic situation in the UK and beyond, many of the under-dogs are going to be a-snarling, biting and fighting to break their leashes!
Jay Terrestrial looked a bit tired this night, but still gave his 101%. The lively audience did their bit too. Very much a show where everyone is a performer and participant.
You can get iT’s new album ‘Heart Of The Free’ digitally through Bandcamp or get your hard copy from Bigcartel https://innerterrestrials.bandcamp.com/ https://innerterrestrials.bigcartel.com/
Inner Terrestrials’ live from France. Great Stuff!: https://youtu.be/hAWlxNV0ADE
‘Enter the Dragon’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-FY8K1G7J0
Sunflower Ingram Quartet – http://www.robinsunflower.com/
Post the Lounge Society ménage, I spotted some ‘respite musical care’ at the 3 Wise Monkeys. Robin Sunflower and friends.
Sounds of jazz and blues, guitars, harp (harmonica), rasping Tom Waits croaks on a whisky-sodden Friday night. This was just what I needed, and it’s great to see that such venues – a kind of Thai supper club, can still exist alongside dj sets, dance and more.
The meeting was like the sparkle of a diamond,
like two comets colliding,
after a superburst of immensity.
I tried to avoid it,
changed my orbit
I turned …
But figs bloomed like the first plant in the galaxies,
the light of a thousand suns
shines…
And then love was born
to fill all the Cosmic voids…
Daisy Tsvete
Picture Nick Victor
Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column which thinks Sundays should be seen and not heard
READER: I will ignore that shallow humbuggery, I’m looking forward to it. Do you go out for Sunday Lunch or have a nice homely roast?
MYSELF: I’m from the far north, we don’t do lunch, but having Sunday dinner at home? Are you mad? With the plethora of diverse, local, sustainably-sourced catering on offer?
READER: I know but… I just want a traditional home-cooked Sunday Lunch….
MYSELF: Dinner!
READER: …..dinner, with Yorkshire pudding, roast beef and all the unhealthy trimmings. Restaurant menus are far too pretentious these days. I mean, how do you fry something without a pan?
MYSELF: You don’t, and the problem is this; the people who write these menus are clearly head hunted from estate agents or art galleries. For example, this year I’ve booked a table at ZootAllure on Cockmarlin Marina, and I’m having purée des haricots cuits au four juxtaposed with rod-caught, gluten-free, pan-fried baril de poisson pourri, nestling on a rustic trio of Assaulted Jersey Potato, Hand-Shaved Raw Celery and Violently Crushed Raspberry Stems, all drizzled with a melange des têtards vivants swimming in a marinade of secretly blended Tibetan healing oils.
READER: You lucky thing, that sounds delicious!
MYSELF: I know, but unfortunately, hand-shaved raw celery always gives me heartburn.
HORSES ‘FURIOUS’ AT ROYAL GUN CARRIAGE SNUB
“Where will this end?” asked spokeshorse Gulzar’s Folly of the Equestrian Employment Board. He was referring to the decision to have the gun carriage bearing the late Queen’s bier hauled by130 infantry marines. “They told us the internal combustion engine would not affect employment opportunities for horses. I need to make no further comment on that promise.”
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF HOLMES & WATSON
No. 352 The Golden Earwig of Rangapanga
It was mid-December and Dr. Watson sulked moodily as he flicked through the April 1875 edition of Simpson’s Almanac of Churlish Revenge searching for ideas. He was still bristling from an incident earlier that day, when he had foolishly described to Holmes his attendance at his favourite niece’s school, where she was appearing in a nursery rhyme-themed Christmas pageant. He winced as the afternoon’s events once more paraded mockingly before his mind’s eye.
Holmes had been studying an application from Mr. A.G. Bell for the patenting of his long-distance speaking tube, when the good doctor, clearly upset burst in to their lodgings at 221b Baker Street. During his tearful companion’s relating of the story, the soot-belching cherrywood pipe waggled like the antennae of a praying mantis between the detective’s firm jaw, causing dark, foreboding cumulous clouds to gather ominously around his head. The cynical sleuth, (whose idea of a good Christmas was to lock himself indoors until it went away), idly poked the glowing fire as he tried, unconvincingly, to appear vaguely interested.
It transpired that the school governors had voted that Watson, because of his background in amateur dramatics, be put in charge of acquiring the props for the production, an appointment he was delighted to accept. But the forgetful doctor had catastrophically omitted a very important item from the first piece, Little Miss Muffet, in which Polly, his niece, played the lead. “Can you imagine my embarrassment Holmes?” pleaded Watson, “I mean, everything was going swimmingly, but as the offstage narrator recited the rhyme’s second stanza, poor little Polly glanced into her bowl and her face assumed the most heartbreaking expression. The dear girl appeared utterly mortified and burst into tears. The spider, played by a ten year old boy who had just spent 3 hours in makeup, deflated like a balloon and he had to be helped off. I was forced to leave via an emergency exit, in order to avoid the ire of the angry parents!”
Holmes’ eyes, until now veiled in the grey patina of stultifying boredom, seemed to light up for a split second like mating fireflies. Removing his filthy pipe, he looked Watson straight in the eye and with a look of feigned surprise, detonated his deadly sarcasm bomb. “No whey!” he intoned with all the sincerity of a snake-oil salesman. Watson, feeling a familiar twinge in his back, slackened his braces and trying desperately to remember the mantra given to him by the fraudulent yogi Vishuddhananda Ranjit Singh, during The Baffling Case of the Indian Rupee Trick, attempted to levitate.
POETRY NOW
This week’s featured poet is Cuthbert String, who has recently headlined a national tour of Butlin’s Holiday Camp Poetry Weekends, featuring himself and Emphysema Ratatouille:
COUTHNESS
From toothless and bald
To balding and toothless
Life on the whole
Can be stone-cold ruthless
So handle with care
Cos your caries and hair
Are exterior signs of your couthness
GYPSY SONG
Lady sing your gypsy song
Whilst I pop out
and put some more chips on
And then when I come back
You’ll have finished your clack
And have me to compress your sweet lips on
READER’S LETTERS
Dear Sausage Life,
I was listening to Radio 2 the other day whilst cutting up a couple of cow carcases for my husband’s hounds, when I heard Countryside Alliance by The Hunt Cult. How refreshing to hear a record which extolls the healthy outdoor pastime of foxhunting. The Hunt Cult have come up with a jolly catchy ditty which so perfectly encapsulates the joy of getting drunk at 6am, getting on a horse and galloping about killing furry animals. I have only one criticism however:- I may stand accused of being old fashioned and fuddy-duddy, but why does it have to have the word “bloody” in it?
Helena Handcart
Herstmonceaux
Dear Helena,
a version of “Countryside Alliance” can be accessed at the bottom of this page, where you can make your own mind up. Or not.
MATHS DESTRUCTION
Dear Sausage,
I wonder if you could settle an argument. My friend says that in an equilateral triangle, the square on the side of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. I say that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. Who is right?
Myrtle Beelzebub
Nuneaton
Dear Myrtle,
You are both wrong. The Otto cycle is a two-stroke internal combustion engine with a low cubic capacity, unsuitable for heavy pulling work .It was originally designed for King Otto of Sweden, whose religion forbade him to wipe his own arse.
Sausage Life!
Colin Gibson • Emmet Ives • Anita Makris
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I am currently working on a book entitled State Functionality in the Middle East and North Africa. This will examine how power and sovereignty is exercised in six Arab majority states, and how each of these states function in the context of complex and unstable political dynamics. Full details of this project are below. The paper on Iraq is complete and can be read via the PDF below. What then follows is a summary of its findings and the paper’s conclusion.
Animosities billow like sharply exhaled smoke at a pavement café. I said, you said, and words flare into a burning point that could take out a child’s eye as soon as it can satisfy that unhealthy itch. There’s a war going on, but it’s almost slipped out of the news, and there’s every chance we’ll be sleeping in abandoned cars by the time the real cold hits, yet there’s an ugly need to stain our fingers yellow and taint our every exchange with lung-deep poison. None of it matters, but idle hands can’t resist the scratch of sulphur against phosphorous and our chests need to feel the weight of our brief mortality. Disease circulates and growth is stunted. It’s nothing at all but words, words, words: I said, you said, until silence stubs everything into smoke that we’ll smell in our hair when we wake up alone.
Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
Father Berrigan ate an apple from stem to seeds.
That is a man who has lived in prison,
whispered Ma.
I wondered about cyanide in seeds. I wondered
about blood on files and missiles, the Baltimore Four,
the Catonsville Nine, all during the time
he sat, long-limbed,
talking, planning to act again.
His brother also a priest. Thorns
in the church’s claws. Blunt swords
in its spleen. And now
he sits, reclaiming apples from Eden.
The church declines to saint them.
Jennifer McGowan
Aerial Atlas of Ancient Britain, David R. Abram (272pp, hbck, £30, Thames & Hudson)
Wow! Normally I’m a bit cynical about photographic coffee-table books, but this new Aerial Atlas is utterly brilliant. Abram thankfully stays away from starry-eyed wonder, gobbledygook occult theories, and postcard views, instead concentrating on archaeology, history and landscape: how the hill forts, tombs, barrows, pits and mounds are situated, their geographical context if you like. Alice Roberts, in her Foreword, talks about walking the landscape of the past, how in fact the past is still physically present with us because our ancestors helped make it, and because of the evidence all around us.
Abram’s own, informative Introduction, tells readers about how he researched and compiled the book, and how this gave him a new sense of Britain, a ‘new mental map’, allowing him to ‘rediscover forgotten horizons’, and consider how different places were important in different times, and how they interconnected. He also makes a strong case for aerial photography and how it reveals ‘[a]lignments and reciprocities’, suggesting that many of these sites could be considered as ‘a form of landscape art’ within ‘ceremonial landscapes’. He finishes by explaining the structure of the book (‘roughly chronological’), also highlights the disadvantages of this ordering (contemporary rather than contemporaneous distinctions), and flags up the fact that each of the four sections has its own introduction. He also notes that out of ‘tens of thousands of prehistoric sites’ he has ‘selected some of the most spectacular and significant’.
And spectacular they are, certainly in the photos gathered together here. Each photo has its own informative text, and many are presented as full or double page spreads, all in glorious colour. The four chronological sections are The Paleolithic and Mesolithic, Neolithic Britain, The Copper and Bronze Ages, and Iron Age Britain, and whilst the first section shows minimal human interventions and traces of occupation – holes and caves, a pit full of bones, the second section is full of fortified hills, barrows, circles and mounds, not to mention standing stones and a flint mine. Some stand alone in wilderness, others are amongst farmland, with ploughed or cropped fields all around, or within clearings in man-made woods or forests. Some are photographed midwinter, with snow light helping capture the contrast of the man-made with the natural, accentuating the shadows and forms of standing stones and protective walls. Stonehenge, Avebury, Silbury Hill and other well known sites are featured here, the last labelled as ‘[o]ne of the great enigmas of British prehistory’.
By the Copper and Bronze Ages there are barrows everywhere it seems, some clustered together as cemeteries, others in orbit around other ancient sites, others part of complex processional routes, those ‘ceremonial landscapes’ mentioned earlier. One my favourite group of photos in the book are the three images of Moel Goedog in North Wales, where a hill fort, itself part of a route involving standing stones and cairns, is trisected by stone walls. The first photo shows the hill from straight above, looking down, the next looks along the ridge the fort is situated on, in the third the point-of-view moves down and back to show the glorious view across an estuary, a bay, the Llŷn peninsula, with Snowdon in the distance. Abram notes the site has not received much archaeological attention, but then also makes a succinct but convincing case for it being ‘a pivotal landform’.
Elsewhere there are intriguing, if not so photogenic, examples of field cultivation in Wiltshire, producing strange stepped areas as a result of ploughing; stone field boundaries and enclosures on Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor; and the White Horse of Uffington, carved into a hill ridge in Oxfordshire.
By the Iron Age, hill forts are becoming more complex and as much about accommodation and farming as defence and protection. Multiple moats and walls enclose the remains of roundhouses or stone buildings, whilst the ground itself still evidences trackways and areas of use. This is the era of Cadbury Castle, Badbury Rings, the very wonderful Maiden Castle (which I made a plaster model of when I was 9) and Old Sarum, a ‘centre of power for over two and a half thousand years’. We visited that from school too, also taking in Salisbury Cathedral and a set of wall paintings full of devils and torture in a church which was supposedly en route.
Abram gives us a separate page entry with detailed information about Iron Age houses, accompanied by a grid of small photos from around Britain, including a couple of my local ancient village site Chysauster. The Wittenham Clumps follow, which I only know from Paul Nash’s paintings and the train window. I had no idea they were part of a hill fort or that Pitt Rivers (who founded the very wonderful Oxford museum of the same name) was an archaeologist as well as an ethnologist! This is apparently another site that has not been fully explored, despite the presence of ‘many circular structures and a street plan’ and ‘a higher concentration of Iron Age coins than anywhere else in Britain’.
The book concludes with a useful list of materials for ‘Further Reading’ and is fully indexed if you want to find something specific, but this is also a wonderful book to dip into and follow geographical or historical threads through. Mostly though it feels like Abram is generously sharing that ‘new mental map’ of his through his wonderful photos. I’ve already got a list of places to seek out next time I’m actually travelling rather than mentally doing so in my armchair.
Rupert Loydell
It’s been a fairly uneventful week on Normal Island, not a great deal to report! But here’s some stuff I’ve been up to.
SHELL’S EXHIBITION AT THE SCIENCE MUSEUM
Some impromptu new exhibits appeared last week as part of the Shell-sponsored carbon capture exhibition at the Science Museum, London.
I thought it was weird that an exhibition about carbon capture, paid for and sponsored by an oil company, didn’t once mention that 81% of all the carbon *ever* captured by this technology has been used by oil companies and pumped back into oil wells to help extract more oil. Seems like a significant omission (ok yes we can call it a ‘carbon omission’)
Also thought it was weird that the exhibition didn’t mention that oil corporations are some of the biggest investors in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. No doubt because of how useful it is to them in getting more oil out of the ground, while being able to pass it off as a ‘green technology’ for tax breaks and marketing purposes.
But now at least, for a time, the Science Museum exhibition does mention those things, as well featuring a great new idea about a super useful product to turn all that captured carbon into.
This action got a bit of coverage in the Morning Star, which you can read online here.
COMMEMORATIVE COIN – SOLD OUT
For some reason recently there was a large uptick in demand for these “God Will Not Save the Queen” commemorative coins I made last year, to the point at which they’re now sold out. I have ordered another small batch, but won’t be ordering any more after that. So if you would like one and don’t mind waiting a few weeks you can still order one here.
Or you can wait for the God Will Not Save the King coin that I’m working on…
I won’t bore you with any monarchy chat here, but if you want to see what I’ve been posting it’s all on my twitter.
MUSEUM OPEN THIS BANK HOLIDAY
Earlier this week I announced on social media that the Museum of Neoliberalism will be one of the few tourist attractions in London open this bank holiday Monday. The bookings filled up immediately but it’s still open to visit all weekend including Monday 11am-7pm, if there are too many people I’ll be organising a queue along the following path:
TRUMP’S GOLF CART ONE
After reposting my Golf Cart One scale model online recently I had a few offers to buy it. It is one of my favourite pieces but I realise I could use the studio space, and the money, for new projects. But I thought I should run it past you lot before I settle on the price. Let me know if you’re interested.
MORE ART SALE STUFF
I also noticed lately that I am accumulating a large number of original drawings and paintings that could be better put to use in paying the studio rent, (and, in this case my water bill). I’ve decided to do a semi-regular ebay auction of some selected pieces, the above painting has just gone up on a 7 day auction, you can bid here.
TOMORROW’S WEATHER
The Met Office may have stopped giving advanced weather forecasts “as a mark of respect” for the Queen, but I spotted this advanced weather forecast on the overground recently. More subvertising work on my website.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Got a few things on next week!
21st Sept – On Peace (London)
I’ll be hosting a talk between founder of Veterans for Peace UK Ben Griffin, and war correspondent Martin Bell at Conway Hall, London. Tickets are free (book online first) and it’ll also be live streamed at abolishwar.net
22nd / 23rd Sept – Middlesbrough Art Weekender
I have work in a show at Pineapple Black (Thurs 6-9pm/Sat 10am-5pm/Sun 11am-4pm) and will be on a panel discussion with other artists in the space on Friday 23rd 3.30pm-5pm
24th- 27th Sept – The Hell Bus @ The World Transformed (Liverpool)
I’m bringing the Hell Bus to Liverpool for The World Transformed festival of politics and art, an antidote to the drab centrism of the Labour Party conference. Bus will be open 11am-7pm each day.
29th Sept – 2nd Oct – The Hell Bus @ MAKE (Birkenhead) *TBC*
Planning on having another show with the Hell Bus south of the river in Liverpool. Hopefully running for a few days, but check my social media for confirmation/times if you’re planning on coming to this.
HGV DRIVER WANTED
Related to the above I’m looking for a HGV class 2 driver to drive the bus in Liverpool next week. If you have the license and would be up for this – I’m happy to pay for your time. Just starting to get worried I haven’t managed to sort this yet!
MINI DAILY MAIL – COMPETITION WINNERS
A while back I found some of the first edition of the Mini Daily Mail and said I’d give them away to 20 subscribers of this here mailing list. Well I finally got round to it and I’ll be emailing the winners today, make sure it doesn’t end up in your spam folder!
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Eternal thanks to anyone who’s ever backed my work on Patreon or through the shop!
And thanks for reading!
Verity of my sand clad hands
Churned with ego’s lost battle.
The scars that fade away
With scratching winds
Of salt beaten eyes
Of a syrupy heart
Of unanswered grief.
A single fire that melts my
Skeleton of wine stained glass
Made a candle,
Over the wooden plated card box.
Armed with shame
You graced away the admirers
In stealthy silence.
The pigeons clasped forward
In the east trodden sky
Their deaths made a lasting appeal
Then you locked up
The treasury of words
To her
Her remaining days passed on
With the pigeons
Of the red sky
In silence.
By Sayani Mukherjee.
Picture Nick Victor
There’s no line on the map
that’s any part of music,
although a note can divide
a land from a land.
But when someone blows that thing –
sends you out to somewhere,
let’s take it from the top –
don’t let go of my hand.
.
Phil Bowen
.
Remember the poet Horace –
When he raised a toast of ‘Emperor Reserve’
Caecuban wine
It came from those same vineyards
High above volcanic slopes
His father had once tended as a slave! –
Before he gained the right of ‘Citizen’
To train his vine to wealth in civic freedom
But let us seek secluded shade –
Toasting Horace in a rough clay cup
Of ‘Ombra’ – unpretentious country wine
Combining by its name both ‘man’ and ‘shadow’
Shedding insight fit for two-faced Fortune –
That we might greet adversity as evenly disposed
As small wins on the lottery or fluctuating fame
For this is certain – any father’s son
One day will die and then become
Indifferent as this world
Although stoned spacemen
Line-dance on the moon
To sing ‘God Bless America’ –
In romper-suits of silver
To ‘frug’ with ‘Funkadelic’
Forward for mankind
Too soon it is ‘goodbye’…Farewell
The modest flat in town the ocean yacht
The haunted country pile the heated pool
The membership of highbrow this and that
The basement spa still flouting planning law –
The nurse’s violet eyes once candidly sincere
Are now discreet and softly turned elsewhere –
Tall pine and poplars lend their elegiac shade
To cinema outdoors at The Borghese
Gardens where ‘bohemien ragazzi’ of stoned Rome
Ditched home-grown Pivano and Pavese
To swallow ‘broken English’ from ‘The Stones’ –
Boy-pirate Pans old public schoolboys
Emulate Though it is late
And decibels cannot deny
Dying notes returning into silence –
For men are rough clay cups
No-thing at all may fill
Until entirely empty
Bernard Saint
Illustration: Claire Palmer
.
.
This brief moment you hear me
Slipping your fingers through the pages
Words I wanted everyone to see
Preserved for my life and through the ages
Below, pen, paper, hand, this small ember
Above it, a trillion messages on my screen
The needle in the haystack that I remember
Reflections of you and where you’ve been
© Christopher 2022
It would at least be interesting to include the gravy-eyed shift as etymology, but that is too much like learning another history. No, it would be more selective than this – gaps darkly occupied for then forgetting: daytime is for words that foster and protect a new culture and era; night-time is burying those that would be troublesome if remembered (the ‘gravy’ of a built-in obsolescence). The boneyard is fine with ethics, for example. As are the words deception, obfuscation, deflection. Or even integrity and honesty, to explore – thought not – the antonyms: what has been disappeared because not appearing on daylight’s Prime-Time Education. As Kanye explains the intentions: I’ve been working this grave-shift / And I ain’t made shit.
Mike Ferguson
Pic: Rupert Loydell
.
When the much esteemed Empress died at the age of one hundred and seven, the Crown Prince was informed immediately. He staggered from room to room in the palace shouting ‘It’s all mine. IT’S ALL MINE’. She had lingered on, becoming ever more vague and indecisive, while he mooned about, eating quantities of cake and chocolate as a way of consoling himself for his thwarted ambition. He was grotesquely fat, frequently constipated, and crimson faced. His greatest desire had been to convert the palace grounds into a safari park where corrupt former heads of state could, for an exorbitant fee, hunt exotic animals from the royal zoo. But his implacable mother had blocked him. ‘When the old lady finally croaks,’ he had once told one of her counsellors, ‘I’m going to organize a special hunt in the royal forest, and you will be the prey.’
Free at last of the old crone’s constant interference in his life, he began to make plans for that long-imagined hunt. Nothing would stop him now, the Crown was to be his. He waddled into the audience room, tried to climb onto the throne, suffered a massive brain hemorrhage and was pronounced dead a few hours later. The Prince was eighty-eight, separated from his fifth wife, and childless. Few tears were shed over his demise and mourners had to be hired to give the impression the nation was grieving. The government approached those next in line for the throne but could find no one willing to assume the role. ‘All that dressing up and vacuous speechifying? What a yawn,’ said one candidate, who preferred to remain anonymous. There were calls to declare the country a republic and the government bowed to popular sentiment. The Empress and her son were buried together, with appropriate televised pomp, and the royal palaces and country estates were turned into holiday hotels and theme parks. The royal zoo became the people’s zoo where former heads of state who had been convicted of war crimes were sometimes exhibited.
Simon Collings
.
(For Thiet Bao Phi)
For two weeks they acquired the requisite materiel,
hitting thrift stores, yard sales, garage sales,
rummage sales in church basements.
They raided trash cans at the local daycares,
and even secured one from an aunt’s closet,
leftover from her daughter’s girlhood.
With the necessary protocols in place,
the recon complete,
and gallons of Heinz amassed,
they designated the strike-point, and the zero-hour:
Sunday, July 4th, 1965, 0300 hours.
Mission mandates strictly forbade any smoking,
so they had already toked-up on the drive in.
Killing the headlights they slipped into neutral,
and coasted into the lilacs along the chain link fence.
A few giggling minutes with the bolt cutters
and they were in.
I can’t see shit hisses one.
No, but soon they will quips the other.
Both work efficiently, despite the Indica.
One has just quit ROTC.
An hour later, objective complete,
they slip, in their beatnik black,
back through the compromised fence that hangs
jagged as shrapnel-torn fatigues,
or the screams of a napalm village.
And by the dawn’s early light the first golfers behold
their manicured greens littered
with dismembered body parts,
the heads, arms, and legless torsos
of hundreds of toy baby dolls.
Up comes the sun, flaring on smeared ketchup:
the carnage chokes the commons of the country club,
besmirches the hillocks, clogs the fairways.
From the flag pole now hangs a bed sheet painted red,
No More Youth in Asia!
Cigars fall from gaping mouths. A mother grabs
a sanitary napkin from her purse to shield the eyes of her son.
Mr. Wilkinson, who has not cussed since the 8th grade,
mutters Jesus.
It makes the local news, the party circuits,
and the front steps after Sunday service.
It’s even written up in a local rag.
I’m pretty sure this is where the Beatles
got the idea for their banned album cover.
Though my father never said it outright,
telling it all again over Thanksgiving.
.
Thor Bacon
Painting: Mark Rothko
.
On the Vagrant Lovers debut single PARADISE BURNS/bw ROCK N’ROLL IS A DEATHWISH
(BLANG SEPTEMBER 2022)
The Vagrant Lovers’debut single is dropped like the fruit
Of temptation; a bitter bite that spits image as well as the pips
From dark love as the ‘stage is pre–lit’ and the ‘apple split,’
There’s damnation raining down on those searching
For some kind of sign from above. As Paradise Burns,
the drum box trips and slips across Spark charged rhythms,
As Gil De Ray’s dark synth sirens and ominous bass set the scene
For Kirsty Allison’s vox, one part Wendy James, one part Siouxie,
As she sneers and seduces, singing and singeing on the burning
Down of hope’s dream. This track charts the course from Brecht
And Weill, through to Nico; it has the crunch and grunge
Of the Velvets and the sheen and shimmer of its own
Underground groove. It is warning and wind, blowing in
From Hell’s corner, as leather clad angels give up the ghost
To improve their last chance and yours. ‘Experience is pain,’
Kirsty tells us. The points of ascension and fields of descent
Are our own. And while ‘The Garden of Gethsemane
Ain’t new to me’ She speaks for us, as we inevitably chorus
How hot it can be when alone we watch the world burn
As it has been for years now. Poem as prophecy. Sound
As suture for a future to find in the ash. Which this startling
New single brings; Blang as provider, produced by Snapped
Ankles and Floating World Pictures’ Chestnutt, like a
Hieronymous Bosch lightning flash. This song is the darkness
During the storm which does not quell the fire. Instead,
It is upto the Vagrants to revivify and tame flame.
Listen, dance, see, as they excoriate Paradise whilst in
Peckham, and then chase horizons, as if scorching all skies
For song fame. Rock N’ Roll is a Deathwish follows on,
With its 70s stomp-like Rhythm. Allison intones on the connection
Between early death for those marked by the need to embark
On the same fate smeared journey in which Hendrix, Joplin,
Morrison, Cobain, Winehouse and co met the dark.
Voice flanged, megaphoned, the sonic assault is pure warning;
Harsh preaching mutating into comfort and care under noise
As the story is told in a collage of reverant reference;
A word storm that’s whipped by Gil De Ray’s bass testing
Treble which plugs directly into the spirit of all of those doomed
Girls and Boys. From Richie Valens to Malcolm Mclaren,
The song says that the desire to dream it, is what in the end
Sours night. As Kirsty cavorts her screed becomes post-punk
Dylan: a Subterranean Homesick Blues, with blood
For these vagrants whose own love is themed through
The fright. You can see these dark angels in light and a film
Of the mind at all moments, as well as at Rough Trade
East on Wednesday, September 21. 2022 is the year
In which the changes are charted. The death of the Queen.
No more Unpriti Patel. No more Johnson. Even as
The tumescence from yet more pricks and cunts has begun.
The Vagrant Lovers both come with a test, and through
A tempest of temptation to make this dark totem,
Burning bright through ripped cloud. In both digital form
As well as a Vinyl, to shake and to show you
How the heads who sing proudly for the sake of us all
Are not bowed. John Gosling and Isabelle de Jour’s mix
Restoratively rams the point home, with a world music
Flavour that charms and charges and colours and calls
Further skies. Bidding the night stained angels on, as ecstasy
Crests excelcis. For if love is homeless it is also saintly,
And horny; its wings and horns hardened by the losses
and gains still to prize.
David Erdos 14/9/22
https://vagrantlovers.bandcamp.com
.
Jean Luc Godard dies and takes film-future with him.
Breathless once more, he’ll stay frozen as part of the truth
He first coined. One of the 24 frames which enlarge
Film’s scope and span for each second, while revealing
Academia in the edit as learning and life are cojoined.
Godard revolutionised film, and within the nouvelle vague
Form found focus. By tracking between language levels,
Image and word were entwined. He seemed to peel celluloid;
‘Onioning’ it to prise meaning from the papped pulp
Of most others, to make a kind of cinema for the blind.
His films are essays, lectures, demonstrations and exhibitons.
A prolific parade of invective in which the viewer
Practically becomes the auteur, as they learn to disseminate
First, as creators must from the mires made from tradition,
And convention if they are to fashion the kind of look
(or luc) Jean preferred. He was restless, and changed
Both style and perspective. From Alphaville’s starkness
To One Plus One’s coloured Stones; where revolution was cut
Into Sympathy for The Devil’s recording, and where even
The implicit dare in that title provoked anarchy’s vibrant
Throne. From Masculine Feminine. Le Petit Soldat,
And Hail Mary, to Goodbye to Language, Filme Socialism,
And Vivre Sa Vie: each entry a change in not only French
Film’s Lingua Franca, but within the eye’s language for any
And every country. Jean-Luc Godard provoked. He was
So much more than a movement. He was a city-state
And a nation, an attitude, a new art, residing in film
Yet projecting out to all thought-forms, messages made
For high branches and for basements where bombs
Born in anger were then studiously pulled apart.
He raged against all routines, crushing feeling itself
Into corners, there to skull-fuck it, until the kiss
That came next was dark eyed. Whether through the cannibalistic
Recourse of Weekend, or Belmondo’s wild abandon, the visceral
Streets of Detective, or a Bande A Part’s Western chic
Godard irised in, through both long-shot and close-up.
His anti-story style telling stories that no other author on Earth
Could complete. The Godardian camera is poised, as well as
Impatient. As he dared the notion of dreams and their dazzle
His lightning like thoughts struck like bolts. As he literally
Visualised words and the impositions within every image,
As he cuts between cloud and city with a weather like will,
The eye jolts. He used film as paint and also ink, image-writing.
His mise-en-scene, a miasma, as early on in intent, the colours
Stay sharp. Even black and white film does not dull them.
His energy startles as you try to discern what he meant.
He is not like Lelouche, Chabrol, Renoir, or his former friend
Francois Truffaut, with whom he quarrelled, and who was
The great cineaste. Godard to me, was much more the Man
In the iron mask, a la Dumas, clawing at the frame which held
Captive all conventional thought. The true task was to evaluate,
Charge, change, and create a new medium for the message
Where what we see elevates us as meaning and myth
Are combined. We lived and loved ancient ways. Godard
Fondled the flicker to manipulate light’s God-like function:
To project the possible in all minds. Each frame truly matters
And now, his living breath shattered, JLG is at rest
And projected in the pieces of film he defined.
David Erdos 13/9/22
.
What songs sing the sorrow of homelessness from Ginsberg’s metaphoric hydrogen jukebox?
Such mythology of the heavenly liberated hobo is often drawn from, for example, W.H. Davies (1871-1940) – the original supertramp. Davies, Newport, Wales-born wanderer of America, who famously settled in Gloucestershire, was frowned upon by Muse Colony of Frost (1874-1963), Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938), Edward Thomas (1878-1917) and their gang. They themselves lamenting loss of Brooke (1887-1915) then dear Thomas himself, both WW1 dead. Frost considered the different road to be taken around the daffodil woods west of Gloucester or at foot of Forest’s May Hill, the different paths of life (‘The Road Not Taken’, 1915).
Rambling old Welshman across the American landscape, Davies pre-dates songs & lamentations of the road. So perhaps turn to the railroad riders – Jack Black (1871-1932), ah, You Can’t Win (1926) – and myriad other lonesome travellers of the railroad night who sang in the cold loneliness under stars and from which emerged the American country folk blues. Then came depression-era rootlessness of the dust years of Steinbeck America (1902-1968) as seen through lens of Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) or lyric words of Woody Guthrie’s fascist-killing machine (1912-1967). Later still, Dylan of course (b.1941).
With a B-side of Lonely Tramp, Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry (b.1937) sung the bouncy hit Ain’t Got No Home (1956), later imitated in the shower for new generation by Corey Haim (1971-2010) in The Lost Boys (1987). Robert Johnson (1911-1938) had Rambling on My Mind (1937), but Elmore James (1918-1963) captured real tears of loneliness looking out on the grit streets, moaning ‘The sky is crying…can you see the tears roll down the street.’ (The Sky is Crying (1960)).
Perhaps it is in this very same street of tears whereupon the mythology of the supertramp wanderer crumbles.
Homelessness, a zenith of utter loneliness, is also the mark of desperation. Reality for the forgotten and overlooked. Unforgiving streets become home to the homeless, weary wanderers of dirt, drink, drugs and death. To live it is to be dehumanized. Dehumanized by state, hope, work. Dehumanized by all of us who pass with hardened gaze, fixed on some futile consumer culture comfort, some comparably pointless anxiety of our own.
That street of tears is the ground trodden by next generation Beat poetess Mimi German in her collection Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars.
Forget your utopian freedom dreams of Walden; dropping out here is kick in the eye of reality. They’re the real poems of pain and searching for grace under hopelessness. Raw articulations of life-choice made only of necessity and loss. German is a grit queen of the outlaw rebel poet tradition, of the oral tradition of the Beats, Howling in anger and truth.
But let’s first scrutinise this contradiction, the Beat mythology of the supertramp and the freedom of Kerouac’s holy fellaheen, as compared to the true experience of life and death on the streets.
In my own ‘Benchsleepers of the World’ (Oblivion: 200 seasons of pain & magic (Gloomy for Pleasure, 2021)), I pondered the same thesis, contrasting this 20th century lore of the free wandering supertramp to the reality of homelessness. The Beats, we must conclude, use the term ‘beat’ as in ‘downbeat’ as metaphor for exhausted suppression of the disenfranchised brought upon by failure of consumerism to provide for all. But also tired and beat from life under all stale norms of expression, ways to live. And yet, at the same time, Kerouac uses beat as be’at as possibility of ‘beatitude’, as in beatification.
I’m happy to embrace that mythology – territory of Walt Whitman – and do so at the start of my own ‘Benchsleepers…’, only to explode it at the end: “but lonely old soul, lost soul, soulless soul, what kisses of the world have you tasted, apart from that of sourblacktragedy and ice?”
German’s scraping gravel poems live in that “sourblacktragedy”. She eats it. Spits it out, bloody and into our minds so that we might fleetingly taste the real grit for ourselves, antithesis of ‘Kubla Khan’s’ “milk of paradise” (Coleridge, 1816).
But Mimi’s not after your pity. Has lived through these stanzas in hard graft. Not as homeless herself, but as campaigner, activist and co-founder of the Jason Barns Landing, a transitional village and houseless community in St. Johns, Portland, Oregon. Cold, hard streetwork. The real deal. A defender.
‘The arts have always been a response tool to politics,’ she asserts, ‘to either shed light on what is happening or to create a way to navigate the harm that politics creates.’
Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958) are often referred to as calls to drop out and embrace the wandering. The Dharma Bums sought to start a backpack revolution. And for some I guess that was the dream. Even today, witness the big quit / great resignation since COVID-19, or the rise and rise of ‘van life’. The atomised of the social media age want out. But dropping out of the rat-race to live authentically is just a choice. Homelessness, on the other hand, is bereft of choice. It’s not the result of hedonistic romanticism, but the domain of desperation. Dharma Bums hiking up the Northern Cascades or the Matterhorn pondering a zen mind this is not.
But if we’re gonna entertain this myth at all then I think, in a way, Chris McCandless (1968-1992) has to be my patron saint of Beats, though no Beat himself…I guess all saints are unaware of their saintliness until it is posthumously bestowed. He left the consumerist life for the wandering in 1990. Went Into the Wild (non-fiction (1996) by Jon Krakauer, movie (2007)) and, in the Alaskan winter, died of starvation.
Compared to the free roaming life supposedly the topic of On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Chris’ story perhaps offers a warning against this notion of the supertramp Beat freedom. But that hitch-hike wandering is just one aspect, one interpretation of Kerouac’s novels. One pushed by marketeers of the publishing world or lazy critics. I’ve always argued that On The Road is, to me, about friendship whilst The Dharma Bums is about friendship and spiritual doubt. But, fine, let’s put that aside for a moment and entertain the popular conception of those books. If they’re merely about dropping out, then Into the Wild raises an alarm against the kind of conservative consumerist society which has now advanced so terribly that a wondrous boy could slip so easily away.
Either way, dropping out isn’t Mimi’s focus, even if she, in my opinion at least, has a spiritual and poetic link in form to the Beats and shares much of their outlook. In this collection the subjects of her eye are those for whom capitalism has failed. For whom bad choices, lack of support, and/or addiction have disabled opportunity; has rendered them bereft of choice. Bereft as a sub-class, and denied decency.
Another critique of the supertramp life and pre-dating Krakauer’s book and Chris – Alexander Supertramp – McCandless’ own setting out in 1990, is Agnès Varda’s (1928-2019) Vagabond (‘Sans toit nil oi’ / ‘With Neither Shelter Nor Law’, 1985); a movie where homeless death has never been so brutally, tragically and poignantly portrayed.
It’s my view that Mimi has added to that canon as a new, authentic voice, a next gen Beat voice mixed with – as poetic outlaws ought to be – sparks of grit and dharma, sparks of beatitude and acts of humanity. She’s one of the objectors to our age’s affront to kindness.
Of the two, Vagabond is the better movie in my opinion, even though Mona Bergeron is a fictional character based on an amalgamation of real homeless people Varda met during research, whereas McCandless was real. Vagabond wins by virtue of its crisp cinemaphotography, deft near-documentary style direction and a searing performance by 17-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire. Both movies, however, portray this balance of the so-called Beat ideal of freedom and the reality of tragedy. Both show the danger in the freedom they seek and Vagadond especially shows our society as one that refuses room to people who live authentically. Mona is asked, ‘Why did you drop out?’ to which she replies, ‘Champagne on the road’s better.’
So, in their respective ways, both movies break that supertramp myth. Both end in tragedy. And it is that tragedy which is so often the outcome for those on the streets who will have no movie. It is that reality which is the subject of Mimi’s poetry and the motive for her work on the Jason Barns Landing.
‘Jason Barns and Jason Barns Landing is a long story…I met Jason in the winter of ‘17. He was freezing and I convinced him to come over to my truck where I have supplies for folks on the street…After helping {him} into dry clothes and trading plastic bags that were his socks for true socks, he began to trust me. He asked me to start a village so they would have a chance at survival on the streets. He told me he’d die on the streets if we didn’t do this.’
‘While we were in discussions for how to make this happen, Jason died whilst collecting cans on the street in November, 2018, hit by a drunk driver.’
‘After his death, we decided to occupy land belonging to Metro and ended up housing 20 people in a transitional-style village that could provide stability for these unhoused people. The city harassed us deeply for nine months, that we had to move numerous times. We are in our third iteration today, still trying to get the city to leave us alone.’
Death will slip into you with ease down on the streets, in the cold winter fields, or among the snowy pines of Alaska. In all these stories, true or imagined, homeless deaths are unremarkable in a world of uncaring. The tragedy completes.
In Vagabond, Mona is questioned by an ex-homeless dropout who has rebuilt his life on a different path to liberty starting a family and small holding; he warns Mona ‘You chose total freedom, but you got total loneliness… My friends who stayed on the road are dead now or else they fell apart – alcoholic, or junkies. Because the loneliness ate them up, in the end.’
Such romantic ideals of freedom can so easily be nulled by this cruel, cruel existence crushing down on their subject with the weight of brutal reality.
As remarked earlier, Mimi’s subjects are homeless through circumstance, not choice. They’re victims of society, not dropouts. Victims don’t choose that kind of freedom. In that way, it’s not freedom at all, but raw brutality. It’s abandonment by society of what it regards as the dirty. A flightless bird does not choose to remain earthbound.
Yet society, with its casual judgements and suspicion, still somehow regards the homeless as people with choices; that they’re just drop-outs who’ve chosen not to work in regular jobs and create a home. But it’s difficult to do virtually anything when you’re addicted, suffering from depression; where you just feel so generally let down that you have no faith in even yourself. It’s then, when you’re at your lowest, most desperate, you find yourself cut off from all normal means of support. Adrift from our possible humanity.
With all that in mind, it’s so easy to be overwhelmed when reading work like this, the relentless tragedy. Back to On The Road and The Dharma Bums, and Kerouac – thru his alter-ego Sal Paradise and Ray Smith respectively – enjoyed a support network, was able to return home to mom or stay with friends and continuing the party; was free to explore his spiritual and literary existence with the relative safety net of fellow writer friends or family. The subjects in Mimi’s book have but only the kindness of strangers. That unsung body of people: volunteers. Activists.
As one of those strangers, Mimi is unapologetic: ‘All of the poems in this book are about the lives of unhoused people. I’m an activist, an organiser, and an advocate for unhoused people in Portland, Oregon.’
Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars was launched at Revolutions Bookshop in Portland. ‘It’s a tiny store,’ says Mimi, ‘More of a small nook of revolutionary and radical books and authors. Poetry. Radicalism. Kerouac and Burroughs. Angela Davis. Audre Lorde. Whitman. Yeats. Local zines you’d never see elsewhere except at protests. Anyway, I emailed to see if I could set up my first reading at their place and that it would be an event where housed people sat alongside unhoused people, you know, to actually be in the same space, listening to poetry about the struggle to survive on the streets.’
‘Bringing housed and unhoused people together is incredibly important to me,’ she continued, ‘…it’s something I’ll continue to do no matter where I read in person. We have to remove othering. Remove the space that allows housed people to pretend to understand what they do not understand, help bridge that gap with reality, where humans meet humans over a cup of poetry.’
From the first line of the very first poem, these verses have a sense of place, the littered urban space: “shadows cross the wired streets” – the streets we readers roam for images and truth thru the poets’ eye (‘The Crossing’, pg. 7)… ”this is no house row” (‘No House Row’, pg. 10).
Ginsberg’s (1926-1997) “lonely old grubbers” (‘A Supermarket in California’, Howl & other Poems (1956)) roam in Mimi’s “vile loam of night” (‘When Are the Buds’, pg.24), “across the shatter beneath the gravel weight of stars” (‘The Other Side of the Coffee Shop Window’, pg.8).
With the refuse of modernity “tangled in the cling wrap morning sky” (‘No. 19 – earth on dry ink’, pg.9), these poems wreak with anger of Diane Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters but with a somehow raw subtlety that’s hard to grasp, surely difficult to write. Reminds me sometimes of touches of Elaine Feinstein, albeit in a Beat mode with that keen holy unashamedness of outlaw poetics.
Each poem is justified in both left and right margins and spread across the width of a page so leafing thru presents like 26 tombstones of names left out to die in the cold night of shame – our shame.
She’s also a voice of hope in the dark chill streetlamp night. A voice that reaches out to those so dehumanised as to be even without their own reflection (Unsheltered, pg.21). Her work is more than support, it’s the activism that seeks the right to life, respect, and a home. ‘These folks are beautiful to me,’ says Mimi. ‘Folks I’ve met on the streets. So utterly real. With absolutely nothing to lose. Nothing to hide. Because there’s nowhere to hide. It’s what I write about, even when it’s not poetry directly about the unhoused, like the poem ‘The Scenic View’…
{not in Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars, presented here by special arrangement}
German is also reflective with touches that allude to her reading of Castaneda: ‘Life is poetry. Life sucks. Life is suffering. Life is ugly. Yes, of course, there’s also beauty…’ she says. ‘Carlos Castaneda taught me that you have to live your life in a way where you really understand what it means to say that today is a fine day to die. Meaning, live! Neal Cassady taught me the same thing. Live life. Do what needs to be done so you have nothing left undone.’
And scattered among the Mimi pages is that zen-like calm you sometimes get from the Beats and the transcendentalists before them. Sometimes that calm comes as acceptance, fortitude and recognition of simple fortunes: ”no rain | no wet | the bone shiv of winter waits in the cracked lips of clouds | mean time thirteen cans is a free lunch” (‘No. 29 – opaque pastel on crepe paper’, pg.23).
It is the beauty of the barren lands that informs her next project: ‘I’m working on my desert poems,’ she says. ‘When I’m in the wilderness, I write about the desert. It’s an easy transition from the ugliness of the world. I’d much prefer the beauty of the open land to urban life… to live out there in the wilderness… There is a different song to be heard… The stars vibrate… wildflowers defying the bounds of living.’
Who isn’t beguiled by the real and metaphor of wildflowers in the desert night, cold dawns and dust-blood sunsets?
Indeed, the abstract cover of Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars is well poised to reveal beauty in the darkness-mess: cerulean blue in a green smog clouding alive with neon streaks that scratch the stellar night, mess of cosmos with pockets of fire red and ochre debris. It reminds me of David Armitage’s music-derived art Songlines back in ‘97. Today his work seems to meld Bacon and Kandinsky but you can still spot techniques that hark back to Jackson Pollock, himself linked to the mid-20th century milieu from which the Beats also emerged.
I’ve referred to Mimi as a next-gen Beat, but she’s flattered by the accusation: ‘To be considered a new Beat poet? Fabulous! The most influential people in my life were Beat writers, including Whitman! Beat. The rhythm of the Beats. Yes, I share that. The disdain of the ‘norm.’ I rejected the 9-5 and all that fits into that a long time ago. I think my mother would attest to the fact that I was born this way. I’m not into borders or boxes.’
Walt Whitman, like Ezra Pound and William Blake, have all been a huge influence on the Beat Generation. Those greats and the muse within them continues to resonate in today’s next-gen Beats, as Mimi herself attests, ‘George Wallace writes in his poem, ‘The Poet’, “…inside his head jaguars prowl, jaguars and jackals”, and later in the same poem, “he speaks all languages, all the uttered phrases of lost nations are at play in his head, his brain is fire, his brain is smeared concrete, his brain is hieroglyphics, he lives in the tomb of the forgotten kings, his tongue is cave paintings, his will was written by a frightened child, and the city loathes him”. If we are lucky enough to have a reader, and then, a reader who admires or gets something powerful from our words, well, there’s the glory. But it resides within the reader or the poem itself.’
Wallace, lifetime National Beat Poet Laureate and current writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, having read some of Mimi’s work, saw resonance with San Francisco’s Jack Hirschman. And, yes, there is a similar passion for justice in German’s work.
Mimi’s great at last lines, but I’m not going to share more with you; I don’t want to spoil your own reading. This collection deserves to be read widely, and shared. Experienced fresh. It’s in that first read where its power is most potent. Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars communicates reality in a poetic style that is accomplished and which shines. It is art from desperation, and beauty out of sadness, regret and shame.
That shame is ours.
That we don’t do more. That shame is society’s: for walking by; for allowing civic authorities to act without civility; for accepting capitalism built to turn our hearts and minds away from the needy and broken.
They’re starting space tourism when the streets are littered with broken people. Who will sing for them?
Let’s add Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars to the songs of sorrow, in poetic form, to Ginsberg’s hydrogen jukebox. Songs of tragedy, sadness, struggle and hope. For all poems, truly, are songs of the heart.
Review by Karlostheunhappy (facebook.com/karlostheunhappy)
Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars is available from Amazon on both sides of the Atlantic or direct from the publishers at thepoetrybox.com $14
USA: facebook.com/JASONBARNSLANDING
UK: www.shelter.org.uk
This article first appears in Steel Jackdaw issue #7 summer 2022: please support this fantastic eco-arts magazine by buying the original.
John Henley Heathcote-Williams: prince of poets and squatters everywhere, actor, playwright, activist, conjuror, anarchist, father, lyricist, errant student of the law, grandfather, celebrant, conservationist, painter, Hollywood collaborator, inspirer, paramour and courter of models, musicians, historians and novelists, journalist, polemicist, smooth-voiced sage, cupboard dweller, word-whisperer, trouble and mischief maker, seminalist, rabble rouser, editor, reformed wild man and tarnished saint in the making was also a tribe gatherer of the first order. At his funeral on July 14th 2017, one roamed through a crowd containing every strand of human and artistic endeavour, from famous actors, writers, directors, painters, and musicians, to the children and grandchildren of famous actors, writers, directors, painters and musicians, each shuffling uncertainly, like partly stunned cattle, alongside publishers, Lords, activists, long deposed figures of power and responsibility and more than a headful of what could still be called the lunatic fringe. It was a bewildering day. Nobody could really understand what had happened. Suddenly there was a small wicker coffin lined with blue hearts, and utter disbelief at the fact that this particular totem had toppled and passed into the wind which exists beyond all other weather, borne now, above us, with each attendant name there and status left impossibly small on the ground.
In a post Brexit time of national uncertainty and economic struggle, it’s perhaps logical that the death of the grandmother of the nation should be the cause of mass sorrow. That said, a long weekend just spent in London made me aware of the sharp contrast between the tourists and devotees in the centre and the workaday folks going about their business in the periphery. That Queen Elizabeth II worked hard in her role as head of state is not for me in doubt. That over 70 years were spent in this inherited position is a cause for personal admiration and respect. However it should also be a reason to step back from the emotional fray and ask why? That the appointed ‘national’ broadcast media are going into expected overdrive to mobilise mass mourning is not surprising. However that shouldn’t prevent the more reflective among us from doing what the prime ministers of Jamaica and Antigua & Barbuda have just announced they will be doing, and having a national debate about whether their countries will become republics or not. Perhaps it’s indecent to suggest such a debate in Britain at a time when our former head of state hasn’t even been interred in the national imagining let alone Charles III formally crowned. But surely it’s precisely at this time that we should stop and wonder what maintaining the monarchy, or at least maintaining it as is, is good for?
The much vaunted “neutrality” and claimed ‘non political’ nature of Windsor family rule will not only be tested by our new King’s attachment to a range of deeply political causes and opinions, but politics very much goes with the Windsor turf, as it were. You can’t be head of the Commonwealth and be sworn to uphold the Protestant faith and not be political. To think otherwise is to dwell in a soft, pink, cotton notion of the world forged in story books and childhood delusion. The king, like the late Queen, is a deeply political figure, as any head of state would be.
The question is whether we’re happy to maintain a political system, and yes, ‘regime, that having a monarch whose government uses royal (prerogative) powers, ensures? For those quirky enough to have watched the more than hour long ceremony on Saturday morning live from the Privy Council, an appreciation of all that is undemocratic, indeed archaic, about our political system was in full, open and transparent view. It was as if Penny Mourdant had won the premiership and Liz Truss had been kicked straight upstairs before even passing Go as PM.
As Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mourdant led the business of the great political and clerical good who constitute this former Executive body. However her announcement of the Privy Council’s decisions underpinning the uncontested ‘election’ of Charles as king was straight from Medieval Britain. The Union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland was a constant reference point as was much Monty Pythonesque referencing of the Great Seal and of interim Seals of some kind. The newly minted monarch himself grew visibly more irritated by the arcane absurdity of all that he had to voice ‘Agreed’ to. However for him, his Consort, and his Heir, I suspect this was all so much tiresome theatre, as no doubt it would seem to any still watching members of the public.
However the substance of what was on display was an assertion of power by unaccountable decree from a body, the Privy Council, whose official purpose is to “counsel” the monarch but is in practise more about the underpinning of the royal prerogative powers that all governments exercise by reference to the crown and not to the sovereignty of the people. Charles’ stated affirmation of his office, that he is the sovereign, made clear where powers still lies in Britain. It may be his “constitutional” understanding that God and the elected government, in that order, should guide him in the performance of his ‘duties’, but our unwritten constitution gives “his” government a welter of unaccountable royal powers to exercise on his behalf.
Should we care? Well, declaring war, signing international treaties of any kind, issuing executive decisions such as orders in council without proper parliamentary scrutiny, are all the exercise of royal prerogative powers. They quite literally have nothing to do with claimed electoral mandates turned into parliamentary legislation. A country that has supposedly ’taken back control’ doesn’t seem to care that as an electorate they have little control and that their sovereignty is only partly honoured in name and largely ignored in practise.
The great symbol of British parliamentary democracy is not the office of prime minister but the speaker of the House of Commons, the
person who, ceremonially speaking at the ‘State Opening of Parliament’, bars the monarch’s entry to the legislative chamber via Black Rod. Speaker Hoyle though was a mere attendee at the Privy Council on Saturday, lending his democratic imprimatur to the throughly undemocratic proceedings.
Perhaps this is all liberal elitist claptrap, point scoring by a member of the over educated classes when ordinary folk just want a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work, and affordable, heatable, housing to live in. But if the masses aren’t actually determining who governs them and how, and if their elected representative don’t hold sovereignty on their behalf, then what hope is there that popular needs and desires can be met?
Arguably the last time a collective programme of mass need was addressed by an elected UK government was in the latter 1940s when the second war in two and a bit decades had brought an establishment and party political consensus that things could never be the same again. Democracy’s role was merely to chose those in the red corner as the ones who should try to administer it. No Labour government has in practise done anything to challenge the monarchical constitutional settlement other than to partially limit the power and membership of that residue of royal favour, the unelected House of Lords. The maintenance of the monarchy shouldn’t however be a matter of left V right. It should be a matter of democracy V unaccountable power. If Scotland goes independent then it’s likely to replicate Windsor’s prerogative powers over an elected Holyrood.
We are told that the late Queen was so shielded from the mucky and constitutionally inappropriate business of politics that in 1975 her Governor General in Australia turfed out an elected Australian Labour prime minister in cahoots with the then Prince of Wales and the Queen’s private secretary. These were royal powers used secretly to get through a political impasse that should have been Australia’s political business, but was actually the business of the UK monarch’s own Governor General. The British Labour Government of the day was seemingly equally constitutionally “shielded” from what the British royal house was up to.
Britain plainly needs a head of state to at least arbitrate when there’s such a political impasse at home. It was feared that the Queen couldn’t be shielded from doing that if there had been no prospect of a UK parliamentary majority ‘to get Brexit done’. The prospect, pre PM Johnson, beckoned of the Queen having to appoint a national (coalition) government to get through the political morass. Some would argue that it’s surely better that such a political arbiter be the head of the house of Windsor than perhaps an archly party political figure appointed as a figurehead president. (Few serious republicans in Britain want a presidential political system ala the USA.).
This is not just a matter of what kind of head of state do we want when the parliamentary arithmetic is bothersome. It’s very much more than that. It’s about who do we think should rule us, whether as head of state or in terms of the laws, orders and executive decrees that are currently issued on the basis of monarchical power? Should these be our laws, argued over by our representatives, or the prerogative of a royal house that, as witnessed on Saturday, elects itself?
Brian Morris’s work as an academic over many decades has taken in everything from how cultures name things to how they interact with nature, religion and the concept of self. Since the 1960s he has also been active as an anarchist and has taken a particular interest in social ecology.
Brian has written for many publications including Freedom and has published several books on figures such as Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin and Murray Bookchin, as well as taking on the topic of anarchism and ecology in a series of books such as Anthropology, Ecology, and Anarchism (PM Press) in 2014 and Visions of Freedom: Critical Writings on Ecology and Anarchism (Black Rose) in 2018.
Tell us about your early life and influences
I am at heart a working-class lad from the Black Country, with a fascination for the natural world. I have had a somewhat odd academic background. I failed my eleven-plus and left school at the age of 15 to work in an iron foundry in West Bromwich, like all my male forebears. While working in the foundry I severely damaged my right hand in a machine. For that I was awarded £120 working men’s compensation – a lot of money in those days.
This enabled me to leave home aged 20, after undertaking my two-year National Service as a seaman-navigator in the RASC. In October 1957 I sailed from Amsterdam to Cape Town, and after hitch-hiking around South-Central Africa for about five months I eventually obtained employment as a tea planter in Malawi (then Nyasaland). I worked as a tea planter for more than seven years, eventually sitting and passing five GCE “O” levels at the age of 29. I then returned to the UK. Failing to get into university to study biology (ecology) – my cherished ambition – I trained as a teacher at Brighton College of Education in the late 1960s. It was there that I first engaged in socialist politics.
The main intellectual influences on my life were not philosophers, nor even academics, but popular naturalists such as Charles Darwin, Ernest Thompson Seton Gordon and W. H. Hudson. As a teenager I avidly read their nature writings. Apart from Darwin, all have been forgotten. My intellectual outlook on life has therefore always been one that is realist, historical and ecological – a form of evolutionary naturalism.
How did you get into anarchist politics?
Although I have always been something of a rebel – even as a boy I flouted the law of trespass – I became an anarchist largely due to two events in my life. The first was that my wife, Jacqui, sensing, perhaps, my rebellious spirit, gave me as a birthday present in October 1965 George Woodcock’s Anarchism. Although much derided these days – quite unfairly – this book opened my eyes to what to me then was a completely new political vision.
The second event was a meeting on comprehensive education that I attended in February 1966, at Conway Hall in London. It was to hear a lecture on “Education or Indoctrination” by Madeline Simms. After the lecture a lively debate ensued during which a rather large Bakunin-like working class bloke spoke out forcibly about the rights of children. He appeared to be quite a misfit. I overheard one person remark, rather disparagingly: “Oh he’s only an anarchist.” Quite by chance I met up with him later in Red Lion Square. I asked outright “are you an anarchist?” “Yes” he replied, and we got talking about it. His name was Bill Gates, and he gave me the address of an anarchist bookshop called Freedom.
On that cold night in February 1966, we said our farewells. I never saw or heard of Bill Gates again, but that meeting had a profound influence on my life. I later visited Freedom Bookshop, then in a back alley near Chelsea football ground. There I acquired cheap books and pamphlets by Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and Guy Aldred (in those days there wasn’t much else). I read them avidly and have ever since considered myself an anarchist.
During the 1980s I attended several meetings of the “History Workshop” on anarchism. There I came to meet the likes of Geoffrey Ostergaard, Peter Marshall, Caroline Cahm, David Goodway, Nicolas Walter, Carl Levy, Stuart Christie and Laurens Otter. I gleaned much from them.
I have throughout my life been involved in protest movements, whether against inappropriate road schemes, the Vietnam war, the Apartheid regime in South Africa, nuclear weapons, the National Front, the Poll Tax, and neoliberal capitalism in its various guises.
Can you say a bit about what you think was happening through the late 20th century when trends such as anarcho-primitivism grew while ‘red’ anarchism struggled?
The end of the 20th century involved the development and hegemony of global capitalism, and the emergence of neoliberalism as its political ideology. This was accompanied by several other tendencies: a rise of neo-Darwinian theory with its emphasis on human nature as fundamentally selfish; a revival of philosophical individualism as a radical cult (Nietzsche, Stirner); and the emergence of nihilistic postmodernism, a cultural movement and ethos that some have viewed as a radical ideology and an alternative to so-called “modernity,” while others have dismissed it as the latest ideology of neoliberal capitalism.
What troubled me was that many self-proclaimed anarchists embraced these tendencies with uncritical enthusiasm, in the process repudiating the philosophy and politics of early anarchist communities, specifically their metaphysics and their evolutionary socialism. The post-modernist tendency to simply dismiss anarchist communists as advocates of the ideology of capitalist modernity seemed to me quite misleading given that the intellectual trends within modernity – covering around 400 years – are both complex and multifaceted.
In Anarchism is Movement, Spanish writer Tomas Ibanez argues against red anarchists’ tendencies to act as “guardians of the temple,” where fetishisation of historic positions can end up undermining or closing off (class struggle) anarchism from being flexible in the present. Would you say that warning has merit?
The title of Tomas Ibanez’s book states the obvious. For, like the Buddha and Heraclitus, anarchist communists as dialectical naturalists (materialists) have long recognised that all things in the world are in flux, and continually changing. Anarchism is no different. In fact anarchist communists have always emphasised that anarchism is not some eternal idea emanating from god, but a historical movement and political tradition. Although the post- modernists seem to deny the very idea of a social movement, given their emphasis on the ephemerality, fragmentation and liquidity of modern life.
The recognition that social and political conditions have changed since the 19th century is hardly news to anarchist communists, and hardly an insight unique to post-modern philosophers and post anarchists. Anarchist communism, in fact, has been continually renewing itself throughout its long history, quite independently of anarcho-primitivism (Zerzani), Stirnerite egoism (McQuinn) Nietzschean aristocratic individualism (Hakim Bey) and post anarchism (Newman) – which only became prominent in the last two decades.
Anarchist communists have always been open to new ideas: Bookchin drew on ecological theory; Colin Ward engaged in the then current ideas on community organisation and education; and David Graeber (like me) drew on the insights of anthropology. Anthropologists (along with pragmatic philosophers) were critiquing “essentialist” conceptions of the human subject many decades before the post anarchists arrived on the intellectual scene. Of course, anarchists should be open to new ideas, and to the ideas of other cultures, and alive to their political struggles. This is something I have been writing about for some 40 years.
With respect to Ibanez’s book, unlike him I have always made a clear distinction between the radical Enlightenment and capitalist modernity. But the postmodernist’s rejection of reason, representation (science, knowledge), universalism, the concept of human nature, secularism, and history, by misleadingly and negatively equating these concepts with capitalist modernity seems to me completely obfuscating. Lost on Ibanez, given his dualistic mind-set, is the fact that anything that is “good, beautiful or true” (including reason and human rights) has been appropriated and utilised by capitalism and by the state, to promote and bolster their power, influence or legitimacy.
Modernity is best understood not as a secularised version of Christianity (as the likes of John Gray and Ibanez contend) but as entailing what the Mexican anarchist Flores Magon described as the “dark trinity” of the state, capitalism and religion, a complex that has dominated, exploited, and culturally oppressed people over many centuries. As I note in A Defence of Anarchism Communism, many contemporary nation-states –Turkey under Erdogan, Russia under Putin, Arabia under the Saudis, China under Xi Jinping, India under Narendra Modi etc – exemplify this” dark trinity.” They all combine the advocacy of global capitalism, a highly and repressive and authoritarian form of politics and the support and active promotion by the state of some religious metaphysics. In the above states these relate to Christianity (the Russian Orthodox Church), Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, or some form of Islam (specifically Sufism and Wahhabism). The secularism extolled by the radical Enlightenment cannot be equated with capitalist modernity. The “world” religions, in contrast, have historically been “religions of empire” and ideologies of colonialism, and they have always been an intrinsic part of modernity – not its antithesis as some post anarchists seem to contend.
Murray Bookchin’s acerbic critique of so-called lifestyle (post) anarchism has always been misunderstood. He was not critiquing the likes of Hakim Bey for being libertarians but for rejecting socialism. Likewise, Peter Marshall rebukes me for being “sectarian” in advocating anarchist communism (otherwise known as social anarchism or libertarian socialism) and describes himself as an “anarchist without adjectives”. But of course, this is the very term that Malatesta used to describe anarchist communism in his critique (like Bookchin) of radical individualism, and in affirming that anarchist communism is libertarian – libertarian socialism. Anarchist communism is no more “sectarian” than anarcho-primitivism or the radical individualism of “post left anarchy”.
I do not envisage anarchist communists as “guardians of the temple” as there is no temple to defend, other than the general principles of anarchism that I underlined in my pamphlet. There are of course many different kinds of anarchism, expressing different styles of metaphysics, and different political concerns and strategies. But to divide Western thought, in all its complexity and diversity, dualistically into two ideologies – “modern” and “postmodern” seems to me not only simplistic but quite vacuous.
The closest thing to a recent red mass movement is probably Corbynism. What do you think of it – and its collapse?
The Labour Party, given the nature of its origins, has always expressed an inherent tension between liberal democracy and statist politics and socialism derived from the trade unions. There have always been deep cleavages and conflicts between these two wings.
Under Corbyn the more socialist wing tended to flourish, given Tory austerity measures and general working class discontent. But Labour has never been a radical alternative to capitalism. Its socialism has always been muted, and when in power it has always advocated and upheld Britain as an imperial State.
The demise of Corbynism certainly opens up opportunities to re-affirm anarchist communism, especially as anti-capitalist sentiments are now widely expressed in the media. But one should never underestimate the powers of the modern State, and the degree to which the market has penetrated everyday social life. I have never had much enthusiasm for Labour, or for the Greens’ “New Deal” which continues to support capitalism, and actually endorses giving increasing powers to the modern State, even though we may be able to engage with them on specific issues.
Increasingly, and regrettably, the ecological crisis tends to be discussed in terms of either Leviathan or oblivion, as if there is no alternative.
Where do you think anarchist communism can respond most effectively?
I do not have any pat answers – though I certainly hold that a better order of social life is both possible and necessary in the current crisis. Contemporary anarchists surely must engage and be active on three fronts.
Anarchists should endeavour to keep alive the “spirit” of anarchism, a vision of a world free of capitalist exploitation, State oppression, and all forms of what the anthropologist Christopher Boehm called “hierarchical dominance,” propagating the notion that there is no viable alternative to capitalism and the State. Anarchists must be continually engaged in critiquing capitalist modernity.
Anarchism as a libertarian vision should be employed as an “ethical compass” in marshaling that critique. Anarchists should therefore participate in or support any event, grassroots organisation or community that attempts to defend the well-being and rights of working people against the intrusions of the State and capital. This does not imply, even with regard to the present ecological crisis – as anarchists like Chomsky and Vodovnik have argued – State power and an involvement with parliamentary politics. Insurrection and protests are, of course, intrinsic, and anarchists should freely engage with any enterprise that undermines capitalism and State power.
Finally anarchists should create forms of social life based on mutual aid and voluntary co-operation. Such groups and organisations may be focused on a diversity of different needs and interests, including to defend the environment or for worker’s solidarity, and be based on “prefigurative politics.” The organisations we create in the present must reflect the kind of libertarian socialist society we intend for the future.
It seems to me that anarchist communism is the only alternative, for all other forms of politics have all been tried, and found wanting.
This article first appeared in the Summer-Autumn edition of Freedom journal, available at our online shop for the cost of postage.
Whilst we rightly spend these days remembering how many people were brutally murdered under her sovereign command, spare a thought for those mourning the fact that they’ll never get to see Elizabeth’s head on top of a spike.
Today there was a solemn, angry march for justice for Chris Kaba.
The killing of Chris Kaba by the police on the 5th September in Streatham Hill has incited demonstrations outside Brixton police station.
Cleaners and UVW members at Latchmere Leisure Centre in Battersea yesterday received confirmation that from 1 October their wages will increase by 16%.
Back here on the path, it’s all spit and brick dust, with once-white plimsolls kicking up scurf into sticky air. It’s forty years since furnaces bellowed across a town of solid men and women with brass in their pockets and swarf beneath their skin; thirty since the walls crumbled into dead eyes and thick veins; twenty since the Sun gave up calling and left no contact details, and ten since the dead shuffled out of the nettles and bindweed, coughing out stories with no beginning or end. There’s a point at which the path ends, though it’s different every time, and there’s a point at which even the most regular visitor – and you have to come back, whatever your mother or your sensible self may advise – will forget all they ever knew about money, machines, and motorways which once ran from here to the Moon. But then a ghost will take you by surprise. It will take your hand and take a cigarette from your proffered pack which you don’t remember buying. It will tell you of long, hard days, sweating through insubstantial time. It will recall lost names for the first time in decades, rolling them from its dusty mouth like companions in war. We’re all on the edge of metaphor here, if we could only pull our laces tight and walk on, but the ghost points back the way we came – the way everyone came – and there doesn’t appear to be a path.
Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
23 August 2022
Thanks to Lucy Alexa
Isbn: 978057 1322138 Faber& Faber
In review by Alan Dearling
I came to this new book with ‘eyes half shut’. I’ve enjoyed Damon Albarn’s post-Blur work more than I particularly liked Blur. Graham’s life has been bank-rolled by the fame and fortunes of Blur. He’s been an influential and individual guitar voice in the UK’s pop world and beyond. Solo and collaborative works from Graham Coxon I’ve listened to are a real potpourri, ranging from free-improvisations, squalls and walls of Dinosaur Jr/Thurston Moore guitar sounds, through to gentle, mildly psyched-up, finger-picking Davey Graham-styled folk music, tinged with a hint of Nick Drake (Spinning Top), and even a kind of synth-pop, funk, multi-artist opera (Superstate). The last album of his I reviewed was ‘A+E’ back in 2012. It included some pop moments, but I found it a bit grim and noisy.
The book will be of interest to fans of Blur and of Graham himself. As guitarist in Blur, he is widely known, yet much less high-profile than Damon or the flamboyant, Alex James. Personally, as more of a distant observer, it comes over as a very personal autobiography. Much of it filled with fragments of his ‘states of mind’, his frustrations, his insecurities, his naivety, his dreams, demons, what he calls (and draws in his diaries) “his monsters”.
Unfortunately, he does indulge himself and us, the readers, in wallowing in his seemingly disadvantaged childhood with a father who was in Army military bands, living in Army accommodations, his hard-done-by-ness. I’ve lived in Australia, and it reminds me of what the locals call, ‘Whingeing Poms!” Graham makes much of his being ignored, his ‘outsider’ status in Blur, his fragility, for example he writes:
“I was exorcising my general on-stage discomfort and paradoxical need for affirmation.”
Seen through Graham Coxon’s eyes, Blur were great fun to be part of and he continues to have great admiration for his old Colchester school friend, Damon. But, he cannot help himself being frustrated at the adulation which came as being one of the members of a major Brit-Pop band, when what he wanted was:
“I just wanted arty-farty people to like us, because I thought we were arty-farty people. That’s why I was uncomfortable when the hooligans and the new-lad brigade caught wind of us – we weren’t particularly a lad band.”
There are some fascinating insights to Graham’s musical education, his early loves of the likes of Robert Fripp and King Crimson, even Caravan and Pink Floyd. And I enjoyed the descriptions of the beginnings of Blur and how they morphed from being ‘Seymour’, before the name change to ‘Blur’. Here they are playing at The Square, Harlow, 18/12/89: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vha8UmAmNI4
By the end of the Graham’s book, I had begun to feel that I was living in the worlds of Jack and his son, Danny, in Stephen King’s books ‘The Shining’ and the sequel, ‘Dr Sleep’ – a world where Jack and later, Danny Torrance drowned their discomfiture, their feelings of wretchedness and inadequacy, in booze. For Graham, relationships fell apart, he went into rehab, took part in the AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) 12-Step programme, and reconstituted his life. The book sometimes feels like a personal history on ‘repeat’: desperate ‘downs’ and depressions, periods of levelling off, reconstruction. Then another period of positivity, plans, activities and the ‘ups’.
Quite a lot of these positive periods seem to have been fuelled by Blur reunions, including in London’s Hyde Park in 2009, headlining Glastonbury Festival also in 2009 and ‘The Magic Whip’ tour in 2015, which promoted their 8th album. They also reunited for a one-off event at Africa Express in London in 2019. Graham Coxon had left Blur during the sessions for the 7th album, ‘Think Tank’ in 2003, but is still one of the four founders of the band. ‘Parklife’ from 1994, with its clutch of catchy sing-along tunes and uneven, but eminently danceable music, remains their most successful album. ‘Girls & Boys’ is a simply great pop song. A total Brit-Pop Earworm!
So, all in all this is rather a sad book. I guess it is such because it is quite intimate and honest. A series of reflections on mental health, fame and addictions. Graham has reached the pinnacles of pop stardom, but much of the book reflects on the times he has also spent in the company of his own, personal ‘Monsters’.
Strange Beauty, Graham Dean (Softback book + DVD, £35, Gonzo Multimedia)
I first came across Graham Dean’s paintings at one of the Bath Art Fairs back in the 1980s. I noticed them because Peter Gabriel was looking at them but then I looked for myself. Last year some early works I have only ever seen in a catalogue were on show in London and it was quite a revelation to see them full size and on the wall. I’d forgotten how big these watercolours are, and how radical Dean’s use of the medium is.
Those early works were often images of weirdly spotted figures, which turned out to be the symptoms of strange diseases. Others were more straightforward portraits, whilst further works caught humans in strange, sometimes awkward, poses: playing cards, leaning out of a window, climbing a ship’s stairs. All evidenced a fascination with pattern and texture, be that of a person’s shirt, or the way skin slips and slides over skeleton and muscle.
My description makes Dean’s work sound bizarre, but it isn’t. Strange Beauty is an apt title, because these paintings are beautiful, mostly because of how they are made rather than the subjects themselves. The stains and edges, tones and transparent layers of watercolour conjure flesh, water, landscapes out of almost nothing. Dean’s work is mostly about figures, but there are also stunning images of animals, forests and birds here – some of the last juxtaposed with, indeed painted over or behind, images of a boat. The human form is observed from different angles and perspectives, compressed and folded, laid down, turned into unexpected shapes. And Dean also paints figures embracing, as well as the distance between people who are about to kiss or embrace.
In the brief, one page, introduction, the artist explains how he ‘wanted to turn watercolour on its head, to re-energise it, to move it forward, away from its rather fey image’. This involved not only making large works but drawing work on assembled sheets of paper which were then disassembled and worked on separately before a painting was again reassembled, sometimes using torn or displaced sheets to disrupt the expected or planned image.
In addition to hundreds of paintings which constitute a ‘selected works’, the full colour book also contains drawings and ‘workbook’ pages, details, and clusters of work with thematic connections and repeated shapes. I have to admit that part of me wishes the work had been given more room to breathe, and spaced out, also that the book contained an index, details such as the size of the paintings, and some critical and contextualising writing. Not to explain but to help the reader place and understand the work. And because this fantastic artist deserves more than this scrapbook approach offers.
I’ve struggled to watch the accompanying DVD, as none of our computer DVD drives or the DVD player attached to the television like the disc. It ground to a halt, judders, froze and got jammed in the mac I am typing this on. Most of the content turns out to online anyway, which is where I watched it.
The DVD begins and ends with some intriguing experimental films that zoom in on painted details, observe the artist at work, and pan out to give it context. The more recent ‘Waterproof’ from 2014, which offers shots of Dean’s practice, then moves to sea and landscape, is remarkably similar in some ways to 1981’s ‘Undercurrents’ which is the final piece. This features an original Peter Gabriel soundtrack, whilst ‘Painting Music’ uses music by David Rhodes, then of the group Random Hold, to ‘merge the music and the images so they became equally dependent on each other, to create an interesting hybrid’. I think it’s the best thing on here, a marvellous, seductive take on Dean’s painting and thought process.
Elsewhere are more mundane documentation of the art, and an unremarkable, if enthusiastic, interview with the painter, as well as the videos for two Peter Gabriel’s songs: ‘Solsbury Hill’ and ‘In Your Eyes’. They are, to be honest, very much of their time, and visually rather lo-fi and unambitious; simply assembled and edited. Again, this DVD feels rather casually pulled together and produced, and whilst I don’t want the bullshit, ego or false marketing claims that can accompany some fine art, I would like something less scrappy and unfocussed. As I said above, this artist and his work deserves better – better editing and selection, better design, production and product.
Rupert Loydell
Details of various versions, including a signed hardback with DVD, and a limited edition deluxe edition boxed set with two original Dean art works in, can be found at https://www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk/
THEN THROUGH NOW, Henry Dagg and Evan Parker (CD, False Walls)
Evan Parker is a maestro of the saxophone, able to sustain long periods of cyclical breathing to facilitate playing, and also able to produce multiphonics out of his instrument, that is more than one note at a time. With a huge discography, he has spent years and years refining his instrumental skills, sometimes solo, but also by improvising in response to other musicians and musics, including Scott Walker’s The Climate of Hunter album and recent David Sylvian work. I should also mention the lovely album Evan Parker with Birds, which does exactly what it says.
I saw him in concert several times at the London Musicians Collective back in the 1970s, when they were housed in a damp, cold British Railway building. Sometimes, he would honk away for an hour or so solo, other times he would interact with other freeform musicians on percussion, or guitar, or wordless vocals. It was an intense experience butone not always persuasively so: some nights I would escape to the pub over the road and wait for my friend to join me there at the end of the session.
Over the years though, I’ve kept listening to Parker, and now enjoy his sonic explorations, the shading, colour and energy of sound(s) he makes, the textural complexities and musical interactions with others, the contrasting moments of noise and quiet or silence. One of the musical directions Parker has explored is the use of live sound processing: his large ensemble, the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble features those using live electronic, sound processing and treatments, as well as a musicians who also have ‘live electronics’ credited to them, along with musicians like Parker playing his saxophones and Barry Guy his double bass.
In a way this is like taking a studio into a live setting, but it is of course also another form of improvisation, of trusting someone else to change, alter and process your music live, back to the musician to then respond to. Or perhaps it is no different to any sort of improvising music other than widening the sonic palette? What’s interesting about THEN THROUGH NOW, however, is how the composer, improvisor, sound sculptor and instrument inventor/builder Henry Dagg engaged in live musical dialogue with Parker, but also put the first half of their performance back into the soundscape for the second half. Then, to add to the complexity, took the tapes away and used the three recordings to make a final mix.
Dagg’s ‘Stage Cage’ is a slightly Heath-Robinson analogue affair, whose components include two tape recorders, sliding tape heads (on a ‘railway’ between the two recorders), varispeed control, delays, frequency shifter, ring modulators and oscillators. He explains and enthuses about this as part of a wonderful conversation between the musicians and performance artist Karen Christopher, who is not only interested in the music but creative processes and their relationship to collaboration, which she is engaged in researching and writing about, as well as using as part of her practice. It’s an engaging and illuminating document, well illustrated with photos, that allows Christopher to tease out some details and ideas that shorter, less engaged blurbs or sleeve notes would not facilitate.
The CD contains one 56 minute track, although surprisingly it is divided on the back cover into 14 different sections with individual names, along with start times. Sounds tick and echo, circle and twitter as the work starts, whilst later on the lyrical ‘Small Talk’ turns into the slightly bolder playing of ‘Condolences’. Further sections engage with call and response, disintegrating and looped sound, percussive bleeps and bloops, whistling electronics and feedback (reminiscent of early computer sound works), the ebb and flow of Parker’s sustained burbling, before the journey of sound ends with the duo ‘Surfing the Waveforms’.
It’s an exhilarating soundscape, showcasing not only the wide range of Parker’s musical abilities, but also the quiet and focussed attention to sound and detail that Dagg brought to both the initial live proceedings and the studio work which followed. Constructing music in the studio is, of course, standard procedure these days, but this CD retains its sense of edgy improvisation, urgent and immediate musical responses, whilst also evidencing the trust and restraint both players utilise as they listen to each other and themselves. Parker talks about their relationship being non-hierarchical.
Hand on heart I can’t say this CD is all that different to many other Evan Parker releases, but it is one of the best sounding and contextualised, and stands as a remarkable report back from the world of new and improvised music, beautifully recorded, designed and packaged. False Walls are to be congratulated on pursuing an individual and eclectic agenda with their growing catalogue of intriguing releases.
Rupert Loydell
Evan Parker sax solo @ Talos Festival 2017
Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, June 2022
Cruel mystic
Face emerges
A montage of peeling posters
Scratched and torn
And, on the terrace slow-dancing couples fuse and mutate
To Strangers in The Night
Anything…
Out, empty road
Faded millennia slipping away through time, as
The conscious mind becomes separated
From this flesh,
Distanced from my flaking skull
From
The edge
Distant, pale sphere echoing beyond
Subtopia (anything), anytime – anywhere
Now black bird alights on broken pillar
So slender, so upright
Croaking slogans
Harsh, the distant music…
© A.C. Evans
Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column that Damien Hurst once tried to saw in half
READER: Hello! I’m sending this on my phone from THE ROYAL QUEUE.
MYSELF: I hope the weather holds out. Coincidentally, I’m just listening to The Queue live on the radio. They’re holding a fascinating phone-in discussion about queues, tea and toilets. It’s ironic don’t you think that such an English obsession should be represented by such a French word?
READER: French? Queue? Don’t be ridiculous!
MYSELF: C’est vrais! It means tail.
READER: Well I never. How typical of the French to appropriate such an expressive word and stick it on the back of a dog.
MYSELF: I just heard a precocious American child say she had been in line since 3am and was very excited to be able to see the queen. I think the yanks would mummify her if they could – Colonel Tom Parker where art thou?
READER: Didn’t he invent the fountain pen?
MYSELF: No, he didn’t,
READER: Oh. Anyway I’m shocked that you could be so tickled by the death of our sovereign queen.
MYSELF: Listen, I was a huge fan of a series called Police Squad which was possibly the funniest thing ever made for TV. Nothing however compares to what I am listening to now. Many people are comparing the coffin queue to The Chronicles of Narnia, or The Lion The Queen and the Wardrobe. Only the British could be capable of stringing out this sort of thing like a French lunch. I mean, where are the entrepreneurial pizza and hot dog salesmen? The Buskers? Even pickpockets are closed for the day.
READER: And not a pop-up commemorative gift shop in sight.
MYSELF: Exactly. Queen-in-a-Box. How long do we have to wait for such a souvenir?
THE BIG FIGHT
According to British heavyweight brawler Typhoon Anger, Puerto Rican contender Garcia “Gonzo” Gondola has “no chance” of victory when the pair meet in next month’s world championship qualifying bout. “He doesn’t dress like a boxer, he doesn’t smell like a boxer, he doesn’t even have a proper boxer’s tattoo,” he told reporters at his weigh-in, “Gonzo is a disgrace to the profession. Who wears tartan socks with polka dot shorts?”.
Gondola’s trainer Sammy Macaroon retorted: “The so-called Typhoon is just a big mouth on a stick. He’s finished. My boy is like a bowl of angry puttanesca with teeth. His footwork alone is worth the ticket price. When the audience sees his new shorts they will go wild. It’s all over for Anger.”
“The Gonzo doesn’t stand a chance,” butted in Ron Maserati, Typhoon’s manager, “His fists are like two baby rabbits in a fur hat. In cheese terms, Typhoon’s uppercut is like an eye-watering, extra-mature gorgonzola whereas Gondola’s is more like a mild crumbly Wensleydale. His uppercut is about as terrifying as a meek Dutch gouda or a triangle of Smiling Cow.
Passing an exploding Cuban cigar to Gondola’s trainer, he continued, “The Gonzo is kaput. His career is as good as over. Typhoon is so fit he will knock the Puerto Rican out in round one. He’s lethal. He’s been in the gym all week training with Danny O’Moron, who made him spar with a horse. His right hook is like a steam-powered sack of adjustable spanners. In musical terms he’s like a concert grand piano with the lid up, surrounded by bass trombones”.
WHO KNEW?
Astonishing tales from around the world of items
A journalist who was arrested for making up a story in order to fill up a gap in his newspaper, claimed in court that he was kidnapped by Somali pirates on boating lake during a day trip to Brighton, who forced him at gunpoint to write the pirate-friendly piece. They tied him up, stole his credit card, and later went on a spending spree where they bought 46 pairs of corduroy trousers, half a dozen parrots and some pine -scented shaving soap.
The following is a paid-for advertisement, and not an article about The Conservative Party:
IS YOUR MATTRESS FAILING?
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Don’t let Preventable Mattress Failure scar your future, act now.
collegeofbedroomfurniture.com/mattressfuton&hammockfaculty/enrol
AUSTERITY SPECIAL
For one week only, The Attila the Hun Grill in Cockmarlin is offering a limited edition breakfast to celebrate the cost of living crisis and the birth of a new era of austerity. The Full Conservative consists of Freeport eggs, all-day brexit bacon, white privilege pudding, bat’s blood, monkey glands and half a grilled tomato. Ersatz tea or coffee and non-sustainable gluten-based toast with an individual portion of I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Last Tango In Paris butter-flavoured trans-fat spread is included in the price, which must be negotiated with the chef after he has consulted that morning’s Forex Flow Indicator to determine the current strength of sterling.
GUANOGIFTS SPECIAL OFFER – WHEN IT’S GONE IT’S GONE
Ken Hom’s Chinese Horoscope ‘n Noodle Set (Was £160.00, now £15.99).
2022 being the Chinese year of the King Charles Spaniel, could this be the perfect gift for the missus? Here is Ken Hom’s prediction: “Coming year will be kind to goats, giraffes and all zoo creatures except snakes, and filled with life achievements. April and May should be spent indoors in case of lunar-year leap-frog mishap with trousers. August rhymes with nothing, so good luck for farmers and travelling salesmen. Beware of monkeys.”
Wise words from Ken as always. And whilst you’re browsing, why not think ahead and purchase some of our world-famous Christmas crackers at £29.99 per box of six? Not only do they challenge the empirical juxtaposition of objective methods of aesthetically rendered mindscapes, filtered through the silky gauze of hypothetical procrastination, but they also contain a paper hat, a top-quality novelty item and a rib-tickling riddle like this one:
Question:
What does Jeffery Archer write his novels on?
Answer:
A tripewriter!
Sausage Life!
Colin Gibson • Emmet Ives • Anita Makris
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is something I doubt
I could capture. The kind of guy
who makes iconography
of long coat and Alain Delon hat
is the kind of guy who’s lean, hard,
limbs angular, the life he’s lived
etched on his face like the closest
of shaves. Me, I’m rocking the short arse
with beer gut and hangover look
and if anyone’s filled art galleries
with that, it isn’t Vettriano.
Nor can I see it going over well,
asking my better half to drape herself
over me or a card table or the bar
in the kind of wispy cocktail dress
that enfolds the embonpoint
and leaves it at that.
Nah, I’d be the guy dancing on the beach
as the soft-focus Hollywood rain
escalates to monsoon, the two
bums rounded up at the pier
dropping the umbrellas and legging it,
the car sinking to the hub caps
in the sand, windows open,
tonneau cover leaking.
Neil Fulwood
Neil Fulwood has published three collections with Shoestring Press, ‘No Avoiding It’, ‘Can’t Take Me Anywhere’ and ‘Service Cancelled’. A collection of political satires, ‘Mad Parade’ was published earlier this year by Smokestack Books. Neil lives and works in Nottingham.
Friends, comrades and co-conspirators, welcome to the 2022 Anarchist Bookfair in London. Once again, as part of Antiuniversity.
The Bookfair is happening on Saturday, 17th of September.
It will be a day packed with Anarchist literature, books, zines, discussions, workshops, culture, mischief and shenanigans.
The Bookfair itself will happen at Bishopsgate Institute. This is located opposite the main entrance of Liverpool Street Train Station. Stalls will be scattered between the Main Hall, The Courtyard, The Gross Room and The Studio. There will also be a limited display of the leather archives in the library.
Series of discussions will be taking place in Toynbee Hall and Whitechapel Gallery, both are approximately 10 minutes walk away.
There will be a Zine Fest in Angel Alley outside Freedom Bookshop, as well as poetry reading in the evening.
There is also going to be a small crèche located in Decentre, above Freedom Bookshop, with a programme of kids activities. please get in touch ASAP if you plan to come with kids.
Dissident Island Radio crew will provide a coverage of the Bookfair, so tune in if you can’t come in person.
There will of course be various parties and after parties, on the evening and throughout the night around the city.
And just to sweeten the deal, unrelated to everything, Decolonise Fest is happening on the weekend, so check them out while you’re in town.
Please see our accessibility assessment if you have any accessibility concerns.
Please come wearing black to show due respect to the passing of her majesty Queen Elizabeth the second 😉
The Bookfair is free and open to everyone. All are welcome!
Full details at https://anarchistbookfair.london/
John Tarsul is watching a dog grinding on a joint, on a big lamb-bone. To be precise: he’s actually watching a pregnant Welsh Border Collie. Her abdomen is bulbous, and her teats pert like some kind of punctuation waiting for a sentence. And this is where John gets his idea – for he is fascinated by the sound of the bitch’s teeth scratching, and he is mesmerised by the scratches the bitch’s teeth are making in the bone. The bitch’s teeth, which are a kind of bone, are removing minuscule amounts of bone to leave a space in the bone ––––––– a space shaped as scratch. A ravenous recording. John had also noticed the succulent ripping of meat off the bone, at the beginning of the process.
John Tarsul hurries home. He is suddenly very impatient to begin his work, and he is feeling enormously hungry.
John sits down at his work-bench in his huge experimental labio. He is surrounded by an array of tools, equipment & containers. There are small oily saws, through to sparkling scalpels; an ornate and rather old-fashioned-looking microscope, alongside state of the art laser-sculptors & a neutrino microscope; there are numerous ancient earthenware jars, that once uncorked give off all kinds of organic, mineral, & synthetic scents … some of them pungent and eye-watering; and there are diamond test-tubes, flasks, retorts, & alembics, all laser-lathed, as well as being magno-liver-balanced, and thus able to withstand the heat & forces of nuclear fusion. One wall of the labio is devoted to various robotic arms, jigs, & vices. There are shelves of books & discs. And in one corner of the labio a Bitten Apple Knot-Pad on an old fashioned writers’ bureau made from burnished aluminium inlayed with finest synthetic mahogany. Above this desk – framed within a delicate basket-work of bleached sparrow bones – is written the expression: This Place of Her Labour is The Hearth of A Reverberatory Furnace.
John has just extracted his left upper canine. He will now begin to work for a whole month on this tooth. From this one tooth he will fashion all the tiny tools needed to execute his art. The largest tool will be a sliver of dentine, reinforced with scalded gold-carbon. The tiniest tool will have to be viewed through the neutrino microscope, and will be a macro-molecule of diamond-dentine laser-lathed into a ‘fairy-sword’.
The Fairy-Sword Moonth has passed, and so John Tarsul is now prepared. He is ready to begin The Work. By his side, asleep on the floor, is a bitch Springer Spaniel. He has chosen this creature – or perhaps she has chosen him – as a kind of familiar. In a sense, this bitch, he has named Sagdid, is the closest John will get to A Sister of The Work. He will listen to her sniffs . . . . . . . . . . . . . and he will count them.
All John’s tools are finished. He has meditated alone for weeks, drinking in the evenings only distilled water, and in the mornings only his own urine, sometimes flavoured with honey & hawthorn-tar. He has eaten only raw vegetables & giant puffball fried in his own fat, extracted from his now virtually none-existent left buttock. John has also perfected The External Soul-Box, as he calls it. This is a computer program attached to an energy-freezer capable of storing human awareness. And there is also a robo-gut with a high-speed feeling-cable connecting it to the The External Soul Box.
John Tarsul begins with his feet. He amputates them, and then meticulously dissects them until all the parts – the bones, the ligaments, the tendons, the individual muscles persevered in helium-aniseed, the skin dried by decelerated light – until all these bits of his feet are laid out and ready for him to write upon. John will write with the various nibs & fairy-swords so carefully made from his canine tooth.
♌︎
Now read the work written on (and into) John Tarsul’s feet (inscribed 440,080,945 times, with many variations of spelling & grammar, various fonts & point-sizes):
Its Chy Feet
Maggie walked the skin-road. Each podge of touch, each compression of sole-sheath to foot-bones beamed up her leg-bones to her womb. The surface of the road began to bruise as she moved over it with her journey under her arm. And then the road began to show signs of serious tear & wear – the inter-gender highway (carefully maintained by The Authorities) was now ripped and bleeding. But Maggie did not stop. With every footstep she made, the journey under her arm became heavier & bigger … until she had to sling the whole voyage on her back. She became heavier & heavier with making way … and the skin-road soon became a gaping wound with blood dripping over the verges into the fields at the road’s sides, and then across the meaty land … and then … beyond to the bony towns & cities.
It was not long before The Authorities decided something had to be done. They had to impede Maggie’s footsteps, and also repair the damage she’d done to their ( and everyone else’s (?) ) inter-gender highway. Suddenly Maggie found herself surrounded by swarming silver capsules hovering: highway maintenance bots. They were pumping out wodges of silver-wool, and tamping them into the red squelchy road surface. This made Maggie angry, so angry she sprouted a wiry black beard from her chin that grew down to entangle with the hairs between her legs. She began pulling up the silvery-red wool-wodges, and then began kicking them into the fields & meaty land around. They glistened in the pastures like lumps of silvery-red android-dream. ( And gynoid-dream too, if you are so inclined to see that way ! )
The Authorities responded with a new weather they had kept secret. Suddenly Maggie’s feet were horribly sore, as a gravelly kind of rain began pummelling her soles. The ground was raining hardcore – chips of mountain spurting up to meet each of Maggie’s footfalls. Some of the silver maintenance capsules were cracking open, and being swept away by all the blood & granite chips. The Authorities were making a hell of a mess, with real ugly smells … smells of ugly real. But at whatever cost they were compelled to stop Maggie’s footfalls. The bleeding would have to get a lot worse before it got better.
Maggie was furious. She rubbed mugwort & a paste made from a pregnant bitch into her soles & toes. Then she stamped and stamped her feet, making each podge-vibration stronger, making the beam to her womb up her bones thicker and thicker.
And so it is that human roads & transport networks are so fraught & bone-locked, and so clogged with worn out feet … feet that have fallen off the millions of refugees fleeing the battle.
Maggie with her vast fattening odyssey on her back, to this day is still kicking and kicking at the the silver-wool maintenance that follows her. She sets each of her painful footfalls so carefully … travelling and tra vailing on and on … Her toes so raw, her soles black and blistered and stinking of a sweet & salty rot …
♌︎
It is weeks later. John Tarsul now begins engraving the complex parts of his amputated ankles. Give him some time. Wait.
Now read the work decorating the intricacies of John Tarsul’s ankles ( inscribed 11,201,793,047,771 times, in various forms ( for the most linguistically gymnastic version you will need to set the neutrino microscope to ×20,000,000 )):
Peek-aboo Ankle
All the men f
eel the watching ankle, fee
l the delicate lady-bit just pee
ping at them
from just beneath the he
m.
So, in the playground the men
kick each other’s ankles
and hop about in agony. Hop about in
a
go
ny.
A long time ago, at night in bed,
watched by the deli
cate ankle-gazes of ladies,
apparently the men rubbed themselves
most vig
or
ously with in
flat
able
sp
rained ankles.
♌︎
Now read the work on John Tarsul’s amputated shins ( inscribed countless times, in every literary form ever known ). No point in using the neutrino microscope – Tarsul has taken miniaturisation to its brutal limit. You cannot see it. You will simply have to imagine it all yourself.
Two Classical Co Lumns
Arch Stanton had lost both his shins. He sat in a wheelchair next to the open window, the curtains billowed and sunlight slanted past him. Molly had not seen him in weeks, and when she last saw him, before whatever accident had befallen him, he’d been standing at this same window. Molly was very concerned. As she spoke to him, with his back to her, he just gazed out at the mountains. ‘What have you done, Arch? Why do you do this?’ Arch does not answer, but she can see him stiffen on hearing her voice. She tries again: ‘Please! Just speak. What happened?’
Suddenly there is a very dry loud crack – like a twig trod on in deep woods – and then Molly is about a foot shorter … and she is sobbing in agony. Both her shins have just snapped under her weight.
Arch begins to speak (whilst still staring at the mountains): ‘Out there somewhere, Molly, amongst those big purple bastards out there, somewhere amongst the scree … there are all the lost splinters of my shin bones. Out there, Molly! We could both crawl up there, right now, and then we could spend the rest of our lives dragging our selves around those mountains … looking … for the splinters of my shin bones. You though, you can see your shins, neatly snapped and still attached to your feet, safe & sound on the floorboards just there, and right now … safe & found … safe & found in a house … still at home. My shins, though … I watched them being stripped clean of meat … by the wolves. And then after that came the lammergeier – it gripped my poor shin bones in each of its talons and then, from great height, dropped them onto the granite to shatter them. My shin bones, now shards, and way off and way up there … outside amongst those cruel purple bastards. Gone I’d say, fucking gone!’
‘Ladies & Gentlemen, this next cabinet contains the broken shins of The King.’ Two highly polished shin bones, both snapped about half away along, seem to glow on the black velvet in the display cabinet. ‘When The King’s time was up nine priestesses would pin him down, rip off his buskins, then they would snap off the bottoms of his legs. For his honour & eternal life he then had to walk a mile from the palace – where he was born – to the burial ground. He was then buried under a pile of previous Kings’ shin bones, the fresh pieces of his shins newly polished placed on the top of the pile. The priestesses would shake the pile … and in listening to the rattling of the bones predict which male would next be born in the palace.’
Molly dragged herself out of Arch’s house. She must get to the museum … old Smith the curator had hinted at something to do with shin bones when she was a little girl. For some reason this vague memory now ached furiously in the bottom of her legs (which were no longer attached to her). She hadn’t realised that you could feel (or indeed feed) a memory somewhere else other than in your head. Yes – at all costs – she must drag herself to the museum. It all makes perfect sense now, she thought. Yes! … at the museum I will be able to sleep in a glass cabinet … and never walk on earth again.
Algarot Castelli concentrates on the penalty ahead of him. The tension is immense, so much rests on this kick. The goal is a door, and the soccer ball a moon , Algarot thinks, and he is shocked by suddenly having thought that. And Franz Habra’s eyes press into his brain – the world’s greatest goalkeeper is renowned for his gaze … a gaze like a well-trained dog’s as it stares at a lump of raw steak … waiting for its master’s command. And the crowd is silent like an avalanche hanging still. But Algarot must not fail his nation. He is running towards the ball … suddenly the museum is in his memory – the woman in the glass cabinet, beautiful, but with no lower legs. She is so … so … so still. And also, next to her, is the cabinet with the moon-white glowing shin bones … both … broken. The crowd, even fans of the opposition, are utterly appalled by what happens next …
♌︎
John Tarsul will amputate and dissect all his parts and write on them. As he begins to write all over his stomach & intestines he will plug himself into the robo-gut to maintain his sustenance. When it is time for his lungs to be dried papery he will oxygenate his blood using a super-ozone fern. And then when it is time for his heart to be transformed to art, he will connect the fern’s tiniest fronds to the capillaries in his brain, and then pump his remaining blood round his brain with a polythene frog-propeller. When he has no arms he will utilise robotics controlled by his thoughts to write on the remaining parts of his body. When he gets to his brain, he will then transfer his consciousness to The External Soul Box from where he can write on his brain’s bits whilst maintaining existence elsewhere. He will finally lay out on a conveyor belt his entire preserved and written-on (and written-through) body – all the bits neatly arranged. A rare work of fine art. The conveyor belt will then transport all his parts into the robo-gut. He will witness this via cameras connected to The External Soul Box. And at the other end of the robo-gut, from a circular door with puckered rubbery edges, there will emerge a dark cloud of sloppy rubble. Eventually a large heap of John Tarsul’s faeces will be produced by the robo-gut. A heap of his own faeces made from his self having digested his own body. Throughout this entire process John’s familiar – his loyal Sister of The Work, the bitch Sagdid – will sit obediently still and absolutely silently … despite the intoxicating faecal effluvia that will assail her olfactory system.
Here is the last thing John Tarsul will do before he switches off: he will erase the entire contents of The External Soul Box. And thus, all that will be left of John Tarsul is this pile of excrement.
If anyone finds this huge stool and then doesn’t simply tidy it up, if instead they analyse this biological waste … they will discover it contains substantial particles of gold, exceeding well beyond the level of traces normally found in the human body. And if they are clever enough they will also be able to deduce that it would take 1001 human beings working for 101 years to accomplish what John Tarsul had managed to do – all alone – in just one year & one day. John Tarsul – solely from the Alone Ness of his corporeal body – produced exactly 1g of solid gold. But no one will do this analysis. John Tarsul’s shit will be discovered, but very quickly it will be simply, and with little fuss, cleaned up. And it will be as if John Tarsul, his gold, and what he wrote through his bodily self had never ever existed. (And also, no one will ever know the original name of the bitch Spaniel … although she will live out the rest of her life happily … loved by a farmer & his family.)
The only piece of art by John Tarsul that will remain for us in the future to read, is the following haiku:
each leaf now falling
from that last oak on Grass Hill
goes its way alone
Mark Goodwin
Art Rupert Loydell
August 2019
Youth in upheaval—Nixon,
Vietnam, the assassinations,
our country stripped of its veneer
of stability and, worse, its honor.
In the face of it, our flawed,
fast-burning prophets sending
their single message: Don’t die!
And what dangerous truthtelling—
Havens inventing his “Freedom”
like an escaped slave on the run,
the Who spitting out “We’re not gonna
take it,” saying it, as it
turned out, for us all, and
most shockingly Hendrix’s epic
take-down of our blood-soaked flag.
It was all in place for that convergence
that could have turned demonic
but came out angelic instead.
That psychedelic apostle clown
Wavy Gravy in his white coveralls
and impossible hat dared to call
it from the stage, “Heaven,” and he
wasn’t wrong. The darkness had grown
deep enough for the light to burst
through, and for an illuminated moment
we all stood in it together.
It wouldn’t last, we, its imperfect
vessel, couldn’t hold it, maybe no one
could but a few weird saints.
But just for it to have shone
however briefly through a whole
generation was something new,
it was big, a miracle even,
the miracle that dispelled
the hunger and fear and broke
the darkness into loaves and fishes
enough to feed half a million.
Happened before, it could
happen again. That weekend
the eternal slipped the bonds of Eastern
Standard Time, a victory of
peacefulness over violence,
plenty over scarcity,
sharing over selfishness.
Though it couldn’t last,
though we couldn’t keep it,
we weren’t wrong to want it.
Those who still want it aren’t wrong.
—Thomas R. Smith
Between us a shadowy blue
Cast of veins and crimson whites
Whose beauty stands
After digging out.
Then the fresh smell
Of glistening water rushing forth,
That merges with the divine light.
The whiteness of moss flowers
That sponges out
The malice of earth soaked passion
And flashes inwards.
The houses wasp with creamy strokes of
Lavender hue,
The beauty that evening promises –
That eyes forth with patience and grit.
The midnight hour
Sprinkled with the mahogany leaves.
A red ribboned hat
Stuck in the afternoon slumps,
Over there the moon bears
Its maiden white halo.
A carcass of smiles
Made the lips a little more of moist.
By the dark alley,
We swooned through
Among lights and hunches of dark mansions
That pass in the flux.
The magic aroma blinded through
A fluttering birds, the feathers
Warm with flux of colours
Trailed towards
The blue green oblivion.
Greatness squares us after
Toppling upside down,
Born amongst the ruins
Birds fly hard
For the Almighty blesses it
With mighty wings of inspiration.
I profess,
Creative spark is an
Achilles’ shield,
A burning paradox
Smudged with bliss and
The mount of the skyline.
With every claps
The petals unfold a little bit more
Then spook in the eternal solace.
SAYANI MUKHERJEE
Art: Claire Palmer
.
Hugh and Steven are on their monthly city break. A hobby they took up when their relationship cooled, two and a half months after their civil ceremony. A special day that they initiated when their one year love affair came to an end, with a view to ‘taking it to the next level’, as Steven described it. Hugh had had enough of the polyamorous playground of London’s ‘scene’, and considered making a commitment to Steven a better choice than becoming yet another ‘withered, lonely homosexual in late middle age.’ It’s not that he didn’t love Steven, it was just, well, he didn’t like him very much. He still lusted after him and hotel rooms offered an opportunity for greater freedom of expression in their sex. Hugh put it down to the neutral territory. Steven told him hotel rooms turned him on.
They found themselves having lunch in a ‘showy’ restaurant in the centre of Prague. A huge ‘art nouveau’ dining room. A high ceiling, wall length windows with expansive, heavy, red velvet curtains. Waiting staff in black and white busying around dark wooden furniture. A grand piano with the lid open sat waiting for an absent pianist.
The menu, written in English, was presented by an English speaking waiter. Hugh pretended not to notice Steven ‘checking him out’. They had a brief discussion about their preferred choice of lunch. Hugh went for a Czech dish comprised of meat in sauce with dumplings while Steve chose omelette and chips, which annoyed Hugh no end. ‘What was the point of coming all this way and eating the same food as they ate at home?’ Steven shook off the criticism with a shrug of his shoulders. Hugh asked for a glass of sparkling mineral water, raising an eyebrow when Steven ordered a large glass of white wine. Hugh didn’t understand how Steven expected to enjoy the afternoon’s museum tour if he was half cut. Steven told him he hadn’t come for the sightseeing. The accompanying wink made Hugh wince. It turned out he’d married a sex tourist.
The waiter came back with the drinks, putting them down the wrong way round and left again before Hugh had a chance to say anything. Begrudgingly, Hugh corrected the mistake. Steve was too busy watching the waiter walk away to notice and reached out for his glass just as Hugh put it in front of him. Lifting the glass to take a large gulp of wine, smacking his lips, he remarked that it ‘wasn’t that bad, considering’. Hugh asked after the factors to consider, ‘well, you know’, Steven replied. ‘Anyway, what’s going on in the office this week?’ He asked, before swigging another mouthful. Hugh said he’d rather not talk about it, and the usual conversation around not wanting to spoil the atmosphere with office talk took place, which, as always, ended with Steven being insistent and Hugh conceding.
‘We’re discussing’, Hugh began, ‘the ethics around putting amphetamines in the public water supply in a bid to tackle the environmental crisis.’ Steven nearly choked on his wine. When he’d composed himself, through a smirk he remarked that Hugh ‘could not be serious.’ Hugh assured him he was and he regaled facts and figures he had been given to study, that outlined the amount of food/energy/money, that could be saved if the appetite of the population were to be supressed. He told Steven that the need for food could be reduced by one hundred and twenty million kilograms a day, if everyone in Britain had one day a week ‘off food’. This would also reduce the amount of raw sewage needing to be processed, by approximately six million kilograms a day. Hugh assured Steven, with these sort of figures at stake, while farmers struggle to meet the country’s food needs whilst also taking in to account the water companies difficulties in being able to process human waste profitably within the existing infrastructure, the proposal was indeed being taken very seriously.
Steven laughed out loud, making Hugh look around nervously. He asked Steven what he found so funny. Steven said it was the fact that Hugh could sit there and in all earnestness suggest that dosing the population with speed could be considered a viable solution to saving the planet. Hugh remarked that it might sound funny to him, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Besides, the figures added up.
The money the super markets lost on food sales, Hugh explained, could be offset against the profits the pharmaceutical industry make on ‘the supplement’. The projected increase in productivity and the stimulated motivation of a depressed work force were a clear incentive. It could signal an end to the ‘not wanting to do low paid work’ attitude, the country’s poor had slipped in to. A predicted rise in spending on taxable consumables, nicotine and alcohol for example, not to mention all the fuel people will need to enable them move around, were an added incentive. A decrease in general life expectancy was another positive, as was an increase in spending on dental treatment. As far as Hugh’s department were concerned it was a ‘win-win’. Quite simply the only negative, was ethics.
Steven was now crying with laughter. Wiping his eyes with his napkin. Hugh knew he was about to come out with some stupid remark. Steven composed himself, wiped his mouth, apologised and, whilst holding back his laughter, managed to blurt out that he had thought of the ideal slogan to win the public round. Hugh readied himself. ‘Do your bit, do one less shit’. Steven roared with laughter again. Hugh took a deep breath, and exhaled loudly, lifting his glass to take a sip of mineral water. He felt the bubbles bursting on his top lip, enjoying the fizzing sensation. He was not going to engage in Steven’s school boy japes. Saving the planet whilst remaining in profit was no laughing matter and if that meant amphetamines for all, well, so be it. In fact, to Hugh, it seemed the only sensible thing to do.
Ben Greenland
.
One of the princely dregs
lies in waiting, (lying in state),
to become a despised King.
Wait in line leech like.
Bide the time in ceremony,
to fill an empty space.
With a ‘Prime Monster’ elected by a
tiny rump of Tory vermin. Feeling
nothing for the foodbank poor.
Lies! The currency of Capital – too
absorbed to see small nations
clawing free of the Butcher’s Apron.
Weather vane warning –
storms to come;
through workplace and community.
Let lightning strike
and thunder roar –
Des Mannay
About me – “Focused on hard-hitting social issues… poems which made a statement”’ (Sabotage Reviews). “One can almost hear the words thumping aloud on the page. One can only imagine the rapturous response of an audience listening” (Menna Elfyn) Des Mannay is a Welsh disabled writer of colour. His first poetry collection, “Sod ’em – and tomorrow” is published by Waterloo Press. He is co-editor of The Angry Manifesto poetry journal, a judge in the Vailiant Scribe poetry competition (USA), and the winner of the ‘rethinkyourmind’ poetry competition (2015), and LIT-UP poetry competition (2018). Placed 2nd and highly commended in the Disability Arts Cymru poetry Competition (2015). ‘Gold Award’ winner in the Creative Futures Literary Awards (2015), Madder Than We Look poetry competition (2016), shortlisted for the erbacce-prize for poetry (2015, and 2016 and 2019), Welsh Poetry Competition (2015), The John Tripp and Idris Davies poetry competition; part of Rhymney Valley Literature and Arts Festival 2016, and the Disability Arts Cymru poetry Competition (2016)
Des has performed at numerous venues, including the ‘Unity’ Festival, ‘Maindee’ Festival, ‘Hub’ Festival, ‘Stoke Newington Literature Festival’, KAYA Festival of World Music & Arts, Merthyr Rising, The Seed Festival, Walls:Muriau – Welsh mental health arts festival, Green Gathering, Leeds Poetry Festival,Tranas at the fringe, Sweden, Abergavenny Writing Festival, and Gwen Gwen Festival. He has poems published in ‘I Am Not A Silent Poet’ online journal, ‘The Angry Manifesto’, ‘Proletarian Poetry’, ‘Yellow Chair Review’, ‘Indiana Voice Journal’, ‘Stand Up And Spit’, ‘Red Poets’, ‘The Scum Gentry’ ‘The Round Up’, ‘Poetry24’, ‘Winning Writers’, ‘International Times’, ‘Erbacce Journal’, ‘Pendemic’, ‘Valiant Scribe’, ‘Dwelling During the pandemic. An Ohio Poetry Project 2021, and work in 36 poetry anthologies. Des is on facebook as “The stuff wot I wrote’ Des Mannay – hooligan Poet” and Twitter as @hooliganpoet
We talked about love
But, often what hurts
Is that
I had you
In my heart
The whole time
And you never noticed.
I didn’t believe in love at first sight
Until
Your eyes,
Your heart,
Your existence,
Enlightened my heart & soul.
I admire so many things about you
But your heart is the reason
I still fall for it
Every single day.
I have your name
Tattooed in my heart
I kept some of that ink
To paint my mind
The tree of your love
It keeps growing in heart & mind.
I found love in your presence
Living,
Existing,
Being.
Is a miracle
I want to cherish
For the rest of my life.
The Moon and the stars
For all nights I spent
Telling them all my secrets
My desires,
My purpose,
My truth.
But mostly about the love
I have for you.
Monalisa Parida
Picture Nick Victor
Bio:- Monalisa Parida is a post graduate student of English literature from India, Odisha and a prolific poetess. She is very active in social media platforms and her poems have also been translated into different languages and publish in various e-journals.
She has got 80 international awards for writing poetry. Her poems have been publishing international e-journals “New York parrot”, “The Writers Club” (USA), “Suriyadoya literary foundation”, “kabita Minar”, “Indian Periodical” (India) and “Offline Thinker “, “The Gorkha Times “ ( Nepal), “The Light House”(Portugal), “Bharatvision”(Romania), “International cultural forum for humanity and creativity”(Aleppo, Syria), “Atunispoetry.com”(Singapore) etc. And also published in various newspapers like “The Punjabi Writer Weekly(USA)”, “News Kashmir (J&K, India)”, Republic of Sungurlu (Turkey)” etc.
One of her poem published an American anthology named “The Literary Parrot Series-1 and series-2 respectively (New York, USA)”. Her poems have been translated in various languages like Hindi, Bengali, Turkish, Persian, Romanian etc. And she is the author of the book “Search For Serenity”, “My Favourite Grammar”, “Paradigm”.
The Stingray’s wheels sped along the highway
as fast as eight cylinders
of Chevrolet engine could carry them.
Cruising transfixed, Malcolm saw the sunset
ignite, subside and flare up again;
approaching, receding, deceiving.
It conjured memories of the Alhambra,
that sparkling white wedding they’d seen
emerging from the Iglesia de Maria Elena
into the embers of a chill February afternoon.
At least Monica had got to ride in a white car.
Striding into the Yellow Rose Saloon,
the first bar they’d hit in downtown Amarillo,
he ordered a highball for himself
and an ‘under the volcano’ for Monica.
They clinked glasses and eyed each other.
Protagonists in different books,
they wondered how many pages there were left to turn
in this serendipitous chapter of collision,
before they lost that loving feeling.
Julian Isaacs
They each fill the intimate
fluidity with current movement:
fitting into physical spaces
a luminous balm to glide &
echo beyond celestial clear a
reputation for modularity.
The predilection for
instrumentation & ability
to write complex pieces
without getting to the point
where it takes you makes them.
The next time it feels like
a “simple,” it can mean
something entirely different
& a little disorienting but
all of this is possible when
you are a beginner who can
take on the challenges of running
with your hand and making
things more intuitive.
Andrew Taylor
.
There is a lot of emphasis
on technical accomplishment
but this is what comes of
empire building. Is there a
pecking order when we are
talking about rural crime?
“The code is cracking,” he
said. Weather is happening
all the time and suddenly
the possibilities seem endless.
All the men in this scene are
wearing suits and hats. One is
lighting a pipe. Smoke is rising
from an ash tray. “Things in my
life are getting louder,” she said.
What strikes you is the queue but
this is where ornithology began
and here are the finished artworks.
.
Steve Spence
.
………….
………….
From poems and quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792 – 1822
.
Alan Dearling shares the live event
Tim Lane is the charismatic frontman of The Pink Diamond Revue.
Very much in the mould of mutant, Showroom Dummies ‘at the Discotheque’. Indeed they are fronted by a mannequin. Insistent beats, repetition. Curious drumbeats, psych-syncopations’ that mesmerise, slow lobotomies, cauterizing with a 1950s’ undertow of rock ‘n’ roll guitar riffs. It’s a strange mix of Talking Heads, David Byrne, Mick Green guitar, with an angular, Bowie androgynous imagery. ‘Tis a great live show, mixing some superb film imagery projections. As it says in their promo: ”An audio-visual cinematic masterpiece more than just a live band, The Pink Diamond Revue symbolise the spirit of the Vapour Trail with their sexy electro-psychedelia. Fronted by a genuine mannequin. Surreal samples, stuttering guitars and renegade rhythms before hypnotic visuals all collaborate to create a world where Kraftwerk meet sex and you find love.”
The Pink Diamond Revue arrived on my West Yorkshire doorstep with a loud kerr-thump. Talking to Tim Lane, gold-suited, eye-liner and make-up intact, but alien, distant, gum chewing, before and after the gig. It was obvious that Tim inhabits his ‘art’ and ‘persona’ full-time. He’s an art form. He reminded me of a taller version of Wilko Johnson from the Feelgoods. Weird sounds from the proverbial, Jim Morrison Gold Mine. A twanging Duane Eddy, he’s a real living, legendary Stardust Punk, on tour from London, accompanied by his colleague, drummer, Rob Courtman Stock. Here are some sounds and images that engender some of the Spirits of Pink Diamonds.
‘Go Go Girl’: https://youtu.be/VFazCv6GeIc
Live Pink Diamond Revue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhm1KKiOFtE
New single, ‘Fuzz Guitar’: https://youtu.be/YOzCRCLKclU
Tim Lane gave me the 12” 4 x track ep from ‘The Pink Diamond Revue’ circa 2016. It encapsulates the hi-end, Radio Broadcast quality of the band. “Death seems like a friend” is intoned during ‘Miss Lonely Hearts’…and various psyched-up iterations of “We’re not a Rock ‘n’ Roll Band.” They Are! Good stuff but perhaps not as powerful as the newer tracks… As a Total Experience, The Pink Diamond Revue are cutting edge diamond indeed!
MAX EMRG – slipped onto the stage before The Pink Diamond Revue, clutching his beat-up computer, simple keyboard and guitar. His arrival offered a nice touch of hinted darkness, his ending venturing into even darker territory, without any instrumentation, his vocals over bass beats, sans keys or guitar, reminiscent of early Velvet Underground. Hidden behind his shades, Max left a drone, a minimalist mystery…synth sounds, garage band sounds alternating with the sounds of the alternative 80s’ pop scene.
Ending the night of strangeness, Vukovar apparently started out as a Throbbing Gristle-inspired boy band. Live: Ramshackle, messy, noisy, chaotic. They say it is, “brutalist (inspired) with absences-of-light of Wigan & St Helens, now partially transplanted to the pagan wastelands of West Yorkshire and releasing their 10th album proper ‘The Body Abdicator’.”
‘Place to Rest’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Izt3S6bCUo
DJ Glenn Evans – is often seen manning the decks at many of the big nights around West Yorkshire. He’s a walking, talking encyclopaedia of musical history. Thanks to all involved at the Golden Lion for another slice of music memorabilia. Here’s a link to Glenn on SoundCloud:
The banned feet’s
Beating and thriving the roots of rhythm in the narrowing community yard
The power jugglers cannot hear the ‘We’s’;
The lands fall apart; the gravity cannot hold;
Mere mutiny is loosed upon the Mother,
The hunger-stick inflation tide is loosed, and the vanity
Off cremation is drowned;
The statesman lacks all conviction, while the weak
Are full of lethal summon.
Surely some rebellion is at land;
Surely the advent is at land.
The advent buzzing! Rumbling pebbles down the hills
When a thundering light strikes thy crage, O Mother!
Flaring up the impenetrable woodland
A shape of smoke musk floated with an alluring flames bust
A version of tails turning reality, natural calamity!
The rolling river of furies separating the chest of Mother
A shape with ten heads and a body of divine,
A fearless gaze and ruthless smile,
Is moving its foot, while all about it
Spindle heritage of indigenous land, Washed.
The sharp plight gaze back; the darkens drops again
Now I know
The dominant bleach of deities needs
Is nil.
Our Ravana is awake,
Our deity,
Our priest
The centuries of curtained sleep
Where documents handouts rules over our cultivated land
My ancestral land,
Marked by the whole forest and its breeds
Are not evident documents for my stay?
As I lack the papers of the stately identification.
Who came first my trees a century old
Or the papers which never reached us
As we are mountain man
Distanced by We’s.
What rough nobs, its sun comes round at last,
Sagging feet towards the woodland to rejuvenate
The advent souls
The Asura’s will thrive again!
Author: Sonali Gupta
India.
Glossary:
Asura’s – The word ‘Asura’ directly translates as Demon in English. The Asura’s tribe is one among the marginalized and endangered tribes situated in Gumla district of Jharkhand, India. Besides Jharkhand, members of the tribe live in pockets of Bihar, West Bengal and few other states of India. Isolated, deprived of basic livelihood amenities this tribe is not just abject poverty, they also have to deal with social stigma. As this tribe considers itself to be the decedents of Mahisasur(a buffalo demon in Hinduism). The stately governance, socio-economic and educational parameter all turns null when touches the ground reality.
Ravana- Ravana is considered as a demon in the Hindu epic Ramayana. But few tribes in India worship Ravana as there deity.
We’s- We’s here refers to “We the people of India…” (Extract from constitution of India).
Summary: Voicing the indigenous space. The poem deals with the theme of ‘Ulgulan’. The word means ‘Great Tumult’. The rebellion sought to establish the rights of indigenous people over their resources which were being snatched away from them by people in Power. This poem is themed upon Asur tribe in particular. The treatment of ‘Outsider’ is given to them. Their finger counting population needs to be heard and read about worldwide. The poem basically deals with their struggle and rebellion for identity and existence among the mainstream society.
Twitter handle- https://twitter.com/_Sonali_Gupta__?t=yzh3RPaCFZ272yMgwfyhFw&s=03
Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004868226417
“The day died, Aurelia.
One day, wholesome
just whistled past us
into the dark.”
“What happens now?”
My daughter asks
staring at the dissected dusk
on the slab made by moss.
“Sun shall be airlifted
first to its land, and to its burial
and then to its throne – again,
resurrected.
Breeze releasing summer seems
to agree with my reportage.
Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor
@amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet
Author Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/KushalTheWriter/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
Congratulations on your appointment as culture, media and sport secretary, which should be one of the best jobs in cabinet but which has become a bit of a joke. And not in a funny way, but in the way that the title of “culture and information” minister in Afghanistan makes people grimace.
Your immediate predecessor, Nadine Dorries, never appeared to take the job seriously, somehow mistaking the culture department for the department for culture war.
As a journalist, I can tell you that politicians prone to making mistakes and shouting at people make great copy. The problem is that the job, and those who do it, should be bigger than that.
Forgive me for this unsolicited advice, but as the 11th Conservative culture secretary in the past 12 years, you must see it is time to take the job seriously.
You have been left with a huge to-do list, with proposed new laws ranging from the not-yet published bill to privatise Channel 4 to a digital markets bill, which could change the way technology platforms pay newspapers. Much of it is complicated, and requires that you learn your brief.
Again, learn from Dorries’ mistakes. By all means, plan to privatise the nation’s only state-owned broadcaster if you believe that is genuinely in the public interest, but at least try to understand it first. Don’t criticise Channel 4 for being “in receipt of public money” when it isn’t. Don’t argue that its rival Channel 5 was successfully privatised when a quick Google search will show you that it never was. Such ignorance doesn’t help when so many independent producers who rely on Channel 4 to make a living are opposed to privatisation.
Everyone makes mistakes, of course, but much of the agenda you inherited seems more motivated by politics than economics.
Trust based on truth is the essence of all good journalism, but especially for public service broadcasters such as Channel 4 and the BBC, given the fact that they are either owned by or paid for by the public.
A few months ago, Dorries accused Channel 4 of using actors in a documentary about people living in desperate conditions in housing estates, Tower Block of Commons. Who could argue given that Dorries, a former reality TV star herself, appeared alongside them in the show? Except that a subsequent investigation found the allegations to be wrong, leading to a denial backed by a DCMS committee led by a Conservative chair. There has so far been no apology, and the allegations are left to cause doubt and distrust.
Similarly, when the BBC showed footage of Boris Johnson being booed by royalists on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral during the Queen’s platinum jubilee celebrations, Dorries tweeted that there were “far more cheers” than boos despite the video evidence to the contrary.
Reality in our dystopian age is often distorted. Call the BBC a hotbed of socialists and Trots all you like, but the fact is that the two blokes at the top have either donated to the Conservative party or considered running as local Tory candidates.
And whatever the politics of those inside, all broadcasters, and particularly the BBC, are governed by impartiality rules. This must be infuriating to politicians keen on doing deals for favourable coverage, but is one of the things that makes the BBC one of the most trusted news sources in the US, let alone the UK.
Millions more people may read the Daily Mail than the 81,000 who voted for your boss, Liz Truss, or indeed the 30,000 people who voted for you in Chippenham. But the Mail doesn’t run the country – or at least it isn’t elected to do so. Calling opponents a “leftie luvvie lynch mob” is fine for its columnists, such as Dorries when she writes in the Mail, but it’s the written equivalent of blowing a raspberry, not really a thoughtful argument.
The task of running digital, culture, media and sport in this country is also way too important for this. And not just because arts and culture enriches a nation, its wellbeing and sense of community, but for its economic importance alone – the sort of reason that should be obvious to a Conservative minister at a time of economic crisis. More than four million people work in the sectors you are now responsible for, or 13% of all UK jobs. Unlike many other sectors, those numbers grew last year by 3%. At a time when Britain is redefining its role in the world the sort of soft power wielded by its creative industries needs nurturing, not attacking.
As universities minister you took aim at what you considered “wokery” on campus, such as schemes to diversify staff. Two years ago, you seemed to join the BBC hit-squad, writing: “I think the licence fee is an unfair tax and should be scrapped.” Be wary of that sort of thing. See Dorries as a warning, not a role model.
Entertainment and the media has long been used to distract people from harsher realities, such as not being able to keep warm or eat. Don’t go down that road. Let culture be a source of strength and enrichment. It’s a proper job. Do it properly.
Yours in hope,
Jane
The latest episode of Fire in the Wire is a celebration of one of the greatest reggae artists of all time, the late, great Alton Ellis, and features several of his songs alongside other great ska, reggae and dub cuts… enjoy!
Tracklist:
Marcia Griffiths Aitken – I’m Still in Love
Trinity – Three Piece Suit
Alton Ellis – Dance Crasher
Sound Dimension – Whipping the Prince
Prince Buster – Rude Rude Rudie (Don’t Throw Stones)
King Tubby – Who is the Dub
The Mighty Diamonds – Pass the Kutchie
Hortense Ellis – Sitting in the Park
Alton Ellis – A Fool
Mickey Dread – Saturday Night Special
Lyn Tait – Rock Steady
The Marvels – Rock Steady
Alton and Zoot – Oppression
The Wailers – Stepping Razor
Jeff Barnes – Get in the Groove
Hortense Ellis – I’m Just a Girl
Michigan and Smiley – Rub a Dub Style
Jim Brown – Clippin
Dub Specialist – Message from Dub
Alton Ellis – Cry Tough
Errol Brown – Toughest Dub
Althea and Donna – Uptown Top Ranking
The Mighty Two – Calico Suit
Steam Stock
You have told me,
it is very rare.
It is bizzard,
it is strange and sometimes unfair,
it is perhaps somewhere far…
Waiting for you even in the dark…
Love to find is so, so rare,
as to find a diamond, black as night air…
Tu m’as dit ça,
c’est rare…
Comme c’est bizarre,
arrivè par hasard…
On le trouve également dans le monde pendant le brouillard.
l’amour est si rare
comme trouver
un diamant noir.
c’est rare…
Comme c’est bizarre,
arrivè par hasard…
On le trouve également dans le monde pendant le brouillard.
l’amour est si rare
comme trouver
un diamant noir.
Daisy Tsvete
Picture Nick Victor
High above Skull Island, Kong
Watches sunfall hears the surf
Leap, feels a cool breeze as down
In the forest mist rises
Claws slash ripping teeth tear but
Nothing’s killed just for pleasure
And nothing dies of despair.
The sky darkens, stars ignite.
Beyond the wall camp fires flare
As Kong’s old scars, well beaten
Tracks through greying hair itch and
Tighten he dreams old bones new
Fleshed and himself safely held.
Wakes suddenly
To his heartbeat’s drumming sees
Smoke on the horizon rear
Up like an uncoiled serpent
Fangs bared and ready to strike.
A new book on the crisis in the NHS, jointly produced by Angry Workers of the World and the Anarchist Communist Group:
Essays exploring how workers in the NHS are fighting to improve patient care and working conditions, whilst also having an eye on creating a future of vastly improved health and healthcare for all in a post-capitalist world.
The NHS is often called a ‘national treasure’, and its workers are sometimes lauded as angels and heroes. In the last two years of the Covid-19 pandemic we have more than ever seen the reality of how it works – and also sometimes how it doesn’t.
How have we ended up in this situation? What are the factors that have led to healthcare being organised and run the way it is? What struggles are happening in the NHS currently, and how might we magnify their impact and win gains now?
Understanding all this is fundamental to enabling us as workers and patients to fight for better work conditions and better patient care under capitalism now, while also having an eye on ultimately creating a future of vastly improved health and healthcare for all in a post-capitalist world.
Essays include:
Lost in service: How the NHS works for us & how we work for the NHS
The identity crisis of hospitals: Know the past to understand the present
A cup of tea and some militancy please? Thoughts of an NHS housekeeper
Struggles in scrubs: A history of industrial action in the NHS
Fuck the clapping, let’s get angry! Struggles in and beyond the white factory
A hotbed of pestilence: Cholera, covid, and the class struggle
Reports from the care sector Work and survival & Resistance in a crisis
Superstition, sickness, or service? Mental healthcare under (and after) capitalism
We only got that through struggle! Work, politics, and the future of the NHS
You’ve made your own bed, now die in it: Towards an emancipatory medicine
Care not capital: Improving the lives and deaths of older people
Pandemic struggles and future healthcare in Greece: A view from below
Book details:
Editorial Crew: Angry Workers, ACG
Buy a copy here: https://pmpress.org.uk/product/sick-of-it-all-work-inquiry-struggle-in-the-nhs/
[from https://www.anarchistcommunism.org]
Nightfly. The Life of Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, Peter Jones
(366pp, £26.99, hardback, Chicago Review Press)
Steely Dan are one of those bands who divide listeners. Are they purveyors of smooth AOR blandness or sonic perfectionists? Do they subvert jazz rock, funk and disco, or just buy into the mega LP sales they could see other bands achieving? Were they taking the piss spending years and millions of dollars on each project or just obsessives? And why were they so smartarse and rude? Why did they insist on not touring and not even playing rock any more?
Steely Dan, whose moniker now remains with Donald Fagen after the death of musical partner Walter Becker (the duo who pretty much were the Dan after the first couple of albums), emerged out of a desire to escape New York City, where the pair were ensconced writing hit songs together as a day job. Their songs were too obscure, too reliant on jazz chords and key changes, for there to be many hits and eventually they moved out to Los Angeles, although many regard the band as somehow always intrinsically rooted in the Big Apple.
But for a good while Becker & Fagen bought into the coke-fuelled LA music business, forming a band, recording an album and even touring to promote it. They undertook interviews but didn’t help themselves with surly one-liner retorts or disinterested sarcasm, and eventually refused to tour, broke up the band and hired freelance session musicians for the albums that followed.
Later of course, they would make a comeback and reform, loosening up and seemingly enjoying touring; later albums sounded freer and more fun, the guys appeated to be having a good time. But back in the 70s and 80s they lived in the darkness of studios, recording endless guest parts and solos, mixing and remixing, and grappling with (and often losing out to) new emerging technologies.
Katy Lied (1975) spawned a couple of hits, the next year’s The Royal Scam sizzled and rocked from the word go. Both were lyrically enigmatic and musically shifty, often including the most unexpected twists and turns before resolving back into verse and chorus, and some kind of resolution or narrative ending. It was the next two albums, however, that broke the (record company’s) bank and, eventually, their musical partnership.
Aja (1977) and Gaucho (1980) are epic productions, featuring extended compositions and the cream of session musicians, plucked from day after day of recording. Michael Omartian’s keyboards drift across the former’s spacious, jazzy songs, whilst Gaucho is mostly overwound taut funk-rock, all hard edges and electric gleam under its crystal clear (over-)production. Both remain classic albums, great for the car stereo on long journeys, both are accomplished and focussed in a way that the previous two albums aren’t, although those more mixed-up albums are the ones I return to when I am listening at home.
Since then there have been solo albums by both Fagen and Becker, two new Steely Dan studio albums in the early 2000s, and a slew of tours (one of which I was fortunate enough to see in London), which have continued after Becker’s death in 2017. Live, the music slipped more towards big band arrangements, although more recently there have also been tours where specific albums are played straight through. Both studio and live albums sound warmer and looser. During the decades-long separation, Fagen returned to New York, Becker sloped off to an island somewhere, where he could indulge his drug habit without bother, and the guys hardly talked. No real animosity, just burnout and the need to be apart.
Peter Jones tells a more expansive version of the above in this new book. It’s well overdue, as there hasn’t really been a good Steely Dan book before. As a musician and writer, Jones is well situated to author this critical biography, although you get the feeling he sometimes chose to use his research to reaffirm previous ideas about the band. So, from the word go, the duo are portrayed as a cynical double act, and only as that; he also writes off Gaucho, which is an unusual stance, it has to be said, for a Steely Dan fan!
But he’s good at telling the story, or stories, of what went on and why. There’s enough technical information about recording and mixing for the geeks; sex, drink and drugs for the lads; musical explanation and criticism for the musicians and fans; and some authorial attitude to engage the reader, or this one anyway, including a dismissive tone towards most of Fagen’s solo output and the idea that he is somehow coasting and living off past achievements. Jones is also unhappy with the lecherous tone of many of the song’s narrators towards young women, perhaps confusing character with composer.
Personally I love the three solo albums Fagen has issued under his own name, and the second Walter Becker solo album too, despite its penchant for sloppy reggae beats, rough vocals and cliché guitar solos. It’s great fun, nothing more, nothing less; and that’s OK. In fact it’s strange that the book starts by questioning the smartarse comedic approach to lyrics and interviews but ends up wanting more, along with more outrage, more studio finesse once the guys mellow…
It’s hard to take, I know, but it’s true. Steely Dan now tour with the likes of the Eagles and the Doobie Brothers, both the epitome of MOR rock. Back in the day, Steely Dan’s ‘Everything You Did’ featured the putdown ‘Turn up the Eagles the neighbors are listening’, with the Eagles retorting in ‘Hotel California’ how ‘They stab it with their steely knives but they just can’t kill the beast’. Presumably they’ve either kissed and made up, or realised how to maximise their income streams.
Although I disagree with Jones’ contention that ‘Fagen and Becker were postmodernists before many people were even aware of the concept, including perhaps themselves’, and also that irony is ‘postmodernism’s defining characteristic’, early on – in fact on the first page of his ‘Introduction’ – Jones offers a fantastic summary or conclusion of what he is about to discuss:
‘It is now clear that Fagen and Steely Dan were sui generis, their music painstakingly distilled from elements of rock, R&B, blues, soul, jazz, pop, country, funk, Brecht-Weill, Bach, and Stravinsky, along with Henry Mancini “faux-luxe” TV themes that mesmerised Donald as a child. So thoroughly did he internalize these sources that his own music emerged as something entirely unique.’
Spot on and well said. If you like Steely Dan, stories about musicians, recording studios, songs and shenanigans, this book is for you. File under ‘I already bought the dream’ or ‘show biz kids’.
Rupert Loydell
Kushal Poddar
Picture Harald-Sohlberg
@amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet
Author Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/KushalTheWriter/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
That’ll be Dr Otway if you please as so called ‘Rock’s greatest failure’ is granted a doctorate!
Referred to by many (not least himself) as Rock n’ Roll’s Greatest Failure, John Otway has been awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford Brookes University. Despite failing all his A levels as he concentrated on preparing for a career as a rock star he can now boast high academic achievement.
Despite the ‘failure’ tag, Otway has made a living out of 50 year music business career. He had his first hit ‘Cor Baby That’s Really Free’ in 1977 and A second hit duly followed in 2002. He has made 15 albums, had two volumes of his biography published and the film documenting his career was voted 2nd best film of 2013 by Guardian readers and is still popular on Netflix. As an actor he has appeared in various TV appearances and was one of his songs was voted the seventh greatest lyric of all time in a BBC poll – higher than anything by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, The Bee Gees or Leonard Cohen
He has sold out The Royal Albert Hall, The London Palladium and in April this year celebrated his 5,000th gig to a packed Shepherd’s Bush Empire. He continues to gig and is now up to 5,041 with many more booked to the end of the year and beyond
In awarding the degree, Gavin Barber praised his his ‘international musical and cultural contribution over five decades’ and his ‘commitment, generosity, talent, and dedication that embody the values and attributes that we seek to encourage and develop in our students.’
Surely national treasure status now beckons?
Just months after performing his 5,000th gig to an adoring Shepherd’s Bush Empire crowd, unique singer songwriter John Otway has been awarded an Honorary PhD in Music by Oxford Brookes University.
Otway, best known to many for his first hit ‘Cor Baby That’s Really Free’ said ‘I’m really thrilled to be awarded this totally unexpected honour, especially as I failed all my A levels as I decided to concentrate on preparing for my burgeoning career as a rock star. To get this from Oxford Brookes 50 years later shows I did the right thing. And I did have some further education in Oxford in the 1970s – my learning was at a pub in St Clements, The Oranges and Lemons performing my embryonic act there over 50 times in 12 months. In that short time I went from playing to 20 people in the pub to having a hit record. I haven’t done a sensible days work since! Now this doctorate puts me on the same level as other celebrity Doctors such as Brian Cox, Angela Merkel, Brian May, Kermit the Frog and Geri Halliwell.’
In announcing the honour Gavin Barber, Deputy Director, Academic and Student Administration at Oxford Brookes, said: ‘Oxford Brookes is proud to be awarding an Honorary Degree to John in recognition of his international musical and cultural contribution over five decades. As a champion of live music and an active supporter of grass-roots venues, and of course a legendary performer, John’s commitment, generosity, talent, and dedication embody the values and attributes that we seek to encourage and develop in all of our students”.
When his first autobiography came out the publishers decided to market Otway as ‘Rock n’ Roll’s Greatest Failure’ for his innate ability to make bizarre career moves, often plucking defeat from the very jaws of success.
The title has stuck yet he has actually enjoyed a 50-year career in the music industry with successes that are the envy of many wannabes. Since playing his first gig in his hometown of Aylesbury in 1972 he has built a sizeable cult following of amazingly loyal and adoring fans through his ceaseless touring, surreal sense of humour and a self-deprecating underdog persona.
He first achieved micro-stardom with a memorable (and very painful – ask him) 1977 appearance on the Old Grey Whistle Test leading to his first hit record. In 2002, a mere 25 years later, he had another hit when ‘Bunsen Burner’ entered the Top Ten.
As well as his brace of hits (more UK hit singles than Led Zeppelin note), he has had 15 album releases (more than Ed Sheeran) including six with on-off, on-off again-on partner Wild Willy Barrett. He has sold out The Royal Albert Hall and headlined the London Palladium (neither of which David Bowie achieved). His self-made biopic Otway the Movie: The Story of Rock n Roll’s Greatest Failure premiered in Leicester Square, was shown at Cannes, voted 2nd best film of 2013 by Guardian readers and is still popular on Netflix. Two volumes of his autobiography have been published (precisely two more than Mick Jagger has managed).
Otway’s song ‘Beware of the Flowers Cause I’m Sure They’re Going to Get You Yeah’ was voted the seventh greatest lyric of all time in a 1999 BBC poll – higher than anything by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, The Bee Gees or Leonard Cohen.
As an actor he has appeared in TV’s Super Gran, William Tell, Heartbeat and others including a certain brand’s ‘Secret Lemonade Drinker’ commercials.
Never happier than when performing, during lockdown he performed 9 shows from his sitting room via Facebook, each attracting over 10,000 views. But it is his legendary live shows, that have kept the fans coming and this micro-star shining for half a century. He celebrated his 5,000th in April and as of 1 September is up to 5,041 with many more booked to the end of the year and beyond.
For a list of his upcoming shows, visit www.johnotway.com/gigs, where you can also find a full list of every gig he has ever performed.
STEPHEN FORSTER
was my seed
bruised
even
before I was
brought unto
this world
left alone
on the side
of that old
dirt road
a cast off
poem
Words and image
TERRENCE SYKES
Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column which builds its nest around other birds’ eggs
Due to the appointment of Liz Truss and the logging off of Liz Windsor, our reader is spending the day at Balmoral with black armband, umbrella, deep fried mars bar sandwiches and a flask of Auld Lum Reeky single malt whiskey from the Isle of Muff. Here is what’s left of the TV schedule.
THIS WEEK’S NON-MOURNING TV
The eagerly anticipated season 54 of Rail Cops starts on Netflix next Wednesday. Here is the trailer for episode one, “Things’ll Be Different When We Get To Ongar”
The RAIL COPS have collared a kid as he gets off an underground train. They scan his oyster card on a portable machine. He has the wrong ticket for the discount claimed on the card.
RAILCOP 1
Rail cops sir. Step this way please
RAILCOP READOUT:
OYSTERCARD. DISCOUNT INVALID. WRONG TICKET. TERMINATE SUSPECT
WE CUT TO AN UNDERGROUND TRAIN DESTINATION ONGAR. TWO HOBOS ARE RIDING THE GUARDS VAN AND SINGIN THE BLUES. THEY’RE HEADIN OUT NORTH, WHERE THE WORK IS, OR MIGHT BE.
HOBO 1
Things sure are gonna be be different when we get to ONGAR!
HOBO 2
Damn right buddy! We’ll be in clover. Just as long as we can keep ahead of the
RAIL COPS
HOBO 1
I might just set me up with a fruit farm
HOBO 2
What kinda fruit farm?
HOBO 1
Peaches maybe. Or Queen Victoria’s Plums.
HOBO 2
I ain’t never had a Queen Victoria’s plum
HOBO 1
Me neither, but they sure sound good and juicy.
HOBO 2
They sure do.
CUT TO: LATER THAT SAME DAY IN THE RAIL COP CAFÉ
RAILCOP 1
Yeah some 11 year old punk wants to ride the underground. Thinks he’s a hobo. Tries to hand us some cockeyed story about paying the conductor on the car or some such bullshit. Knock it off kid, I says to him, Rail Police! Then I shoves my motherfuckin badge right in his panhandlin’ face! Ya shoulda seen the look on it!
RAILCOP 2
Motherfucker. What happened to the kid?
RAILCOP 1
He ignored the fine notice. Too scared to tell his mother, the fucker.
RAILCOP 2
Motherfuckin motherfucker!
RAILCOP 1
Then he got the other warnings and done the same thing.
RAILCOP 2
Ignored em?
RAILCOP 1
Yep. And the fines went up. 40. 60. 80
RAILCOP 2
Mother……………Fucker!
RAILCOP 1
we had no choice but to take his stuff
RAILCOP 2
what’d you get?
RAILCOP 1
Bicycle. Football trophies, not much.
CUT BACK TO THE HOBOS ON TRAIN
HOBO 1
Might even get me a real tractor
HOBO 2
Like a Massey Ferguson?
HOBO 1
The business. Outperforms a Ford every time. Where are we?
ANNOUNCEMENT: THE TANNOY IS SO BAD YOU CAN’T MAKE OUT WHAT IT SAYS.
TANNOY
Mwar sera mwar, molar corpustle tofu. Carborundum sheep trials, flute liasons, orabora tora whenever,rear view wellington catering. Tomorrow.
HOBO 2
Who can tell? All I know is we’re ONGAR BOUND
POETRY NOW
THE RICH
By Celia Kanthe
The rich are not at all like us
they have no need to catch the bus
They defecate on silver plate
And their faeces
appreciates
NOT HIM AGAIN PART 2
Warriors fans had a horrible feeling of déjà vu last Saturday as a visit from league leaders Cockmarlin Thunderbolts served as the debut match for their new manager, one-time Warriors supremo José Pypebahn. The Spaniard’s departure in 2020, following his dismissal was far from amicable.
BRING YOUR OWN BOOS
Boos rang out all over Warrior Park as the feisty Spaniard took his place in the technical area, after which the former sausage magnate responded by sticking out his tongue, dipping into his trainer’s bag and throwing chipolatas spiked with strong laxatives at the angry supporters, many of whom ate them gratefully since the club’s caterers’ strike was still ongoing.
Fans will not easily forget Pypebahn’s embarrassing appointment of Mr Chorizo, the club mascot, who attended games dressed as a sausage to encourage fans. Mr. Chorizo, real name Norman Rhodes, was convicted of affray following a very public nervous breakdown after being mocked by fans on a specially set up twitter account, #sackthesausage
SPOOKED
Pypebahn was dismissed by the board two seasons ago after a heavy league defeat by Herstmonceux Cannibals. The red-faced sausage millionaire told our reporter afterwards: “I have written to the Nuclear Waste Disposal Solutions League (South), demanding an immediate enquiry into the circumstances surrounding this so-called football match.
For instance, just hours before kick off, our goalkeeper Tim Smegma, who has never been in the army, got called up as a reservist and posted to the Middle East, so we had to use a double who had never played football before.
Midfield dynamo Karl Schwartzschmidt was up all night with Cruciate Ligament, one of his racehorses, which was suffering from withdrawal symptoms. The driver of the Herstmonceaux team coach deliberately reversed over Nobby Balaclava’s legs in the car park which considerably slowed up his game. Ruud Van Smoot, their Dutch centre forward, gave some of our younger players lines of white powder in the dressing room. He told them it was ecstasy, but it turned out to be Chinese heroin, which in my book contravenes all the unwritten rules of sportsmanlike conduct.
SPIKED
As if that wasn’t enough, Welsh wizard Craig Cattermole, who as we all know has difficulty behaving himself at the best of times, had his pre match gin & tonic spiked with lysergic acid. The chief suspect was the Cannibals’ Ivory Coast striker Boniface Mandingo, who wasn’t in the squad, but was spotted lurking outside our changing room dressed as Little Bo Peep. Just before kick off, all our boots had been replaced with fur lined tartan slippers, except for Cattermoles’s. which had been swapped for huge pink clown’s shoes, which squeaked every time he kicked the ball. Sven Finlaysen, Herstmonceaux’s Swedish manager, ran up and down the touchline making vile Welsh insinuations and “baa” sounds through a megaphone, all of which was deliberately calculated to wind Craig up in my opinion. That partly contributed to my decision to bring him off in the 87th minute when, at 7-0, we were still in with a chance. To cap it all, after the game Sven gave me a cigar as a sporting gesture, and it exploded.”
GAME OF CHANTS
Asked to comment on the obscene chants heard from the crowd throughout last Saturday’s game, the inscrutable Spaniard would only say this: “My sausages will always be sausage-shaped, which is not the same as being penis-shaped.”
Sausage Life!
Colin Gibson • Emmet Ives • Anita Makris
SAY GOODBYE TO IRONING MISERY!
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Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column which is burying Easter eggs as a hedge against inflation
READER: It’s a bit early for Easter eggs isn’t it?
MYSELF: Buy as many as you can and bury them in a secret location. I had a hot tip off that bloke who does bitcoin.
WE’LL BE RIGHT BACK AFTER THIS MASSAGE
Men! Tired of boring exercise and rigorous diet regimes? Fed up with cruel taunts like “Who ate all the puddings?” and “When’s the baby due”? Don’t despair, Gordon Thinktank Flab Solutions may have just the thing for you. NomorGym the elasticated silhouette improvement trousers for gentlemen are guaranteed to improve your social profile and make you one of the beautiful people. NomorGym Is available in large, extra large, avocado, magnolia and Pino Grigio.
RACING TIPS by Nostradamus
A perfectly preserved document believed to have belonged to Nostradamus himself has been unearthed during Upper Dicker Council’s recent purge of Grade 1 listed buildings. Written in Latin on a scroll of vellum parchment with a 16th century fountain pen, it is thought to be one of the earliest examples of the great seer’s eerie prescience. Here is a short excerpt.
On 23 July 2019, a chestnut mare called Spaffer’s Folly will romp home at 33/1 in the 3-30 at Chepstow, heralding the arrival of Satan and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Borne on a tidal surge of the great river in the north, unwelcome visitors will bring giant poultry to defeat the usurers.
DIARY OF A SOMEBODY
Compiled by Patrick Carabine
An occasional series in which Patrick Carabine randomly browses the recollections of an anonymous diarist
MONDAY September 13th: I agree to meet Twollet the Greengrocer in town for ‘a cup of coffee’. He insists we rendezvous at The Sheep & Squaddie, a squalid public house frequented by roughnecks, countering my temperate objection with “You don’t have to drink alcohol old boy, they do splendid coffee in pubs these days”. Much to my regret, I order Irish coffee, not realising it contains whiskey, and after my fifth, begin to feel a trifle woozy. Twollet shows me his recently acquired tattoo, Antelope Pursued by Jaguar; executed in the style of Tracy Emin, which I, in my now rather inebriated state, fancy to be rather tasteful. The next thing I remember is sitting with Twollet in the waiting room of a particularly salubrious tattoo parlour, looking through a catalogue of designs. The rest of the afternoon occupies a gaping black hole in my recollection.
TUESDAY 14th: Awake from a terrible nightmare in which thousands of ants are marching over my belly wearing tiny spiked running shoes. Bleary-eyed, I pick my way through discarded items of clothing to the semi-wreckage of the bathroom, where I am confronted with an unimaginably terrifying reflection in the mirror. I see, on my lower abdomen, a large, raw and still bloody tattoo of The Eiffel Tower, which emerges from my pyjamas and points obscenely at my chest. What happened? Myriad thoughts pass through my head at an alarming rate, not the least of which is; I will never be able to go swimming again.
Later that same day, Celia Badwig calls, and tells me I look as though I am coming down with something, but I have not the heart to let her in on my secret. I telephone Tarquin, my eldest, who lives in London and knows about such things, and explain what has happened. I hear him come dangerously close to choking, and when his guffawing and snorting has eventually subsided, I reluctantly ask his advice. This sets him off again. “Twollet! The Eiffel Tower! Hahaha!” he giggles, almost weeping with mirth.
“Never mind that idiot,” I shout, “You have to help me! I must have this monstrosity removed, before anyone sees it.” He tells me to “keep my hair on”, as he knows someone “who knows someone”, and is going to “make a couple of calls”.
THURS 15th: I have been housebound since the tattoo incident, for fear of anyone finding out, although I suspect the loose-tongued Twollet has already let the goose out of the sack. At last the telephone rings. It is Tarquin who says he’s been put on to a man who can “sort out my problem”. As instructed, I catch a train to London, and make my way to the Tutankhamen Café in Paddington, where a man wearing a camel coat and reading The Racing Times is waiting for me. His thin pencil moustache does not fill me with confidence, nevertheless I allow him to escort me to his ‘clinic’, a shabby looking place with a threadbare carpet in the back room of a betting shop. He tells me his name is Cuthberto and instructs me in broken English to lie on the stained velvet chaise longue, and lift up my shirt. After a long whistle, and what I took to be a supressed smirk, he tells me it’s a major job that will require a general anaesthetic. With no other options, I find a cheap hotel nearby and agree to turn up early next morning with an empty stomach and £500 in cash.
FRI 16th: As I regain consciousness, I am surprised to find I am not in too much pain. I cock my wrist to see what time it is. My watch is gone, along with Jesus, the strange Mexican anaesthetist, the ‘surgeon’ Cuthberto, and my wallet. Nevertheless, I dash eagerly to the mirror, and lift my now grubby nightgown.
NO!…! The dreaded thing is still there! The only discernable difference being that The Eiffel Tower has had the word CANCELLED tattooed over it. Livid with rage, I decide to erase Twollet from my address book altogether, and unfriend him on Facebook.
DICTIONARY CORNER
Robust (n). Reinforced sports bra developed by Playtex in 1948, for the British Olympic ladies coxless fours……
Salmonella (n). highly toxic jazz singer
Aplomb (n). soft fruit of the genus Prunus.
Sausage Life!
Colin Gibson • Emmet Ives • Anita Makris
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Back here on the path, it’s all spit and brick dust, with once-white plimsolls kicking up scurf into sticky air. It’s forty years since furnaces bellowed across a town of solid men and women with brass in their pockets and swarf beneath their skin; thirty since the walls crumbled into dead eyes and thick veins; twenty since the Sun gave up calling and left no contact details, and ten since the dead shuffled out of the nettles and bindweed, coughing out stories with no beginning or end. There’s a point at which the path ends, though it’s different every time, and there’s a point at which even the most regular visitor – and you have to come back, whatever your mother or your sensible self may advise – will forget all they ever knew about money, machines, and motorways which once ran from here to the Moon. But then a ghost will take you by surprise. It will take your hand and take a cigarette from your proffered pack which you don’t remember buying. It will tell you of long, hard days, sweating through insubstantial time. It will recall lost names for the first time in decades, rolling them from its dusty mouth like companions in war. We’re all on the edge of metaphor here, if we could only pull our laces tight and walk on, but the ghost points back the way we came – the way everyone came – and there doesn’t appear to be a path.
23 August 2022 Thanks to Lucy Alexa
Here is a final round-up of Week Three reviews, and general thoughts about the 75th Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I have to report that I and my partner and co-reviewer, suffered from the generally unreported ‘silent covid’ which hit hard and caused us to leave the festival to isolate out of reach. I’m sure, many others suffered a similar fate. Not surprising, considering the general lack of masks or venue attention to preventative measures. One venue director claimed there were no rules and performers were allowed to continue even if tested positive. Irresponsible, in my book, but onward!
Once tested negative, I did return for part of the final week, and here’s an overview of some of the shows taken in. First, a visit to the Free/Pay What You Want fringe:
GEORGE FOX: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DREAD @ MONKEY BARREL STUDIO
Reviewer: Kevin Short
Edinburgh-based Irish stand-up George Fox’s ‘Night of the Living Dread’ (How could I resist a title like this?) at Monkey Barrel Studio was a rare, calming, delight. Although his set was themed around mental health over the covid years, it was delivered (on a low-volume microphone) in such a caring comedic way that the small crowd warmed to his every quip. Yes, there was a hard-edge to some of his material and, no, the millions of YouTube views of his drunken escapades may not give a true reflection of his talent, but live in a small room in Edinburgh, his sobering views on life were a marvel. Thank you, George.
Abigoliah Schamaun: LEGALLY CHEEKY @ JUST THE TONIC AT THE TRON
Reviewer: Kevin Short
What an absolute treat. I must admit to having missed the first few minutes of the show but was immediately immersed in this heart-wrenching yet hilariously performed tale of love, ridiculous legalities and, ultimately, temporary reward. Abigoliah Schamaun, a name and act to conjure with, is a brilliant comedic raconteur whose true-life story of falling in love with an ailing Brit and subsequent fight to stay in the UK, despite her absolute need, loving desire, and legibility to do so, is a revelation on so many levels. Raw, provocative, and passionately delivered, it is a set I would quite happily sit through again. Knowing that Abigoliah has only temporarily won her battle, I may have the pleasure of hearing the next chapter, but I also hope it may not be necessary. Brilliant!
Sharon Wanjohi and Abbie Edwards: NOT TOO SHABBY @ laughing horse at city cafe
Reviewer: Kevin Short
I always try to be positive about all I see, but something about this show irritated. The first 10mins or more was getting to know their audience, and none of us seemed terribly interesting. Finally, the first set began. Sharon Wanjohi, proceeded to struggle with a faulty and totally unnecessary microphone (it was a low-ceiling tiny room), and although her delivery was charming, the constant attempt to involve us weakened whatever themes, or impressions, that were trying to get through. That said, I must admit, the small crowd cackled loudly throughout. It reverberated so much in my non-comprehending ears, I had to not so discreetly leave before the next set began. I apologize, Abbie Edwards, for missing your act, I’m sure it was not too shabby, and you both shall prevail.
more from the paid for fringE:
Vampire’s Ball: Ultimate Halloween Party! @ THE SPACEUK SURGEONS’ HALL
Reviewer: Kathryn S Kraus
Brad Tassell and Steve Goodie (Igor and Dracula, respectively) have created a show that appeals to both children and adults alike. Filled with original Halloween songs, the duo allows everyone to enjoy the fun of Halloween. During the 50 min. show, I don’t think anyone stopped smiling. We danced, we did hand motions, and we sang along to their wonderfully fun tunes. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention their jokes. Yes, some were groan worthy, but all will make you smile. If they come back, take the kids, or just yourself. You’ll forget all your troubles and experience the fun of life.
War of the Worlds (On a Budget): Lamphouse Theatre
Reviewer: Kathryn S Kraus
Actor Tom Fox managed to compress 287 pages of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds into a 55 minute “solo” performance. Using homemade props and costumes, Fox plays 25 characters (including the walking machine and Martian) in a mesmerizing, comedic, narrative. One surprise to this performance was the inclusion of original songs based on Wells’ tale. The songs are smartly written, with some catchy tunes to boot. Fox performs them all, using a loop pedal for the harmonies. This one-man show is a feat not to be missed. Wherever you see it advertised around the world, go!
DOUBLE CROSSED (MUSICAL) @ GREENSIDE OLIVE STUDIO
Reviewer: Kathryn S Kraus & Kevin Short
Written and directed by St. Andrews’ student Matthew Torkington, Double Crossed seems to be inspired by the atypical television cop dramas that flood the airwaves. The musical seemed a bit disjointed in its plot. This may be because it was a 50 min. cutdown from the 2½ hour original show. Though hampered by the lack of microphones, there were many bright moments. The brightest being the vocal prowess of Oscar Cooper (Inspector Lawson), and the stage charisma of Torkington himself (Inspector Morse). It would be interesting to see the entire production in a proper stage setting. Though a little clichéd, Torkington’s efforts should be applauded. There may be some great shows just waiting to be written. *Note: This review is the result of persistent flyering by the company and writer/director. Goes to show, hand to hand. mouth to mouth, advertising does work, despite the giant odds against the smaller companies who get overlooked by the press due to the PR machinery of the giant commercial sector. So, well done, to the Double Crossed team on all counts. *
FINAL SUMMARY
By Kevin Short
I know it may seem lazy but the best I can do is refer you to my summary of a few years ago. After what could have been a two-year covid gap of reflection and new beginnings, the festival returned with the same old problems for the participants. In fact, it presented more. There was no Edfringe App for folk to book and plan on the move. There was no Princess Street Half Price Hut where folk used to assemble in their hundreds each day. There were no large drums in the High Street where companies could put up their posters legally. The Box Office number only seemed to be manned during office hours from Monday to Friday, so no telephone bookings in the evenings or over the weekends. The Fringe Programme was launched a month late, and the list goes on.
In normal circumstances, these failings would cause a change of directorship and senior administrative personnel, yet all seem to be comfortably sat in the same positions of ineffectiveness. What will it take for the Fringe Society to wake up, and bring in a team who can successfully move the festival into the here and now? There is a backlog of issues which need to be addressed and a myriad of changes to be made in future years in order for the festival to achieve the true ethos of its early beginnings. It’s not enough to be the biggest, it’s about being the best, and about adding equal opportunity to its Open Access policy.
Meanwhile, I must confess to my own failings this year. Whether it be the haze left by the covid years, or a blip in my rebellious spirit, I, hypocritically, took my own show to one of the established commercial venues I have been fighting against for decades. For this, I beg forgiveness, and can only say, I was duly punished with a terrible bout of the virus, and a financially disastrous outcome, like so many others. Penance done, normal service shall resume, and I will return to the festival on my own terms again and continue the fight for all I wrote about here in the Open Letter to The Fringe in 2019:
https://internationaltimes.it/open-letter-to-the-fringe
And if that’s not enough, here’s a documentary made in 2013!
Absolutely finally, here’s a summary from 2018:
The Fringe Festival is too big, too many folk, through greed, or organized chaos, lose their shirt and/or gain nothing but drunkenness. It needs a make-over. Yes, it may be open access, but too many have a monopoly on the content and decision making. Is there an answer? Well, here’s mine, for what it’s worth:
1) The Fringe Society, or similar committee, put a maximum on the amount of shows any one Venue Operator, Entrepreneur, Producer, can register into the Paid-for Fringe – thereby preventing a monopoly of interest.
2) Likewise, the various Free Fringe operators put a maximum on the venues they can each run and amount of shows they can show, thereby allowing performers a better chance of success, and more quality product in the process.
3) It would be great to see a levelling of shows on offer too, a more equal measure of theatre/dance/music/comedy etc., and a 50% of ticketed shows and 50% free shows. Even better, would be for all to do the Pre-book or Pay What You Want option but, I fear, that is a long way off.
Agreeing with a fellow-fringer, it would be marvellous if the festival took one year off to reflect, reassess, and plan for a new era. A passionate coming together of all sides, old and new, could really make changes for the better, and launch a new model Festival Fringe to suit and serve all. Meanwhile, see you next year!
VIVA EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FRINGE!
interest rates cripple the new skeleton election
as workers’ sockets train air fare disasters
dodging the scatological increase of social
intercourse errors on the bandwidth airwaves
sown from the jugular in pittance remnants
circumstantial restitution of binary droughts
curtailed in the last chance saloon & debenture
the rock ‘n’ roll circus of flippant recourse
its disinterred flagship of hobnail beauty.
Clive Gresswell
.
M has very bad memories of the film, from the beginning of the shoot in black and white, when she drank with L to comply with B’s wishes and orders. They drank whiskey to relieve tension, but I guess that’s in our nature: most of the dialogue is short and intense.
The action takes place in relative quiet, interrupted only by a series of outside sounds (the bells of a nearby church, the whistle of a passing train), a trademark of B’s rigorous and meticulous approach.
In the end, exhausted and defeated, the actors gave up everything close to a life and a will, so B could have what he wanted: their chosen bodies and neutral voices on display in a corner by the fireplace, as it were.
As the sound of executions is heard in the background, B made his so-called models repeat the phrases “lie down and sleep” and “wherever the wind blows” hundreds of times.
The characters are in strict isolation (F, like the other prisoners, knows that they are next) and F’s successful escape is no accident, as he is seen making ropes and hooks, and mapping the place. B spent the day searching for the unique sound of firebrands clattering to the floor, none of which matched his vision.
In the transition between sound and image, as M hangs up the phone to reveal that she is ready for revenge, a tapping sound is heard, followed by an image of A dancing. A as the instrument of vengeance: this technique is common today but was unknown then.
“Don’t turn your nose up. Keep your eyes open, you are not in a postcard “. She did, but B needed seven takes before he was satisfied, which means that M managed to cry seven times in a row without the help of glycerine tears and without moving her face. I have never hated anyone on a film set as much as B, she said afterwards. I carried that anger like phantom-limb pain for decades, she added.
Melisande Fitzsimons
.
If you told me that I literally had to eat poop every single day
and I would look younger, I might. I just might.
– Kim Kardashian
.
.
I’m pretty certain I would. No, I know I would
eat poop at least once a day—if you told me
all guns would decompose into rock salt
and burr. All the plastic in the ocean would turn
into krill, kelp, coral song, tufted rain. I would gladly
eat my poop. And yours. And yours.
If you told me Putin would become a baby
tarantula under a rock on the sleepy soil of Siberia
to be eaten by a larger tarantula. I would.
You would. We would eat Putin’s poop right now
with a side of polonium bacon. If you told me there
would never be war of any kind, not with missile,
bomb, bullet, kiss. I would eat Kim Kardashian’s
literal poop. If you told me the planet grows younger,
ever younger. O Lord, I’d eat your waste, too.
John Bradley
Montage: Rupert Loydell
.
Playboy of the Western Word – Lucy Brennan Shiel & Necessary Animals
Tarkovsky called Olga Sergeeva’s voice “a sign of the Russian.” That’s more than a sound, as this recording is. This album based on readings from Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ in the deft custody of Lucy Brennan Shiel – an enthusiast who hosts regular gatherings of passionate Joyceans for the sole purpose of sharing the joy of Ulysses – can be justifiably described as ‘a dalliance of the Irish’ but in no predictable pre-configuration. Brennan Shiel infuses the cunning of Molly Bloom with a winsomeness and unexpected innocent relish, giving her a childlike excitement, not always afforded the portrayal of her bold experienced controlling character. Anyone who has known the true nature of Irish women, whether independent or shackled to convention, will recognize the richness of this inner dialogue. “Women were like rivers that flowed in their own ineluctable way” (James Joyce – Edna O’Brien) and it was such an independent innocent twenty-year-old runaway that Joyce fell for, to set Ulysses on their very day of meeting. Lucy Brennan embraces all of this, invoking her synergetic relationship with nature. This is apt, for Joyce’s predilection was to greedily devour the everyday realities and hypocrisies being swept under the carpet and for such remains distinct in an ever disguising world.
‘Playboy…’ is equally challenging and playful. It may derive more from the analogue synth emergence of the 70s and 80s rather than Irish traditional folk, yet it is not even slightly dated but modern, ground-breaking and timeless. Chilled groove, acid jazz and evocative as the more experimental sequential music of say Weather Report’s ‘I Sing The Body Electric’ embracing dissonance amidst surreal sinuous harmonic reflections – it is accompanied by similar trippy percussion and cheeky abstract guitar licks, weaving the sublime and ridiculous through the intimate and brash fabric of Joyce’s visionary life-scapes.
Regular listeners to Verity Sharp’s Late Junction (BBC Radio 3) may recall the fox barking in ‘Fox n Clock’ – recorded from Keith Rodway’s midnight balcony. The skewed bass and jaunty guitar chords and Lee Igglesden’s gymnastic scales and lead convey the spontaneous instincts Joyce poetically caught in a hunting dog biting off more than it could chew. ‘Weaver of the Wind’ as a cool groove is “not to be thought away” – especially when overlapping synth glissando transcends Amanda Louise Thompson’s understated and melting trippy Rhodes, all deliciously enraptured by the harmonised trumpet of Sebastian Greschuk. Always cool with a hint of Hassell. In ‘Who’s Who In Space’ it even gets a little Finnegan’s Wake. Abstract-acid befitting its off-kilter lyricism. Here is where Thomson tilts the head and Igglesden delights us in the sonority of a single note. ‘Sky Blue Clocks’ remains as obtusely angular, tamed by pulsating ripples from sonic pebbles dropped into the fluid mix and Lucy’s reminiscing reflections, never too far from nature. The constant arpeggio of ‘Flies Come Before’ are exquisitely modulated by the spontaneity of Ryan Bollard’s percussive nimbleness, reminiscent of Erskine on a quiet day. This dexterity continues in ‘Molly’s Soliloquy’ with tiny touches on hollow toms – like fingers tickling a Bodhran – and the softest pillowy kick. Brennan excels here in her introspective mirror-gaze, wooed by Greshuk’s effervescence. ‘Song 7’ is initially misleading, bringing us slightly back to earth, or within perusing distance, with the kind of sounds that would accompany aerial views of futuristic cinematic citadels; pausing for a cybernetic scan of its environment.‘Wonder woman who can deliver the goods” treats us to more intellections before the Atlantis submerges and re-wilds, a passing bumble bee suddenly replants our feet on Joyce’s redolent muddy terra firma; “slow music please.”
But these descriptions and all following comparisons only approximate and somewhat discredit it. The taste of all players and production values of Fritz Catlin and Keith Rodway’s craftiness in timbre-blending and genre-bending, consummately unconventional, are never sensationalistic but sensitive. It beautifully encapsulates all the character of that red revolutionary that indulged, transcended and immersed us in the rich sensuality and raucous rancidness of a staid and polluted, murky, embittered and fist-fought proud community, engulfed by its primal panorama. If this is sounding effulgently McKittrick Ros now, maybe it’s the infectious lilt.
I had the pleasure of being present when ‘Fox n Clock’ and ‘Molly’s Soliloquy’ were first played in public. Lucy Brennan’s intuitive velveteen vocals were at once deliciously playful, seductive, audacious, enticing, empathic and comical with an acute sense of place and space. Her articulation places you within the mise-en-scene of Joyce’s imagination, from pensive euphoric consort – the persuasively manipulative voluptuous Molly – to the bared teeth and tensile flea-bit follicles of a hair-back dog on the chase. Brennan is extremely Mollyable.
https://necessaryanimals.bandcamp.com/track/mollys-soliloquy
In forty-four years of music-making and serious listening, from Be-bop Deluxe and Jefferson Starship, through Mahavishnu, Mode Plagal and Morricone, Paco De Lucia, Royksop, Scott Walker, Miles, Ana Brun, Soft Machine to Bran Van 3000; Ceramic Hobs to Olga Sergeeva; Tingle In The Netherlands to Leanne Le Havas – you get the picture – it is eeeasily one of the most exquisite and imaginative compositions I have ever heard. What I find unique about Necessary Animals and particularly Keith Rodway, is that I’ve rarely heard sounds that are usually quite brutalist mated so effortlessly to all other electronic and acoustic environments with an emotional receptiveness that never seeks to foist itself upon anyone. This album is a panoptic example of that; the sculpted esotericism of a Rodin, or Moore, rich as Klimt and full of Klee – inKandinsky.
Kendal Eaton – (soundingoffuk.com)
No-one likes a joke more than a Stoic
But there is little ‘laugh-out-loud’
When ‘dressed-down’ by The Ministry of Furies
For failing to support their new ‘Sport-Art’ –
Like everyone I’m ‘running to stand still’
So must have missed their Match –
Then – paranoia pumping – ‘Oh please no –
Not ‘Berlin’?
Reducing Imagination to Competition –
The only ‘composition’ those politicos approve –
They cannot love – so strut to ‘micro-manage’ –
It makes them seem so clean and spruce and fit – Ah yes
‘Fit for what?’ you ask
Digging deeper vaults and shoring walls
Where Truth and Beauty can be shot to pieces?
They ‘poo-poo’ any poet who has the power
To call King Arthur from his sleeping barrow
Robin Hood to give them Green
Lullaby of forests from his long-bow when released –
They deduce every knight appears from Knightsbridge –
So handy for shoplifting Harrods –
My gift-list is placed elsewhere –
A twitching Itching-Powder for a truss
A Green-Teeth dolly-mixture for a doris
Vampire Fangs for self-devouring boris
Look into your Lucky Bag
Mucky-Puppy melting snack or ‘sunak’?
Reeking Lotus? – place in coastal water
Presto! putrid petals or ‘patel’
Rubber vipers storm the last plane out
‘Slithey Toves’ or goves
Low Comedy Comedians!
Now set down The Round Table
See three modes of capital economy:
The Swedish or the Japanese
Or America’s – the harshest –
Was this latter really our best choice?
Do you remember voting for it?
Or was it imposition and assumption
By those we elect to protect The Common Good?
And are they compromised from doing this
As covert shareholding ethic-shirking sharks?
Who smile behind our backs –
Artists who lack their Machiavellian demeanour
Patronised who write an ‘English Literature’
For their Jingoistic England that couldn’t care less
Except to sell all ‘assets’ to the tourist
Except to oust and de-grade
The arts from school curricula
While they ‘sympathise’ on high ‘of course’
They who are the lowest of the low
Bernard Saint
Illustration: Claire Palmer
.
– The forecast is for snow, then more snow.
– The toboggan manufacturers will be celebrating.
– Bastards. Anyway, what have you been up to?
– I was reading a book but I gave up on it.
– What was it?
– “A Snow White For The Digital Age.”
– You don’t want to be reading that kind of nonsense. Stick to stuff that was written before typewriters were invented.
– You’re probably right.
– There’s no ‘probably’ about it.
– Whatever. I’m going to go look out the window.
– There’s nothing but loads of children out there.
– What’s the world coming to?
– Children glued to their phones and waiting for the snow.
– So they can build snowmen.
– And throw snowballs at old people.
Martin Stannard
.
Miles to walk to live, to revoke the helplessness in leap.
Pick up the chunk which can’t be undone
Aching shoulder, numbing head
Over the open sky with sunny lanes.
Wished I could find some twig,
And shoot tall with a shade of different leaves.
Feelings left behind, dwelling my mind of frames.
Tune to turn away this helpless deed,
The fire of hunting stomach bleeds.
I carefully balancing on the Buffalo dung,
Overhead and roll far away in sun.
I don’t know who decided ‘We’ to be the one,
My accidental birth made my head hoist this tub of dung.
Scrapes the cattle shed and shackled chains,
To pile up the dungs collected from touchable lanes.
We can’t say, as needs to be un- clayed.
Bagged a thirty kilos grains upon the patched lap;
Badged as reward for being inhumane slaves,
At the end of every seasonal chain.
The weight of the dung waves,
For every coming six months un-traced.
When the sun is seated notched like a king,
I pat the dungs along like the succession of followed up drills.
The chunk dap flat upon the bricked walls,
Round dung cakes stick like a babies nipple-ed mouth.
My hand never weighed the weight of the ink,
But got imprinted upon the dunged cake.
My breathe was cramped, eyes partake under the veiled sight.
My feet was trained to un-walk as the deed finished.
My touch was like a plagued monstrous being.
And felt life would be easy,
If was born a Shadow- less breeze.
The earthen stoves fired on,
By the chunks of dung cakes made by me.
My imprinted palm upon the dung cakes;
Crosses the border walls of upper caste,
Lands upon the bake stations and turns into flames.
I am a chambermaid, doomed to inevitable curses,
By my bloodlines dipped in drainage lanes.
Dung cakes, which wheels my needs;
Still my upper caste employers not ready,
To pour water to me in this scorching heat.
As I am at last an untouchable to be,
As heat can never beat the stigma upon my being.
As the upper caste employers, cast my work to deed,
Unlike my community which is known to be a Dalit!
Author – Sonali Gupta
Gumla, Jharkhand, India.
Twitter handle- https://twitter.com/_Sonali_Gupta__?t=YKEKdayvFw2N6M0QgJhWS
Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004868226417
https://theredpropellers1.bandcamp.com/track/back-in-the-stirrup
Love supreme
Love supreme
Cupid’s bow
Cupid’s bow
Keeps missing its target
John Coltrane
John Coltrane
Early November rain
Dog walkers out in numbers
Scooping up shit
Junkies on park benches
Awakening to no next hit
Pop garish billboards
Caesar an epileptic
Confident words managing
To blot bodily weaknesses
Limitations of talent
Constrained by ego
Blamed for infamy
Full on rage
Full on rage
Minimalist prepared piano
Sounding like the Ramones
Bemoans
Unwitting norms
Unwitting norms
Lonely security
Against emotional
Emotional storms
Dense fog
Hoovering over High Street
Orange of the bin men
Lights flashing
No sign of the sun
No sign of the moon
Find the treasure
There is to seek
Humiliation experienced
At an early age
A cage
Around the demeanour
Greener eyes behind
Expensive shades
A disguise
A denial
Conspiring
As if there is no tomorrow
Declining to borrow
A site safe sorrow
Haunted by the ghosts
Guilt and despair
Shiny new railings
A secret memorial
No flowers
Complacency granted
The boot goes
Back in the stirrup
For now
The boot goes
Back in the stirrup
For now
For now
Back in the stirrup
The boot it goes
The boot it goes
eighty eighty ninety years away
& William Burroughs is walking to school
the teacher’s trussed up like a monk
sporting tracts like a mortar-boarded fool
still in his gym kit and too young for junk
little Bill’s satchel is leaking rocket fuel
it’s not the world that’s cruel – it’s those that run it
you can raise a lone star flag but never outgun it
so little Bill taught himself to fire
he could hit an apple, a hard drive, a vein
he could infiltrate the minds of little green men
cut up their thoughts with a hot knife
& rearrange them so they came out sane
in the grey and yellow of New Mexico
everything was infected – even the morphine
the lower remove injected & so by the time
the invisible man was seen in Tangiers
all bets were off as to who’d be elected
& in the gulags staffed by gimps
children were crying ammonia tears
J Edgar Hoover ran a fifty year ship that never sank
his head poked unafraid from the turret of his tank
fed up with being sidelined George & Ringo formed a band
they called it Gringo & drew crotchets in the sand
making tunes under blue & strawberry moons
while Brian Jones drummed across the dunes
in Duke Street St James there’s a body floating
in the indoor pool – rumour goes the butler did it
just to make himself look cool
forty fifty ninety years away
the elite & the elated are crying out to be sedated
the words of rancid roosters never flew away
against the odds they’re coming true today
Julian Isaacs
Art Rupert Loydell
Steam Stock
Tracklist:
Ennio Morricone – The Strong
The Lovin’ Spoonful – Daydream
Topanga Canyon – In Love
Pixies – Ana
Eddie Kendricks – My People… Hold On
Fleetwood Mac – Tusk
Donald Byrd – Lansana’s Priestess
The Clash – Lost in the Supermarket
Fun Boy Three with Bananarama – T’aint What You do (It’s the Way that You do it)
Odetta – Midnight Special
Howlin’ Wolf – Little Red Rooster
Peanuts Taylor – Nassau Blues
The Teddy Bears – To Know Him is to Love Him
Les McCann and Eddie Harris – Compared to What
Stevie Wonder – Jesus Children of America
Shirley Bassey – Light My Fire
10 years ago the government criminalised squatting in residential property, taking away the ability to make use of empty property best designed for living.
This was done sneakily by adding it on to a bill already most of the way through parliament, and which was otherwise attacking legal aid and increasing punishments for the poor. Only the usual suspects objected.
Squatting has a long history in UK. Since the World Wars especially it has been a way for many people to house themselves affordably, but more importantly it was a part of a social movement over housing and space that used direct action (squatting, occupations, rent strikes etc.) the law and any other means to make housing fit for people rather than profit
By the end of the 1970s the movement seemed to have been successful, with people generally being able to house themselves through squatting, the increasing number of housing co-ops, council housing (including “hard to let” properties given to others when families refused them if they weren’t good enough, which was possible then), or could even afford to buy in those days. As well as housing, squatting had helped create spaces for artistic & political expression, parks, nurseries, food co-ops, social spaces with free entertainment and welcoming for women, queers, black people, etc. It wasn’t heaven, but things were going the right way and people were gaining the strength to fight for more.
When Thatcher came to power deliberately restored the domination of power and money, rather than human need, over housing and space. Starting with the sell-off (and underfunding) of council housing and the handing over of large areas of land to speculators and developers like London Docklands Development Corporation, they have got us back to a position where housing is primarily an investment and people come last.
In the last decades (whether under Tory or Labour rule) this approach has prevailed and private property & investment have been at the centre when shaping local policies on housing and urban space. It has translated into attacks on the alternative forms which people outside that logic and on low incomes find to house themselves. The criminalisation of travellers’ ways of living in the mid 90s or the recent restriction of boater’s mooring spaces in London are some examples. It has also been the perfect climate for models like guardianship companies to spring, by profiting both from owners who buy their “anti-squatting” service and from tenants who give up on rights out of need for slightly more affordable rents.
The ban on residential squatting was perhaps the biggest statement in such direction. It got supported by the speeding up of a trend already existing to make court & eviction processes cheaper and faster for the non criminalised squats, where free rein has been given increasingly to often violent cowboy security guards acting for bailiffs.
All of this hasn’t only affected squatters. Medium and low income renters from diverse backgrounds have over time been forced out of their communities to give way to gentrification processes in more and more neighbourhoods. Currently we are seeing massive increases in private rent in addition to the rising of all other costs of living that everyone is facing.
However, lots of people haven’t just been passive and miserable. Squatting in non-residential property is legal. Occupying residential property is legal if you’re there to protest rather than live there, or use it for social space etc. People have been making use of empty police stations, courts, offices, banks… Community centres, pubs, clubs, saunas … All sorts of interesting buildings! And have also held important protest occupations in housing estates, universities, etc. In the last decade, as well as in the 60s, otherwise empty buildings have become homes and also been used in diverse and creative ways, turning spaces into -often very joyful- expressions of defiance against a reality where money and power are to be in control of our existence.
Squatting still happens. Even if it does in a much smaller scale, it has a necessary role in the struggle and it is worth to rebuild our strength. People got together in the late 1960s to achieve that. Sure enough we face different challenges in different contexts, in relation to back then as well as in between our different situations and backgrounds. But housing precarity has an undeniable impact on the majority of people. Many of the renters who suffer it have also shown in recent years that they want to become stronger together (i.e. London Renters Union, Acorn, Housing Action for Southwark & Lambeth,…). Squatters have been side by side with tenants resisting their evictions, tenants have stood up in solidarity with squatters resisting theirs or when holding occupations.
The latest blow is the “Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Bill” that got passed this year, which further punishes travellers / people living in vehicles, plus a myriad other provisions that will restrict the way anyone behaves in the streets, including to show dissent. Loads of people opposed it in the lead up, through the huge amount of “Kill the Bill” initiatives and took it to the streets fiercely and fearless together.
Against the suffocation of our autonomous initiatives to fight squalor, which relies upon isolation between individuals, let’s remember that we are many and let’s act…
SQUAT THE LOT!
Reprinted from the website of the Advisory Service for Squatters, who offer legal & practical advice for squatters and other homeless people
Resources, handbook and links at Advisory Service for Squatters
http://squatter.org.uk/squatting-with-vehicles
I take longer now in supermarkets, squinting at the salt content of food for thought and the percentage of fat in the food of love. I accept that we need to eat the rich but when did maths displace morality as our primary concern? When did the figurative enter the realm of BOGOF and loss leaders? When did Keith, our Customer Experience Consultant, decide to place that stacked standee of tricksy treats exactly where our hands will always fall? I accept that unimportant details are eating into my time, and that the forbidden apple of my eye may rot my teeth, but there are warnings to be digested around every bottle and can, and there are plastic sacks full of fresh air and fresh starts teetering at the bagging area. There are children’s faces printed on every label, with illegible details and dead numbers. I long to eat but bones hook my tender skin like words hook my eyes. A spoonful of sugar dissolves in the ocean. I now long to take supermarkets to task for failure of disclosure. I long but don’t belong. We’ll eat again, Vera. Don’t be long.
Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
Along with Deadly the Roadie, John’s side-kick, Alan Dearling marvels in wonderment at the bonkers worlds of John Otway in his 70th year!
“Cor, baby, that’s Really, Really Free!”
Along with Wild Will Barrett, John arrived with a serious collection of jumps, rolls and bumps, feedback, screams and general mayhem, as he jumped up on, and fell off, Willy’s amp for ‘Cheryl’s going home’ on the stage of Old Grey Whistle Test show in 1977. But, that’s after an incendiary version of ‘Really Free’.
Essential, totally demented, rock history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6oQ4oRH_nc
John has always alarmed, astounded, amused and bemused his audience. Still does after over 5,000 performances.
He’s a showman, an old-style variety-show performer. A comic, a maverick and very funny too! It’s not just a show of his musical hits, it’s circus, he is part-acrobat, part magician and a superb story-teller to boot. Many of these tales are from his own life – a life of near-misses, disasters (almost all predictably waiting to happen; frequently of his own making). He lives in, and delights amidst his own autobiography, his life as ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Greatest Failure’, and his two hit records, twenty-five years apart.
‘Bunsen Burner’ with his wonderfully ramshackle version of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ as a B-side reached Number 9 in 2002, after a massive crowd-media campaign for this 50th birthday, culminating in his performance in front of 2,000 fans at the London Palladium – to hear the announcement of John’s new pop chart success! Here is: ‘House of the Rising Sun’ with much manic audience participation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BwOyVIlupg
John gives his all every show. 110 per cent. He lives for his fans and there are many. He is a man of gimmicks and publicity stunts galore. In recent years he has been working with Attila the Stockbroker, Dr Feelgood’s Wilko Johnson, Alexei Sayle, Pete Townshend, Jilted John, and, on occasions his old sparring-partner, Wild Willy Barrett as well as his many solo shows, where his technician, Deadly the Roadie, often steals many of the laughs, as the stooge to the self-loving superstar, Otway! Many of these tales appear in John’s two published autobiographies, 1990’s ‘Cor Baby, That’s Really Me!’ and from 2010, ‘Regrets, I’ve had a Few!’
But, seeing him live, ranting, laughing, having raucous fun, one suspects that his madcap humour has always suited him being an ‘outsider-icon’, a cult, rather than a more mainstream star. I mentally place him alongside, Arthur Brown, Tiny Tim, Viv Stanshall and Alex Harvey. But his fans really are devoted to him and their votes in the BBC poll of the 20th century’s favourite lyrics, meant that his song, ‘Beware of the Flowers’ put his lyrics into the BBC chart at Number 7, well above Bob Dylan or Paul Simon, who didn’t make it into the Top 10. And, 50 fans joined him on the epic flight and tour to Canada, flying over Niagara Falls.
And here he is in my own little video: ‘Bunsen Burner’ at the Golden Lion: https://vimeo.com/739368983
Plus, a final two more epic pics from the live show.
This river is the clouds’ heaven.
Those mountains are where they dwell,
and I saunter – all wet
as if an unknown grief
has airdropped their pamphlet
like confetti from a flying object.
My aunt, the one who
said that she should die first
ere her husband ceases to age,
and so she did, fell ahead,
scurries to pick up
the memories she laid on
the clothesline for the winter.
Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor
@amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet
Author Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/KushalTheWriter/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
Homeless photos moving north:
Heysham Head to Sandylands
Early sunlight across inconsequential house façades . . . somehow encapsulating the meaning of life – if you are in the right mood. Heysham, 9th Feb 2022
Though many may consider associative thinking a self-indulgence, those with a natural tendency to think and feel in such a way are likely to find ordinary avenues of thought, plodding and dull. Despite that many of the images and sensations offering transient radiance later reveal themselves hollow, without such calm (or febrile) excess, all hope could easily be lost in our increasingly fascist/materialist state (excess materialism being tantamount to fascism), where anyone with sense has no choice but to veer between escape and fierce (or resigned) involvement with the burgeoning quantity[i] of protest groups. The growth of protest is obviously positive, but will it lead to the “serious system change” so devoutly to be wished?[ii]
‘a rural headland with grave holes carved for disarticulated saints perhaps’[iii
Heysham Head, 9th Dec 2020
As well as being gruesomely utilised in Edmund Glasby’s Weird Shadow Over Morecambe [iv] the cut stone graves on Heysham Head[v] also appear on the cover of Black Sabbath’s best of compilation album of 2000[vi] . . . but don’t let the escapism of such cultural artifacts distract from the elemental power of the original stone – both symbolic and material/anti-material – in its dramatic setting.
St. Peter’s churchyard, Heysham Head, May 2018
The same location almost 60 years earlier, for the funeral of Billy Rice (Roger Livesey) in The Entertainer, (1960) filmed in September 1959
Anyone with sense is a forlorn phrase, since even when I’m feeling charitable it’s impossible not to be conscious that the number of people in this world with any abiding sense is very limited. Every morning just a glance at incoming emails emphasises this. This morning a breaking news story about Russian invaders shelling a massive power plant housing six nuclear reactors in Ukraine[vii]. The morning I was writing this, an update on seismic blasting off the Cumbrian coast[viii]. Here the stupidity of one set of supposedly educated scientific minions/morons, is being channelled in an effort to find a solution to the mess created by another set of supposedly educated scientific minions began a couple of generations ago with the opening of Calder Hall[ix] the world’s first “full-scale commercial nuclear power station”. What a first to be proud of!
Glebe Gardens, Heysham 29th June 2022: While resisting another anti-nuclear reference, it is with deep regret that I must report that Capt. James Bigglesworth, DSO., MC., familiarly known as ‘Biggles’, was shot down while flying an investigatory reconnaissance over Heysham’s “nuclear facility”. See my Notes for the hard evidence.[x]
Heysham Old Village, August 2019
Technological addiction, status anxiety, aspiration twisted by a botched educational system poisoned by constant testing and a lackadaisical attitude to gadgets . . . are just a few of the causes and indicators of our vanishing sense. As for politics, there may be a residual loyalty to the ideal of democracy, but little effort to attain any kind of example worthy of respect.
Two very friendly strangers who invited me into their house for a cup of tea, and we never even exchanged names. Heysham Old Village, August 2019
Vintage Bus Day, 22nd May 2022, Heysham Old Village
40 years ago, I wrote:
“Before real democracy can work (not the burnished byword for every compromise and caricature going), stupidity must be confined to minorities, and there is no clear way of doing this, since stupidity freely penetrates all levels of education and material wealth, class “intelligence” and opportunity . . .”[xi]
Since 1982, things have only got worse, and now that the human race has less than a decade to achieve some kind of path toward a wider survival, it’s either too late to be relevant or more relevant than ever.
Above Heysham Sands, 2nd April 2022
What specific relevance does any of this have to Morecambe and Heysham? Lancashire may be the seventh poorest area in Northern Europe[xii] and Morecambe not the worst of it – but is stupidity any more common here than it is in wealthy Windermere[xiii] or luxurious Lytham St Anne’s[xiv]. Systemic poverty may be at its worst in Blackburn with Darwen[xv], but I would be prepared to bet that its inhabitants are probably less selfish than average. If both selfishness and unselfishness could be argued from different viewpoints as being sensible, surely unselfishness is a better kind of sense?
Towards Twemlow Parade, Heysham July 2020
Taken in 1945 from below Strawberry Gardens[xvi] looking out over the bay, this house (Bay Cottages on the 1919 map) was where the kids play park – just visible in the 2020 colour shot, above – is now.
The advantage of the hermit or the other-worldly dweller in rural isolation is that it’s easier to forget just how inadvertently (I’m being charitable again) stupid all too many people are; easier to ignore the self-destructive bent of the human race. Now that we live in a town, we can’t escape the constant examples of stupidity – individual and corporate, alternative and official – which appear every time you glance around. But even in moments of anger or despair, I wouldn’t make the mistake of permanently ascribing this stupidity to any particular place. It is simply endemic.
Towards Heysham old village, August 2019
In Heysham and Morecambe – in my experience – kindness and consideration occur just as often as stupidity, so it’s a shame that such virtues and flaws can so happily co-exist within the same human frames. Yet perhaps what we are suffering from is less curable than stupidity – inadvertent or not? Perhaps we are succumbing to a form of mass insanity?
Tarnbrook, Heysham, half a mile inland, 6th March 2022
Talk of mass insanity (struggling towards a lighter note) was intended at this point to usher in the Morecambe and Heysham seagulls (or “shitehawks” as a local name has them). Instead, I’ll save that focus for part seven, where it will feel more in parallel with the images of slightly inland streets. Streets watched over by the more malevolent Janus face – that grin which disdains the spacious, cheerful façade of the promenade and the clear openness of the sands or sea’s surface.
Seaside Cul-de-sac, Heysham, 9th February 2022
Ever since I encountered the legend Cul-de-sac in small letters on a road sign as a kid, I’ve been an admirer of the phrase, (ignoring its Latin – via French – origin[xvii]). At the time – circa 1971 – I was going out on a limb, following the requirements of a paper-round which extended into a posher part of Aylesbury. By contrast the phrase Dead End can be unnecessarily brutal. Meanwhile, perhaps the standard/classic highway code sign for No Through Road – the T with a red bar forming the horizontal – is a variety of compromise? I’d prefer to view my life as a cul-de-sac or no through road rather than a dead end – though not in the whimper versus bang sense. More in the mysterious sense that there could be an escape route or alleyway that continues – if you are not prisoned in a car. That beyond the gardens behind the houses, there are fields and moors, the sky and the sea . . .
High Tide, Heysham Sands, 22nd March 2022
I’ll resist applying the symbolism of dead ends, whimpers, bangs, or rising tides, to our more general human fate – nearing extinction, climate change and so forth.
Memory might escape, recede,
not care for exactness,
but essence remains certain
and through your eyes I trace the constellations
to watch the tide, flooding the rockpools.[xviii]
Twemlow Parade again, ideal hideout for Buchan’s master spies[xix] 19th February 2022
Retirement – an idea which really appealed to me only when I was a young child on sunny days ruined by school – is obviously friendlier when seen as a cul-de-sac as opposed to a dead end. Back when I was a child, at first, the older people I knew, just seemed further on in a good way, not frail or dependent or ill. Possibly they were wiser or calmer . . . but mostly I envied their time (so I supposed) for hobbies – for modelling or reading or their small gardens of flowers, for their self-containment. Even then I must have been ‘desperate to avoid the pointless, noisy world / Our illusion of stupid facts’[xx]
From Twemlow Parade, 19th February 2022
As possible retirement locations go, Twemlow Parade covers an extreme spectrum: from visionary suburbia to elemental edge depending entirely on the weather. Not that I can see myself retired: I won’t ever have the money or the time for that . . . but even if I had the opportunity, it was never in my nature. Quite a few of my old friends seem to be retired or retiring these days, and I hope they make the most of it. But retirement now isn’t like it was. Is that old sort of retirement in anyone’s nature any longer – I mean the deckchair in the garden, the allotment, and the pipe? We all have this ridiculous aspirational determination or peer pressure to live the dream – and there’s nothing wrong with a non-material version of this inside your head – as I’m always preaching. But the poison towards the ideal of consumption begins young when disadvantaged primary age kids in disadvantaged schools[xxi], can be tutored parrot fashion by cheerleading teachers to recite: “My life! My choice!” when most of them will never have any valid choice, and life is already being sucked from them by deprivation and technology.
Almost Sandylands, Aug 2019
So, what is an acceptable form of living the dream in a world with rapidly diminishing resources, in which before long, few of us will have any pleasant choices? Forget the cobbler’s awls[xxii] (balls) of offsetting destruction by planting trees. Plant the trees by all means, always a good thing, but Carbon Zero is what is needed. We just have to STOP doing certain things. No flights at all for anyone. Severely restricted car use – to put off the day when all our cars, like old phone boxes, will just be decorative greenhouses in the street, or book-swap stations. We need to stop wasting food and seriously reduce our expectation of power for any facile whim. Learn how to use tools as tools and not be used by them. Stop wasting water and so on, ad infinitum (sorry, but we’ll all have to realise it in the end or die[xxiii]). Here, most of the old political parties are not changing fast enough, they are all as materialist as each other. We need austerity – but austerity especially for the rich, not the poor paying for everyone else’s greed. Another thing I wrote 40 years ago to no avail:
“The one line continues: Extreme materialism for a few, or materialism spread more evenly. A more comfortable cell. Econo-politics is just a line, why must everything be seen from that line?”[xxiv]
What we need more than anything else is the life of the mind, a non-consuming appreciation of the world around us, the light, our huge store house of art, literature, music, and film from around the world. Some of the best of this still struggles on, if only as a largely ignored underground stream. By comparison with this past and its present, much contemporary culture is a poverty and a corruption.
Decapitated house, Oxcliffe Road, Heysham, 6th March 2022
Changing tack: several unusual states of mind can be triggered simply by extraordinary light – low-angled or unnaturally strong, colour-tinged or fading to dusk . . . One such state could be described as the floating observer, a state not overly connected to the nuisance of material existence, i.e., a state that forgets having a body. This disregard of physical facts can be a danger when the fascination of certain places takes precedence. It would be easy to be runover or fall off a cliff[xxv].
Heysham Road, 17th May 2022
Another strange presentiment I often get, is that I’ve walked into a novel – either one that exists before or after my visit, or one I may have to write . . . with memory, notes and photos as reference or ignition points. “All I can see is the frame . . . I’m going inside to look at the picture”[xxvi]
Morning arch, Heysham Road, 17th May 2022
Both these states of mind share the tendency to insinuate meaning where there probably is none. Or to look at it more optimistically, from both of them, the sense of a better world can begin to emerge. Hence, for me a few days back (now a few months), the Heysham Road was briefly transmogrified.
Heysham Road, 17th May 2022
Never uninteresting in atmosphere – suggestive at times of unregarded areas of Bournemouth or Plymouth – a sense of the sea is always in the air on the Heysham Road. Even though the sea can only be glimpsed between buildings at two or three points, past The Battery[xxvii] as the road heads south away from Morecambe, its presence persists. From the top deck of a bus, between residential streets climbing the crest of land intervening, the occasional prospects of ocean increase.
Twemlow Parade and the sea from Royds Grove which rises from the Heysham Road, 17th May 2022
Being on the route to the children’s school, (one life, no choice), I must have viewed the road in different weathers a hundred times since we moved last year. Fortunately, since my first visit riding on a vintage double decker bus back in 2018, it has always appealed to me. Something about its atmosphere is notably conducive in a passing-suburbia manner to time-travel . . . It is easy to imagine it in different periods, especially perhaps when it was first built, a Victorian or Edwardian outlier[xxviii]: bigger gaps between houses, fields behind, a quiet dusty track with occasional horse-drawn vehicles . . .
Leafy withdrawal, Heysham Road, 17th May 2022
So it was that on May the 17th, for twenty minutes or so the road was heightened out of time altogether. Pausing on the return from school in bright early light, the rush hour was subsiding and seen optimistically, a better world began to breathe through the everyday fabric. I knew it would be transitory, but I didn’t let that put me off . . . I went into it.
Lobelia Lodge, Heysham Road, 17th May 2022
As the human activity of “getting and spending”[xxix], of life contained by the digital isolation of some or other gadget feigning connection, faded away, the buildings became homes with long reaching lives, projecting a multitude of hopes and aspirations not dependant even on the materialism of social distraction. Rather than a series of random buildings strung together by traffic noise and a vividly irritating sense of the largely purposeless routine of our daily activities, everything was focussed and made sense . . .
Souvenir of France (V.R. 1898) 17th May 2022
The Duke de Richelieu’s modest Heysham hideaway perhaps?
If that blur of dreams, which without confusion or conflict briefly filled the air, is beyond the human condition, at least its recurring essence makes life bearable for me. But the road grew loud again, and it was time to go.
Ruefully, as I travelled away, a line quoted or coined[xxx] by the writers of Fargo[xxxi] “You’ll know the Angels when they come because they’ll have the faces of your children” came to mind, though I seriously doubt such beings (should they exist) would any longer bother to appear for us. Weariness and cynicism, greed or hubris – even if so many of our mistakes are inadvertent, we are probably too far gone.
Tea for Two, Sandylands, Aug 2019
If conflict and longing are clearly the more perennial sources of art, do they also inescapably underlie the basis of material life itself? Love, life, and hope may need their contrasts and therefore the negative cannot be banished, but are all positive ideals, qualities born in the heart which can only live on in the mind?
a universal hope, a dawn which never breaks.
Shuttered, exhaling,
desperate to avoid the pointless, noisy world,
Our illusion of stupid facts[xxxii].
Health & Safety, Aug 2019
As yet another coda to the nuclear mess Heysham and Morecambe are blighted by, see the Heysham Power Stations emergency plan, a pdf[xxxiii]. With a cover not unlike a variant of the notorious Protect & Survive leaflet from the campaign of the same name[xxxiv], this is filled with chilling details. The one below is taken from page 5:
“Stable iodine tablets have been issued to occupiers of all premises within the area surrounding the power stations site.
The tablets act by “topping up” the thyroid gland with stable (nonradioactive) iodine in order to prevent it from accumulating any radioactive iodine that may be released to the environment.
If moving house please leave the stable iodine tablets in place at the property for future householders.
Additional stocks of stable iodine tablets are available to be issued following an emergency.”
I wonder how many householders still have stocks of this “stable (nonradioactive) iodine” – and is it issued to holidaymakers staying at Ocean Edge Caravan Park or other numerous locations within the dangerous radius of Heysham 1 and 2?
The looming mass of Heysham 1, nuclear threat beyond Heysham Head (which conceals Heysham 2) 10th August 2021
Warm sands and a glittering sea are perhaps the perfect camouflage for one of our more unfortunate realities. Realities which – like space exploration – a couple of generations were primed to see by teachers, scientists, television, and the like, as exciting rather than misguided, risky, or exorbitantly wasteful. Even the world of Ladybird[xxxv] (long before its mutation into self-spoof[xxxvi]) followed suit by prematurely featuring Atomic Energy on the last page of its Great Inventions title[xxxvii]. Weren’t they aware of the Windscale fire?[xxxviii] – “the worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom’s history, and one of the worst in the world, ranked in severity at level 5 out of a possible 7”. A disaster which occurred only three or four years before the book’s publication. Or was this final page of a Ladybird ‘Achievements’ book, a classic case of hope over experience? Throwing caution to the wind for the sake of a dangerous, hubristic fashion . . .
Sandylands, looking across the bay towards the lake district, 6th March 2022
Trying to find an even keel, in Morecambe and Heysham anyone can always turn to embrace the northern prospect across the bay towards the mountains and lakes. And if that only serves as a beginning, there is always the retreat into personal (or fictional) love stories – no matter whether or not they can ever be solved.
Inconsequential coda, 26th August 2019
But is the enigma, the impossibility,
inevitable?
Never to forget this time or moment in space . . .
The wind in the trees, the grass overwhelming
To scorn the divided path.[xxxix]
© Lawrence Freiesleben
Cumbria and Morecambe, May-August 2022 (delayed by the jubilee)
NOTES All notes accessed between April and August 2022
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_in_the_United_Kingdom
[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/24/climate-sceptics-protest-emergency-activists
[iii] Ibid., Bombed Out
[iv] See parts 1 & 2 of this digression:
https://internationaltimes.it/in-her-kingdom-by-the-sea-visionary-seaside-suburbia-part-1/
https://internationaltimes.it/in-her-kingdom-by-the-sea-part-2/
See also: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/g/edmund-glasby/weird-shadow-over-morecambe.htm
[v] https://flickeringlamps.com/2016/04/30/the-ancient-rock-cut-tombs-by-the-lancashire-coast/
[vi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_of_Black_Sabbath
[vii] https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/un_ban_attacks_loc/?
[viii] https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/legal-challenge-stop-seismic-blasting-irish-sea/
See also: morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/seismic-blasting-irish-sea-nuclear-waste-dump-will-be-devastating-marine-life
[ix] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calder_Hall_Nuclear_power_station
[x] Biggles’ Sopwith Camel – crash landed in the Glebe Gardens, Heysham Old Village, 29th June 2022
[xi] From The Bow. In the revised edition, Stride Press, 2000, (ISBN-10: 1900152657) the section comes on page 28 (Chapter 6). In the original version of 1983, though the meaning remains the same, the sentence is slightly longer and occurs on page 22 of Chapter 5.
[xii] https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/16683945.lancashire-one-poorest-places-europe/
[xiii] https://www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk/news/19115123.10-expensive-areas-streets-cumbria/
[xiv] https://www.lancs.live/news/property/lancashires-most-expensive-streets-15553323
[xv] One of the most deprived areas of Lancashire: https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/19880251.east-lancs-deprived-areas-cost-living-soars/
In another one of those strange coincidences, I had only registered Darwen a few days before discovering this link. Watching the dubious Norman Wisdom vehicle There Was a Crooked Man, (1960), with my youngest daughters, Darwen was the background location used.
[xvi] http://www.heyshamheritage.org.uk/html/strawberry_gardens.html
[xvii] https://www.etymonline.com/word/cul-de-sac literally “Bottom of a sack”.
[xviii] From Hound Tor (also known as Subtle Anniversary) of July 2022
[xix] See: https://internationaltimes.it/in-her-kingdom-by-the-sea-part-2/
[xx] Ibid., Hound Tor, July 2022
[xxi] As has been happening to my two youngest daughters at school.
[xxii] Cockney rhyming slang for “balls”.
[xxiii] Here I wanted to reference the Auden/Orwell argument over Auden’s Spain https://orwellsociety.com/beyond-the-nancy-poet-jibe-orwell-and-auden/
before realising that the line I was thinking of, ‘We must love one another or die’ came from Auden’s September 1st, 1939, and the argument was one Auden had had with himself. See: https://reasonandmeaning.com/2014/05/22/w-h-audens-we-must-love-one-another-or-die/
[xxiv] From The Bow. In the revised edition, Stride Press, 2000, (ISBN-10: 1900152657) the section, unchanged from 1982/3, comes on page 20 (Chapter 3).
[xxv] As perhaps happened to Humphrey Jennings? See: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/jan/01/1
[xxvi] A line from that greatest of all Noirs Out of the Past – released like The Ghost and Mrs Muir in 1947: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039689/
[xxvii] https://thebatterymorecambe.co.uk/
[xxviii] Barely even that. A 1919 map shows very little on the Heysham Road. The main development of this section must have been between the 20s and the 50s – merely numbered periods without royal assent.
[xxix] From Wordsworth’s The World Is Too Much With Us: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us
[xxx] The line sounds biblical/mythological, but internet references only cite season 2 of Fargo, episode 10, Palindrome. An unusual entertainment of mayhem and violence, Fargo (the series) is barbed with the odd challenging thought and occasionally deploys quotations in a way which revives their uncanny power – such as Mike Milligan (unforgettably portrayed by Bokeem Woodbine) using Lewis Carroll’s Jaberwocky: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky (Episode 6, season 2)
[xxxi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fargo_(TV_series) : “created and primarily written by Noah Hawley”
[xxxii] Ibid., Hound Tor, July 2022
[xxxiii] file:///C:/Users/Commander%20Languid/Downloads/heysham_emergency_plan%20(1).pdf
[xxxiv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_Survive
[xxxv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_Books
[xxxvi] A self-published spoof by Miriam Elia (2014) preceded the official series, until Penguin Random House’s legal department “snapped into action”. After which they nicked the idea and ran with it . . . https://publishingperspectives.com/2016/01/curious-case-uk-popular-ladybird-book-parody/#
[xxxvii] https://www.wob.com/en-gb/books/richard-bowood/great-inventions/9780721401324?gclid=CjwKCAjwi8iXBhBeEiwAKbUoffKa_5YSwPwmgs99ov8UQC9MSVtuTk35sCGinfGapUCRc3HcPhvRbRoCfSgQAvD_BwE#
[xxxviii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
[xxxix] Ibid., Hound Tor, July 2022
(i.m. James Wilson /1975-2006)
Hardened into the habitude
of self-discipline; internal
rhyme, assonance, ambiguity
having become a sixth sense.
What cafe-bars can contain
their leathery, comfortably-
at-home carapaces? Hardly
Parisian when the provinces
harbour these inner-emigrés
like outposts of civilisation.
Martello towers who beat
out faddish, jejune armadas;
solitary volcanoes who, having
erupted in youth, now exude
more tranquilly into the middle-
period with a regained hilaritas.
Indifferent to the yapping Zeit-
geist, they dig into life-giving
soil, fructify tradition with a
seasoned zest. Now solidifying
their techne with the engraver’s
patience, they wield biros with
a burin-deftness. Notebooks are
their lexicons-in-flux, a perpetual
re-routing of the Quest.
Painting by Marc Chagall ‘Mazin, the Poet’
Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), The Angel of History (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two, as well as a tragi-comedy, Arden. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review, Rasputin and Le Zaporogue.
Subterminal, Cindytalk (CD, False Walls)
Houses of the Wind, John Luther Adams (CD, Cold Blue Music)
Cindytalk was originally a noisy post-punk band, who from 1984 spent a decade releasing surprising albums that followed their own sonic interests without hesitation or compromise. There were quiet, almost ambient, albums, improvised music, tinges of industrial and electronica, sometimes written as film soundtracks, sometimes with links to specific visual art images.
After 1995, Cindytalk wasn’t always a group, instead it was front-person Cinder as a constant nucleus with others in orbit around them as and when required. There were improvised performances and a focus on collaboration and electronics. Subterminal continues with that trajectory, following Cinder’s return to Glasgow, where the band started out from all those decades ago.
False Walls are based in Kent, but CJ Mitchell, who runs the label, lived in Glasgow for many years, and was in contact with Cinder back then. The label had a previous life in Chicago in the early 2000s, but has now reincarnated, with digital reissues and a catholic selection of forthcoming titles, including a box set of live Anrew Poppy recordings, and new music from Evan Parker and Henry Dagg.
The title of my review comes from a quote by Cinder on the press release. Don’t let the word ‘noise’ put you off though: this is a dense, quiet, compressed album of sound, carefully assembled from field recordings, treatments and re-workings of music created during the process of recording a previous album.
Each of the four tracks is long enough to allow the listener to be sucked into the abstract landscapes which are evocatively conjured up here. Sound is sustained, drifting through changes of texture and dynamics, other noises echo and fade, interrupt and disrupt, feedback starts up then immediately ceases.
It is disturbing, intriguing stuff, music to drift and dream in. There are few points of reference: only Mick Harris’ albums as Lull on the Sentrax label, and Peter Hammill’s ‘Magog (In Bromine Chambers)’, from the In Camera album, come to mind. Perhaps the art is a better touchstone: the glitched and treated images by artist Paul Tone create organic cyberscapes, seductive digital patterns and forms.
Cindytalk are pushing the boundaries of what music can be, reinventing and pursuing sonic possibilities, combining the actuality of the world with the imaginary and hallucinatory to create a magical, intriguing four-part work.
John Luther Adams also challenges traditional composition and classical expectations with his work, which is often long and abstract, rooted in American landscapes, particularly Alaska where he lived for many years before moving to New York City.
For many years he too (like Cinder) has made field recordings of nature at work – he specifically mentions fire, ice, thunder and the creak of glaciers – but also aeolian harps, wind-played instruments out in the open, producing constantly shifting tones and drones. His new album Houses of the Wind, is constructed from a ten minute recording of one of those harps, composed (or assembled) in the studio.
It is a much more static and less dynamic music than Cindytalk’s, perhaps more easily placed within a tradition of drone-works such as those made by Alan Lamb and Jon Rose, and ambient music as articulated by Eno, where music must be as ignorable as it is listenable. You could also play join-the-dots to Adams’ Cold Blue labelmate Chas Smith who creates and plays his own instruments, and of course to Adams’ own extensive discography.
This musical house contains five different winds, five different moods, five 10.5 minute tracks, each of which ebbs and flows, swirling around the room into your head and mind. It is a calming, windswept music that gently blows worries and discontent into the distance like unwanted sand or snow, yet enlivens rather than dulls. It will be interesting to see if Adams incorporates this way of working into future music, and is always interesting to see musicians from different genres working in similar ways.
Rupert Loydell
5th Anarchist / Radical Bookfair
Saturday, September 3, 2022
11AM – 5PM
The 1 in 12 Club Bradford
21-23 Albion St., Bradford, UK
We are pleased to announce that the 5th annual Anarchist and Radical bookfair is planned for the 3rd September 2022. There will be stalls and hopefully some other events, talks poetry and discussions.
If you would like a stall please get in touch, we expect to charge £10 per stall for this one with all proceeds going towards the 1 in 12 Club!
Although tbc we have the following stalls lines up:
WYACG
PM Press/AK/Active Distribution
0161 Festival
Pirate Press
Cubesville
Forged Books
We hope that we will be joined by Solidarity Federation, No Sweat/Punk Ethics and Tyneside Anarchist Archive.
As usual we will have some poetry from Luke Tatty Hoggarth amongst others.
If you want to put on a “event” such as a talk etc please get in touch.
https://m.facebook.com/events/334123405170705/
The Traces. An Essay, Miread Small Staid (194pp, Deep Vellum/A Strange Object)
Miread Small Staid’s book is the kind of writing the term ‘Creative Non-Fiction’ was invented for. It is a travelogue, a memoir, a romance, critical literary exposition, art history, and a quest, all in one. It meanders, branches, follows its own diversions, conversing amiably with the reader as it reflects on time, memory and place, looking for and considering the nature of that most elusive of human conditions, happiness.
Staid’s book is ostensibly about a period of time spent studying in Florence, her friends there (one, Z, who she lusts after, flirts with and eventually beds), Italian art, architecture and culture, and trips from there to elsewhere in Europe, Venice and Paris included. It is also a commentary on Renaissance painting, and books, especially Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the novel where Marco Polo invents or describes cities that turn out to be variations on Venice itself. Sappho, Anne Carson, Montaigne, Michelangelo, Cesare Pavese, Alain de Botton, Carlo Rovelli, Lyn Hejinian, and a host of others are also referenced, as is another book of Calvino’s, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
This isn’t an academic treatise though, it’s a personal consideration of how physical distance and memory allow revision, nostalgia and reflection, which is one of the ways happiness arrives. Staid is aware of how happiness is often experienced in the past, not in the moment; and this fascinates her, even as she openly undercuts her own narrative by revealing her European travels happened a decade ago. She understands we are getting a mediated and self-edited version of her idyllic summer and love affair, not to mention a version now underpinned and annotated by philosophy and art history.
To be fair, the art history seems to be mostly contemporaneous to the trip, and often includes her art lecturer’s comments, and she also appears to have been engaged with some of the books she uses at the time, as well as her notebooks and journal. Despite all this, The Traces remains what Kubla Khan, in Invisible Cities, calls ‘a journey through memory’ – a quote Staid uses in her discussion, briefly before highlighting another pertinent statement from the same book: ‘[A]ny totality that is not potential, speculative, or plural is no longer thinkable.’
Invisible Cities is full of descriptions of the same city from different points of view, different understandings of function, different focal points and ideals, something the emperor of the book and the reader only come to realise as the book proceeds. Staid has written her book in the full knowledge that she is only telling one story, or a number of stories as she interprets her friendships, her learning, her reading, travels and desire, through the lenses of time and other texts. She is constantly ‘gesturing towards some unknown’, suggesting that ‘[w]e hold so many different selves within’ but that she still wants more.
So, this is a book of possible stories told by only one, or a few, possible selves. It knowingly grapples with layers of possible, selective and selected narratives, filtered through experience and desperate to define and pin down happiness. It takes a long time for the author of this book to realise happiness is elusive: ‘[e]very time I set out, I end up back where I began’, she closes a focussed discussion of happiness towards the end of the book. ‘This written account […] can never be equivalent to the lived experience nor even the lesser recollection, but it can make up for its deficiencies in other ways: art, insight, a belated and lasting surprise’, she notes earlier, although this book is not deficient in any way.
It is the written equivalent of those magicians who reveal how the trick they have just performed is done: the illusion is still just as amazing even if we have been shown the mechanics of it all. The Traces tells and deconstructs a complex story of one person’s happiness, woven from all sorts of creative material. It is one of the most inventive essays and best books I have ever read. In part of her discussion of how we long for ‘elsewhere and elswhen’, Staid poses the question ‘[i]s this an answer or a question?’, answering herself a few lines later: ‘Like a long glance, like a kiss, they ask and answer all at once.’ In a similar manner, this wonderful book offers both questions and answers, prompting us to think and enquire for ourselves.
Rupert Loydell
sitting in school watching the breeze move along the bushes
I see it: the universe reaching out –
reaching out as if one of those uncanny days
when the sun & moon occupy the same sky
or the silent red evening when swallows scythe to feel the breeze in the
cutting of the air –
unseen, she drops tender light inside a raindrop,
spectrum trapped, a world sliding down purple bell of foxglove –
I see her song of moments in memories too:
the pale young-lady wrists of my grandmother peeling potatoes
in cool sinkwater –
oh, sweet universe, you’ve spread across the long dawn of forever as thin waves of creation, have become in us
a child helping his father read,
guerrilla poets dropping free verse at graffiti bus stops in the rain,
even an old lady up late in moonlit Frome writing to Israel for the
Palestinians –
the leap of the whale, fall of a star
ghost of Segovia ringing thru a guitar
explosion of bloom, the multitude of green,
these songs sing wherein universe declares herself –
does so each night under eyes that are closed, gifts us the innate meditate –
we sleep illuminated in the black, in the space between the stars,
breathe soft without knowing
as she breathes thru us cosmos w/graceful touch her waves of nothing –
empties waiting minds that practice the endless from whence we came & go
so that we might ourselves dream instead perhaps hymns of moment,
such as these –
Karlsotheunhappy
Picture Nick Victor
a nobody & Beat Poet Laureate (England) 2022-23
Moved by A.C. Evans ‘beyond writing’ piece, by way of hoping to counterbalance the view, it’s with pleasure I offer the attached (formatted layout, below, plain text) for consideration as submission to the greatest countercultural publication of our time…all times…?
Flattery probably get me nowhere (knowhere?), but I found love at Sid Rawles’ Forest Fayre here in the Dean in 1992, and have the marks to prove it. Now writing Beat-dharma self reflections and wandering into vipassana, falling down the other side of 50; so please let me know if you accept the following.
Either way, all the best & keep up the good work.
Alan Dearling shares with us snippets from a couple of hours with Beans on Toast, aka, Jay McAllister (pictured on the right with Tensheds, on left).
During his main set, Beans on Toast described Tensheds as ‘Matt Magic Fingers’. It’s not a bad description. A very, very skilful pianist and a breathy, throaty singer with more than a little Tom Waits about him. Tensheds (aka, Matt Millership) told the packed audience that he was the ‘warm-up’ for Beans on Toast – and he kept the eager, sold-out crowd pretty much captivated with his fab piano-tinkling and tickling. He returned to accompany Jay/Beans on Toast during parts of his set.
Tensheds with a (extremely) little punk palace vid: https://www.facebook.com/Tensheds/videos
‘Ticking clocks’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS7Txd11iwg
‘Hell is in the water’ from Tensheds’ latest album release, ‘The Days of the My Confinement’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5woSFIiJ0TA
In his live set, Tensheds explained that he normally avoided long introductions, but that his song about ‘The Bridge’, needed some ‘back-story’. Harrowing details of the mostly young people who have arrived at the North Bridge in Halifax to ‘end their days’. A hush fell across the room, as the song was delivered.
Now we know why there are often flowers on the bridge. Here is the song. Haunting…’The Bridge Song’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWsDC1PebOU
Tensheds is a beautiful pianist, a charismatic chameleon. Part punk, part classical concert maestro. Intense and often quite dark and melancholic…
Beans on Toast on the web: https://beansontoastmusic.com/
As he told us during the intro to a heaving, banging, intimate, pub gig at Todmorden’s Golden Lion, Beans On Toast is the stage name used by Jay McAllister, who hails originally from Braintree, Essex, England. He is a cheerful, loveable, laddish character. He grew out of the modern UK folk scene in 2005. And hit the big festival stages…running, jumping, singing. But he’s naughty and edgy. His songs often feature topics of politics, drugs and love. As Beans On Toast he has released twelve studio albums, traditionally releasing a new record each year on 1 December, Jay McAllister’s birthday.
It’s mostly cheerful, jangly folk. It grabs your attention, makes you smile and sing-along, ‘Human Contact’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tiq50_pXpWk
And, ‘A Beautiful Place’ – ‘Survival of the Friendliest’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l116g3agY-g
‘MDMAmazing’: But, hey, this is his Big Hit! Pretty much what it says in the title. About half the audience was (loudly)singing along. Wowzer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGJxxEr1aCM
Liquid Acid, indeed…
From Wikipedia: Jay McAllister we learn that, he “…was born on 1 December 1980. He began his career as the vocalist of alternative rock band Jellicoe, embarking on a solo career in 2005 following the band’s split.
Beans On Toast has performed at the Glastonbury Festival every year since 2007. He supported Kate Nash at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2008, before releasing his debut 50-track double album Standing On A Chair in 2009. Produced by Ben Lovett of Mumford & Sons, it featured guest vocals by Emmy The Great, Frank Turner and members of The Holloways, amongst others.”
Beans On Toast performed to a crowd of over 100,000 in one week while opening Frank Turner’s UK stadium tour. And back in 2014, he embarked upon his first American tour, playing headline shows as well as several dates with Irish-American punk band Flogging Molly. Since then he has toured extensively in the UK and US, as well as in the Netherlands, Germany, and South America. He told us that this pub gig is just about his first in 2022, wedged in between back-to-back festival appearances this summer.
He has a huge charisma. He is a born raconteur. Great voice. Strange phrasings as a wordsmith, and immediate rapport with each and every individual in the crowd. He told us of his recent musical education from his four and a half year old daughter, dancing and singing with her to ‘The Album of the Day’, whether it is from Dolly Parton, Beatles, Paul Simon, The Pogues or Bob Marley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHRWrsZYHDc
He is a natural-born charmer. “How much does it cost to live a good life?” He asked. He told us that his friend now gets paid more to pull pints at The Fountain pub in Whitstable than she did working as a teaching assistant. The message from Beans of Toast is that we are not facing a cost of living crisis…we simply need the rich to have money taken away from them and for it to be shared out more equitably. But, amidst the political bits, Beans on Toast exudes humanity, humour, fun, humility and irreverent mistakes! “Propping up the bar with a couple of pints, who is going to send me home?”
In 2018 he published his first book ‘Drunk Folk Stories’, a collection of ten, short, true-life stories about songwriting, travelling and drinking.
His 12th studio album is entitled, ‘Survival of the Friendliest’. His ever-growing entourage around the world would go along with that title!
Do you like writing poetry? Fine!
Poetry is just so easy these days – its blank verse for the blank generation, a freestyle free-for- all – yes it’s the only way.
All forms, from the fractured remnants of archaic stanzas to the modish Modernism of open field, process and beyond, are available to the auteur.
Pick-and-mix as you like! But reject ever more sharply the vainglorious folie de grandeur of epic high seriousness. Instead, embrace the cardinal virtues – and what are they? Convulsive beauty, automatism, objective chance (phrases taken at random from a top hat, or the mass media), black humour (nothing is sacred), mad love (the amatory mode always appeals) and – no offence! – Total, absolute, freedom of expression.
Oppose the literary ideologies of the last four decades, put yourself on a collision course with ‘theory’, pour scorn on the fashionable nonsense of radical chic linguistic obsessions – it is hardly surprising, you might say, that the chattering classes of academia are fixated on language.
We all know that the best work is always off the radar.
So, what’s it all about?
As always, the answer is Style.
A.C.Evans
The cacophony lures the crowd
The hands jarring for a halt
The jolted tongues dives in.
The fledgling words,
Shackled to graves.
Well let me dive into the crust of mine,
And pump out the blood of revolt.
The bull’s leg is chained at last
And wrest’s down the dust,
With breath of pride,
Which denied to rust!
The dust face and heavy breath,
Of wrecked leg sublime.
The owl’s of modest soul,
The priest of darken sights
Moulds it’s wings and fly at the back;
And the bull of labour be born to being.
My fallen tongue still has it’s strings.
Killing of the croaking frog,
Won’t silent my being!
Author – Sonali Gupta
Gumla, Jharkhand, India.
Twitter handle- https://twitter.com/_Sonali_Gupta__?t=YKEKdayvFw2N6M0QgJhWS
Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004868226417
Announcing the 5th annual Halifax Anarchist Bookfair. Taking place on Saturday, September 3rd.
We are at a breaking point. Thread by thread our global economic system is unravelling before our eyes as we dance on the precipice of all the converging and cascading crises of these turbulent times. From pandemic to war, inflation to crumbling supply chains, ecological breakdown to housing scarcity: we are feeling the crushing weight of capitalism more than ever.
The roots of these crises lie within the construct of authority itself. Anarchism helps us to understand the roots of these systems of power, to widen the cracks in their foundation, articulate our desires for self-determination, and dream of a world where all are free.
The Halifax Anarchist Bookfair exists to create space where strangers and friends can gather from all walks of life to discuss, question, and learn how we can fulfill the needs of our communities without coercion. To gather is to remind ourselves that we are capable of joy even in struggle, that our strength and bravery in the face of state violence are worthy of celebration.
The bookfair will feature publishers, book distributors, vendors, artists, and facilitators from across Turtle Island, including workshops, discussions, stories, parties, and kids’ activities. Join us as we share our love, grief, and rage, and build toward the liberation of all people. All anarchists, book lovers, and curious souls are welcome!
To sign up for updates (like the location announcement), sign up for our mailing list here: https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/habookfair
Drawing on Previous Learning by Mike Ferguson (Wrecking Ball Press)
I have known Mike Ferguson as a friend and colleague for years, and have admired the clarity and integrity of his thinking about education in general and English education in particular. His occasional blog rants and regular Xmas Stocking Filler pamphlets have been a welcome blast against fatuous and bigoted Tory views of education, small bright beacons in an increasingly bleak landscape of politicised interference in the potential magic of English in the classroom. Those beacons draw their energy from a lifetime’s immersion in the craft of English teaching, and in experience as an examiner in various versions of GCSE over the years.
Mike has put together a collection that celebrates and scathes, with honours and horrors put on the page in poems, prose poems and monologues. Many of these skewer the way in which the cultural capitalist model of curriculum and assessment has increasingly rewarded the labelling of devices as a substitute for real engagement with thought and feeling in literature. He voices many examiners’ frustration with foreshadowing, caesura, enjambement and the fronted adverbial offered as the assessment tokens of learning in the reduced repertoire of reading for the test.
In A Bold Cold Autumn, Mike writes:
…English enjambment
rules the forward thrust of negativity, and seasonal
expectation is painted with the red grimace of falling
leaves, even when that metaphor has been sucked dry
by a taught language so keen to explain away surprise.
In National Curriculum at Sea Life, he observes the way his daughter’s encounter with a SATs reading test yields surprise and delights in her comments that ‘the o flying away from didn’t is an apostrophe’ and her misreading of ‘the astonishing angels’ from which objects at Sea Life can be seen. Mike’s wryly forlorn comment on such assessable incorrectness is memorable:
Most noticeable angles are actually hard
As she’ll learn and tell
herself when discovering what might have been.
Throughout this volume, there is a call for the humane and creative tradition in English teaching to oppose the reductive barbarism of the Govian inheritance, vociferously promoted by the favoured orthodoxies of Direct Instruction and so-called ‘knowledge-rich’ Tory favourites who adopt the Hirschian model of culture as a means to social mobility to justify a model of education that values what you know over why it’s worth knowing, receiving wisdom over questioning it and, consequently, privileging compliance over agency. As Mike says in Crushed Stetson:
…In a room where someone is preaching,
better lessons are taught and learnt when chanced upon.
Oddly enough, or perhaps not, it’s in his piece on Art Teachers that Mike articulates those energies that should fuel good English teaching, because they are Art teachers who:
…abhor black and white in education / use a palette for being mixed-up /
know Dali should design the curriculum / brushstroke their lives.
As may be expected from a writer immersed in poetry, there is wit and warmth in his homage to Coleridge in Aeolian Harping On, to Jonson in On My First Job and in his self-study based on Larkin’s Mr Bleaney. My favourite of these is his reflection on Hughes and creativity in Who Killed the Thought-Fox, in which he considers the ‘freedom to roam…curtailed by trips and traps set by new hunters who know no better’. He ends:
…and the murderers can come
running with their measuring tapes
sizing up this final kill.
Peter Thomas
Drawing on Previous Learning is available here:
https://wreckingballpress.com/product/drawing-on-previous-learning/
Its 1966 and Scott Walker is moving flats again in West London.
From St. John’s Wood, to Chelsea, then to The King’s Road,
Or a Mews in Marble Arch, seeking the peace that the war-like
Screams of stalking fans feed him, as well as a place to point
Silence on, towards a new kind of chart; away from Pop,
And then pap, to arrive at the start of a conquistador’s
Golden journey, where he can alter the ballad and evolve
The love-anthem it apes, into art, with lyrics that gleam,
And in doing so, water-colour, as sounds become paintings,
The colours within crying, flowing as the scoring of strings
Makes songs arks. Here is a popstar with guitar, sat
Surrounded by lyrics. Feeling across the thick carpet
For the unravelling texture of stars. A teenage heart-throb
Whose beat even side-steps the arhythmic, to pump
And pulse the soul’s tempo, often within 3/4 bars.
Listen to Orpheus first and then Mrs Murphy.
The Amorous Humphrey Plugg, and on a smeared
Evening Montague Terrace (in blue). From ‘the stomach room’
To Plastic Palace People, his croon is not Matt Monro, Mathis,
Como; no, Noel Engel has an angel’s aim. He sounds true.
A 23 year old man cool on the trail of the ancients,
Constructing palaces from his singing, as there are cathedrals, too
In that voice. The size of his vibrato and tone is its own architecture.
Instead of Tom and Engelbert, Noel Engel raised the inner ear,
Gave it choice. An aspiration which matched all of John and Paul’s
Innovations. A royal and wilful act before King Crimson,
And Led Zeppelin raised the stakes. Or, Hendrix. Or Yes.
For there was Brecht and Brel in his music: battle-cries, blood
And Bergman, as the Boy-Child bleats his heart breaks.
To me, Scott did more than these progressives.
Even the pastoral side of Pink Floyd, post Syd and Pre
Dark Side of the Moon couldn’t catch it, as Scott’s 1-4 shimmer
With an astral path, clouded, raised. One that he himself
Could not see, as at the time his myth misted, and his personal
Tastes turned against him, as fans could not see the path
His art blazed. But the signs were there at the start.
These four sets were beginnings. Listen to the strings on
Its Raining Again; they mix music with a visceral echo of haze.
From such seeds he transforms, as did those working with him.
Some fell, like the Walkers, Maus and Leeds, others lept,
As arranger Wally Stott did into the persona and body
Of Angela Morley, the slide coinciding with the musical secrets
Inside Scott had kept. But Scott 4 didn’t sell, despite Scott 3’s
Prime position. Sent back to his shades, Walker wore them,
Whether there were on or off for eight years, while he returned
To the pap and clearing of contracts, his confidence wavered
As Orpheus wept tourist tears, of disappointment perhaps,
At the place at which he had been delivered. Instead of plucking
The lyre he was fucking his throat with a bottle, his talent
Diaphragmed before booze. And then the next compromise:
A walk back with the Walkers, offering No Regrets, and then Lines,
Which soon faltered, until the need for one last rake or claw
Through the ooze. Scott’s proverbial Nite Flights EP. Four songs
That changed everybody. Or, rather one song: The Electrician.
How that formed frames this tale. As from that shimmer of strings
In Its Raining Again, and that texture, Scott tears the fabric in order
To create a new way that took him to Tilt, The Drift, Bisch Bosch,
And the soundtracks. From Scope J, And who Shall Go to the Ball?
Pola X and Childhood of a Leader, into the miasma his life
Tentatively strummed on death’s day. As a youth he played to screams,
But as an older man, he played that screaming. The blocks of strings.
The crates, boxes and sides of beef hung, the night-howls.
Just his naked wail trapped in a bewildering mirror, reflecting back
Darkness; his Bisch Bosch black hole sees stars cowl. Scott Walker
Defeated the sun which wasn’t gonna shine any longer. From ‘wretched
Mathilde’ to Mussolini’s squeeze, Clara, hung like that side of beef,
Or pork in the square, his art evolved. He went further than that other
Sound scourer, Fripp, who in his seventies now is more his wife’s
Entertainer. Nothing wrong with that. But at 76, Noel Engel, before
The Angels’ aim caught him was soundtracking all fears and all
Darkness, and taking on that task, as a dare. He sized and stared
That dark down to become an In terror-ior sound designer.
And also definer of what it is song can do. Which is equal us
To the Gods, or if they do not exist, to the other mysterious forces,
A Pop-star again for the cosmos. Listening to him becomes action.
And so even in death, Scott renews.
David Erdos
.
Revenge of the She Punks, compiled by Vivien Goldman (2CD, Tapette Recrds)
Inspired by the book of the same title, this wonderful double CD gathers up 28 tracks which ‘demonstrate how girls around the world, with no or few role models, found ways to thwart blockages and become self-expressive musicians, breaking traditions and expectations, setting new standards with every chord.’ That’s quite a claim, and this is quite a compilation!
Goldman has chosen four themes she feels are common issues: Identity, Money, Love/Unlove and Protest. She also notes she paid attention to the sound and not the lyrics when sequencing the music, and discusses how open and inclusive she has chosen to interpret the term ‘punk’ as, more interested in ‘the spirit of punk’ than any other definition, especially one reliant on ‘frenetic full-frontal sonic attack’, though there is of course some of that here too. But the loose definition allows for welcome appearances by Grace Jones and Neneh Cherry.
Goldman clearly doesn’t believe in punk being limited to any specific period of time either: the album opens with a 2006 track by Tanya Stephens who arrived in the music scene in the late 1990s, and a 2005 track by USA hardcore band Fertil Miseria, who only formed in 1990. Skinny Girl Diet’s song is from 2016, as is Big Joanie’s track. It’s kind of hard to see anything rebellious about 21st century punk, and even harder to see the reason for Goldman’s inclusion of her own track, ‘Launderette’, when she states she didn’t have room to include all the songs she wanted.
Anyway, what do we get? We get hardcore, punk, pop-punk, power-pop, dub, ska, hip-hop, rock, poetry, no-wave funk, and unclassifiable hybrid music from the wonderful Raincoats. Patti Smith struts her stuff, Debbie Harry pouts and poses, Grace Jones lusts after her stoned ‘Jamaican Guy’, Poly-Styrene screeches in front of X-Ray Spex, and Crass are, as ever, unlistenable, despite all their good intentions.
It’s an exhilarating anthology, with lots of new names for me to investigate. It’s a celebration and a showcase, it’s a great listen, but it’s also confused and unfocussed. There are questions about empowerment, femininity, gender and sexuality, race, money, culture, and abuse of power raised here in the songs, all deserving more in-depth and serious attention and consideration. And there are unasked questions too: about women fronting male bands, about whether music changes society, about whether punk – however defined – changed anything, about why there is so little experimental material here. Where are the female grime and jungle artists or those involved in ambient, electronica and improvisation? The rappers and performance poets? Or the current female pop stars? Are they not empowered, assertive and questioning? Aren’t they making music articulating female experience?
I hope Goldman will be able to write more in depth about the issues she touches upon in her book, and to contextualise this music more than she has done here. Maybe I’m taking it all too seriously, but Goldman clearly considers it possible for women to use their creativity to ‘mould their own environment, create their own space, and live as self-actualized artists’. I agree, but let’s see even more evidence please.
Rupert Loydell
Faith, Matthew Horton (126pp, Bloomsbury Academic 33 1/3)
Tapestry, Loren Glass (117pp, , Bloomsbury Academic 33 1/3)
Why Patti Smith Matters, Caryn Rose (240pp, Faber)
The 33 1/3 series of A5 books about individual albums has become a strange library that meanders its way through genres, taste and recent musical history. Sometimes it seems the series editors are trying to be too hip or obscure for their own good, sometimes the albums seem a perverse choice which goes against both popular and critical opinion, and sometimes the books are so strangely written they hardly seem to mention their subject.
The title track of George Michael’s Faith album was one of a very few singles I took note of in the 1980s. As a university social secretary not much inclined to pop music, I’d learnt the hard way how to keep student crowds dancing before gigs and during band swopover periods, as well as what the majority of attendees expected to be played at an ‘alternative disco’. I also learnt which songs could quickly clear venues at the end of the night, with Discharge’s ‘State Control’ at full volume being particularly effective.
Anyway, where was I? The video for the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘West End Girls’ in 1985 caught my attention, and two years later ‘Faith’ did the same with its rockabilly charm. Wham! weren’t for me, even ironically, but the new single’s apparent musical simplicity, hook and slightly camp video made me smile. It was one of the standout tracks on his first solo album, though if I was forced to choose Michael’s best album I’d probably plump for 1996’s Older, a much more consistent and seductive affair.
What’s great about Matthew Horton’s book is the way he projects backwards and forwards in time from Faith. So we get the rise and demise of Wham! as well as the more produced and polished trajectory of later Michael solo projects. Horton is good at cutting to the chase about what songs mean, how different tracks are constructed, and why they are (sometimes) so bloody good. He’s no geek though, this is a book about influences, friendships, attitude, and ambition. It’s about a self-made man who crashed into fame, wanting out even as he got to the top.
Horton makes good use of his resources, with Paul Gambaccini present throughout the book as an informative and sane commentator on Michael’s personal life, and many other musicians and technicians chipping in about composing and recording. In the end though it’s about Michael’s self-esteem and his faith in the music biz, and also his ensuing despair and doubt after he became a huge star.
Horton states that ‘Michael had achieved what he wanted to do and didn’t like it half as much as he expected. He was briefly the most bankable (white) pop star in the word, but didn’t want to be a commodity anymore’, whilst Gambacinni ‘has a take that’s rather more personal. “Part of it was because he wanted to be a very private gay man,” he suggests.’
In earlier days of the music industry, privacy – if not being openly gay – was still an option. Many bands didn’t put themselves on LP covers, and many artistes relied on their record company’s song factories to give them material to record and perform. Carol King, with her husband and musical partner Gerry Goffin were a successful part of one of those music factories. Eventually, however, the partnership and marriage would fall apart, King would move to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles, and she would start to record and perform her own songs.
After a shaky start as part of a band called The City and her first solo album, Writer, King found instant fame and success with the evergreen Tapestry, an album that would sit in the charts for many years, and still remains one of the biggest ever sellers. Its warm, low key arrangements and production facilitated an album that seemed intimate and personal; its tunes and guests (such as James Taylor and Joni Mitchell) and that slightly unpolished voice even more so.
Loren Glass embeds the making of Tapestry and preceeding/following events within a view of culture at the end of the 1960s, one where feminism had not made the inroads and changes it later would, and women were expected to look sexy and do what they were told by their (male) producers. King’s sloppy jumper and well-worn jeans were the antithesis of this, as were the (seemingly) confessional songs of love, lust, confusion and longing. In 1971 the album was a revelation and would pave the way for later confrontation, assertion and rebellion. For people like Patti Smith in fact.
There’s no question that Caryn Rose mentions Patti Smith, her subject, throughout Why Patti Smith Matters, but Rose also mentions herself rather a lot too. This book is an enthusiastic summary of Smith’s career, friendships, influences, music and books, all excitedly reported in relation to Rose’s infatuation and emotional state at the time of initial encounter, as well as later publication, album releases or live concerts. Rose is desperate to convince us how different she was as a teenager and how Smith’s music facilitated that difference, allowing Rose to engage with the New York punk scene (not that Smith was ever punk) and keep on engaging, keep on infatuating and emoting.
I don’t want to be too down on this, as I love just about everything Patti Smith does, but there are better books by better authors out there. This one feels like recycled facts and opinions leavened with gushing confession and attitude in lieu of critical distance. It’s the sort of thing that gives musicians and fans a bad name.
Rupert Loydell
I had a bit of a shit month in August, caught COVID for the first time which put me on my arse and meant I couldn’t get the Hell Bus open at Boomtown. Back at it now tho.
NEW DRAWING
40 years of privatisation and deregulation presents…
If you’re not familiar with the UK’s water situation, our privatised water companies are dumping tons of raw sewage into our rivers and the surrounding seas. I’m starting to suspect its part of a Tory anti-immigration policy to construct a moat of turds surrounding the country in order to ward off asylum seekers.
HELL BUS IN LIVERPOOL
The Hell Bus is coming to Liverpool next month as part of The World Transformed 24th-27th September.
The bus will be parked up in town for a couple of months so hoping to do another event or two while it’s there. Will post more details when I have them.
The last time I was in Liverpool for The World Transformed, my work ‘sparked uproar’ over my Make Stuff Dead/Be The Meat mugs, Join the Army comic and Action Man: Battlefield Casualties flyers which various media outlets such as The Sun, Times, Daily Mail and Huffington Post reported on saying, among other things, that my work “mocked crippled British troops.” (yikes) Many of the reports also incorrectly said my stall was at the Labour Party conference itself, until I complained and it was corrected.
Despite the fact my work was supported by and in some cases made in collaboration with Veterans for Peace UK, the temptation to smear left wing activists generally, and Corbyn in particular, was too much to resist for some conservative and centrist hacks.
The Huffington Post one in particular seemed oddly out of place at the time. But I couldn’t help notice that a recent and quite bizarre Byline Times article attacking Corbyn over his comments on the invasion of Ukraine was written by Chris York, the same journalist who knowingly lied about my anti-war work in that Huffington Post article. I posted about it on Twitter here, which includes Byline’s disappointing response.
PSTD ACTION MAN – FOUND AND RETURNED!
You may remember from my last mailing list that on the first proper day our group subvertising exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg in Berlin my PTSD Action Man, a one-off boxed figurine I made in 2013, was stolen from the show.
Unbelievably, yesterday, one of my fellow co-curators found it while getting a tattoo in a squat in Berlin and heroically, victoriously brought it back. I’m absolutely over the moon. It’s ridiculous. Massive thanks to @doublewhy_y for finding and grabbing it! I’m very happy, the theft had been the one thing that had soured what has been an incredible show, and now it’s fixed!
The Action Man: Battlefield Casualties toys got their own ads back in 2015 when I worked with Veterans for Peace UK and director Price James and a whole team of other incredible people, not least the legend Matt Berry who provided the voiceover, to make three Action Man: Battlefield Casualties satirical “adverts”. The film currently has over 10 million views on Youtube:
Veterans for Peace UK recently announced they were closing down after 10 years. They’ve done some great work & I was proud to have worked with them, not least on the above film.
While it’s the formal end of VFP UK, I know many involved will continue campaigning for peace & against militarism.
TOMORROW’S PAPERS
My ‘Everyone is Dead’ poster started appearing in bus stops over the last month or so as part of actions by Extinction Rebellion which involved protesters breaking, spray painting and flypostering the windows at News UK headquarters (Rupert Murdoch’s media company & owner of The Sun/The Times etc). More recently the posters have also been appearing across the country with local XR groups getting involved.
One of the posters was photographed here by Andy Rain and appeared in The Guardian, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal (each with an increasingly weird take).
The other poster they put up was a variation of my ‘Don’t Believe Everything Billionaires Tell You’ image that I made for the 2019 election. This version of the poster initially went up alongside the XR action which blocked three printing presses owned by Murdoch in 2020, delaying the distribution of several national newspapers and leading to several politicians losing their entire minds. Probably my favourite XR action to date.
SHOP STUFF
Your periodic reminder that I have a shop full of lovely stuff for you, your friends and enemies, the sales of which are one of the few things keeping the wheels and the lights on all this. Get it before inflation means I can only accept payment via wheelbarrow.
MUSUEM OF NEOLIBERALISM
The Museum of Neoliberalism I co-curated with Gavin Grindon is back open regular hours in south east London after being closed most of the last month with me having COVID and attempting to bring the Hell Bus to Boomtown (more about that next time).
You can book a free timeslot for your visit here. Please book in advance so I can make sure we’re open when you visit.
The museum is also going to have extended open times during September as part of Open House London.
If you’re travelling here across London (or beyond) while you’re here make sure to also go to the Migration Museum in Lewisham Shopping Centre, which is also free and about 20 min walk or 5 min bus ride away.
This update is public and shareable so please feel free to pass it on. If you’re not on my mailing list but would like to be you can sign up here.
Eternal thanks to anyone who’s ever backed my work on Patreon or through the shop!
And thanks for reading!
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– Where have you been?
– I had a break.
– Did you have a Kit-Kat?
– Our abroad friends may not understand that quip.
– I’m not so sure. I think it’s a reference that’ll have global resonance. Let’s try it. Did you have a Kit-Kat?
– No, I broke my leg.
– Quelle horreur! May one ask how that came about?
– I fell off the roof.
– What, pray, were you doing on the roof?
– I was having a chocolate-covered wafer bar confection created by Rowntree’s of York.
Martin Stannard
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On Cantata Dramatica’s performance of THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE: A ballad Opera by Nick and Tony Bicat, from a story Nick Pitts-Tucker. The Reform Club, London, August 25th 2022
.
Nick and Tony Bicat, since the late 1960s of Portable Theatre
Have been musical and lyrical movers of what is possible in the play.
Both have also ventured through film, from Wetherby, The Reflecting
Skin and Devil’s Island through a vast repertoire, as writers, directors,
Composers. Currently its Cantatas which have ignited the fire
In their brother bred cast and kiln. Contemporaries of Brenton
And Hare and the much missed Snoo Wilson, the vibrancy of their language
Graces the siblinged stave and the stage, which The Reform Club Library
Puts on display at this one off performance in August, where privilege
Meets perfection and with a classicist’s touch charms our age.
Channeling Handel, Nick’s noise is soon soothed by structure.
His score is musical invocation; refined and yet vibrant, with notes
And bars bursting like glistening grapes on the vine. As brother Tony’s
Tenses combine eighteenth century phrases, with words which seem
Modern such as in Garraways opening: ‘Ye circum and uncircumcised/
Come hear my song and be advised’s’ wit-won line. Tony also directs,
With a fluid fringe-like staging, with chairs as a moveable feast,
And a bottle of Guinness for Ireland, along with a Parisian fan
To transport all we will see on this immaculate journey,
As the Cantatas characters each encounter what the story’s
Message purports. Inspired by a tightly told tale by Nick Pitts-Tucker
Of a the rise and ruin Pre-Coward of those brave enough to take on
The South Sea Bubble stocks 302 years ago, In which the aristocracy
Were inveigled by a proto-capitalist Captain whose head narrowly
Escapes his own block. This entrepreneur’s name is John Law,
A man who nearly breaks himself (we learn) later, and yet acts
For now, as persuader, and as founder of financial fun,
He’s our guide. As he devises the means to change base gold
Into paper, making light of the fortunes that the Duke of Chandos
For one, can provide. To illicit this he involves two society women
Sofia Kirwan-Baez’s Lady Mary Herbert and Emily Hazrati’s
Aunt Lady Anne Carrington, along with Alexander Anderson-Hall’s
Social mover John Gage and Richard Cantillion, an irish banker
To set sail on a (metaphorical) tanker soon to submerge, as these
Ingénues for investment soon become harridans. Gage falls in love
With the divine Lady Mary, and in a song that compares her
To Catharge’s Dido, has ‘her hymen’s rights forgot.’ ‘Tis truly folly
To be true,’is the song’s closing line which informs also,
As it underscores the swift plot. Nick Bicat’s music fuels this.
As bliss meets Ballad Opera; his use of Harpsichord and piano,
With accordion colour scenes, with such clarity that separate
To style or genre, words and sounds are God-chorded as a means
To convey bastard schemes. With Paris and London enthused
As they fuse the Mississipi Company over there with over here’s
South Sea Bubble, the opening song’s joyous rhythms
And tonal twists capture wins which everyone has
As soon as sin sets them spinning, until the bubble bursts
As they’re prone to, for when blown for too long, air can sting.
And so having blown, David Jones’ John Law has to suck up
What he’s squandered, as once he has Gage and Chandos,
He cannot, on sentence of death get to England to regulate
And control the fervour they have to play these stocks
Like pianos, with plenty of flourish (much like Keyboardist
Joe Howson), and so it proves too easy, as with all gains
Once counted, to lose track as tongues and lips sweet
And smacking suddenly start to loll. Our excitements seem
Frail when reality’s sturdy, and even though Chandos
Commissions Handel to provide a celebratory Acis & Galatea,
(A beautiful red-headed duet as sung by Ailsa Campbell
And Alexander Hume), joy is fast jaded as, and fruitfulness
Duly pulped; for know what we do, especially when it comes
To money, and while some find failure funny, particularly
Among the rich, what we sculpt is our own memorial bronze,
When it was always gold we most wanted, its gleam screened
By paper , refused here by Newton, but gladly accepted
By Handel himself and John Gay. Society folds, as does a Fiver,
And yet what we’re alive for is the diving into new depths
Which the Bicats depict in this their latest example, of advance
And adventure in a trend spending culture whose pockets
Were emptied and when the strong authorial voice fell bereft.
And yet here, today in this time stamped room behind Piccadilly
We see the silly and the serious too, too note by note. Utopia’s
Words and music deepen joy despite the failures the taunted trio
Are bemoaning, while Angelina Dorlin-Barlow’s Olive Trant,
Mistress to the Regent of France paints air purely
In Little Conjuring Book’s aria-esque anecdote. With a tad more pace
The adventurists face the future in which such follies became
De Rigeur. And this is the skill of this 15 Song Cantata,
A glossy fruit from these growers, these farmers of facts,
Who defer too much message. Instead they offer some wise
And prized words and music which show how, should we
Choose it, the lessons of the past can still teach. We just refuse
To learn. That’s the joke. The Libretto, too, is a lesson.
As is Nick Bicat’s music and their sister Tina’s design: score as reach.
Another sweet fruit from the family tree, reared from decades.
As those from the theatrical underground of the sixties now attain
Plenty’s height. All that the Bicats begat could be heard here
On Thursday. A one time performance, which has already faded now
As I write. And yet to work to one aim; which is to illustrate
Something golden and then to relinquish its hold on the moment
Remains the purpose and point of all art. You observe. You engage
And then like love and luck, you can lose it. Ah, but then you remember
And that is the score still to chart. Tony’s simple staging caught all.
That sumptuous space became 1720. As they carried themselves
Across the fine carpet, the members of Cantata Dramatica
Heard Time’s call. So thankyou, also James McOran-Campbell,
Caspar Lloyd James, and the youthful Mariana Da Silvo Sabrinho,
The exuberant Leo Jarvis and spirited Jonathan Creaser,
And the subtle accordion playing of Rafal Luc, and to Julia Stutfield,
Who produced and organised all we witnessed. It was two hours
Away from the present. And that is a true reformation;
A gift gained in a grand room, governed by light and loss,
Framed by books.
David Erdos 25/8/22
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The dah dah dah of Shelley’s world’s great age via Ginsberg which is a molossus via the editor of a lecture transcript I have just read. We are here. We are death. Three long vowels. There is form and meaning being studied here, and I have to break the form to engage. I have to. We have to. I would say the necessary gravitas is in the latter. In the universal (to break the form by three beats). And we have finally broken / destroyed / decimated the time of the world’s great age, here in this third war. We are left with the ear to still hear it dying, like a jazz musician’s discordant lament.
Mike Ferguson
Illustration: Claire Palmer
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The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening is a 40-minute immersive soundscape from artist Trevor Mathison that offers a re-examination of the lives and histories of those laid to rest at the cemetery in the context of contemporary anti-racism movements, honouring Stuart Hall’s memory and his ongoing impact on contemporary national debates. Audiences are invited to listen to the soundscape on headphones as they follow their own pathway through Highgate Cemetery’s beautifully conserved landscape of monuments, buildings, flora and fauna.
Trevor Mathison developed The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening by exploring the legacy of Stuart Hall (1932 – 2014) and his arrival in the UK from Jamaica in 1951 and taking a historical look at Highgate Cemetery: how it came into being, the radical thinkers buried there, and its botanical meditative landscape. The piece imagines those that are resting – philosophers, artists, writers from different periods – coming together to expand on their lives’ work and debate with each other. Mathison has incorporated field recordings from the Highgate Cemetery and its surrounding areas, as well as audio extracts from Stuart Hall’s 2004 lecture ‘Through the Prism of Intellectual Life’ and text from Hall’s posthumous memoir Familiar Stranger spoken by actor Joseph Black. In addition, extracts from Selina Nwulu’s poetry have been woven into the piece.
‘I am fascinated by the number of individuals buried in the cemetery who have contributed so greatly to our own realities and in various different ways; from scientists, philosophers, writers, painters, academics and many more. First among them for me, is Stuart Hall who was one of the most important social and cultural thinkers of our time. I feel the need to keep them close, to acknowledge their work and think about how their ideas and questions continue on through our own present-day debates. I have also been drawn to the plants that grow alongside the graves in Highgate Cemetery, imagining how voices might permeate, connect and continue to flourish through the rich layers of its natural landscape. My hope is that the soundscape provides a meditative space for the listener to relate back to the cemetery, reflect on Stuart Hall’s legacy and in this way, to consider the community and dialogue resting there, with all its multiple, active connections that we are being invited into.’
– Trevor Mathison
STUART AND HIGHGATE CEMETERY
Professor Stuart Hall was a member of the ‘Windrush Generation’ who arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1951. He became a leading figure in Britain’s radical tradition, whose work transformed the nature of public conversations around culture, race, and identity at a pivotal time of immigration and social change. He was a prolific writer and a deeply committed teacher with a firm belief in collaborative projects, a desire to communicate and an expansive range of interests which continue to have vitality and relevance to those hoping and working for change.
Unlike many of the Windrush generation, Stuart did not wish to return ‘home’ to Jamaica on his death. Despite a long and uneasy relationship to belonging in Britain, he imagined he would be in good company at Highgate Cemetery, settled amongst a community of Left intellectuals – Karl Marx, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel, Claudia Jones – and close enough to his North West London home for it to feel familiar. Here, he is settled, in the company of friends and others who have contributed in critical and imaginative ways to Britain’s cultural and political landscape. Like many visitors to the Highgate Cemetery, Stuart Hall’s family and friends have developed a living relationship with the site which resonates with the Foundation’s interest in bringing the past, present and future into a meaningful dialogue with one another.
Trevor Mathison is an artist, musician, composer, sound designer and recordist. His sonic practice – centred on creating fractured haunting aural landscapes and integrating existing music – has featured in over thirty award-winning films. Trevor was a founding member of the cine-cultural artist collective: The Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC, 1982 -1998), where his sonic designs defined and situated the Collective’s film and gallery installations, including Signs of Empire, Handsworth Songs and The Last Angel of History.
Mathison has continued to work with some of his former collaborators from BAFC (John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul and David Lawson) creating sound design for installations and feature documentaries, including Mnemosyne, The Unfinished Conversation, Peripeteia, The Stuart Hall Project and The Nine Muses. Recent compositional scores feature in John Akomfrah’s and Dredd ScoXs’ Slave Rebellion Re-enactment 2019 and Garret Bradley’s award-winning feature America 2019.
Mathison has also founded and been active in a number of other experimental sonic groups – Dubmorphology, Hallucinator and Flow Motion. Dubmorphology is a production and performance group with fellow media artist, Gary Stewart which conceptualises, produces and performs sonic and visual events – site specific installations and large-scale ambient scores that have formed the basis for moving image works. His most recent work with Dubmorphology, Colony, 2021, was commissioned for UnNatural Histories as part of Coventry Biennial.
Mathison has also been a pioneer of sound installation work. In 2020 at CAPC in Bordeaux, he was commissioned to make a sonic response to Lubaina Himid’s installation Naming the Money. His most recent sound performance was for the African Digital Innovation Festival 2021, a live-streamed sonic event between London and Johannesburg South Africa. It comprised a digital sound clash between electronic musicians.
The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening was commissioned by the Stuart Hall Foundation in partnership with Highgate Cemetery and LUX, and with funding from Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust.
For more information, visit the Stuart Hall Foundation website: https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/…
I cross over seven seas
To be with him
The only person enchant
My sublime soul
With his magical words.
Now,
I am totally lost
In my own lonely life.
I live alone,
Without any hope in life.
Stand without fear
On the mountaintop
Just to have a look at him,
The man whom I love.
My feeble heart is searching for him,
Every nook and corner.
My eyes shed a tear or two,
On the very thought of losing him!
I cry,
I weep,
And I shout.
Then I hear an echo
“Come my love, I am all yours!”
Then the sea calms down,
Thunder stop,
Flowers bloom.
And suddenly a new vigour and faith,
Entered my heart.
I smiled and smiled
For all his love!
From today
The world is going
To be better and better
And the streams will flow silently.
To the ultimate destination,
To the ocean of love.
Monalisa Parida
Picture Nick Victor
Bio:- A post graduate student of English literature from India, Odisha and a prolific poetess. She is very active in social media platforms and her poems have also been translated into different languages and publish in various e-journals.
She has got 80 international award for writing poetry. Her poems have been publishing international e-journals “New York parrot”, “The Writers Club” (USA), “Suriyadoya literary foundation”, “kabita Minar”, “Indian Periodical” (India) and “Offline Thinker “, “The Gorkha Times “ ( Nepal), “The Light House”(Portugal), “Bharatvision”(Romania), “International cultural forum for humanity and creativity”(Aleppo, Syria), “Atunispoetry.com”(Singapore) etc. And also published in various newspapers like “The Punjabi Writer Weekly(USA)”, “News Kashmir (J&K, India)”, Republic of Sungurlu (Turkey)” etc.
One of her poem published an American anthology named “The Literary Parrot Series-1 and series-2 respectively (New York, USA)”. Her poems have been translated in various languages like Hindi, Bengali, Turkish, Persian, Romanian etc. And she is the author of the book “Search For Serenity”, “My Favourite Grammar”, “Paradigm”.
The Waterboys
The second Puck Fingers mashup from All Souls Hill.
Ever since I was a child
I have been able to fly in my dreams
Ever since I was a child
I have been able to fly in my dreams
Yet oftentimes I find myself
on a rollercoaster, not in control
or on a busy street, naked
or playing a concert with no equipment
or making a record with no songs
In almost every dream is a magical bookstore
In others an artistic village, set apart
or a large house with secret attic
filled with my tapes and papers,
in the corner a wardrobe of childhood treasures
Sometimes I step on a bus and notice I’m barefoot
step off again to find myself
in Venice meets San Francisco
Musicians populate my dreams
my band members old and new
certain Rolling Stones
Ian MacDonald from King Crimson
David Bowie showing me round Dryden Chambers
Thighpaulsandra, Sly Stone
Amy Winehouse still alive
Vivian Stanshall punning in a cafe
and imaginary musicians:
a singer named Imperfecto, Sonic Dave
The Amazing Brothers
Alec Finn starblown like a young Bolan
Iggy Pop, an old sly dragon
Over time I trained myself
to always write down my dreams
before stepping out of bed
and if I start to forget,
lay my head once more on the pillow
and it all comes flooding back
It all comes flooding back
Last night I dreamed and all the same characters
all the same scenes were there
and my young self broke through
and made all my choices
Ever since I was a child
I have been able to fly in my dreams
Michael Scott / Simon Dine
The clouds have mixed their cotton with sand from the desert
Like ripe grapes, the drops are sown in the fertile land
Someday it will bloom, the desert flower
planted by the longing of the Bedouin to the sea
Dessy Tsvetkova
Photo Nick Victor
a place to breathe beyond gunfire
a summer meadow, maybe,
swaying with cicada song
a long rain to drench this thirsty soil
we can get through if we’re not alone
contributing shoulder to shoulder
with neighbor our kindness,
without comment, with our hands
whatever we build here won’t last forever
but might stand long enough
to cast a shadow over hate
a place to gather
love shack, cathedral, concert hall
whatever it is will be enough
maybe an ark to carry the promise of our children
across this river of blood
.
Alfred Fournier
.
I was in the process of putting together my second New York show when I heard that Valerie Solanas had shot Andy Warhol.
“Process” is a word I like, but almost no one seems to understand it in relation to my painting.
I don’t especially like Andy Warhol, though I was sorry someone had shot him.
Actually, I have to admit that I don’t really know Warhol; I’ve bumped into him at gallery openings, however. And I once went to Max’s Kansas City, where he and his entourage hung out. He was there. They were there.
“Joel Loehy?” someone asked. “Right?”
“Yes”, I said.
“I missed your last show, but I heard it was really cool!”
Cool! Oh dear.
“I’ll have a new one in a few weeks.”
“Cool! I’ll try to make it.”
“Thanks.”
He wouldn’t. Whoever he was.
So as I say, I’ve never really known Warhol. What I don’t like is the whole scene around him, the vainglorious hangers-on, mostly talentless, of course. And I don’t like his influence.
It seems like a version of the Great American Dream, but with silver helium balloons and the hip, addicted and lost in its wake.
I don’t even like his art.
A democratic art? No, an art that’s primarily for the snide elite. An innovative art? Only when the stereotypical takes on its appearance – its disguise – and wins, big time. Yes, a mass following in the end. That’s the only end worth considering.
Can we see that certain forms of impoverished art have to be called great by art critics so that it can be sold to the museum curators and to collectors, who then also call it great so that they can justify buying it? Why is it supposedly great? The artist is a celebrity; the artwork is a by-product of celebrity status. But how did the artist become a celebrity? Because his (or her) artwork is great. And how did that become the case? Because the artist had become a celebrity. Why did the critics say it was great in the first place? Can I please stop repeating myself? Are you confused enough as it is?
Or do I have to mention the ever present, ever renewed insistence amongst art gallery owners, critics and curators for novelty, for the next thing, especially the glamorous thing, coupled with the demands of the art market for sales? (Alongside the perennials of the art market, such as poor van Gogh, who never sold a painting in his lifetime.) Even if certain artists seem to step away from those demands (not always very far, and most certainly not someone like Warhol).
I have had exhibitions, as I’ve said. But I don’t really fit the bill. So I suppose what little reputation I have will eventually peter out. As will my shows: galleries will drop me or refuse to take me on. I’m resigned.
By the way, I always insist that in the catalogues for my exhibitions, the paintings don’t have titles. They’re listed as Painting #1, Painting #2, and so on.
When I tell people that Giotto, Duccio and Piero della Francesca are the painters nearest to my own art, they don’t seem to make any connection, and of course ask about more modern artists, and I then mention Malevich, Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, Ad Reinhardt, Mathias Goeritz…. And they look befuddled, more often than not.
They can’t see that there are any resemblances. (And some of them nod absently when I mention Vantongerloo or Goeritz.)
Of course there aren’t any resemblances, not pictorially, at least. My paintings don’t really resemble any others.
They don’t resemble anything.
They’re invisible. Utterly invisible.
You can’t see a thing. Because there isn’t any thing.
David Miller
.
