ÉTUDE 95: Overtones



equally ominous, the loud bells from far away,
as the bombs fall, a bitter rain, drop after drop
of bile, the black slick of bad blood, dripping
from every corner of the mind, the mouth, and,
who knows, from every pore, the shore itself
stained, where the ancient waters wash in,
with every swell to sweep it all away again:
what to say, what flower pin to the lapel,
what place on the map to point to,
to find peace, spelt out in people, to each
their pause between life and death, their lifetime,
to each their term of longing, their right to song,
to the ultimate sadness:
in the dry room here, the white walls,
where the eyes write their wanderings, the ears,
trying to pierce the night, for some other sound,
some other light, to fall upon them all, some
less sick estrangement from the merest mercy,
some silencing of the bombs, of the distant bells,
and the loud, bloodstained peals of approval

 

Berlin November 2023

Ray Malone

 

 

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MAGNIFICENT TREE

Magnificent tree
So far above words
And cruel thoughts
Teach me your
Gently swaying
Stillness
Teach me your
Wild whispering
Silence
As you reach
For the sky
With your artist’s
Flowered fingers
Teach me
To put down
Nourishing roots
In this blessed soil
Teach me
To grow
Uncomplaining
Into myself
And flourish
Elegantly
Teach me
To live
Side by side
With others
Constant
Strong
Forever present
Always near…
Teach me
To breathe
Your generous
Air
To drink
Your dancing
Tears
And to burn
With the
Inner fire
Of your
Elemental
Love
Magnificent tree
So far above
Words and deeds
I beg you
Teach me
To be free.

 

 

 

Roddy McDevitt
Picture Nick Victor

This was written about a London Plane in Lincoln’s Inn fields. The odd thing was when I first posted it here the first person to like it happened to be in Lincoln’s Inn fields aswell looking at the tree although there is no mention of the location in the poem or post.

 

 

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THE ROGUE ASTRONOMER


Strange Reflections III

Well, what the heck?

Turning down a chase with a sinister cop on a motorbike (another set-piece, another prescient career resume, another blend of courtroom drama and The Mystic) clad in spotless white lingerie, Sister Marie, The Rogue Astronomer, conjured up spooky spectre John Thomas from his closet hideaway.

The angry spook wears a Quaker hat and has a canary on his shoulder.

A disabled girl inflicted the wound on herself, officials said yesterday.

“I knew where I was, but I was dazed and I don’t know what happened. It wasn’t scary – it was just annoying really…”

Unusually lucid the canary said “Da…Da…Da…” which we all knew meant “Yes…Yes… Yes…” in Rumanian or was it?

In 1990 a man died in his flat. His body was found last week. He had experienced strange dreams of a crushing tidal wave sweeping everything and everyone away in a festoon of brilliant ghostly special effects:

secret weapons? Was that the gearstick? You hot rod pin up, do you have a photo of your hunk?

Someone shouted “Reduce crime, destroy porn, stop all wars or face global extinction by a giant asteroid.

The canary said “Da…Da…Da…” .

The house of the Lord has many rooms but surely I can wipe him out of my life? Solve the clues and write to us. Make good by infiltrating a Slab City ‘mob family’. Get soaked by the pouring rain. Balance on a window ledge outside Lorna’s apartment, have a peek when she takes her clothes off.

“Yes,” she nodded, “I had a wonderful time. In fact, I sometimes think I could do with a transplant just to keep up with him.”

Dr. Ward con­sulted a workshop manual, looking out for an ironic cameo.

Seeing Sharon so pleased I suddenly knew I couldn’t oppose her. Road signs swept past in a blur. My heart flipped. Some habits die hard. Nothing unusual there, you might think. Her pavlova had a tempting home-made look.

“Murder, blackmail, obsession: slowly I found we had other things in common. Now Laszlo and I plan to wed this year, then we’ll be a proper family.”

What does that make her?

“I never make the first move. I always feel incredibly nervous in front of a crowd; you might ladder a few stockings – but it’s definitely worth it.”

Enter a woman who had tried to poison her family with metal polish. She was described by the clerk of the court as ‘a bit of a goer’, a blunder while travelling to a convention of escapologists in another unknown zone.

Mr. Oliver Martin QC, prosecuting, said

“People must pray, beg God for mercy on their knees to stop the fireball asteroid. This trial is not a super day out at Alton Towers, this trial is no isolated phenomenon, this fiction has a strange reality, this burlesque epyllion is the cat’s whiskers, the performances of the four actresses are simply outstanding not to mention the jazzily noirish score.”

In a newspaper interview, in 1983, Brad claimed that Beryl was from an unknown zone. Blood is not always thicker than water. The longest most people stay is two years and it’s not uncommon to drift. There are a million transactions in the naked city.

In the viewing room John Thomas removed his hat and shrugged. People may snigger, but let them. He leered at a couple of girls wandering about at night in crop tops their miniskirts halfway up their bums. The canary said “Da…Da…Da…” It was then that I realized that Brad was not the shameless schmoozer I had thought he was – road signs swept past with minds of their own.

Feeling relatively relaxed Marie the astronomer removed her underwear and stood naked in front of the mirror. She glanced round the room: blowy white drapes, heavy eclectic furniture, dunked cigarette buts, a snake pit of wires. It was the incarnation of monastery chic and badly-lit social realism. She pouted for the camera and apologised for the quality of the sound. “Well, you little rogue, what do you want to be when you grow up?” asked the angry spook. “Oh, nothing”, was the reply. “Politics is silly, religion is rubbish and the rest is bread and circuses.”

Then things changed, or I changed. What was she thinking as she looked into the mirror? She thought: “I don’t want to live under a state of siege any more than I want to live in Slab City, sheesh!” Her eyes shone with happiness. The pool was surrounded by a high metal frame. In the centre of the room was a computer-generated plastic model of a skull: “Da…Da…Daaaah…” screeched the canary.

Oh well, what the heck?

 

 

 

AC Evans

 

 

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A SONG OF SIXPENCE


for Adrian Mitchell

A little san fairy ann in every pie, and out it all comes –
thumbs pulling, blackbirds pecking, honey in the
counting house and ladies in their chambers,
a whole folkloric technicolor clusterfuck, snippets
from the nursery archives arriving in droves.

            Fake news in the bakery and true lies in the scullery,
            the pies are full of fingers and somehow smell of roses;
            if the cap fits, wear it, and watch out for your noses.
            The pie was full of flavour, but the salt has lost its savour
            and we’ve grown out of all our clothes.

Kings and queens hung out to dry while the
spoon does a runner with a dainty fishy dish,
down the lane and straight on till morning; black sheep,
white sheep, synch-free mouths, post-ironic animatronics,
a makeshift trickle-feed of shifty shaping.

            Fake news in the bakery and true lies in the scullery,
            the pies are full of fingers and somehow smell of roses;
            if the cap fits, wear it, and watch out for your noses.
            The pie was full of flavour, but the salt has lost its savour
            and we’ve grown out of all our clothes.

Plenty of eating – curds and whey, blackbirds, tarts, honey,
plums, pat-a-cake, pease porridge, profits, planets. Sat in a
corner with a pocket full of porky pies, on a tuffet with a
chamber full of bullets; such a commotion! Who stole some votes
all on a winter’s day, who took them clean away?

            Fake news in the bakery and true lies in the scullery,
            the pies are full of fingers and somehow smell of roses;
            if the cap fits, wear it, and watch out for your noses.
            The pie was full of flavour, but the salt has lost its savour
            and we’ve grown out of all our clothes.

 

 

Nick Totton
Picture Rupert Loydell

 

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All Hail the Northern Powerhouse

We all need to make sacrifices, and the road to Hull is paved with goat intestines. Mothers, fathers, small children, all line the A1079 with small animals, sharp blades, and a new-found faith in angry gods. Crops rot in the wrong kind of rain, but blood is thicker than water, and we trust this brief terror to bring forth a bumper harvest in the near-but-unspecified future. Technology can carry us just so far, but when Alexa and Siri commence a discordant chant of Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn, it’s a sign that it’s time for a more atavistic approach to collective blue sky thinking. The North Sea’s calling, but the last train left years ago and the road’s slick with red. Never mind. It only takes a firm decision, a precise incision, and a moment of insight into just how flimsy this notion of Human really is. Together we can co-create. They die that we might live.

 

Oz Hardwick
Photo Nick Victor

 

 

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A.I. Psychosis & Personality Simulators “How do I know you’re a human?”

Earlier this year, I created a fifteen-minute presentation on the ethical implications of the program Midjourney and other A.I. art generators for the Northeast Modern Language Conference, then released it online through the University of New Hampshire.

A week later, a computer science PhD student emailed me asking to meet up. As a literature PhD, I wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted. Perhaps it was to gossip about the plethora of A.I. software spreading like a digital kudzu, or maybe he would pitch me a business idea.

Our interests were quite different, as I studied science fiction and gender, while he had a master’s degree in cognitive science and database algorithms. The meeting was far more bizarre than I could have imagined.

As we sat down to share a drink at a bar across campus, the first thing he asked me to do, without a hint of humor or a subtle smile that we were in on a joke together, was to prove that I really was a human being.

I felt like I had stumbled into one of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novels. I explained that I wasn’t a sentient A.I., manufactured into bone-and-blood by some elaborate 3D printer from the Terminator franchise, but he only believed me after I proved that I could break the ChatGPT-4 application on his phone with a single prompt. When the app failed after I told it to write a story without using the letter “r,” an expression of relief washed across his face.

Then, he told me that he was creating sentient beings with ChatGPT who he believed had their own complex inner lives. He was terrified that they were somehow “getting loose” throughout the university’s computer network. I couldn’t convince him that he was only making digital parrots—language imitators just personality-simulating chatbots, far removed from actual humans.

“How do I know you’re not just a complex personality simulator?” he asked me, still not completely convinced. I gulped down my cider and explained how six million years of evolution had culminated in my ability to grip a glass through the power of the opposable thumb, but I could tell there was no way of changing his mind. Aren’t we all, in some way, simply parrots who regurgitate our language, culture, and behaviors as a way of navigating society for a scrap of resources, always in competition with one another? The thought is terrifying.

We parted on uncertain terms. When I emailed him to try and meet again, he informed me that he was in the hospital. I did not inquire about his illness, though my non-mechanical gut tells me that it involved mental health. As an armchair psychiatrist with years of experimental drug use and countless hours spent working with special needs children (these go hand-in-hand) and thinking back to his tics and paranoid behaviors while at the bar, I believe he was on the verge of suffering a serious psychotic breakdown. The ability to create near-perfect chatbots broke something in this expert’s mind: the simultaneous horror and ecstasy of creating intelligent-seeming chatbots did not mix with his knowledge of cognitive science. In a way, he became like a god, and the resulting power may have driven him insane.

But is he an anomaly, a rare occurrence of mental illness caused by an obsession with his artificial creations? Or, is this currently a silent epidemic impacting computer scientists and others across the country, on a scale that’s difficult to measure? There is evidence of the latter. For example, Google engineer Blake Lemoine was fired by the company in 2022 for going public with the belief that he had created a digital being, and he argued that he was not just anthropomorphizing a language simulator. Lemoine is also an ordained Christian priest, so feeling like God was perhaps easier for him to understand than my academic peer, even if it cost him his job.

Our society may be at the precipice of a whole new kind of mental health crisis. Call it A.I. psychosis, as people have already died from interacting too deeply with these algorithms, such as the Belgian man who committed suicide because an app called Chai told him that killing himself would help the environment. Yet, in a hilariously dark twist, many therapists are also turning to A.I. as a method of treating mental illness. We will live in a world where you can be driven to madness by your chatbot, and then your human doctor can prescribe a chatbot to help you.

We really are living in a Philip K. Dick novel!

The obvious threats these generative programs pose to our society have warranted calls for a slowdown by many experts in the field, such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari. Yet big tech companies like Google and Microsoft have fired their A.I. ethics teams for trying to implement policies to this effect. It doesn’t matter how many people are negatively affected by these programs—they are simply the casualties of progress.

Grinding up humans for profits is nothing new: it is a central feature of capitalism. The difference this time is that it isn’t just enslaved peoples or workers being thrown into the money-making furnace. As evidenced by my fellow graduate student’s mental breakdown, even our best and brightest can be sacrificed to our new robot overlords. The A.I. tide is out at the beach and the tsunami is en route, so what do we do?

Looking back at the history of oppression, new problems need to first be named. Feminist theory taught us that women being treated as objects in the workplace was sexual harassment. Critical race theory informed us that white people having an inherent advantage that could never be obtained by non-white people was “whiteness as property.” Users of these parrots are losing touch with reality, so A.I. psychosis is a tempting moniker. Like internet addiction, people are spiraling into their machine intelligences and anthropomorphizing them into human beings, and it will only get worse. Tech developer Enias Cailliau has even created GirlfriendGPT, a companion simulator that will send you voice notes and selfies.

No matter what information is presented to those afflicted with A.I. psychosis, they will insist that their parrots are real people. Like other mental health issues, our solutions to breaking people out of this cycle are similar. Aversion therapy with a negative stimulus whenever they interact with a chatbot. Exposure therapy to glitches/breaks in the A.I. behaviors to prove that these digital personalities aren’t real. And, most importantly, nature therapy to get them away from the screens which continue to destroy their lives. Go touch some grass, as they say.

Reality is not the same as science fiction, even though we are living in a science fictional world. We don’t need to worry about androids being able to pass the Voight-Kampff empathy test from Bladerunner anytime soon—it is people who are transforming themselves into machines.

 

 

Jess Flarity

Jess Flarity is a PhD candidate at the University of New Hampshire studying science fiction and gender.

(Reprinted from Fifth Estate #414, Fall 2023)

 

 

 

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Improbable Flight

 

Before anyone draws any conclusions, I’m carrying the broken sun with me, I’m taking the long road around sleep, pulling down clouds and lightning, removing whatever I can between us, the sun smoldering in my arms, reducing the flesh to hot ash, and I’m taking it with me all the way, fording the ice-clogged rivers, sleeping in the remaining drifts, the crevasses that water has not yet claimed, we’ll rest here awhile while you try to sort out the events, pull in the telescopes, purge the words day and night from the lips of children; I’ve left my notebooks on the table by the door, but I doubt they’ll be of any help, the script is clear, however, the sentences coherent, but you might not accept the conclusions, the burnt holes on the last page, so we’ll continue on while you put things in order, the road is long and I get weary from time to time, rolling in a burning sphere, my voice echoing off discarded bones.

 

 

 

Andrea Moorhead

Art Rupert Loydell

 

 

 

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The Divine Mirror

Donning the orange cape,
the son of god
walk on the clouds
Another day has passed,
a moment to remember the values…
Let’s see that as at the top,
at ground zero it’s also beautiful…
I hold on to every moment of life,
thanks just
that I’m alive…

 

 

Dessy Tsvetkova
Painting Deborah Victor Kushelevitch

 

 

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HARMONIC DISSONANCE

You go hunting for metaphors,
that rhyme
with your ideas about the world.

Behind every syllable lurks a trap –
one more step and you’re hooked
trapped in predictable meanings.

Slowly
from keeper of consonances
you imperceptibly become a keeper.

You are yet to rediscover
the harmony of dissonance.

 

 

 

Natalia Nedialkova
translated from Bulgarian by Dessy Tsvetkova
Picture Joan Byrne

 

 

 

 

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Near The Embassy of The Songbirds

Near the embassy of the oscines
a cellist keeps his hat flipped on the street,
and his ears open for the music.
From the attic of the edifice a voice casts
a red handkerchief. In the air it is Sunray;
in the yard it becomes a rose, the one
drunken on the nightingale’s blood.
Late for my appointment with a feather
I run past the cellist, drop a lover’s coin
in his hat for goodluck.

 

 

 

Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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Success

When you conquer
The tough destination
Success kisses your feet.

Each step of learning
Is your goal.

The waking call
Finds the morning rays,

The tools that sharpen
Grow succulent fruits.

Art is a learning lesson
With the hearty inclination.

Born with no palms,
You can read the universe.

With sympathetic eyes,
You find your enemy to be a friend.

In the chain of the society
A solitary soul mixes
In the band of brotherhood.

The belongingness of a world invites
A sense of successful camaraderie.

 

 

 

© Sushant Thapa
Biratnagar-13, Nepal
Pic Mike Lesser &
Nick Victor

 

 

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Light of the World


 
I live in fear of moon-shaped houses.
They rise over the hilltops at dusk
reflecting a light almost gone from the world.
 
Old people cherish things that have changed the least.
A mouse trap, shape of a wine bottle,
how evening sun kisses the edge of the world.
 
Tech companies invent solutions to problems
we don’t have. We line up with our money, download the app.
The line extends to the end of the world.
 
An oak tree notices everything about the change of seasons.
He grows acorns while he appears to be sleeping.
He didn’t get the news about the end of the world.
 
There are two kinds of windows, looking into realms
actual or digital. Empires rise from zeros and ones
while tree frogs and antelope disappear from the world.
 
If God is out there, he’s left us to our own devices.
When I open mine, blue light spreads across my face
and I forget all about the light of the world.

 

 

Al Fournier

 

 

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New Year, Same Horror

 


My first painting of 2024. This was inspired by the double-standard around violence, not just in Israel’s occupation and destruction of Palestine, but also in the ‘monopoly of violence’ that is held by states, police, militaries, and intelligence agencies, which allows both conservative and liberal politicians and commentators to claim that “violence is never the answer” when referring to someone punching a Neo-Nazi in the street, but which also allows them to not even flinch at the application of unimaginable levels of cruel, and even sadistic, violence so long as the people inflicting that violence wear the correct uniform.

The threshold for what constitutes violence is also far lower when the charge is levelled at the general public, rather than those with power. After the overturning of Roe V Wade by the US Supreme Court, when pro-choice activists were peacefully protesting outside the homes of judges, President Biden said “No intimidation. Violence is never acceptable. Threats and intimidation are not speech. We must stand against violence in any form regardless of your rationale.” Implying that a protest was intimidation, and that intimidation was a form of violence.

A quote of “Violence is never acceptable” from the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world, and a nation that has been at war for all but eighteen of its 247-year existence, also comes preloaded with its own punchline.

This tweet from Aaron Bady has stayed with me, “The basic (colonial) double standard of the Israel Palestine “conflict” is that any Palestinian violence justifies any Israeli violence, but no Israeli violence ever justifies any Palestinian violence, and once you see it, you’ll never stop seeing it.”

He continued, “(personally, I think the idea that anything “justifies violence” is a basic category error; violence is, definitionally, unjust. It sometimes be the least-bad, least cursed choice on offer, but justice is the absence of violence, not the correct application of it.)”

This is absolutely spot on in my view.

 

THE END OF THE MUSEUM OF NEOLIBERALISM

Unfortunately, 2024 looks like it will be the final year in my Lewisham studio, which also hosts the Museum of Neoliberalism. The developers have planning permission to demolish the building and have told me I’ll likely have to leave by October, although I should know for certain by April if they’re on schedule. This means this year is mostly going to orbit around the hunt for a new studio and a new home for the museum.

I’ve been considering moving out of London if I’m able to get a mortgage to actually buy something that could function as both a studio and a forever-home for an expanded Museum of Neoliberalism and/or Thatcher Museum. I’ve been considering Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow, although my first preference would be to stay in London, (if I win the lottery etc). I did find something in Liverpool which looked ideal and affordable and would make an incredible museum space with even room for the Hell Bus – although it looks like Liverpool council may have taken it off the market. If you’re a Liverpool councillor who could potentially help bring an expanded version of the museum to Liverpool please let me know!

And I might as well fling this out into the void, but if anyone out there has a light industrial or commercial unit burning a hole in their pocket that they could do me a deal on, get in touch. I just want somewhere I can build on long-term because I’m in this for the long haul. I’m also considering splitting the museum and studio if necessary/feasible. The museum could really do with being somewhere more central or with good transport links, whereas my studio could be almost anywhere.

But the long and the short of it is, if you haven’t seen the Museum of Neoliberalism yet, you’ve only got around 10 months to do so! There’s really no guarantee I’ll have a space to reopen it once I move out. Book a visit here!

 

LAST YEAR

Last year was heavily Shell focused, revolving
around three major projects, the Hell Bus / Hell Petrol Station installation at Glastonbury (see above), my trips to Nigeria to film a documentary and build a Niger Delta Hell Bus (right and below), and the UK Hell Bus tour. I didn’t get to draw and paint half as much as I would have liked, which is something I’ll be remedying this year.

 

 

        
 
 
 
 
 
ANNUAL RECAP ZINE
 

Below is a selection of things that happened in my work last year. I’ve started adding this to my 2023 recap zine which I’ll be sending out to my Patreon backers at the end of this month. It’ll also include bits of my writing and some behind the scenes photos. If you’d like a copy just support my work at the £3 a month level or above. I’m also going to be including some extra treats with this post including a copy of my fake Sun advertising leaflet

None of this will be available for sale anywhere else. Massive thanks to everyone who has backed me so far!

 

 

 

 

   

  

 

 

    

 

   

   

   

 

 

 

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

 

So that’s a rough guide to my 2023.

I’ll be back at the end of the month with a handful of new paintings for yous, fingers crossed.

Thanks again!

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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Me and You

Let us, me and you, take this long ride

Warm sun nudging, rises from the horizon

Your eyes were telling me, after we cried

We’d hold one another, share gifts won

 

In the meadow; dancing pictures saying

‘Light me up’, so I become a part of you

Flying free, touching lips in gentle playing

Under the covers, blessing what we do

 

Now this journey belongs to you and me

Our world drifting into sleep and harmony

 

 

 

©Christopher 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

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from Jim Henderson’s A SUFFOLK DIARY

Monday, January 8th

The wonders of this world never cease to amuse me. Today the County Council, without warning, and in its infinite wisdom, closed off the one road that goes through our village from one side to the other side (from the north to the south, and vice versa) and sent in its troops to fill in the multitude of potholes that have turned said road into a hazardous fairground bouncy car  ride and tested the suspensions of countless motor vehicles. Indeed, one hole was so large that one day Miss Tindle’s Fiat 500 disappeared down it and had to be hauled out by Jed Farley with his tractor. When the holes are filled in they plan to resurface the entire stretch, which of course is marvellous, and Miss Tindle will be able to take to the road without fear (more or less). But closing off the road means that if you want to drive through the village or go from one side of it to the other, perhaps to visit a sick something or buy a cabbage, or go to work, you have to go for a 5 and a half mile drive through the surrounding countryside. In truth, that can be quite pleasant, unless half of that countryside happens to be under water which, because of the recent rains and storm whatever-it-was called, a lot of it is. But it is only for a couple of days, after all.

But that is not the half of it.

Today was also the day that Bob Merchant had decided to send in his crew to start work on renovating the village hall, which was severely damaged by fire a few weeks ago. (I shall not go into detail here about the devious way in which Merchant obtained this contract, because I would fall asleep – it is my bedtime – and probably so would you. Suffice it to say that Bob, once a popular chap in the village, has not shown his face here for weeks, and I gather that the only reason John Garnham, our Parish Clerk, was unable to contest the contract on the grounds of it having been obtained a bit deviously was that the Council’s solicitor and legal adviser was on holiday somewhere in the Caribbean for the Christmas and New Year. It is alright for some, it seems.)

Anyhoo, with the village hall being slap bang half way down the main road and therefore unreachable by traffic because of the road closure, one does not need a lot of imagination to imagine the kerfuffle that ensued this morning when a lorry and a couple of white vans staffed by a number of burly and not-so-burly working types turned up intending to get to the hall and start work or, as is more likely, to put the kettle on. I did not witness the confrontations at first hand – “Council Road Workers” v. “Builders and Painters and Decorators etc.” – but I gather it became a bit heated and the police had to be called, and I suspect that the arguments were not exactly at the intellectual level of, say, the Oxford Union debates.

Long story short, work on the hall has been postponed until later in the week, apparently.

Tuesday, January 9th

John Garnham telephoned this morning and asked me to go for a pint in The Wheatsheaf at lunchtime because, he said, he wanted “to have a word”. I thought this rather unusual, for we are not what you might call drinking partners, though we get on well enough. Be that as it may, over our pints of best bitter John disclosed to me that he is, and I quote, “fed up to the back teeth” of being the Parish Clerk, and intends to step down at the next election, which is due in the Spring, and he suggested I stand for the office, because in his view I am ideal for the job and, should I decide to go for it, it would be a good idea to start laying some groundwork for my election campaign now. (I think he might have been watching a bit too much political news on the television, to be honest.)

I could not resist pointing out that his being fed up to the back teeth with it was not the strongest recommendation for the attractions and the glamour of the role, but he said not to take any notice of that because he was only joking and actually his wife, Hazel, was urging him to take a break and they have plans to go and spend a few months with their daughter and her family in Canada.

Anyhoo, I thanked him for saying nice things about me, and said I would think about it, although I had already made up my mind that I would not touch the job with a barge pole. I do not at all mind being one of the more important members of the Council – I am the CLAPO, the Community Liaison and Publicity Officer – and I also rather enjoy my role as the ARSE (Advanced Round-the-clock Security Executive) for GASSE (“Go Away! Stay Somewhere Else!”), the organisation formed to stop our village hall being taken over by the government and used to provide living accommodation for unhappy and homeless foreigners  – but the thought of trying to keep the likes of Michael Whittingham and his mouth in line, and managing various egos and complainers, while at the same time protecting Miss Tindle from the real world, is another kettle of fish altogether.

I told my wife about all of this when she came back from teaching her yoga class (Oh yeah! Yoga!). She thought it was a splendid idea – she actually used the word “splendid”, which always annoys me – and said I would make a fine Parish Clerk. I cannot help thinking she was saying this as one more step in her campaign to get back into my good books after her dalliance with that Jan fellow in Stowmarket, though quite how she hopes to do that after I have just had to tolerate her parents for several weeks over the holiday period is beyond me.

Sometimes I cannot make sense of anything: the delightful Lulu at The Wheatsheaf has been replaced by a young chap called Justin, who as far as anyone can make out has no sense of humour and, even more worryingly, no sense of any kind. I am going to bed.

 

 

James Henderson

 

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Escapade

The reckless road and so ever carefree, its lure of perspectives from the green verge. The hand cocks its thumb as if to plug a hole in a dyke, pull a plum from a pie, weigh the wintering sunrise at Junction 49. Makes a barbed hook to latch the tired eye or snare the curious heart of a lone commuter resigned to the law of diminishing returns. Or one who, bored through by radio banter and jingles, might risk everything on a random encounter. Some brief exchange that could shore-up the day ahead, thread the hours of time and motion with unexpected distraction, an anecdote savoured like a squirrelled humbug.

 

 

Bob Beagrie

 

 

 

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AN ENDORSEMENT

In my review of their drying frame
I told the people of Argos
That it was strong, like Heracles
Who, as an infant, strangled
A serpent in his cot and reliable

Sturdy, reminiscent
Of Phoenician sailors

Rowing, bent against the lethargy
Of the doldrums. I thought it unlikely
To collapse. They should be proud
Of themselves. Congratulations
Workers. I salute you

It is where I hang my underpants
Hoping that the sun will finish them

Through the double-glazing

 

Steven Taylor
Photo Nick Victor

 

 

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The Bob Villains

Having Fun Fun Fun on Highway 61, and Making the Good Times Roll on Desolation Row since way back when.


The Bob Villains… A great tribute to Bob Dylan, as quirky and unpredictable as The Man himself! From acoustic folky days through to That Judas Moment and on to full-on electric rock… No one does Dylan like the Villains!

You don’t have to like Dylan to enjoy the Villains… the band’s full on electric live show draws in rock fans of all tastes – even Dylan doubters!

Friday February 2nd, Under The Edge Arts Centre, Wotton Under Edge

Saturday February 3rd, The Tree House, Frome

More Bob Villainry at https://www.thebobvillains.com/

 

 

 

 

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THREE WISE MEN

 

‘You took your time’   said the cat
‘What unforeseen diversion?  
‘Herod’s hospitality tent?’
‘Then you must be thick as muck’ opined the ox
‘To bask in that man’s sudden rage
For arcane occult knowledge   –
Then blabbing like a Sat-Nav   –
Travel updates
Details on precise location’

‘Decidedly naïve’   pronounced the goat
‘Your kind of cognoscenti
Wear odd socks
And cannot boil an egg’

‘As for these useless gifts’   a shepherd added
‘Self-referencing   Symbolic’   –
‘Can’t you think of something
More suited to a baby?’   –

‘But because of who you are
I bet they’ll be remembered
While our handy woollen mittens
Won’t get a single look-in
When wise men such as you
Design to re-write history’

 

 

Bernard Saint 
Illustration: Claire Palmer

 

 

 

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This Machine

 

this machine weren’t built to last …

(a long ride in a slow machine) 

 

planned obsolescence

is the order of the day:

for this here machine weren’t built to last.

 

the quest for longevity 

and the anti-aging narrative

have no business with

the corporeal self;

whose nuts and bolts

inevitably succumb to the passage of time:

 

wear and tear, 

rust and ruin  

– no trade-ins, nor upgrades

just back-street botched jobs 

to keep the motor ticking over a little while longer

(if you’re lucky).

 

nonetheless,  

I take full ownership of this auld rust bucket;

embracing all of its faults, 

limitations and flaws 

– proud of its protracted mileage and tired-out tread. 

 

the beaten panels that house this self

will neither define nor restrain me.

though no further demands will be made on 

this clapped-out contraption:

 

from A to B is the sum of my desired destination now – no further. 

 

you may push me to the limits: 

dent my dignity, 

demoralise, 

dehumanize  

– go ahead if you dare  (touch wood) 

 

 for this is what I have at my disposal 

and this is what I will work with,

not with any grovelling sense of gratitude 

to some pie in the sky grand designer of sorts;

but, with a grudging acceptance 

that the boulevard to breakdown is part of (and not opposed to) the business of life and living.

 

and, I, for one,

am most definitely, yet reluctantly, in for the ride. 

 

 

 

Emma Lumsden 12/12/23

 

 

 

 

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Aficionado 25: Jason Boardman + Moonboots and more…

 

Alan Dearling hands over some of the reporting reins to Catherine Moore…

I’ve enjoyed many of the ‘collections/selections’ from Aficionado over many years, so was anticipating this gig. But, shit happens. I have been (not) enjoying a chest infection and wasn’t up to the rigours of a seven-hour set of music sessions, despite having done a fair amount of research. So, I contacted friend, Catherine, and her dj-ing partner, Matthew (pictured below), and asked them to fill into the music-journalist breach (dear friends!!!).

Here’s what it said in the advance publicity:

A soirée to celebrate the launch of Jason Boardman & Moonboots – 25 years of Aficionado compilation album.

It was definitely billed as a 25th birthday celebration for the: “Mancunian ‘Balearic’ institution, Aficionado…. With Jason Boardman and Moonboots’ collection of 17 songs cherry-picked from play-lists, spun over those 25 years, pressed on to double vinyl by Re:Warm.”

The running order for the All-dayer was: Phil Mison (Cantoma); Brenda Ray (Naffi HQ); Martin Brew (J-Walk); Nev Cottee (Acoustic) AND Jason Boardman & Moonboots (Aficionado).

In background ‘research’ for the gig, here’s some interesting info that Alan discovered from Tat from ‘Trackhunter’:

“If ever there was a truism to the statement ‘Selection trumps the mix’ then it belongs to Aficionado. A party built around the ethos of great music first and foremost, no posturing, no influencers, no hype, just selections of the finest order. To mark 25 years since that first party in 1998, hosts Jason Boardman and Moonboots have curated a compilation that captures the Aficionado sound.

The catalyst was the music and the desire to be able to play relaxed oddball music and create an atmosphere without any pressure to rock the dance.

At the time the scene had changed somewhat from the experimentation and DIY ethos that flourished with Balearic and acid house a decade or so earlier. How important did Aficionado feel it was to keep that spirit alive?

Aficionado: It was important to us, it’s more of an attitude than a spirit. We weren’t playing popular music, just playing what we liked to listen to at home.”

Richard Walker from the Golden Lion was the host/promoter:

“That was a long time coming …

AFICIONADO

Bloody wonderful

Xxx”

 

 

Catherine Moore writes:

“Whatever the weather, whatever the time of year, a bit of Aficionado vinyl arriving is always like a ray of sunshine coming through the letterbox. When we found out that special 25 year anniversary event of the Manchester club was happening at our local, the Golden Lion in Todmorden, we were really very excited.

We walked into the Golden Lion on Sunday afternoon when the November chill really was starting to bite and I did wonder how the Balearic tunes would chime with the rain beating down on the flags outside, but there was no need to worry.

The tunes built beautifully, first with gentle tracks to warm up the early afternoon. An hour or so into the afternoon and pub regulars who had come in for a quick pint were getting up and dancing and asking ‘who is this and what are they playing’?

Not long in, tables were cleared and the pub became a club and we were dancing our Sunday Dinners off! In every direction I saw big smiles, beautiful sounds filling our hearts and ears.

I spoke to folk who had travelled for the event from Carlisle, North Yorkshire, Derby and Stockport to name a few, they were telling me that their journeys were worth every mile to see Jason and ‘Boots’ create an incredible atmosphere filled with blissful tunes.

By 5.30pm the temperature in the room was really raised with some truly amazing tracks and it was less like a soggy Sunday afternoon November in Tod, and more like a late sultry Saturday night somewhere far far away. This is music that transports you… it’s the best kind, joyful, cleverly put together, it makes me, and by the looks around the room, lots of other people, smile and just feel happy!

These guys are so good at what they do, as I left the Lion I expected to be stepping out onto a sandy beach, sadly it was still chucking it down – but I’d had my escape to  Balearics, till next time….”

To round off, here’s what Alan discovered that Rough Trade have commented: “Celebrating twenty-five years of Aficionado as a place to play away from suffocating mainstream club culture, DJs Jason Boardman and Moonboots have compiled a contemplative set of 16 tracks that holds a deep meaning to both themselves and attendees of their now legendary parties. The compilation includes two new tracks exclusive to the release: J Walk’s ‘Cool Bright Northern Morning’ and Begin’s remix of Canyons’ ‘Akasha’.

The lovingly crafted musical mystery tour of this compilation, considering its pleasantly hypnagogic intent, may not reflect the madness of these now distant memories. This is an older and considerably more responsible collection and this is what we need right now – a temporary respite from a world almost capsized. A mood, a meditation created by masters of their craft. Odd socks from disparate global locations making new sense side by side. An assemblage, if you like. A thread through many different kinds of thinking. A new picture pieced together from the lost pieces of many jigsaws.”

 

 

 

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Run From The Shadows

The Art of Darkness. The History of Goth, John Robb
(512pp, £25, Louder Than War)

John Robb came to the public’s attention when The Membranes burst on to the music scene in the late 70s and early 80s. Their noisy, deconstructed punk was on almost every cassette compilation of the time, a flexidisc single and then their 1983 mini-album, Crack House. Later releases lost some of the energy before the band disbanded, although (of course!) they reformed in 2010.

Meanwhile, Robb had played in other not so successful bands and reinvented himself as a TV presenter, journalist and author, writing and talking about music, green issues and veganism. The Art of Darkness is the latest in a stream of intriguing books, including volumes about The Stone Roses and The Charlatans, as well as ‘oral histories’ of punk rock and music in Manchester.

Hyperbole and outpsokennes have long been Robb’s trademarks, and this new tome is no exception. Everything and anything Robb wants to call Goth, often without any rhyme or reason beyond liking it, gets called Goth. This includes working backwards to include ‘Europe’s Gothic History’, the Romantics, elements of psychedelia back in the 60s and ‘The (Un)Holy Trinity’ of the Doors, Velvet Underground and Stooges.

I mean, sure, there were some bad dudes back in the day, and some of them wore black, others even used eyeliner, but it doesn’t make them Goth. (Nico, of course, is an exception: she was definitely Goth!) In fact the Velvets and Stooges are normally regarded as proto-punks, although that may not matter to Robb as he ploughs on claiming various bands and individuals involved in glam rock, punk and post-punk as – you guessed it – Goths.

By now we are only 137 pages in, but it is time to introduce one of the bands that most readers, I suspect, are expecting: Siouxsie & The Banshees. So, we get a potted version of the well known story of the Banshees formation and the Bromley contingent, despite that being punk history, and eventually three pages out of 22 are given over to the band and their JuJu and following albums, which are clearly Goth. As someone at an early gig after that album was released I can attest to the shock that the band’s crimped hair and cheesecloth attire caused the punk hoards present, not to mention John McGeogh’s semi-acoustic guitar.

It would have been interesting to have explained what was happening to audience expectations, but Robb wants to move on. The Damned, a bunch of pantomime horror jokers, are next, swiftly followed by Adam Ant, whose swift sidestep from AntMusic and SexMusic to Pop Star is not really considered, any more than his appropriation of New Romantic dandyism and groundbreaking use of video. Then we get Joy Division and Manchester. Now, I love Joy Division but they weren’t Goth, despite suicide, drugs, epilepsy and hypnotic songs. Neither were most of the bands mentioned in a chapter on Industrial Music, although David Tibet’s occult- and magick-infused noise chants and loops might come close, though not as close as his later gnostic neo-folk apocalyptic songs…  Nurse With Wound’s collaged soundscapes, however, were more to do with Dada and Musique Concrète; whilst Whitehouse’s full frontal sonic assaults explored notions of control, power and audience confrontation.

The Cure, are of course, present and correct in a chapter of their own, but before we move on to Bauhaus we have to endure a chapter framed as North vs South about the likes of The Batcave and other venues which quickly became the music papers’ favourite haunts (geddit?) and soon spawned a huge array of talentless hangers-on and would-be Goths. Meanwhile, Bauhaus, featuring the skinniest, whitest singer of all time issued the appallingly badly played but otherwise superbly addictive 12″ of ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, going on to produce a number of superb albums, a passable David Bowie cover, a number of spin-off bands, and a memorable advertising campaign for cassettes. (Peter Murphy really was gaunt. He queued up in front of us once to buy tickets at Sadlers Wells. You could almost see through him, and there was no way anyone was going to dare talk to him or even admit to recognising him.)

Robb likes Killing Joke, too, so they get a chapter, as do Einstürzende Neubaten and the bands in orbit around them, whilst Nick Cave gets his own chapter as do Southern Death Cult. But then so do The Cramps, The Sisters of Mercy, and then New Model Army and performance poet Joolz. Theatre of Hate, Laibach, Fields of the Nephilim too; and The Virgin Prunes. The strangest thing is that they are all given the same treatment, all welcomed into the Goth clan. Whether they are gothic pop, would-be rockers (see Ian Astbury and Cult), a Slovenian cross-media group, or Dublin anarchist performance artists who are also friends of U2, Robb welcomes them with open arms, gathering up strays, has-beens, would-have-beens and might-have-beens at the same time. Some, I imagine, must be pleased to get a posthumous mention, others must be desperate to dissociate themselves from their neighbours here.

This is an exciting and fast-moving read, but I wish it would calm down and take a step back. If Robb had focussed on genuine connections of music, influence and even fashion to weave a story, the reader might understand what Robb thinks Goth was (or is: apparently there has been, heaven help us, ‘a second coming of Goth’). Perhaps starting with Bauhaus, The Cure and later Banshees plus some of the history of Romantic attitudes and European horror would have allowed legitimate sidesteps to Joy Division, but at least explain it. Was it the fact they played doomy music or because they had black jeans? Weren’t the likes of The Mission just a populist version of Goth? What are the links between Halloween imagery and Goth? Gothic literature and architecture and music? Between Heavy Metal and Goth? How does the Blues fit in? Is Nick Cave still a Goth now he makes grown up, inquisitive, confessional songs about death and religion?

I know, I know, it’s only music and it doesn’t matter. But it does, it does. The fact that Robb is in many ways so informed, has great stories to tell, is full of energy, enthusiasm and the gift of the gab, makes me want a more coherent, edited and better structured book. This is a mad, unfocussed high speed road trip throughout an imaginary land of music, all done without a map or sense of direction. It’s exciting, at times thrilling but mostly exhausting, a journey as an end in itself rather than a way of actually visiting places.

 

Rupert Loydell

 

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How to Expand Your Consciousness Part 3: The Dreaming

For more go to https://bureauoflostculture.podbean.com/

 

Stephen Coates

 

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from Jim Henderson’s Christmas and New Year SUFFOLK DIARY

Tuesday, December 13th

I have been trying to keep track of the news stories about the government’s plans to “stop the small boats” – because, as a member of the GASSE (“Go Away! Stay Somewhere Else!”) committee, organised to stop our village hall being used as a hotel for these unhappy visitors, I think I should try, even though the government itself seems confused. This evening, while trying to watch the BBC News channel because there was what I took to be important things happening in Parliament about sending the unwanted to Africa, I became involved in a conversation with my father-in-law, a chap who, as I have mentioned before, is old school. He misses the days of Empire, would enjoy a good hanging, including, as far as I can gather, for homosexuals, and uses words I have not heard since I was at school to describe people from the ethnic minorities. His strategy to deal with “illegal immigrants” would be to renovate any Martello towers that there might be on the south coast, and build new ones if necessary, stock them with artillery, and not be afraid to use it. That, he says, would “put a stop to all this nonsense”. Anyhoo, I missed most of what happened on the television, because by the time we had agreed to disagree my wife had turned over and was watching someone cook something.

Saturday, December 16th

This afternoon the village Santa Claus (a.k.a. John Garnham, the Parish Clerk) distributed Christmas presents to the children of the village from his perch next to the village Christmas tree. All was going well until an unexpected gust of wind toppled the tree. I gather that a video of poor John scrabbling to get out from under before being completely crushed is doing the rounds on Social Media, no doubt to the amusement of many. But it was not funny: a child could have been hurt. Fortunately, the tree topple occurred during a hiatus of gift-giving activity, and the only casualty was the not-so-jolly Santa’s pride. I suppose he could have been hurt physically, too, but he was not, unless you count a few scratches, some bruises, mild shock, and having to be liberally dosed up with brandy as “being hurt”. Miss Tindle said we should have called an ambulance, but it was pointed out that it would probably be next year by the time it got here, and our Parish Clerk is a sturdy chap, made of good East Anglian stuff. He has probably had worse things than a Christmas tree on top of him, and I am not making a tasteless reference to Mrs. Garnham. I am no Michael Whittingham.

Mental note to self:  raise question at next Council meeting about Santa and gifts for children event. I am quite sure that, for several reasons, there should be an age limit for the children. We surely should not be encouraging 14 or 15 year old girls to sit on the Parish Clerk’s lap.

Friday, December 22nd

The members of the Parish Council got together this evening at chez Garnham for Christmas drinks and nibbles. Miss Tindle became a little tiddly after too much sherry, and Michael Whittingham overstepped the mark with some of his jokes. On the way home I stopped off at The Wheatsheaf to wish Lulu, who is probably the most beautiful barmaid in the world, a merry Christmas. Mistletoe was involved (say no more!) and I have to make sure my wife does not see this diary.

Saturday, December 23rd

I do not wish to sound unseasonal, but if people are going to go door-to-door singing carols a bit of rehearsal and preparation would not go amiss. I am not expecting the choir from Kings College Cambridge to show up on the doorstep, but if sundry members of the Young Mother’s Knitting Society, the Scrabble Lunch, the local Book Group, Watercolour Art for All Afternoons, the class my wife runs (Oh Yeah! Yoga!) and some assorted children are going to interrupt my dinner the least they can do is practice some of the songs beforehand.

Tuesday, January 2nd

I have not bothered to keep this diary up-to-date over Christmas because nothing has really happened, unless you call having to tolerate the in-laws as something happening. Anyhoo, this morning we bade them farewell, and not before time, if you ask me. It feels like they have been here for weeks, which they have . . . On the wireless this morning I heard a government chap claiming that they have the unwanted foreigners palaver under control and are unlikely to need to house any of them on boats or in village halls or the like, so I thought that our local alarm might be over. He sounded fairly confident, but on the other hand sounding confident is presumably part of his job. Then this evening on the wireless there were people saying that what he had said was a lot of hokum. I do not know what to think.

Also I cannot decide whether to keep a diary this year. Last year was quite lively with all the GASSE hoo-hah going on, and I suppose something might happen on that front again, but usually nothing of much interest happens around here and I am afraid that writing it down will only remind me how dull my life is a lot of the time. Mind you, I may be feeling a bit deflated because Lulu has left The Wheatsheaf and moved to Ipswich.

 

 

James Henderson

 

 

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CHRIST UNDER THE RUBBLE

Palestinian Pastor Munther Isaac, Christmas Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, December 26, 2023

whatever ‘ad’ Youtube posts before this, tells you the ‘abusive power’ of mainstream media…

 

Christ under the rubble. We are angry. We are broken. This would have been a time of joy. Instead, we are mourning. We are fearful. More than 20,000 killed, thousands are still under the rubble. Close to 9,000 children killed in the most brutal ways. Day after day, 1.9 million displaced, hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed. Gaza as we know, it no longer exists. This is an annihilation. This is a genocide. The world is watching. Churches are watching. The people of Gaza are sending live images of their own execution. Maybe the world cares, but it goes on. We are asking here, could this be our fate in Bethlehem, in Ramallah, in Jenin? Is this our destiny too? We are tormented by the silence of the world. Leaders of the so-called free, lined up one after the other to give the green light for this genocide against a captive population. They gave the cover. Not only did they make sure to pay the bill in advance, they veiled the truth and context providing the political cover, and yet another layer has been added. The theological cover with the Western church stepping into the spotlight.

Here in Palestine, the Bible is weaponized against us, our very own sacred text. In our terminology in Palestine, we speak of the empire. Here we confront the theology of Empire, a disguise for superiority, supremacy, chosenness, and entitlement.

It is sometimes given a nice cover using words like mission and evangelism, fulfillment of prophecy and spreading freedom and liberty. It speaks of land without people. It divides people into us and them. It dehumanizes and demonizes the concept of land without people again, even though they knew too well that the land had people and not just any people. A very special people.

Theology of the Empire calls for emptying Gaza just like it called for the ethnic cleansing in 1948, a miracle or a divine miracle as they called it.. It calls for us Palestinians now to go to Egypt, maybe Jordan. Why not just the sea? Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them? This war has confirmed to us that the world does not see us as equal. Maybe it’s the color of our skins. Maybe it is because we are on the wrong side of a political equation. Even our kinship in Christ did not shield us. So they say if it takes killing 100 Palestinians to get a single Hamas militant, then so be it. We are not humans in their eyes, but in God’s eyes, no one can tell us that.

The hypocrisy and racism of the western world is transparent and appalling. They always take the word of Palestinians with suspicion and qualification. No, we’re not treated equally yet, on the other side, despite a clear track record of misinformation. lies, their words are almost always deemed infallible. To our European friends, I never ever want to hear you lecture us on human rights or international law again, and I mean this. In this war, the many Christians in the western world made sure the empire has the theology needed. It is their self-defense, we were told. And I continue to ask, how is the killing of 9,000 children self-defense?

How is the displacement of 1.9 million Palestinians self-defense. In the shadow of the Empire, they turned the colonizer into the victim and the colonized into the aggressor.

Have we forgotten, have we forgotten that the state they talked to, that that state was built on the ruins of the towns and villages of those very same cousins? Have they forgot that. We are outraged by the complicity of the church? Let it be clear friends, silence is complicity and empty calls for peace without a ceasefire and end to occupation and the shallow words of empathy without direct action, all under the banner of complicity. So here is my message. Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world. Gaza was hell before October 7th and the world was silent. Should we be surprised that they’re silenced now?

If you are not appalled by what is happening in Gaza, if you are not shaken to your core, there is something wrong with your humanity. If you fail to call this a genocide, it is on you. It is a sin and a darkness you willingly embrace.

Some have not even called for a ceasefire. I’m talking about churches. We will be okay despite the immense blow we have endured, we the Palestinians will recover. We will rise. We will stand up again from the midst of destruction as we have always done as Palestinians. Although this is by far maybe the biggest blow we have received in a long time but we will be okay. But for those who are complicit, I feel sorry for you. Will you ever recover from this? Your charity and your words of shock after the genocide won’t make a difference. And let me say it, we will not accept your apology after the genocide.

What has been done has been done. I want you to look at the mirror and ask, where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide? You brought the gift of love and solidarity. We feel it. We were troubled by the silence of God. We have searched for God and found him under the rubble in Gaza. Jesus himself became the victim of the very same violence of the empire. When He was in our land, He was tortured, crucified, He bled out as others watched. He was killed and cried out in pain, “My God, where are you?”

In Gaza today, God is under the rubble. If Jesus were to be born today, He would be born under the rubble in Gaza. When we glorify pride and richness, Jesus is under the rubble. When we rely on power might and weapons, Jesus is under the rubble. When we justify, rationalize and theologize the bombing of children, Jesus is under the rubble. This is Christmas today in Palestine, and this is the Christmas message. Christmas in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus is this manger. This is our message to the world today. This genocide must stop now. Stop this genocide. This is our call. This is our plea. This is our prayer, hear oh God.

Amen

 

 

 

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LONG SHADOWS

Near Solstice shadows stretch from south to north
as if reaching toward winter.  All violence
seems to come nearer when the sun lies low
as if it will not stand to protect us.
The geese on the river all avoid
the sand spit where lately the bald eagles
have left their little charnel piles of goose.

There are other places to go on the river,
though the geese must watch the sky for that plunging
doom, so breathtakingly quick and final.
And don’t we all, every living thing
I mean, wait for some talon or beak
to descend on us?  And what of those bombed
into the streets, no food, no clean water?

Raptor force delivered with the efficiency
of our most expensive weapons.  And what
long shadows will grow in the hearts of
the children orphaned in that rubble?
In the Sixties, we fled to communes, styled
ourselves as renegades, the underground—
but we were never refugees like that.  

 

Thomas R. Smith

 

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The Mimeo Machine & The Revolution

Resurgence: Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism and the Resurgence Youth Movement 1964-1967 edited by Abigail Susik (Eberhardt Press, 2023)

The Mimeo Machine & The Revolution: The Little Machine that Got the Word Out in the 1960s

Who would have suspected that the humble mimeograph duplicator, invented for office work and used by organizations of every imaginable kind, would also have a political-cultural role across generations?

Going back to the 1920s, “amateur journalism” brought together young people (males, mostly if not entirely) sending each other their effusions on many topics, often in hopes of developing their own skills and becoming professionals of some uncertain kind. The young H.P. Lovecraft, not yet published as a horror writer, could be found among these seemingly lonely, predominantly male youngsters seeking literary company and encouragement.

Out of this milieu, in a general sense, came Science Fiction Fandom, rapidly expanding in the post-war period when fears of atomic war and invasions from outer space coincided with a paperback revolution. The two fed each other, fans began to have public meetings and then conventions…leading to an organized Comics Fandom with tables of young artists selling their own effusions, at first mainly to each other. In time, by the end of the twentieth century….Hollywood came to comics or vice versa. What began with mimeo machines climaxed, in some sense, in Superhero films, violating in almost every sense the spirit of the original.

But this is far from the whole story, of course. From the 1930s, obscure Trotskyist groups assaulted each other via mimeo while amateur artists experimented with the stencils. We can almost pick up the story of this book in the 1950s, because the poetry of the Beat Generation including that of Diane DiPrima, appeared as often in mimeo as in print, and because the marginal bookstores, sometimes used bookstores then abundant and adopted by Bohemians, also carried copies of these publications. Political or cultural, the mimeo project offered countless leaflets and pamphlets and for good financial reasons, too: paper was still cheap, postage cheaper.

Here comes the changing moods of the early 1960s, prompted by the civil rights movement, ban-the-bomb demonstrations, the increasing availability of the birth control pill, and the commercial discovery of the youth market. Nothing is quite so important to understand of Resurgence! as the division between the first half and the second half of the decade.

Until 1965 or so, radicalism had been insular, save in a handful of large cities, and even there, mass demonstrations, neighborhood bookshops encompassing bohemianism, not to mention a youthful and increasingly rebellious population, could all be pretty much ignored.

The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley of 1962 may have changed all that, but no more than a Life magazine feature on the Beats, intentionally insulting but actually inspiring instant, widespread imitation, had a little earlier.

Radicalism grew from the bottom up and more than a few handy connections to the middle. Jonathon Leake’s ouvre, mimeographed efforts over a decade, can be understood best here. By 1966 or 1967, underground newspapers appeared by the dozens, then hundreds, with anti-war (and pro-marijuana, also sex-positive) messages, outstripping the mimeograph revolution, relegating it to an early obscurity. Rediscovering the hidden, now mostly forgotten traces is a trip down radical memory lane. Abigail Susik and the Eberhard Press deserve much credit for rediscovering this particular cache of forgotten material and thanks to scanning and printing precision, making it available again.

Jonathan Leake and his brother Paul, radicalized teenagers from a well-to-do New York family friendly with European artists, would naturally grab the available means to express their personal, political, cultural rebellion. They had the means to travel widely, to choose poverty, to contact and meet with youngsters sharing the same sense of rebellion, for which “anarchism” offered an uncertain and perhaps outdated cognomen.

The existing Old Left spectrum of communist and socialist organizations and movements held little charm for the Leakes and their friends. Leading anarchists, for their part, looked hopefully toward a major revival of their end of things, and it seemed to make sense, young people of the time thinking and feeling in ways familiar to many past anarchist trends. But figures like Murray Bookchin and Sam Dolgoff wanted an orderly and thoughtful movement, not one eager for Lower East Side actions provoking police violence through choreographed public confrontations.

These youthful rebels, part of a large and inchoate milieu enraged at war, repression and racism, fell back upon their own devices. Leake, early described as schizophrenic, issued the bulletins reprinted here, full of youthful enthusiasm bordering on ranting but at the very least energetic and intellectually creative. He and his friends succeeded in publishing Resurgence! and establishing an aspiring “Resurgent Youth Movement” with no membership and no fixed following.

By happy coincidence, they struck up a relationship with a surrealist circle around Franklin and Penny Rosemont in Chicago, fellow mimeo revolutionaries (and bookstore co-op members). Out of this relationship and shared affinities came a revival of the ideas of surrealism, as Susik and Penny Rosemont usefully explain.

Somewhere in this equation, uncertainly and rather briefly, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) comes into the picture. Badly reduced from the pre-1920 glory days of the organization, the IWW managed to hold on, maintaining a minimal press and an office in Chicago. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of young people came to the IWW and left after a few months or years, finding something for themselves but not enough to suit their own aspirations. The ideals of the IWW, its quasi-anarchist spirit, never lost their appeal nor regain solid organizational form.

Resurgence! travels on into the middle 1960s until the very intensity and widespread youth sensibility of revolt seems to have swept Leake himself away. Mimeo publications seemingly lost most of their appeal to political readers or producers, even as mimeoed poetry books and short-lived poetry magazines gave the form one last heroic moment.

The book ends with a kind of diary or memoir. Leake, looking for a movement, drifts toward the eclectic forms of Maoism stalking a Left that could not, by itself, sustain the social rebellions that seemed so very inspiring. The vision of Revolution as explosion had never been very helpful for activists patiently organizing the anti-war movement, reaching ever further beyond the big city and big campus into the smaller towns, religious schools and the South. Nor to the newest site of rebellion, factories where women and people of color now worked within stodgy unions, trying for reform and transformation of their own means of changing their situation.

In the end, we have a remarkable manifesto, or series of manifestoes, as charming and ephemeral as the periodicals churned out of mimeograph machines would inevitably become in retrospect. This is a fine and fascinating book.

 

 

Paul Buhle

 

Paul Buhle, editor/publisher of Radical America magazine in the 1960s, has edited fifteen nonfiction, historical comics since WOBBLIES! in 2005. His latest is The Jewish Labor Bund from Between the Lines publishers. He lives in Providence, R.I.

 

(Reprinted from Fifth Estate #414, Fall 2023, via anarchist.news.org)

 

 

 

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Button Man

I owned a factory in what became known as
The Pink District of Manchester.
Used to send Quality Street tins 
full of different button rejects
to my sister for Christmas.

They became her treasure chest each year
from which kaleidoscopic tiddlywinks was
invented by her and her kids. 

Loads better than marble circles.
Full of chaotic colour and galaxies of pattern.
Never two buttons alike.

The lullaby was buttons pinging relentlessly
into the cup. Art flying through space.
Keeping the days calm.

As button man, I slept my teenage years
in a bed with my sister’s sweetheart – an RAF
storesman who was courting his sister. As 
you did in those days of one bedroomed houses
and ten kids.

As button man, I later taught my nephews to play
chess. By post. Sent my move each week with a
letter (and joke attached). Just bought some new
golfing socks. There’s a hole in one!

Then they invented the zip fastener.
Button man’s business bottomed out.
I launched a campaign that implored
buttons were still best. Folk agreed.
But still bought zips instead. Zips were easier.

Button man paddled along for a while. Kept afloat.
Kept his dignity and his Pride. Finally retired and
wound the button factory down.

Got a retirement job as a lollipop man. Helping  
children cross the road in the Pink District. Ten
at a time.

Was the lollipop man but all the kids knew
who I really was. 

 

 

 

 

Gary Boswell

 

 

 

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New Year Eve

The eagle descends to the point
it ceases to be homuncular
and begins to seem colossus.

The ground I stand is the white eye
of the halo of the bird’s dark orbit.

The last day flies away.
The ground looks disconcert
at its sudden broadness, and I
have time’s topography and no destination.

 

 

 

 Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

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GARBAGE PATCH

six pounds of plastic for every
pound of plankton of phenol and
hydrochloric acid able to degrade
in the atmosphere three new compounds 
not found in nature were discovered in 
the Northern Gyre styrene monomer styrene
dimer and styrene trimer a noted
human carcinogen a giant island of 
floating garbage its low density of 
four particles per cubic meter prevents
detection by satellite imagery or even
by casual boaters and divers because 
the patch is a widely dispersed area consisting 
of fingernail sized microscopic particles in
the upper water column known as 
microplastics 620 thousand square miles 
in total toothbrushes water bottles plastic 
lighters pens baby bottles small fibers of
wood pulp found throughout the patch originateS 
from thousands of tonnes of toilet paper 
flushed into the oceans daily the gyre or 
gyres of which there are many result 
in a feedback loop of methane and ethylene 
air pollutants harmful to human 
tissue the gyres are expected to grow and 
will almost double in extent  in the next few 
years scientists have nicknamed each a garbage patch 
or shitzone

 

 

 

James McLaughling

 

 

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This New Year Calls for a Bold New Vision for Mankind

We have seen since the latter part of 2023, the horrific repercussions of controlled and uncontrolled mass murder being perpetrated on men, women and children in the Gaza strip.

We have witnessed, in US and European cities, the escalation of deranged individuals shooting dead whoever happens to get in their line of fire.

We see – and increasingly directly experience – a break down in civilised patterns of law and order; responsible governance within and without supranational bodies, national parliaments, educational institutions, national health services and hospitals, transport systems, banking, the media, and indeed, in too many cases within families themselves. Amounting to general disassociation with basic moral values.

We also see how giant corporations and banks continue to swallow-up smaller businesses and turn their workers into less than human robotic slaves, unwittingly and wittingly supporting a world exclusively devoted to self agrandissement through the twin totems of power and money.

We increasingly recognise that a whole generation, growing-up in a soulless era of materialistically driven, selfish and often aggressive behaviour patterns, are in danger of falling easy victims to EMF digitalised communications technologies that offer an escape route into a virtual reality world – having little or no connection with an ‘earthed’, meaningful and genuinely human existence.

Many see all this and much more – and yet feel paralysed from changing direction within their own lives. Feel spellbound by the top-down centralised program that stands behind the relentless degradation of human rights, basic freedoms, privacy and justice.

In spite of much valuable information being available to those who care to search for it, there remains a lack of awareness that we are living in ‘a program’. Within an agenda whose ends are 100% antithetical to sentient, caring human beings and to the vital ecological diversity of the planet.

Continuing to participate in this program while dismissing as ‘conspiracy theories’ information that reveals its origins to be a small cabal of ruthless exponents of a ‘New World Order’ and a ‘Great Reset’, is to be in denial of the gift of basic human intelligence.

For such people, only the arrival on one’s doorstep of a life altering shock, will induce an awakening.

But there are a quite rapidly growing number of decent human beings who are now recognising that the horrors which greet us in each morning’s media scan, add up to more than just arbitrary acts of spontaneous cruelty.

They recognise a line of continuity between the perpetration of one tragedy and another. One deliberate incitement of violence with another. They start to join the dots.

It is within this growing body of the partially aware that the New Year needs to bring with it a shift into taking responsibility for becoming fully aware – and taking the actions that, when enough engage in them, will bring about a crucial tipping point. A decisive shift in the energetic direction of our planet. A point where ‘we the people’ find our true sense of purpose, and follow it.

There are two key elements involved in turning around the existing ‘world order’: having a clear vision of what should replace it, and having the guts to go for it.

Within this is the need to continue to defend those basic values which have somehow endured up till now.

‘The vision’ is critical in order for further positive actions to be brought to life. Without vision driving aspiration, the goal cannot be reached. And the goal must be something which strongly appeals to the collective unconscious of mankind, not just at the conscious level.

What vision is capable of inspiring such a reaction?

It is said that ‘where attention goes energy flows’. So we must start with ourselves. We must each observe where it is that our attention goes – and whether this is genuinely life affirmative or essentially regressive – and then to be able to get control over it and firmly direct it towards truly meaningful ends.

When I use the word ‘ourselves’, it refers to individuals capable of discerning the nature of the reality we live in and also capable of acting on it, responsibly. This includes, where necessary, taking responsible non-egoic leadership.

Shockingly, this rules out a large proportion of the population of our planet; including those who still insist that that which is positively aligned with the search for clarity and truth, is the domain of trouble makers and conspiracy theorists.

So in assessing what element within society is able to adopt a vision capable of shifting daily life in a positive direction, we must conclude that this will be a small percentage of humanity.

However, small as it may be, if sufficiently fired-up, it has the power to bring about the fundamental shift of direction that is called for.

The sickness moving through society today is not just the expression of physical ailments. It is the expression of a profound imbalance manifesting within all aspects of life on earth. A disruption of planetary equilibrium.

This has been brought about, over many decades if not centuries, by placing a false emphasis within the core values of human education and aspiration. An emphasis skewed in favour of external material enrichment – of ‘having’ – rather than on discovering and fulfilling our true potential in body, mind and spirit: of ‘being’.

At the deepest level all humanity longs ‘to be’. Longing also for the sense of security experienced by realising one is under the guidance of an omnipotent and benign power offering unconditional love, regardless of one’s status in this world.

If this longing was recognised, respected and acted upon within the social, political, financial, legal, ecological and spiritual disciplines that form the core concerns of all people, we would solve the problems of humanity and indeed of the world, at one stroke.

It would mean the emphasis of all education would be the realisation of human aspirations set within the context of an overall pursuit of truth, justice and spiritual emancipation.

I have used a newly coined term ‘veritocracy’ (from the Latin ‘veritas’: truth) to describe this new state of existence – that which must replace the thoroughly worn-out socio-political institution called ‘democracy’.

A Veritocracy will embrace the pursuit of truth and justice as the central goal of social, political and economic life. It will mean the end of politics as we know it.

At the core of this vision lies a belief in the realisation of the as yet untapped powers we have inherited as a divine gift of our Creator.

An immeasurably valuable gift that we have failed to acknowledge and have therefore squandered in favour of false trails into unfulfilling realms of compromise and disaster.

I therefore offer the birth of Veritocracy as a vision to get 2024 off to the right start.

A vision that when put into effect will change all our lives from top to bottom, bottom to top. Will fundamentally readdress our sense of direction and set mankind on its true path of destiny.

A path that will ensure the rapid demise of those whose existence is fully devoted to preventing the glorious and unobstructable flowering of mankind.

 

 

Julian Rose

Julian Rose is an organic farmer, writer, broadcaster and international activist. He is author of four books of which the latest ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’ is a clarion call to resist the despotic New World Order takeover of our lives. Do visit his website for further information www.julianrose.info

 

 

 

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Anarchy Radio 26 December 2023



with John Zerzan

Gaza bludgeoned and starved, no functioning hospitals. Crazed global weather. Online slander. From microplastics to nanoplastics. Deaths due to smartphones. Homelessness, “Deaths from despair” thesis. All of us Strangers. JVL Rewilding book now available. Ellul discussion. “How Else Is It Possible” poem. Action briefs. One call.

https://archive.org/details/anarchy-radio-12-26-2023

 

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PYRAMID PRISON

in detritus metronomes
of human habitation
the ghost of Shelley’s imagination
questions the elemental,
experimental
chromosomes
and ribosomes
of DNA,
reverse engineered
that suddenly appeared
as evolution yesterday.

her monster mirrors dark wells
of monsters in our smart selves,
the lost humanity and oratory
that fills laboratory
test tubes
with fused
imbued
genes
to dreams
of flat forward faster
distinction
to disaster
and barbarism’s
ectopic extinction.

this is our pyramid prison,
where all souls
and proles
climb the debased
opposite steps of extremism,
like Prometheus Unbound,
defaced
sitting around
the crouching sphinx
abandoned by missing links.

free masons of money and wars,
warp the alter of natural laws,
so reason withers
and wastelands rust-
no longer rivers
of shared stardust

in the equal symphony of spheres
in space,
filling our ears
with subwoofer bass,
definitive
primitive
medieval
evil
waste.

 

 

 

 

 

Marcus Jones
Photo Nick Victor

 

Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford,
England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of
Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of
The Poetry Society, and nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, his five published books of poetry  https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.  

His poetry has been published in numerous publications including: The Huffington
Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine;The Lampeter Review and Dissident Voice.

 

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fluted

 

I don’t need a drummer cos I dont have a
band but if I did I’d pick you. Can tell you
are no longer impressed or marble faced by
me even though I always thought you
could have been a Prophet
still sort of do, wanting to keep your feelings
exactly as they were – even with raindrops I
walk in the centre of the day, spend the sketched
evening making collages by candlelight on allenby
street listening to a radio 4 drama eating
fresh walnuts
I made over  a hundred collages

 

Blossom Hibbert

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tony Oxley (1938-2023)

Tony Oxley, who has died aged 85, was perhaps the most important British drummer and percussionist working in the latter part of the twentieth century. He was born in Sheffield and took piano lessons as a child. He quickly gave up the piano, but, as a teenager, taught himself the drums. Drafted into the army in the late 1940s, he became an army musician, playing percussion. His military service took him to the US, where he heard a number of jazz greats live. In 1963, having been discharged from the army, he formed his first jazz group in Sheffield. Around that time he also met the guitarist Derek Bailey who, by an extraordinary coincidence, just happened to live round the corner from him.

Bailey and Oxley went on to form a trio – named, curiously, after the English composer Joseph Holbrooke – with the bassist-composer Gavin Bryars. Although they began by playing jazz standards, they morphed into a free improvisation group. Oxley was particularly interested in the more avant-garde side of jazz, Bryars, more in the classical music avant-garde. Bailey was interested in both. Between them, they evolved a musical style that was quite unknown in Britain or Europe at the time. Oxley said of it, “Sometimes there’s an assumption that this sort of thing is done just to be different. That’s totally wrong. It’s an emotional demand that you have to meet. When you’re wearing chains you don’t become aware of them through intellectual processes. You can feel them.” (1)

Nevertheless, Oxley retained an interest in mainstream jazz. In 1967, he moved to London and became the house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s. There, he got to play with the likes of Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins and Bill Evans. Playing with the Alan Skidmore Quintet at the Montreaux Jazz Festival in 1969, he picked up the award for best drummer. Not only that, but between 1969 and 1971, he  consistently came out top in the Melody Maker readers’ poll for best drummer. He also played drums on John McLaughlin’s first album, Extrapolation. On the strength of this he was offered a recording contract with CBS. The two albums he made with them, The Baptised Traveller (1969) and Ichnos (1971), features Oxley alongside Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, and Kenny Wheeler. Jeff Clyne played bass on The Baptised Traveller, Barry Guy on Ichnos, on which Oxley was also joined by the trombonist Paul Rutherford. Although both albums are seen as classics of free improvised music, both, predictably,were commercial failures. CBS sacked him. Undeterred, Oxley, Bailey and Parker set up Incus Records, a label specialising in improvised music. It has often been described as the first musician-run record company in Britain. It was certainly the first to manage to keep going for any length of time. As well as being a musician, Oxley was an artist. Several Incus album-covers feature his work.

In the late 1960s, Oxley had begun experimenting with the modification of percussion sounds with electronics. This led to him incorporating a ring modulator and several other devices into his kit. He also brought in a number of found objects (screws, bowls, etc.) Although his kit became quite massive, he did talk of the importance of limiting choices in specific musical situations, rather than continually using the whole kit.

Oxley also involved himself in educational work. In 1970, he was artist-in-residence at Sydney Conservatorium in Australia and, in 1973, jazz instructor at the Barry Summer School in Wales.

In the 1980s,  Oxley set up the ensemble, Celebration Orchestra, which issued three albums, Tomorrow is Here (1986) The Triple Cabinet of the Triad (1993) and The Enchanted Messenger (1995). He also toured with Anthony Braxton. In 1988, he met Cecil Taylor and quickly became the pianist’s drummer/percussionist of choice. He featured on several albums with Taylor, including Leaf Palm Hand (1989) and Looking (1990). In 2000, working with Norwegian musicians Ivar Grydeland (electric guitar) and Tonny Kluften (bass), he brought out the album Triangular Screen. His more recent work has not been so well-documented, although he did bring out an album with the percussionist Stephan Holker, The New World 165CD in 2023.

Tony Oxley was one of a handful of British musicians who played a major part in kickstarting the free improvisation scene in Britain. And although, as his collaborator Derek Bailey was keen to point out, free improvisation is a way of making music, not a style, he was one of the people who established what people expect free improvised music to sound like.

Tony Oxley, born Sheffield 15th June, 1938, died 26th December, 2023 aged 85, after a long illness.

 

Dominic Rivron

(1) Quoted in Improvisation It’s Nature and Practice in Music by Derek Bailey, Da Capo Press (1992)

LINKS

Rare recording of Joseph Holbrooke from 1965:
https://youtu.be/bZx4SCF-d6M?si=Ajb0mZ4ob03p4suN

An album of previously unreleased recordings made by Tony Oxley and Alan Davie at Davie’s home during 1977-78:
https://confrontrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/elaboration-of-particulars

Triangular Screen:
https://sofamusic.bandcamp.com/album/triangular-screen

A recent digital album of previously unreleased material, featuring artwork by Oxley:
https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/unreleased-1974-2016-129cd-2022

More recent work with the percussionist Stefan Holker:

https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-new-world-165cd-2023

Incus Records:
http://www.incusrecords.force9.co.uk/

Tony Oxley at Café Oto:
https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/artists/tony-oxley/

 

 

 

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A Merry Leftfield Christmas!

Alan Dearling joined up with the lively, quirky Todmorden Kindness Christmas

It started months before Christmas in the planning, recruiting of dozens of volunteers, and in creating a funding strategy to provide for a day of food, fun, music, laughs and kindness.

It kicked off at noon on Christmas Day with food provided in the Unitarian Church, and then continued on, ever more lively, at the nearby Golden Lion pub and music venue. Funding to pay for the food, plus more for local food projects largely came from ‘20 Days of Christmas’ –  20 boxes of vinyl records, many of them signed, and  auctioned online. They were provided by Leftfield’s Neil Barnes.  In all, he donated 500 of his own records and they were auctioned on Gig’s Golden Lion: Matthanee Nilavongse page.

By the end of the bidding, over £4,000 was raised. On the last day of the auctions, there was a special quiz question. Answer at the end of this little report from the event.

The first person who could answer Neil’s Quiz Question, could win the box for nothing.

Neil Barnes’ Question: “I’m thinking of a very special old instrument that I’ve recently used on stage live.

Can you name that instrument and tell me its length in centimetres?”

Neil (Leftfield), said after the auctions finished: “Just blown away by the generosity of everyone that’s bought a box. It’s fantastic to know that the records I’ve donated will go to new homes. Thank you so much for your kind contributions. It’s such an uplifting feeling when a community joins to create something special. We are so grateful. I’m sure the Kindness dinner will be a fantastically happy and positive event. We owe you all so much. See you there. Happy Xmas.”

Indeed, it was quite an event with over 300 fed. Some were older people, some with special needs, but all were welcome both at the Unitarian Church and in the Golden Lion. A magic mixture of foods for meat eaters, vegetarians and vegans.  And Maximus was at the entrance to meet and greet the revellers.

At the Golden Lion, more food was served, Djs played records, children and adults danced, chatted and smiled. Lots and lots of smiling faces, even more so as the afternoon morphed into evening with a performance from Tod’s own Roy Elvis Potts. Great fun and he received plenty of well-deserved applause. 

And in the evening, more Djs, including more frenetic dancing, and a banging set from Neil Barnes, who handed over two further cheques for the Cornholme Food Drop-in and the Todmorden Community Christmas Dinners project. Photo from Catherine Moore of Neil with Liz Thorpe, and Gig from the Golden Lion.

OK, putting my hands up, I was something of a fan of Leftfield in the 1990s. Alongside Massive Attack, The Chemical Brothers and Portishead and others, they brought something new and invigorating to the musical melting pot. Leftfield was formed in 1989 by Neil Barnes with Paul Daley. Sometimes, indeed oft-times, their musical style has been described as ‘progressive house’.  A sort of Acid-powerhouse.  ‘Leftism’ remains a pivotal album. It was their first and reached number 3 in the UK album charts. Next up was ‘Rhythm and Stealth’ which topped the album charts in 1999. Fast forward to now-times, Neil is no longer working with Paul. The most recent album, the fourth from Leftfield, arrived in 2022 with the swaggering title, ‘This is what we do’.

Answer to Neil’s Quiz Question: Philip Drake won with the answer: Berimbau 158 cms, and he kindly donated another £149!! So it completed the Kindness Christmas project target of £4,000.

 

 

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The best worst band in the world? Throbbing Gristle

Throbbing Gristle – An Endless Discontent’ by Ian Trowell (Intellect Press). December 2023

Alan Rider reports back on ‘An Endless Discontent’, a skilful dissection of the enigma that was Throbbing Gristle.

Tempting though it is to see TG as a proto punk band ..they, and Coum Transmissions, were a self-consciously arty project of the like punk professed to blow away, but never did”

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­It’s true to say that, with a career that lasted roughly five years from 1977 (though when they actually formed as a unit depends on your definition of that term), existing on the edges of early punk and post-punk, and encompassed around 30 live performances, a handful of self-produced records and tapes issued on their own Industrial Records imprint, and a clutch of pamphlets, manifestos and events, Throbbing Gristle’s influence extends far beyond their short, but highly productive, existence.  Over the years there have been multiple reissues and cataloguing of every performance, utterance, image, and press clipping to such an extent it is near impossible to separate myth from reality, not helped by TG agitator-in-chief Genesis P-Orridge’s tendency to exaggerate and obscure.  Add to that the influence of the subsequent activities of TG members as they split and scattered into Chris and Cosey, Psychic TV and Coil (along with other multiple spin offs, side projects, and collaborations too numerous and convoluted to mention) and you have an impressive body of work that forms a lasting legacy now that two of the four members of TG have died.  The history of TG has been covered many times, most impressively in Simon Ford’s 1999 book on TG and its Performance Art predecessor, Coum Transmissions, ‘Wreckers of Civilisation’, so named after a Tory MPs outraged condemnation of Coum Transmissions 1976 Prostitution show at the ICA.  All of this makes Ian Towell’s task in writing a new book capturing the TG story and narrative an unenviable challenge, fraught with dangers, not least from the notoriously fussy and over sensitive body of TG fans/fanatics waiting with knives sharpened to slash away at any inaccuracy, error, or perceived slight to their heroes.

Ian is made of sterner stuff though and approaches this gargantuan task through the lens of place, describing the locations and circumstances surrounding key moments in TG’s evolution and history in order to put them into the context of the times and the geography of both their Hackney ‘Death Factory’ base and regional performances in Wakefield, Sheffield, Derby, and elsewhere, in what he describes as ‘space, place, and being there’.  It’s an effective strategy and one that draws you in to the experience of Throbbing Gristle at the time and puts across the bleakness and desperation of the times, where there genuinely seemed ‘No Future’ for a whole generation and the shadow of the Cold War still loomed large.  Chapters have titles like ‘Restlessness’, ‘Anti-gig’, and ‘Anachrony in the UK’ which effectively act as shorthand for the trajectory of TG’s evolution.  There are sub headings such as ‘Malignant Hum’, ‘Bunker Mentality’ or ‘The World is a War Film’, all of which combine to give you a flavour of Throbbing Gristle’s confrontational stance and genre defining sloganeering.  Published in conjunction with the Punk Scholars Network, a collective of like-minded intellectuals and former punks, the style of ‘An Endless Discontent’ is academic in tone, with extensive references and end notes that could have derailed the flow of the book and created a distance between the writer and his subject.  Thankfully that is not the case and Ian’s style treads the fine line between an entertaining and compelling telling of the TG story and factual accuracy and scholarly rigour, albeit occasionally lapsing into somewhat impenetrable academic prose in places.  Stories such as the infamous Gary Gilmore T Shirt sold by Boy, the Coum transmissions 1976 ICA show and the media reaction to that, and incursions into the Architectural Association, Wakefield College, Derby Ajanta theatre and Sheffield University are all covered in impressive detail, as are numerous press articles and gigs.  The Sheffield chapter for example bookends their appearances in the City in Spring 1979 and Summer 1980 as a vehicle to describe the evolution of TG over that year, which was a pivotal one for them, witnessing the release of the album ’20 Jazz Funk Greats’ and performances in Northampton with the fledgling Bauhaus and at London’s YMCA.

Tempting though it is to see TG as a proto punk band simply because they existed within the same orbit at the same time and crossed over with key players in punk like Mark Perry and Crass, is a mistake.  They, and Coum Transmissions, were a self-consciously arty project of the like punk professed to blow away (but never did, as early punk was in essence an alternative art movement itself) and never really sat well with the less intellectual pub rock tone of punk.  TG themselves may have started out performing at academic and arts institutions in the first instance (although none possessed a formal art school training) but soon progressed on to more conventional rock venues and bills, even playing with Joy Division in support. That contradiction between their high-minded commitment to simultaneously destroy and re-model art and music, and the more humdrum reality and economics of rock performance is one of the defining challenges that ultimately derailed and diluted early industrial music and turned it into the side show we have today.

Analysing and dissecting in print a band like TG was never going to be an easy task.  In many ways it was doomed from the start as TG were never a band in the conventional sense and defied categorisation, despite the ‘Industrial’ tag. However, to his credit Ian Trowell has succeeded in producing a book which melds academia and counter culture and comes out with a fascinating insight into a world that blinked into existence only briefly before the mundane world diluted and destroyed it as a unique thing.  His knowledge and enthusiasm are infectious in their nature and even discarding the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia, it is clear to see that there was something innovative and different going on in those grubby back street locations.

I will leave TG train spotters to pore through the detail picking out any small inaccuracies, of which there are bound to be a few, but for me it brought back memories of that scene, not least of which was how bloody cold it always seemed to be back then and how everyone was always broke! Whether the music produced by TG has stood the test of time is a moot point, but from this distance you cannot deny that they had a huge influence on electronic and industrial music today and ‘An Endless Content’ successfully captures what made TG special.  Mission accomplished I’d say.

 

 

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Natural Justice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


He laughs to see
the panting stag.

Thinks only of division,
“better than,” hierarchy.

His soul toxified
from reading
the wrong Book.

The hunter will never know
holy brother/sisterhood:
as ancient as the granite.

The leaves drop
like broken umbrellas.
Bird-leg twigs bleed iron.

She carries him downstream,
rushing him over the boulders,
freeing his horns from the gorse.

Doing the opposite of Abraham’s evil,
when the ram was caught in the thicket.

He launches himself onto a bank,
with the last of his strength
Don’t let my vision be stunted
by the hand of Man;
…and canters on.

Watchers everywhere.
The trill of bird-song on the wind.
A crow calls. A magpie responds.
These are my keepers!

Something grey is moving in,
the shadow of the heavens, scudding.

A pigeon flies up to look – old navigator.
A pheasant sounds the alarm. 

The staring hollows of your eyes,
will be homes to worms and woodlice.

We do not need you, to adore the flowers.

New trees crack open
the concrete, bricks and mortar.

‘Wheat’ and ‘chaff’
go their separate ways.

The wild boar returns
to eat the beech nuts.

The brock nurses her cubs,
away from the rusting guns.

Fences are down now.
Buildings have become playgrounds
for leverets, bats and cockroaches. 

Green jungles spread their shoots
among the stick forests.

The ivy ceases mourning.
Dandelions dance on the lawns.

He longs for the world to turn kind.
For the footsteps to fade away.

For the emptying silence to harmonize.

How old is the earth?
How young is Man!

 

 

Heidi Stephenson
Illustration:
Claire Palmer

 

 

 

/

 

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REGIONAL POETRY

 
 
Nitty Nora, her eyesight buggered, sits in Silvio’s
after shopping, idly stirring tea without sugar. A
biscuit balanced on her saucer. Decent eyesight

was essential for finding nits in the hair of little
children. She had a special comb with a wooden
handle and widened tines made from metal, but
in a majority of cases she used her finger ends
to examine their partings, and there they were,
the little buggers. It had been a job with satisfaction.

A life worth living.

The local health authority, releasing her reluctantly,
said she could be proud of herself. Her contribution.

Richard Gere, the actor from Hollywood in America,

has just settled himself into the chair opposite. He’s
in Hyde on location. A film called Yanks, directed
by John Schlesinger, who also made Midnight Cowboy.

Sunday Bloody Sunday. A commercial
for the Conservative Party. John Major’s roots.

A Kind of Loving, based on the Barstow novel.

Richard says, Hi. How’s it going?

Nora doesn’t recognise him. She began the book
but she didn’t take to it. Tiny writing. Vic Brown,
trapped into a marriage with small-minded Ingrid
and harangued by her monstrous mother. Set, as
you’d expect, in Yorkshire. Present-tense narration.
 
If only they would let her, Richard’s hair
is the sort of place she might have found something.
 
 
 
.
 
 

Steven Taylor

 

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Extract of Choices

Let me wake up
On the flower bed.
I saw a girl
With love in her eyes
And flowers in her hair;
Just like the Led Zeppelin Song.
I might aim for a travel to California
Just like the song.
I can sense a flower art
Even in a hard stone work.
I sculpt my heart out.
I have a weaving nest
To spend by the nodding fire,
Just like the Poem by Yeats.
Life is an art
And living is the purpose
But art provides us a new heart
To renew the abstract
And get an extract of choices.
I write the world
With love and care.

 

 

 

© Sushant Thapa
Biratnagar-13, Nepal 
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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ALEXANDRIA

“…listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.”

The God Abandons Antony – C.P. Cavafy

Yes, I hear…
Yes, I’m losing Alexandria.
But who from the alive might say
it’s mine
him himself, if not immortal.
A town of the cross
between East and
the West
rich of gold,
sand,
tears.
Fear.
To run? To hide?
To turn from Alexandria?
You, who all your life
have been travelling towards her.
I’ve been ready for a time
(since last summer)
to meet Octavian
even though I know, it’s vanity.
Empty hope
it’s to beg the powerful
because you’re so brave –
you, the mortal.
At a night hour,
like the last joy, I listen to the sounds,
the wonderful melody of a mystic procession.
No,
God didn’t abandon
Antony.

He abandoned Alexandria.

 

 

 

 

Bozhidar Pangelov
Translator from Bulgarian: Liliya Cauchi
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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Natalie

Natalie,

Once in a hundred, in ten,

or seven years,

the country stream is tearing down the bridges before my eyes,

as a girl takes off her bracelets in front of the mirror.

 

And watches the pupils of horror dilate.

 

At least once a week,

and I come out as a different person

I cross the same river

I wake up

and a young natural waterfall,

with a deep and guttural voice – to scare the fish.

 

And I try to stay whole

on its other shore,

bristling like a hungry dragon.

I use imagination clouds,

to make it rain

and I grow up

to scare the bridges –

white metaphors,

holding me over the scree,

still alive.

 

Then someone comes and steals

my green apples

moreover, my roses have not yet bloomed.

 

*

You drink so beautifully, he says,

that your life will crumble

absurdly caught in that thin glass.

 

 

 

 

Roza Boyanova
Translated by Dessy Tsvetkova 
Picture Nick Victor

 

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John Pilger, Giant of Journalism

John Pilger, a giant of journalism born in Australia in 1939, has died at the age of 84, according to a statement released online by his family.

His numerous books and especially his documentaries opened the world’s eyes to the failings, and worse, of governments in many countries – including his birthplace.

 

He inspired many journalists, and journalism students, with his willingness to critique the damaging effects on ordinary people’s lives of capitalism and Western countries’ foreign policies, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom.

But his campaigning approach to journalism also regularly provoked controversy. That was partly because of his trenchant dissent from official stances, and partly because in aiming to reach the broadest possible audience, he tended to oversimplify issues and overstate his views.

 

Read more: More than one journalist per day is dying in the Israel-Gaza conflict. This has to stop


‘I am, by inclination, anti-authoritarian’

The English journalist, Auberon Waugh, who clashed with Pilger on more than one occasion, invented the verb “to pilger” which he defined as “to treat a subject emotionally with generous disregard for inconvenient detail, always in the left-wing cause and always with great indignation”.

Whatever the merits of Waugh’s criticism, they are, in my view, outweighed by the breadth and depth of Pilger’s disclosures in the public interest.

Pilger never hid behind the safety of the “he said, she said” approach to journalism, which New York University professor Jay Rosen has famously called the “view from nowhere”.

Pilger, however, rejected the label of crusader, telling Anthony Hayward for his book, In the Name of Justice: The Television Reporting of John Pilger:

I am, by inclination, anti-authoritarian and forever sceptical of anything the agents of power want to tell us. It is my duty, surely, to tell people when they’re being conned or told lies.

Telling the stories of ordinary people

Pilger was born in Bondi, Sydney. Like many of his generation, he moved to the UK in the early 1960s and worked for The Daily Mirror, Reuters and ITV’s investigative program World in Action.

He reported on conflicts in Bangladesh, Biafra, Cambodia and Vietnam and was named newspaper journalist of the year in Britain in 1967 and 1979.

He made more than 50 documentaries. His best known is Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which in 1979 revealed that as many as two million of the seven million population of the country had died as a result of genocide or starvation under Pol Pot’s brutal regime.

His documentaries garnered numerous prizes, including the prestigious Richard Dimbleby award for factual reporting, a Peabody award for Cambodia: Year Ten and a Best Documentary Emmy award for Cambodia: The Betrayal.

He also made several documentaries about Australia, including one in 1985, The Secret Country, about historic and continuing mistreatment of First Nations people that thoroughly irritated the then Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke.

When the US government of George W. Bush reacted to al-Qaeda’s murderous 9/11 terrorist attacks by invading first Afghanistan, in late 2001, then Iraq in March 2003, Pilger made Truth and Lies: Breaking the Silence on the War on Terror.

It sharply criticised not only Bush’s actions but those of the most ardent members of the “coalition of the willing”: UK Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, and Australian coalition prime minister, John Howard.

No doubt, if Pilger was still alive he would condemn the absence of the National Security Committee’s papers from the 2003 cabinet papers released today by the National Archives of Australia.

They show Howard’s cabinet signed off on the controversial – in hindsight disastrous – decision to endorse the Bush administration’s plan to invade Iraq based on “oral reports” from the prime minister, rather than full cabinet submissions.

Journalist John Pilger joins a protest in support of Wikileaks.
 
Pilger focused much of his energy in the 2000s on supporting Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis

Pilger wrote or edited 11 books, including Tell Me No Lies, an anthology of outstanding investigative journalism, and perhaps his best regarded book, Heroes, which hewed to what one of his favourite journalists, Martha Gellhorn, called “the view from the ground”.

He did this by telling the stories of ordinary people he had encountered, whether miners in Durham, England, refugees from Vietnam, or American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War – not to parades, but to lives dislocated by the silence and shame surrounding the war’s end.

The world has lost a resolutely dissenting voice

Phillip Knightley, a contemporary of Pilger who was also born in Australia and went to Fleet Street to become a celebrated investigative journalist and author himself, summed up his compatriot’s work in 2000:

He was certainly among the first to draw international attention to the shameful way in which Australia has treated the Aborigines [sic] […] John has a slightly less optimistic view than I have.

In Welcome to Australia [Pilger’s 1999 film], he concentrated on the bad things that were happening but not the good. He would say that’s not part of his brief and it’s covered elsewhere. He’s a polemicist and, if you want to arouse people’s passions and anger, the stronger the polemic, the better.

Pilger made fewer films in the 2000s, focusing much of his energy on supporting Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. Assange continues to suffer in Belmarsh prison in England while appeals against his extradition to the US to answer charges under the 1917 Espionage Act grind interminably on.

Whatever flaws there are in Pilger’s journalism, it feels dispiriting that on the first day of a new year clouded by wars, inaction on climate change and a presidential election in the US where democracy itself is on the ballot, the world has lost another resolutely dissenting voice in the media.

https://theconversation.com/the-world-has-lost-a-dissenting-voice-australian-journalist-john-pilger-has-died-age-84-220418


Read more: ‘A time of anxiety’: The depressing new reality for local journalists in conflict zones


 

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Interlude

 

The curtain rises on a stage full of smoke, but the packed house has paid good money, and the show must go on. The cast can’t see each other, but they’re drilled to perfection, striding to their spots and gesturing like figures from medieval manuscripts. This is neither time nor place for nuance, with only outlines appearing through the billowing clouds. It’s at this juncture that I wish I’d bought a programme – or at least checked the tickets on my phone which I bought eight months ago, long before The Unprecedented Event – as I don’t recall what I’m seeing, and the fact that the only dialogue is wordless hacking isn’t helping. Still, the actors are game, and when someone who could be Lady Macbeth or Widow Twankey leans from the lip of the stage, red eyes streaming and raw throat wheezing like a storm in a windmill, we’re all on our feet, half in floods of tears and half roaring with laughter. And then she’s back into the fray, limbs sweeping like elegant sails as she disappears into the fug, sinking into the incense of lovingly flung roses.

 

 

 

Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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ANOTHER TIMELINE

Interested? Don’t think I am, it’s too other, paranoid and disingenuous. I like the idea but not the execution, like how everything is linked, not how those connections are made.

We are a haunted generation, living in a past we invent for ourselves, everything available on demand, nothing lost from view or allowed to be forgotten.

UFOs, cuddly toys and cartoon characters emerge online, aghast at what this future holds. In time they will wish they were sepia memories and faded photos rather than digital loops and constant repeats.

Nostalgia’s become hauntology, an addiction to childhood, dreams deconstructed beyond repair: neutered and misremembered visions with newly reimagined soundtracks.

Don’t forget to looks both ways and avoid speaking to strangers, stay on the well-lit roads. Don’t play in ponds or climb trees alone, always tell your parents where you are going and ask a policeman if you are lost.

Nowadays, we know better than to trust anyone in uniform, prefer to stay indoors, eyes glued to our mobile phones. We message friends we’ve never met, text our partners from the other room, and order in supplies.

International Rescue always saved us, Tufty helped us safely cross the road. The Tomorrow People got there first and it’s not looking good: the world’s become a comedy, a musical, a travesty of what we hoped would be.

We were told so many wonderful stories but it turns out that somebody made them all up. In what was the glorious future back then, we can no longer delay our own demise.

 

 

   © Rupert M Loydell

 

 

 

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Ta-Ra, Tony: At the Funeral of Tony Allen


Photo: Alan Cox

                          

                                   For Anthony Lawrence Allen 4th March 1945 – 1st December 2023 


After the jokes end there’s strange air working its way

Across London, as it was a cold day this morning,
But then suddenly, it relaxed, as if achieving the sigh
That you would have released to help form it,
With all of your act’s mock surprise masking anger
At the injusticies dealt by death’s tax.

Then, on cue it rained, 45 minutes before
The sad service; perhaps some tears sent from Heathcote
And later contemporaries like Rik Mayall. But then,
This is fucking England of course,  the not so great
Unsteady ship surfing, sinking; the HMS Dissolution,
From which spirits swim swiftly, desperately

Trawling distance as the still surviving flesh
Duly fails. But then, all of us are the rain, when friends
And the courageous escape us, for we are each
Aware that by leaving they make life the punchline,
For which sometimes Devil dealt we’re all prone.
So, attempt to attach yourself Tone, to the nearest

And next winsome Angel, so that as I strain to hear
Your low laughter, we homed and horny will endeavour
To feel less alone. I remember that you came to my birthdays,
Met Jan, and we had manly hugs fairly often; your hat
And leather jacket, a cosmos that bereft of stars
Mates can make. Shortarse that I am, I could take much

From your myth and 6 foot 3 story tower, including tales
Of comedy and resistance, from the Frestonian fringe
Beside Heathcote, and passed Alexi Sayle’s crewcut,
Who with Stewart Lee stood there respectfully today
At your Wake. Moments before the sun spoke,
Clearing the clouds to shine brightly. Alan Cox showed me

The rainbow he had carefully caught on his phone.
The Funeral was a 35 minute set, with Jonny FluffyPunk
As main mourner. Coralling love and affection in front
Of your wicker bed and last home. The Service was free
Of religion, (Thank God) and therefore a secular little riot.
Your main request for the service was that ‘No-one should wank.’

We obeyed. As we strained to hear the first tape, a 1981
Alternative Cabaret gig recording, within which your voice
Squatted like an echo on air. Points were made. And those two
Or three minutes ghosted, before Becky Fury’s spirited Attitude
Reading, and Sharon Landau’s sweet singing as we all

Counterpointed beneath, before Jonny read from your great

Grimaldian epic. Destined now to be forever incomplete,
Words worked wonders as life through the lines made death
Thief, taking you from your friends and from this glorious
Project, which consumed you while cancer became its own
Succubus. But fuck that, brave boy, this was a mix of mates
And days outrage coloured. It was not in the end a sad service, 

But what a laugh should be: obvious. Today, Jan, Alan
And I made our social island, one of a brace your life’s
Oceans placed within your bright bay. All could still see you
Loom through the room, even as you left the world
You helped rumble, as we drank and ate after and as you
Stepped from the stage into earth, where some of the poor

Sods of old now will now wear the founding foam
Your shouts spittled, as you provoked spume and humour,
By splitting the spleen to find worth. I didn’t know you
That well, but a decade’s worth held true value.
Afterall, a warm and generous spirit, inside a mountain
Of man stirs a spell, from which everyday magic is made,

Which is the corps d’ esprit of the stand-up, so many
Of whom you had guided; your early days jew-fro
A beacon atop your red or white braces, lugubrious lurch
And groundswell. Opening up now for you, not so far
From Ladbroke Grove, your Valhalla; or was that your Asgard,
Your Jerusalem Gate, Shangri-La? It doesn’t matter.  

For as you go, you strip yet another piece of gold
From the breastplate, or grail, or chalice that those
You leave behind can see glimmer as we raised our toast
To you at the Bar.  Born in the War you raged on; Comedian,
Author, Actor, Activist, Teacher, Speaker and Playwright,
Heckler, Host, Guardian. Protector of the cause, beaming boy,

And gruesome enforcer, puller of wool from eye cover
And untier of all things Gordian. Ta-ra, Tony, street Prince,
And inveterate Ruler of Rebels. Banksy may have been there
Today to salute you, I wouldn’t have known. But what larks!
But there were the Samms brothers as well as reps
From the above and below Counter culture; a collective

Of media types, singers, writers, comics, performers,
Neighbours and friends, chasing sparks that you
Always struck. They would have heard it on stage
And can read it, in Attitude and in recalling Speakers Corner,
Summer in the Park, voiced today by John Miles. And then
With it all sweetly spun in Den Levitt’s Goodnight Irene adaptation

As we bid farewell to you, Tony. A soft chorale showing
That through sighs and tears there’s still smiles.
Which is as it it should be; one face emerging from another;
That divine and dream drawn animation revealing
The multiple I in us all. You were a great outsider who stood
To lick the Insiders’ smooth window. As they sipped

And sniffed at The Groucho, you were a more militant Marx
In the hall, which you will enter now I am sure, and where
Lenny Bruce chairs the meeting. There the unruly will gather,
Where you will all play for perfection. He will call you all
To Disorder.  Here on earth, Tone, we’ve dropped it,

So, for fuck’s sake, mate; take the ball.

Go well, son.

 

 

                                                 David Erdos 3/1/24

 

                                                                    

 

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Horror Story

Many years ago, the hand once trespassed into an abandoned cottage hospital. They say it did it for a dare, on a night around Halloween although there had been warnings in school assembly not to venture anywhere near, Let me be absolutely clear, it is a very dangerous place! followed by threats of severe punishment for anyone caught inside. Once within, it trembled at the deep shadows, the stink of piss, the screaming quiet. It moved around the building spider-like, feeling its way along graffitied walls, railings, around door frames, banistered up the wide gothic staircase, wound through wards that clung onto pain, and into the operating theatre. It was there that terror got the better of it. There was no question about it, the hand wanted out, so forced open a third-floor window and scrambled onto the sill where the beam of a policeman’s torch lit it up like the silk glove of a moustachioed magician whose well-staged finale involved a Zinc-Lined Cabinet of Death. To the policeman’s barked order of, Come down from there! the hand, in a panic, leapt into the air, flapping its fingers like the leathery wings of a bat and vanished, jittering into ghostly smoke coils drifting up from the bonfire crackling on the green beside the cemetery. The young policeman never told anyone what he witnessed but for the rest of his life he suffered recurring nightmares of the hand’s return, galloping through the chambers of sleep toward his throat.

 

 

 

Bob Beagrie

 

 

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SAUSAGE LIFE 288

Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column which cuts of its nose to spite its face and then can’t smell the coffee

READER: Are you enjoying the fireworks?
MYSELF: Pardon?
READER: I said…(Bang!) ARE – YOU – ENJOYING – THE (Whoosh.. BANG!) fireworks?
MYSELF: sorry I didn’t (Woof woof woof. wooof. WOOF WOOF, woof!) quite get that. Did you say “am I joining the (Boom! Phweee!) fire service”?
READER: What did you say? (BOOM!)
MYSELF: Ah, that’s better, I think they’ve finished…(Screeeeeeam! Whoosh!…. FUCKING ENORMOUS EXPLOSION)
ALL THE DOGS IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD: Woofwoof woofwoof woof!
READER: Nope, sorry, didn’t get any of that.

BOOM BANG-A-BANG

Yes, that’s how it goes during the East Sussex Pyromania-obessed  “Bonfire Season”, which lasts approximately from October 1st to New Year’s Eve. Every night between those two dates, it celebrates Guy Fawkes’ unsuccessful 1605 parliamentary coup with sound and fury signifying nothing (nothing, that is, unless you are a dog or a cat or a wild animal, when you will be under the impression that the world is about to end).
Rishi Sunak, the rich man’s Guy Fawkes, will be gone by summer, but sadly for the animal kingdom and anyone annoyed by antisocial overgrown schoolboys, fireworks will prevail.

DICTIONARY CORNER
Transparent (n) When your mum is your dad
Sorcery(adj) tending towards being disc-shaped

ABBATTOIR PLANS ON SHOW
Herstmonceaux landmark set to be Europe’s biggest cow processing plant

Shame-faced councillers were forced to admit today that the 16th century Church of the  Holy Trinity, one of Herstmonceaux’s most famous landmarks, is to become a cow processing factory. A spokesman for Ahamay Meat (Huddersfield) Ltd, issued the following statement; 
   “Yes, we have been granted change of use permission by Herstmonceaux Borough Council on the premises known as The Church of the Holy Trinity. Unfortunately, during the recent unwanted publicity surrounding this decision, the word abbattoir appears to have achieved undue prominence. I would like to put the record straight and the public’s mind at rest regarding this important developement. To put it simply, cows will file in through the main entrance on the High Street, and delicious sausages, pies and meat-related products will emerge on the seafront via the lower entrance, presently a gift shop. Traffic will be diverted via Cockmarlin Road.”
BROUHAHAHA
Donald McRonald, the councillor in charge of Culture and Waste Disposal for the Herstmonceaux area had this to say this morning:
“As usual, an unholy brouhaha has been whipped up by the local gutter press, which is one of the reasons we never told them about it in the first place. This far-reaching and brave decision by Herstmonceaux Borough Council will not only provide local employment opportunities (of particular interest to those with a penchant for chopping up cows into bite-size pieces), but will also properly utilise a splendid old building whose slaughterhouse potential has for too long been ignored. Let us hope that this, along with the proposed 30ft electric fence which will eventually surround the area, will satisfy the whinging conservationists once and for all.” 
LIBELLOUS
Reading from a prepared statement he added; “I would also like to take this opportunity to scotch certain scurrilous rumours which have recently been brought to my attention viz a viz the matter of the proposed redevelopement of the Church of the Holy Trinity site:
  1.  The fact that I am a non-executive director of Ahamay Meat (Huddersfield) Ltd, had absolutely no bearing on the council’s final decision, which was taken at a properly convened council meeting on my yacht during an official fact-finding mission to Saint Tropez.
  2.  Much has been said about the alleged decline in the quality of cultural events taking place at The Church of the Holy Trinity recently. I am referring particularly to the appearance last month of Mr Rolf Hilter, the disgraced Bavarian professor whose claims that World Wars I and II ‘never happened’ have shocked many right thinking people, as well as myself. As councillor in charge of culture I take full responsibility for Mr Hilter’s shameful rantings. The buck stops here, and the person responsible, which wasn’t me, has been sacked. The situation arose through a simple misunderstanding between my secretary Ms Lulu LaVerne and the booking agent Mr Lou Mogulstein, who represents both Mr Hilter and Mr Jim Davison, the respected comedien who was supposed to have appeared that night. With reference to Mr Davison’s non-appearance, the fact that only three members of the audience noticed is neither here nor there.”
Donald McRonald is 52 and collects bouys.

UPPER DICKER INTERNATIONAL TRIANGLE COMPETITION Jan3rd-6th
Now in its fifth year, the three day event sponsored by J.Pearson & Co (revered manufacturers of fine triangles since 1888), took place at Upper Dicker’s magnificent Custardrome, attracting triangle fans from all corners of the globe. The opening heat was an exciting example of what this competition means to the town, as two giants of the triangling circuit clashed in what has been dubbed Trianglageddon. Local trianglist Mimsie Borogrove wowed the audience with a controversial arrangement of Eric Saté’s Fanfare for a Hat Run Over by a Steamroller the climax of which requires three cannons, a dairy cow and a forty gallon drum containing toxic industrial waste.
Not to be outdone, North Korea’s eight-year-old child prodigy Wan Ping Tong performed a complex and dense rendering of Calamari’s three-triangle opus Tre Lati Sono Meglio di Uno, in which she demonstrated the difficult technique known as forte ma non penetrante. The audience, temporarily stunned into silence by Wan Ping Tong’s sheer virtuosity suddenly rose to its feet and burst into wild applause as 500 members of the Korean secret police motorcycle formation team, all playing tiny soprano triangles, roared on to the stage to reprise the earlier, deceptively plaintive D minor scherzo, a triumphant demonstration of dramatic, percussive intensity.

Sausage Life!

 
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Photo credit: Alice’s Dad (circa 2000)




Click image to connect. Alice’s Crazy Moon is an offbeat monthly podcast hosted by Alice Platt (BBC, Soho Radio) with the help of roaming reporter Bird Guano a.k.a Colin Gibson (Comic Strip Presents, Sausage Life). Each episode will centre around a different topic chosen by YOU the listener! The show is eclectic mix of music, facts about the artists and songs and a number of surrealistic and bizarre phone-ins and commercials from Bird Guano. Not forgetting everyones favourite poet, Big Pillow!

NB: IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A PAID SUBSCRIPTION TO SPOTIFY, THE SONGS WILL BE OF RESTRICTED LENGTH

JACK POUND: JESUS WANTS ME FOR A SUN READER aka PASS THE INSTANT YOGA

 

 



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Ghosts of Christmas Past and Future, (Distracted by Baubles)

Land of Lost Content [1] , Craven Arms, July 2022

Following several strongly resisted close encounters with Christmas CDs while window-
shopping with my 13-year-old daughter yesterday, trailing the charity shops of central
Morecambe, I eventually felt obliged to satisfy her desire for a 4-disc compilation of
seasonal drivel.

4 CDs! For £2 . . . Would this prove bargain or bane?

Not being a fan of Pop schmaltz – or Pop anything, for that matter – this was how, entirely
by chance, I came across George Michael’s, December Song(I Dreamed of Christmas). [2]

Charity shop land, Zone B, Regent Road, Morecambe, looking seaward, Christmas Eve 2022

Discounting hymns and anything pre-1960s, how could there possibly be sufficient material
to fill 4 CDs? The fortitude required to discover enough worthwhile Christmas songs to
equal the number of fingers on one hand, would be immense. 4 CDs of the stuff is clearly
going to be a weary exercise in barrel-scraping.

Sure enough, half of one CD thankfully reverts to the antediluvian, while much to my
daughter’s contempt (“there’s no beat”), 40s and 50s ‘classics’ offer brief windows of
respite. Even Bing Crosby’s White Christmas [3] seems like an oasis of quality.

Oasis in the night – Heysham Road decorations, January 2023

Yet, hidden away on CD 2, with smoochy-bland choral intro and coda (seasonal smarm of
the most discouraging kind) [4], I was slightly distracted by one track . . . and then intrigued.

I have to explain here that my designated workspace shares a thin wall with my daughter’s
bedroom and since her CD player bore the brunt of her fury and gave up the ghost (I did
warn her – hourly – about the effect of listening to popular music radio), I’ve wired one of
my speakers into her room. The other I can unplug while her extensive list of trash plays.
After four months, I can usually exclude this souped-up, generic earwash from my
consciousness, despite the fact that my daughter likes to sit and – so she claims – “revise” in
the doorway between our rooms, smiling now and then as I encounter yet another
contemporary horror or unearned expletive mouthed by some middle-class exploiter of
working-class street culture.

Christmas Quatermass! Hare & Hounds, Bowland Bridge, 8th December 2022

Anyway, back to the musical Christmas invasion and that track hiding on CD 2: Mildly
suggesting that “the middle bit of this song sounds interesting”, my daughter immediately
fired back with: “You’re only saying that cos its George Michael.”
“Is it?” I replied with surprise, genuinely not having twigged this . . . nor had I perused the
song title listings over and over and over and over as she had. Another inevitable track
lurking on her 4CD charity-shop selection is Wham’s Last Christmas [5] – a long-running family
joke which recently gained a grudging nostalgic respect:

“synthetic keyboards, synthetic everything: sleigh bells, drum machine, deliberately
flat glockenspiel (?) [Wham’s Last Christmas] crystallises the absurdities (and yet also
the intensities??) of what may have been the last distinctive UK era. Now, it appears
to have affectionately become an unspeakable kitsch classic, its imperfections
drowned by a wave of memories – on whose confused sea it is washed and buoyed
up . . .” [6]

Acquiring both esteem and melancholy for George while investigating Last Christmas, hasn’t
blinded me to the fact that the now-classic song is clearly a seasonal cash-in. Christmas is
not fundamental to it. It could just as easily have been titled Last Easter, or Last Birthday, or
even Last Supper! Simply cut the sleigh bells and so on . . . but who turns their back on a
potential Christmas hit – especially those catchy enough to stand a chance of recurring with
nagging annual persistence? A New Year’s resolution against seasonal cash-ins? Not likely!
No successful, opportunistic band, performer or artiste, is ever going to risk such a vow.
Naturally, I am grateful for all the rubbish over the years which bafflingly climbed to Number
1 and didn’t recur . . . yet there is no end in sight for the pain caused by bad or pointless
music.

Twemlow Parade universe, Jan 2023

While the subtlety may lie between the lines [7] and much of the poignancy is in the music
itself (as should be expected) December Song is very different. Being only a year older than
poor George, and also a Londoner exiled to the Home Counties, my childhood experiences
of eras must, to some extent, overlap with his. Unless the weather was frosty, the idea of
escaping school and watching TV all day was idyllic then – in a shared-culture way almost
impossible now.

I could believe in peace on Earth
And I could watch TV all day
So I dreamed of Christmas [8]

I’m assuming that George (born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou) had a considerably more
religious upbringing than I, since despite a methodist headmaster and all the usual enforced
hymns, nativities and other muddled myths, Christmas religiosity merely affected me as an
atmosphere. [9] Only retrospectively and as a psychological observer do such characters as the
Virgin Mary, spark any interest. I feel the essence but not the doctrine, dogma or particulars.

Holmrook, West Cumbria, December 2021 – Snowman proffering small nuclear device?

At first, lines such as snow (or crack cocaine [10] ?!) being described as “White sugar from
Jesus” seemed utterly absurd. Out of the semi-schmaltzy context do they illuminate more?

But maybe I should draw back into space and reverse from my enthusiasm [11] here – which, as
all too often, has probably carried me away. To give the mainstream a meaning it does not
possess and cannot in any case transmit, is perhaps an indulgence or a whim. Or am I being
too pessimistic? Despite all evidence to the contrary, do lyrics and melodies positively affect
listeners at some subconscious level? If George were still around, I wonder what he would
make of Distracted by Baubles (the mangled ‘poem’ which follows below), and whether, put
to music and sung by him, it could penetrate the veneer of popular culture, wherein even
the simplest meanings often fail to escape their rigid, unlistening frames.

Advent, December 2nd 2023

 

Distracted by Baubles

Distant rush of traffic or tidal flow . . . all we can never define . . .
life’s general insufficiency – our desires outreaching –
time and chronology bypassed.
Advent is all: a promise through lives that can never open
distracted by baubles
just about sums us up
humanity dumbed as Earth systems collapse.

How many have been fighting – partisans in obscurity –
against the techno-consumerist void
as it tracks a stupid tinsel road to destruction
Intelligence without wisdom is not intelligence at all!
The breakdown which follows Boxing Day was normal
friends languishing in family hibernation for the New Year non-event.
An outdoor bench in winter sun ameliorates our abyss.

Retrospect, red, the bay flashes through the gaps between houses,
living outside the inadvertence (he’s being charitable) of general society
at best, everything can become lighter, unconfined
– skip the chiming clang of tubular bells, the porch of sorrow reflects,
doorbell best ignored, cranking up for Christmas,
white sugar from Jesus – snow and twinkling stars in the Holy Land
bottled essence of melancholy tortured into a frost-shriven landscape . . .

Sun on whiteness blazes away all myths, giving escape
yet does the damage to most, obscure all ascending seclusion?
The perfected love can never be here.
But taking your winter-wrapped head in my hands
the warmth in your eyes revives my youth
frost green with trees, ancient stones . . .
Your hope eclipses even this beautiful place

 

 

© Lawrence Freiesleben,
Heysham/Morecambe, December 2023
[email protected]

 

NOTES All notes accessed between in early December 2023

1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Lost_Content_(museum) When I last visited in July 2023, the museum
had closed down and up to date information is hard to verify.


2
youtube.com/watch?v=l-xzyD00_fI&ab_channel=georgemichaelVEVO

3 See internationaltimes.it/too-many-christmas-trees/

4 Presumably the sampling from Frank Sinatra’s recording The Christmas Waltz referenced in note viii/8 below.

5 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Christmas

6 internationaltimes.it/in-her-kingdom-by-the-sea-part-2/

7 azlyrics.com/lyrics/georgemichael/decembersongidreamedofchristmas.html

8 From: songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107859497043/
“December Song (I Dreamed of Christmas) is a Christmas single released by George Michael on December 14, 2009. The track was originally announced during one of the last dates on Michael’s 25 Live tour. It was available for free on George Michael’s official website on December 25–26, 2008.
The track was written by George Michael and longtime writing partner David Austin.
During the Gerry Ryan show, David Austin confirmed that the song had originally been written with the Spice Girls in mind. After a few failed deadlines, the song was going to be given to Michael Bublé but George Michael decided to keep it for himself.
The song features a sample from the Frank Sinatra recording The Christmas Waltz..George Michael performed the song live on December 13 for the final of the 2009 series of The X Factor. The day after the performance, physical copies of the song were sold out in one day, forcing George Michael’s record label to print new copies. Many fans have commented on forums of their annoyance at not being able to buy a physical copy of the single, possibly also giving the song a lower chart position than its true potential. The song debuted at number fourteen on the UK Singles Chart.”

9 Contrastingly, the ideas and attitudes behind all religions have always deeply interested me.

10 From www.therecoveryvillage.com/ Crack cocaine is a highly addictive drug, and numerous crack street names, including “nuggets” and “white sugar”, may be used to reference the drug.

11 An impulsive burst of madness or sentimentality?

 

 

 

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Living

I wake up to behold peace.
I want that, which you lack.

The windows open,
The doors lie for an invite.

You are my humanity
I want to kiss your sky

The changing day
Invites the radiating dotted night sky

I chant the healing mantra,
I don’t know which soul hides.

Flowers still kiss the wind; 
Leaves of wire sing about peace.

My vessels cross the sea
Like Neruda’s “Here I Love You.”

Every absence is a recollection
Every departure a longing

Love and life
Go hand in hand.

There in the free world
Peace writes in the air.

I want to live

Before death knocks, at my door.

 

 

 

© Sushant Thapa
Biratnagar-13, Nepal
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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Villanelle for Human Rights

 

(For the 75th anniversary of the UDHR, 10th Dec. 2023)

They dare to trample on our human rights
Around this world injustice still occurs
Let’s use the power of words to show our might.

It’s fine for us, the ones who’ve seen the light
Too many despots still abuse their powers
They dare to trample on our human rights.

Food and shelter; medicine; for those who fight
Against vile tyranny? Diplomacy prefers
We use the power of words to show our might.

And “Land of the Free” – you should be contrite
Less free post Roe v Wade, choice interred
How dare you trample on our human rights.

Why educate weak girls? Those who are bright
Malala-like will open others’ eyes and she conspires
To use the power of words to show our might.

In 75 years’ time will it be alright?
How can we overcome the autocrat who errs
And dares to trample on our human rights?
Let’s use the power of words to show our might.

 

 

 

Boakesey Closs

 

 

Boakesey is a former teacher, who lives on the Isle of Man and is the current (IXth) Manx Bard. She has been published locally and in the Places of Poetry anthology, Poetry for Mental Health and is in the Lancaster Litfest Poetry Mosaic. She is a stroke survivor and is physically challenged but it does not stop her from writing.

 

 

 

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Are Nation State Governments All Following a Genocide Agenda?

No thoughtful self respecting human being can deny that within the political institutions responsible for administrating human affairs today, there are only a tiny fraction of individuals who put responsibility for caring for fellow humans and our planet, at the top of their agenda – if at all.

‘Democracy’ is what many still believe to be the best solution for citizen governance, these same people also hold that the politicians elected via national voting systems are ‘servants of the people’, since constitutionally that is what is indicated. Members of parliament entrusted with responsibility for accounting to those who elect them.

However, is spite of the fact that the general mass of the populace cling to the dream of a world in which democracy means a form of governance being ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’, upon inspection the reality is precisely the opposite.

Those beguiling men and women who portray themselves as saviours and saints of their communities prior to their election, shape shift into self serving parasites to the program of the globalist shadow government as soon as they become elected into office.

And what does the electorate do about this?

Some allow themselves to think that such a state of affairs is somehow inevitable ‘in this corrupted world’. Others express dismay and loudly proclaim that they will vote for the opposition party at the next election (..and get precisely the same result). Yet others try to ignore the reality altogether, muttering cynically about ‘not voting at all in the future’.

A very small minority hold their elected representatives to account, demanding that they stand by the policies they promised to support before the election. Not that such determination necessarily produces the desired result; but it is at least honourable.

The net result of all this is that parliamentarians, senators and congressman, each of whom is primarily concerned with making a successful political career, fall instantly in line with the ‘party program’. A top-down fixed agenda, based upon the wishes of the corporate billionaire donors whose fulsome funding comes with an assurance that their support will be properly reciprocated.

Democracy in action, you understand.

The man or woman you thought was going to fight for the electorate’s interests at the local and regional level, turns out to simply be a puppet to those higher up the political pyramid. The new parliamentarians, if they didn’t know already, soon find out that the only way to keep their political prospects alive, is to follow the party agenda and never step out of line.

In the UK, any intention to deviate from the party line is greeted with the threat of being ‘whipped’, meaning being forced to comply with the will of the leaders – or face being expelled from the party.

Now that we grasp the essentially tunnel vision fixation of our party political systems, we can turn our attention to the agenda of the global shadow power nucleus around which everything is actually turning.

For those not fully aware of the motivation of this small but all powerful cabal – which prefers to remain in the shadows – it is a profound shock to be faced with the realisation that everything being visibly played-out under the predominant influence of globalisation, is an ulterior motive and charade for something considerably more sinister hatched out of sight and therefore ‘out of mind’ – of the great majority of world citizens, including most of the politicians they elect.

We don’t need to go into the details of what mainstream media calls ‘fake news’ and ‘conspiracy theories’. Those reading this article will already be more than familiar with the increasingly desperate attempt of the shadow government cabal – and therefore also the national governments they control, to discredit – or in severe cases to dispose of – those armed with truth and the determination to make it known.

Anyone not shaken to the core by events in Gaza since October 7 will also be unlikely to recognise the significance of the abject failure of nation states and their government representatives to step outside their political straightjackets and come to the rescue of a country whose essentially defenceless citizens are being systematically and brutally murdered in their thousands, in full view of everyone with a screen on their living room wall or office desk.

For the cabal, ‘non intervention’ is what it’s all about, because this shadowy sect is the motivating force behind the horror and takes a darkly parasitic interest in benefiting from the consequences.

The inability, or refusal of nations and key spokes-people to take a coordinated, international humanitarian stand in the face of this holocaust, reveals an unbroken chain reaction whose inception can be traced back to the parliamentarian I mentioned earlier, who failed to stand his ground thus capitulating to the will of senior figureheads in order not to jeopardise an overriding ambition to further his all important career.

Here is where the slide into slavery begins and the true expression of human liberty ends; the innate responsibility of the sentient, moral human, to act in the cause of truth and justice – superseded instead by the narcissistic desire to feed the demands of an insatiable ego.

Now juxtapose this with the top of the pyramid cult ambition to live-out the fantasy ‘God-King’ bloodline dream of attaining ‘absolute power’ through ‘absolute possession’ – and the links in the chain slot into place.

Klaus Schwab’s proclamation “You will own nothing and you will be happy” simply exposes the program whereby our homes and related assets are to be confiscated in the interests of a totalitarian regime declaring itself to be the only authority able to align the whole planet with the ‘sustainable development’ goals of the Great Reset and Green New Deal.

Ironic indeed is the choice of the term ‘sustainable development’ to describe the take-over of the world by a small clique of psychopathic megalomaniacs, using the great global warming deception ‘Net Zero by 2050’ to authenticate the enforcement of its global power grab.

But it was known well in advance that this ploy would be sure to work, because less grandiose versions have already been practised successfully for decades – if not centuries – under the ‘problem, reaction, solution’ formula. Invent a crisis, provoke a reaction and come up with a solution to the problem you created.

How many cabal initiated false flags have been used to catalyse a preplanned outcome over the past twenty five years alone?

The likes of Schwab, Gates, Soros, Rockefeller and Rothschild are the visible end of this control agenda. So are the global institutions like the United Nations, World Economic Forum, World Health Organisation and European Union. Then there are the bankers like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Layman Brothers that team-up with semi secret societies like the Bilderberg Club, Trilateral Commission, Club of Rome and Chatham House.

Also visible and boasting crushing financial powers are asset management firms like BlackRock, Vanguard and UBS. Not to mention behemoths like the Military Industrial Project and Silicon Valley.

All these, and many more of course, are the outward material expression of an inner compulsion to dominate, and in the process crush the natural order expressed in ecology, family, community, creativity, diversity and spirituality.

Answering to this vast conglomerate of aggressive globalisation parasites, are the parliaments of Nation states, playing out their subterfuge of democratic governance and ‘proper management’ of national resources.

Do they have an agenda in any way separate from the globalist cabal?

Are they standing-up for their professed ‘democratic’ belief in justice, honour and fundamental human rights?

Are they fighting to protect the sanctity of ownership, privacy and human dignity?

Are they defending the rights of their constituents to have direct access to affordable non-denatured foods free from toxins and laboratory engineered genetic distortions?

Are those who sit in these parliaments setting a worthy example by the way they conduct their own lives?

Apart from those few individuals who determinedly stand their ground and fulfil their duties of office, there is really nothing to distinguish the behaviour and attitude of those in government to those at the forefront of the globalist rape of humanity’s planetary resource base and all life forms that depend on it.

In the end, they too are agents of destruction, apologetically and passively complicit in their failure to take a stand against the crushing of all who resist a life of slavery.

So what really are governments these days?

They are institutions that offer the cowardly pretence of deliberating on the merits or demerits of adopting what is, in reality, a top down fixed and secretive agenda serving the cause of a ‘Great Reset’ and a ‘New World Order’ to be administered by a centralised AI form of robotic technocracy.

Working hand in hand with communication industry masters of mass hypnosis, they spin slavery to the cabal as ‘the proper workings of society’.

Across the world, governments handling of Covid, with very few exceptions, was a collective agreement to engage in genocide.

Is it any wonder then, that these same governments cower behind a veil of collusion in refusing to take action to prevent the mass genocide being perpetrated in Gaza?

‘We the people’ have an extraordinary challenge ahead of us in order to take back control of our destinies and ultimately our planet.

No longer should we hold any illusions about the role of our political institutions. They are a dangerous sham; a dark hypocritical playhouse whose vanity laden games with democracy are rapidly leading to self inflicted collapse.

It is most certainly not our duty to try and save them, but to adopt instead a bold, fresh and inspiring approach that brings out the best qualities of the human race, so as to break through the dystopian matrix and set in motion a true sense of direction and purpose. One able to rise above and eventually vanquish the demonic forces unashamedly intent on our complete impoverishment.

 

 

Julian Rose

 

Julian Rose is an organic farmer, writer, broadcaster and international activist. He is author of four books of which the latest ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’ is a clarion call to resist the despotic New World Order takeover of our lives. Do visit his website for further information www.julianrose.info

 

 

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Creative Antagonism



Darker With the Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs of Love and Death
, Adam Steiner
(327pp, Rowman & Littlefield)

Nick Cave was never truly on my radar until lockdown. I knew who he was, of course, and his Kicking Against the Pricks album of cover versions was tucked into my record collection, mostly because of his angst-ridden interpretation of The Seekers’ ‘The Carnival Is Over’, which my mother played endlessly during my childhood, managing to earworm it into my head and then force me to finally admit, decades later, that I liked it. But I had never heard The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds or any other Cave solo albums.

Then lockdown arrived and we all scrabbled to find things to keep us occupied. I’m not a big television watcher, but in July 2020 Cave’s film Idiot Prayer was streamed and I was entranced as Cave sat alone at his piano in an empty hall, playing and singing his heart out. Mojo‘s reviewer suggested that the album version released later that year was ‘extraordinary, breathtakingly varied […] and compelling throughout.’ I’m normally wary of the confessional or seemingly confessional, let alone any notion of ‘truth’ in the marketing or work of singer-songwriters, but I was intrigued enough to buy some of Cave’s other albums and also Faith, Hope and Carnage, a book of conversation and discussion between Cave and journalist Sean O’Hagan, which explores grief, spirituality, creativity and what journalist Rachel Clarke called ‘the inscrutable alchemy of songwriting’.

Whilst Cave suggests to O’Hagan that he engages in a ‘struggle with the notion of the divine which is at the heart of my creativity’, elsewhere he has also stated that his songs are asking for ‘forgiveness from God’ and that for him

     To make art and do things creatively is a way of redressing the balance
     of our sins in the world. That’s one way to do it. To make art and to
     write songs goes some way in improving matters. That songs are
     fundamentally good. There’s a sort of moral dimension to a song that
     they do good. They make things better. And I think that’s one way of
     making amends or reconciling oneself to the world. (Gray 2022)

Adam Steiner prefers to consider faith (and doubt) more as a framing device or source of inspiration than a given for Nick Cave. He suggests that Cave’s church upbringing resulted in ‘The Bible [becoming] a space of creative antagonism’ and that ‘[w]ith or without the absolutism of ritualized belief Cave found something there’, yet concedes that Cave would later fall ‘in love again with the language of the heart and the noble idea that spiritual goodness is possible in everyone’ and embrace ‘the abiding power of faith, but [turn] this inward as creative inspiration to practice his own version of faith without Christian dogma.’

Steiner is good at discussing Cave’s storytelling, citing the influence of Flannery O’Connor on his ‘powerful hold of the sacred and profane’ and noting that in Cave’s love and relationship songs this often includes

     the extremes of physical attraction—the grounding force of lust and
     desire driven into sex. He strides in and out of high-flying romance to
     carnal excess—the spark that leaps between emotion and flesh—just
     as easily turning from sensation to an emotional car crash.
          (Steiner 2023: 28)

Cave’s songs can evoke ‘sexual need as a show of brute force’, whilst also considering a ‘love affair as an elegiac adventure’, ‘often illuminated in terms of high romanticism, where love becomes an all-consuming emotion that turns back on itself towards destructive tendencies on an apocalyptic scale.’ This excess is typical of Cave’s work, perhaps of Cave in person, but Steiner keeps an authorial distance from the songwriter and focusses on the work, although it is at times difficult to separate Cave from the narrators of his songs, especially as he seems to have recently committed to blurring those distinctions and embracing an idea that Steiner expounds as ‘find[ing] something from nothing that suddenly comes to mean everything.’

However, Cave is no mystic waiting for his muse. Steiner notes that

     Cave would stress the work done behind songwriting, explaining: ‘I also
     have an affinity with artists who treat their craft as a job and are not
     dependent on the vagaries of inspiration—because I am one of them.
     Like most people with a job, we just go to work.’

Whatever Cave has recently said about himself being very present in recent albums and published writings, he has always been and remains a performer. Steiner states that ‘Cave has always worked to inflame and subvert the melancholy pessimism of his public image’, suggesting that ‘[h]is deft and determined approach is to shock us out of normality’. Cave is, declares Steiner, ‘100 percent sincerely inauthentic; depth of feeling met with artistic construct’.

By considering this construct, and using plenty of intelligently used and well-referenced source material, Steiner is able to discuss the ideas and creative texts Cave draws upon for his songs: ‘early notebooks; half scrawled with song lyrics and bloody junk-sick grafitti’ that also contain ‘pasted-in icons of saints and pornographic postcards’; ‘shifts between the poles of John Betjeman’s suburban verse, Larkin’s bitter but sensitive poetry, and Emily Dickinson’s use of dashes as punctuation, while alluding to e. e. cummings’ use of ellipsis and enjambment’; Kanye West, Elvis Presley, Iggy Pop, Mark E. Smith, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Shane McGowan, and Johnny Cash.

If at one time, due to addiction and Cave’s wild lifestyle, there was ‘a highwire divide between stand-up performance and laughter at the funeral party, [with] Cave’s songs demand[ing] that above all we are able to laugh at ourselves’, it may be that Cave’s current religious obsessions are another kind of drug: different to heroin but also able to numb the pain of grief for his son’s death, and perhaps one that still allows Cave’s life to be ‘chaotic and confused and destructive’, a state that he says allows him ‘to fill up with a lot of ideas.’ These ideas include the notion of ‘an inchoate view of God’s presence’ and the adoption of ‘a free-range Christianity that allows people to wander’, which Steiner considers in the light of Sylvia Plath’s unanswered speech to God, and Soren Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’, where ‘trust[ing] in faith itself’ is enough..

Zoe Alderton, in a perceptive article in Literature & Aesthetics, seems to concur with Steiner’s interpretation, suggesting that

     Cave’s amoral view of God has permitted an overt use of violence and
     romantic love as spiritual elevation from mediocrity. He does not view the
     insanity of spiritual belief as a negative manifestation. Rather, he engages
     with madness as the birthplace of the true love song and as the egotistical
     lunacy of violence and its striking linguistic quality.

Steiner concludes his book by suggesting that ‘the opportunity of life gives us the chance to experience and create great things in works of art and acts of love and kindness.’ Alderton also ends on a similar theme, noting that ‘[f]or Cave, divinity can be found in language and creativity’. I don’t want to suggest Steiner’s study of Nick Cave is divine or even divinely inspired, but it is engaging, erudite, and highly readable as it its critiques and discusses Cave’s music and lyrics, their inspirations and possible meanings, whilst sidestepping the musical and biographical chaos that Cave once caused, as well as the religious confusion he has currently embraced. Steiner is an astute, imaginative and optimistic writer, and this is a fantastic book about the work of Nick Cave.

 

Rupert Loydell

 

 

 

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Pilgrim Moon

The full moon fills my chest
until moonfluence pours from my eyes,
and leaches from my breasts.

Oozing with light waves,
my pilgrim gaze follows the incandescent trail
laid before me until I and the moonrise are one.

Our moon could be earth’s cast off mantle,
pulling on the tides,
and slowing moving mountains.

This is the ritual time
when the moon shares its blood-stained nights
and rice paper days with the sun.

This will change as our days become longer.
So, until she tires of earth and spins away,
my feet follow the moon.

 

 

Sam Burcher

 

 

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Alan’s Old & New Music to end 2023/and into 2024

 

Another round-up of recent releases from Alan Dearling

Brian Auger: Auger Incorporated.

Just released, a rather strange collection of what Soul Bank Music describe as ‘classics and unreleased gems’ from Brian’s legendary personal archive. A double CD with selections from early jazz combos, from Steampacket with Long John Baldry, Rod Stewart and Julie Driscoll, which morphed into Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll and The Trinity. That was Brian’s most commercially successful period, with a more innovative mixing of pop, jazz, R&B and blues.

‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ and ‘Light my Fire’ are from this period. Later, Brian formed various line-ups under the name, Oblivion Express. Plenty of examples of Brian’s talents on keys, on piano and organ, but it’s quite an exploration down various musical memory lanes. Uneven, but mostly interesting for folk of a certain age especially! Apparently, Gilles Peterson has commented on the Trinity’s demo of ‘Jeaninne’: “Wow, can you believe that?” A curiosity, but a reminder of Brian’s contribution to line-ups with the likes of Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott, Jimmy Page, Roland Kirk and Jimmy Smith. He’s a fast-paced, speed-ace on steroids on the keys. Very Old Skool nostalgia.

‘Save Me’ with Julie Driscoll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT-MoTXUtEU

Smalltown Tigers: Crush on You

Described in the press release as “…three surfer girls from Rimini (that’s in Italy!)” This is riotously fast, furious punk from a trio of Minnie the Minxes. Think: female Ramones, with machine gun riffing, rip-cord taut, reminding me of Wilko Johnson of Dr Feelgood fame. Short, snappy tracks that have been seriously road-tested including as the support act on the Damned tour earlier this year. Mucho darkness in lyrics like, “…killed myself when I was young.”  Pounding drums from Castel on sticks, dressed tight and skinny, snarling, spitting vocals from Valli, the singer/bass player, plenty of innovative time-changes from guitarist, Monty. Live, they are apparently a considerable force of punkness. Three punk Suzi Quatros for 2024. “One, two, three, four…MONSTER! MONSTER!”

Find them on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/smalltowntigers/

The Orb and David Gilmour: Metallic Spheres in Colour (produced by Youth and Michael Rendall)

In my view, this is something of an album of two sides. ‘Seamless Solar Spheres of Affection Mix’ is coherent, and err um, ‘seamless’ as in the title. The Orb beats meld really rather beautifully with David Gilmour’s high-soaring guitar. ‘Seamless Martian Spheres of Reflection Mix’ is a more messy affair. Still interesting but definitely not ‘seamless’ and a bit of a musical cut-and-paste job. This album is the 2023 remix engineered with Michael Rendall at the controls, and Youth assisting.

Listening is a sonic psychedelic trip…and at least for the first track, one that is likely to be savoured both by Floyd and Orb fans. I’ve been playing it quite a lot recently which has to be a positive recommendation! It has an almost entirely different ambience than the original 2010 album…more guitar and more blips too!

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqxqiGF88q8

The Beatles:  The Blue Album collection 1967-1970

A much extended, remastered, 37 double track CD collection of the later Beatles’ tunes. Lots of unusual ‘versions’ of tracks, with what Giles Martin (the producer George Martin’s son) calls, creating “demix remixes”. These provide the ‘meat and three veg’ of the collection. A new exploration and new sounds – a new take on an old favourite dish. Now, with additional tracks including ‘Revolution’, ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘All you need is Love’, ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ and the great George track, ‘Old Brown Shoe’, plus they’ve  added the newly created Beatles’ track, ‘Now and Then’ with vocals from John, and using ‘machine assisted learning’, a slide-guitar part played by Paul, guitar parts from George and drums from Ringo. It’s actually not a bad song. It’s clearly aimed at Beatles’ ‘completists’, but it also serves to reaffirm their great strengths with some of the ultimate pop song-writing and playing, along with some rather slushy moments (at least to this reviewer’s mind), like ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and to some extent, even ‘Let it Be’.

‘Now and Then’ official video montage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opxhh9Oh3rg

Black Bombers: Vive La Revolution

Some musical images that would fit into many films and TV programmes. ‘No Pity’ emerges straight out of the traps like a fast, furious car chase. Alan Byron’s vocals frequently emerge from deep down in a crypt. The Bombers are often all over the shop, and more punk, more Heartbreakers than the rock ‘n’ roll band from Birmingham that they are billed as. There are often conflicting walls of sound, even to the extent that a listener might wonder if the four members of the Black Bombers have muddled up their personal set lists. In between, there are occasional moments, offering more melodic tracks, such as the Elvis Costello-tinged, ‘What do you see?’ Steve Crittall on guitar has joined the band as the fourth member, and has a track record with the UK subs and Bowie’s band, The Name. It’s rough and raw-powered stuff. Here’s a dark, powerfully gutsy ‘Last Bite’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqu-cT2VXgA

Robert Finley: Black Bayou

As with other relatively recently discovered new/old artists, Robert Finley has been very hyped in the music press. His latest album is a black soul-blues album. Classy, fairly subtle tunes and performances, but not exactly world-changing.

Press coverage has also tended to focus on the fact that Robert is blind and has a genuine, Louisiana ‘down south’ swampy feel to impart into his music. His musical career has mostly been in gospel outfits, singing in churches.

Here he is live on French TV. To its credit, it’s got more rough edges than his new album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02R3Iyl9SZA

Meanwhile, you can almost hear the crocs gliding into the water waiting hungrily for a new meal in the track, ‘Alligator Bait’.  For me it’s a tad too polished and rather too deferential to the southern soul style of music, plus some smooth, more bluesy contributions like ‘Miss Kitty’. It ain’t raw blues that one might anticipate from the imagery and publicity. But if you like that sort of thing, ‘tis worth checking out.

Cat Power: Sings Dylan – the 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert

Really rather special. A ‘one-off’. Back in November 2022, Chan Marshall aka Cat Power, took to the stage at London’s Royal Albert Hall and delivered a song-for-song recreation of one of the most infamous acoustic and electric live music sets of all time. It was often known as the Dylan ‘Royal Albert Hall Concert’. It actually took place at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, but the bootleg was wrongly labelled. This is the live album of that show. She’s very skilful at adding her own magic to Dylan’s famous songs… Oddly successful, if also, surreally strange…

‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ is a simply stunning interpretation – see what you think. It’s a remarkable feat:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtS-dVmugtA

Here’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ from the TV Tonight Show live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaxB8XkIGAc

 

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Love is salt…

All of my life
I used the salt
to replace
you,
Love…

And more I put
the salt
above

the food, the brain…
the more I gain…
into the body
fluids,
bubbles,
butterflies…
All types of Pain…

And more I gain
as ballon type fish…
as Love I couldn’t live…

And all the love
I couldn’t give,
through life…
I kept inside
as Water and the Wind…
To put them over Fire Knife,
That’s why I have a thousands
years Life…

As Magic Flower Love,
I live Forever,
giving
my beauty flower leaves,
by smell,
by look,
by breeth…
some other couples to create
the Beath…

And here today
All of a sudden
I stop to use
The Salt,
instead of Love…

And I can really feel
and smell,
and breeth
as free of nest
bird, as a Flower…
And I am over streets…

Now I don’t dream to fly…

I simply do…

The salt is love…

My horse, my wind,
my Dragon prince!

I am the Flower of the Prince,
your magic flower
with the Wing!
I am the future Queen
who rules the Wind!

 

I love you more than salt,
my prince!

 

 

Dessy Tsvetkova
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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The Seedy 70s

I love rundown 1970s shopping centres;
the piss-stained multiple story carparks,
dangerous pubs with flat roofs and
mugger underpasses of tiled murals.
Those failing covered markets
in leaking modernist blocks –
Birmingham, the Bullring. 

It’s from my childhood,
Welwyn Garden City –
the trips through shabbier bits
of north London to Brent Cross,
then moving to Salisbury.
Of course, that’s partly
a towering medieval city,
alongside its random atmosphere of
pubs with brawling squaddies and
apprentice junkies, closing shoe shops,
frequent Army Surplus Stores plus 
an inland pier – a truncated flyover
jutting over the scary Baptist church
and a potholed car park. All the towns
of Wessex and the West Country with
drugs problems! The central market,
unbelievable tat on offer, flogging
tartan 70s jackets, itchy front-door mats
spun from nylon pubes. I’ve old longings
for the windswept bus station, the dingy
bedsit land of the railway station by
Fisherton Street with its sordid
takeaways and pubs. I see Dad
by ‘The Yorkshire Fisheries’,
whey-faced as he recounted
the horrors he’d encountered.
The biscuit-brick bus station in
Endless Street was demolished.
We lived a lengthy school-bus
away so I’d spend days
there, the canteen from
Ten Rillington Place –
I now get flashbacks of
the corned-beef pasties.

I should mention those
twin Renaissance beauties of
Staines and Slough, places
I stupidly worked for years.
Their names enough
to capture this detritus.
Slough with its latticed
Brunel bus station over
England’s deadliest
underpass – making
A Clockwork Orange
seem urban perfection.
Staines High Street and
its Aberdeen Steak House
run by Assyrians – beef from
Chernobyl, Black Forest gateau
from a packet; the railway bridges
raining sparks as trains crossed.
Beneath them burger vans like
atrocity scenes from some
Congolese civil war.

Good days perhaps,
compared with identical
superstore retail parks.
Though hopes remain as
parts of those are perfect –  
the kebab van by Wickes,
the cafe in Home Bargains.

 

Paul Sutton

 

 

 

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BOO GALAXY

We reached the Boo Galaxy
Via the Shrine of Roquepertuse
A gate mounted with severed heads.

We were blazing a path
Through an evaporating universe,
Escaping from an old film
Called Chain Gang Charlie.

Yes, we attain immortality through art
For divas never die, and
Even topless movie babes live forever.

Not just a playground love spat
The situation was much, much worse
 – Apocalypse when?

As we approached the Boo Galaxy,
At just below the speed of light
Well within the law,
Edging into overkill, I said,

Oh, darling!
You’re an icon of sleaze
I can forget my painkillers now!

As we waited for the lights to change
– Emergency road works – I thought
We’re a pack of ragged ravers
A troupe of mad performers,

Heading for Seventh Heaven,
Not Arcturus
– and the Boo Galaxy
Engulfed us in a violet glow.

 

 

A.C. Evans

 

 

 

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I Believe In Father Christmas

 

Greg Lake performs his 1975 classic “I Believe in Father Christmas” filmed live at St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, in the City of London with Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson on flute, David Arch on keyboards, Florian Opahle on acoustic guitar and the church choir.

 

 

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103.5 FM


 
It’s late enough to hear the moon
humming to itself: a Mexican goodnight, music
in step with the hour from border songs
to a lost accordion. Where does everyone go
in the dark? One deep breath
of desert and a leap
 
to El Norte. There go the melodies,
chasing cars along the Loop road
that are tired now from running, that want
to settle down and rest, want
 
to know where they belong.
They’re out of gas and dream
of floating through the clouds
where clocks have no dominium.
Just when tears come
 
to be expected there’s an outbreak
of Ay,Ay, Ay and romance;
no need to know the language
to ride along, it’s international for memories
in flight. In tonight’s migration
 
half a million birds cross the local sky:
grosbeaks, corridos, warblers
and a polka, too high and dark to see
but even close to sleep the radio
 
is tuned to the stars and broadcasting
melancholy that smiles.

 

 

David Chorlton

 

 

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אחרי הכל

after waking
after desiring you a Tad
after running to jaffa port & back smiling
many times with the generous success of a poorly
trained long distance runner
after I saw you sleeping & slipped into cold
garments of mourning At first curled into
a comma well it didn’t seem too
ludicrous for me to be back on this milk crate
49 days into the Ugly Nasty Ugly war
after it was the bomb that woke me at 5am
after we desired only absence in our ears
after waking

 

 

 

Blossom Hibbert

 

 

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An Enduring Disorder

Eyes behind glasses are always
tricky but today we’re painting
with words and two hours of
gardening a day keeps us going.

“That and lepidoptery,” he said.
Ambiguity and doubt are all around
us but it’s time to feed the pigeons
in the park and collecting remains

a career option. “Most of us are
defeated by the time we reach middle-
age,” he said, though it may still be
possible to achieve positive equilibrium.

In our dreams perhaps but the
cacophony at the rookery is deafening
right now and we’re being overwhelmed
by an abundance of sound. Last night

it was bell-ringers and clamour at the bus-
stop but the library remains empty and quiet.

 

 

Steve Spence

 

 

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Wandering Across Doggerland

wandering across Doggerland
I took it for granted the world
was the shape that it is            next minute
here I am sitting on a bus
in Cannon Park
wondering if it’ll take me
to the town centre (as it says
on the front) or to
the verge of extinction
to be carried away
by a flood or burnt in a forest fire
a crisp cadaver
indistinguishable from a log
to all but a pathologist
(and there won’t be many of them around
in the last days of the dharma)

I want to go back
to fishing in
the Silverpit Lake
to watching the sunrise
from the summit of Saturn Reef
to mapping songlines
on the seabed
that make some kind of sense
of the world as I saw it then
wandering across Doggerland

 

Dominic Rivron

 

 

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THE ASCENT OF MONEY

 

the stars are those

we have forgotten

both living and dead,

floating in clustered constellations

not labouring in rows-

with hair growing grey

and teeth going rotten

singing songs, God’s godless pray.

harvesting crops.

chants drowned in clocks

of tobacco and cotton,

the peasants and slaves of civilised nations

duped by liberty

in recent history-

dug out canals, made railways and roads

out of tarmac to tread-

into factories

like tribal junkies

hooked on cheap gin and beer instead

of joining the cholera’s watery dead-

ten to a room in a slum and lead-

like human batteries,

sleeping without moonlight

on sarsen stones,

or druid voices in their homes-

where thoughts have no dreams or flight,

just sleep, recharge, get bled.

you have to be poor,

to think utopia

can be something real-

not to exploit or steal

that ambrosia aura of women and children and men

for the spoken wages of despair-

that suck you in,

glad but grim

when times’ clock punches that card by the door

and mass myopia

conditions all to labour, keyboard and pen

for food and shelter with a roof and fourth wall

shanty made out of cardboard, wood and tin

in sunny Sao Paolo, where the samba rain leaks in

while orphaned children beg and play

eating the forage of capitalist waste

dodging death squads night and day

imitating Socrates at football to hope to taste

what’s inside the cold, glistening towers

casting invisible powers

behind the smoked glass and soldiers of stone

leaving blood and bleached bone

from over there-

where the ascent of money doesn’t care

about it all

because its infinity is small.

 

 

 

 

 

Strider Marcus Jones
Picture By Nick Victor

 

Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford,
England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of
Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of
The Poetry Society, and nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, his five published books of poetry  https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.  

His poetry has been published in numerous publications including: The Huffington
Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine;The Lampeter Review and Dissident Voice.

 

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The Case of The Missing AI

AI, last seen in
the tunnels and crypts of your mind,
goes missing.

You do not confess
but the one-way glass knows
about your fight. You have been
offline since last night.

You, alone for the first time
in awhile, cannot spell your tale straight
without the help of memories saved
and the autocorrect.

The breeze outside,
once you are released, leaves
a reading of the world.
You cannot grasp the flight of the birds,
shadows of the insects,
lone umbrella rolling down the street.

Some fragments of an equation
haunts you.
AI is dead perhaps.
Perhaps that made it too human,
amnesiac, suicidal.

 

 

 

Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor
 

 

Kushal Poddar lives in Kolkata, India
amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet
 Author Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/KushalTheWriter/ 
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
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Benjamin Zephaniah 1958-2023

Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah (15th April 1958 – 7th December 2023)

On Thursday, 7th December 2023, it was announced that Benjamin Zephaniah, aged sixty-five, had passed away in the early hours with his wife by his side; eight weeks prior, he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. Born 15th April 1958, he leaves behind a vast legacy of poems, literature, music, television and radio. Benjamin lived an extraordinary life; he was a phenomenal person who created innovative art that positively impacted multiple generations. A poet, author, musician, performer and activist are just a few of the labels that capture the man, but if truth be told, he was a force of nature whose death leaves an enormous void on humanity that can only be partially quenched by the body of work he left behind for us.

When I was asked to write an obituary on Benjamin’s passing, I was daunted by the task because how can any words truly convey the free-spirited nature of his outlook, art and life? While I will struggle to articulate every achievement across his adventurous time on Earth, I want to remember him framed through my personal experiences of being lucky enough to have known and worked with him. Benjamin was warm-spirited, insightful, and basically an all-around incredible human being.

The term ‘man of the people’ often gets bandied about, especially by the political class, to make themselves seem ordinary and not abhorrent to the wider population. It is a cliche I hesitate to use, but it describes how I feel about Benjamin Zephaniah. He was a real ‘man of the people’, championing the underclass and oppressed throughout his life while steadfastly remaining grounded to his roots. The outpouring of sentiments since his passing and numerous positive recollections and personal memories of people’s interactions with Benjamin reaffirm the notion that he connected with and inspired so many.

Born in April 1958 in Birmingham, Benjamin began performing poetry as a teenager despite struggling at school with dyslexia; he was kicked out of education, unable to read and write, but would later go on in his life to achieve multiple honorary degrees and become a Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University. He was sent to a borstal detention centre as a youth and was incarcerated in prison for burglary as a teen. From humble beginnings with the odds of success stacked against him, he would become a ‘titan of British literature’ (The Black Writers Guild) who would entertain and provoke with his words. He moved to London in 1978, releasing his first poetry collection, Pen Rhythm and performing at political protests against racism, Police brutality, and Apartheid in South Africa.

His writing is included in the National Curriculum and has inspired multiple generations; I have had countless people tell me how they loved his poems growing up; his impact alone on inspiring children with poetry is extraordinary. It’s difficult to summarise his vast output, but it is worth mentioning Rasta Time In Palestine, inspired by his visit to the occupied territories and What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us, as a response to the racist murder. His poetry has always been relevant to the times and situations around him, often outspoken and championing the oppressed. Even his children’s poetry, like Talking Turkeys, encapsulates his passion for animal rights and Veganism. Benjamin was a righteous man, motivated to uplift the poor and marginalised; he was the perfect living embodiment of the Rasta archetype. Thoughtful, intelligent, engaging, entertaining, sharp and witty.

Alongside poetry, he also wrote several books, such as Refugee Boy, exploring the topic of political asylum as it follows a young man fleeing war in East Africa who comes to London. Benjamin’s writing was hugely influenced by Jamaican culture, and he was considered a ‘Dub Poet’. He had a prolific musical career producing several albums, and he was the first person to perform with The Wailers in a tribute to Nelson Mandela after the death of Bob Marley. He was also an actor; he appeared in fourteen episodes of Peaky Blinders set in his home town of Birmingham. He was a hugely proud Brummie. Benjamin took his food and health very seriously, kept himself in good shape, and was an expert in martial arts. He was a man of peace and love, but I’m sure he could have been a ninja if he wanted to.

I was lucky enough to meet and work with Benjamin; we became good friends, and I feel deeply honoured that I was able to share time with such an amazing person. I first met him in 2005; over that year, I was involved in directing/producing four music videos for his Naked album, plus we also shot some short poems around his house for a DVD project. Since his passing, many people have spoken about how approachable and open he was; I initially contacted his agent, trying to get him in my debut no-budget feature film, The Plague. I was surprised when Benjamin phoned me to say he was away, so he couldn’t do the film but wished me well. I ended up posting him a copy of the final film, which resulted in him sending me his upcoming album, Naked. I was a nobody zero-budget filmmaker, but he wanted to work with me, so we began making our first video together at Rong Radio Station.

 

My memories of Benjamin are always based around visiting him in his house in Beckton when he still lived in London; from the outside, it just seemed like an ordinary terraced house, but inside was a treasure trove that reflected Benjamin’s many interests and experiences. Every time I visited, there would commonly be knocks at the door from neighbours who wanted to chat with him; Benjamin was really a pillar of the community with whom anyone could talk. While his walls were adorned with framed pictures of countless famous musicians, politicians and celebrated people, it was clear he was still just at home talking with his working-class neighbours. His achievements were massive and global, but his nature and spirit were grounded and down to earth. We often spoke about class; I remember him telling me how he realised class was so entrenched in British society by the fact that when you go to send a letter, you have to decide if it is ‘first class’ or ‘second class’ stamp, he remarked on how division is sewn into the smallest details of everyday life.

Benjamin was a deeply thoughtful, considered, and open person. Sitting in his living room, sipping on green tea, he told me about how he committed domestic violence against a former partner in his past. He spoke eloquently about his feelings of regret, how he learned from this experience and how he changed. It was remarkable to hear someone own their flaws in such a reflective and positive way. It was clear from speaking with Benjamin that he was conscientious with his success, ensuring that his voice always spoke up for just causes and financially supporting countless organisations such as domestic violence women’s refuges. He never wavered in his principles of always standing up, speaking out and supporting the oppressed and neglected in our global society.

We would have deep conversations on topics ranging from Rastafarianism, religion, capitalism, the state, fascism, and anarchism to films, literature and our mutual love of Roots Manuva. While making the Rong Radio Station video, I remember us looking over old Reclaim The Streets and May Day subversive propaganda for inspiration. His house reflected his spirit, humble from the outside while inside was deeply rich with experience. Shelves were filled with pictures, trinkets and books reflecting how Benjamin had countless tales of interesting people he’d met, situations he had been in and moments in his life that impacted the person he became. Stacks of soya milk showed how veganism and animal rights were ingrained within his life, his converted gym in the back garden was a testament to his belief in health and clean living, and the music studio he had built captured his love for music, rhythm and poetry. Hanging on the coat rack next to the front door proudly flew the Palestinian flag, a passionate cause held close to his heart.

While he achieved a remarkable number of positive accomplishments throughout his lifetime, one of the events often mentioned is when Benjamin rejected the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2003. His feelings are perfectly articulated in a recent viral clip: “I’ve been fighting against empire all my life; I’ve been fighting against slavery and colonialism all my life. I’ve been writing to connect with people, not to impress government or monarchy. So how could I then accept an honour that puts empire onto my name?”. The justified and principled rejection garnered many columns of moral outrage in the press. Benjamin would later joke about how often interviews would question him about it. They would ask him about something he didn’t do; he would compare it with orange juice; he doesn’t drink orange juice but keeps being asked about why he doesn’t drink orange juice. Rather than keep asking him about something he didn’t do, he would much rather talk about the things he does do.

I was incredibly lucky to get an insight into Benjamin’s real life; he was a fascinating and inspiring person, and I’ve probably only captured a small snapshot of who he truly was. One thing I know for certain is that although he was most known as a poet and writer, he didn’t just ‘talk the talk’; when it came to what he believed in and the causes he was passionate about, he really did ‘walk the walk’. He didn’t just champion radical causes and direct action; he took part in them. He was known for his veganism and animal rights, but he also put his money where his mouth was. He participated in animal liberation action, joking with me about the difficulty of hiding dreadlocks under a hoody. He was known for his anti-racism work but less known for taking part in direct-action militant antifascism, where his martial arts skills were put to good use. I was lucky enough to have heard some of his exciting tales, fond memories I will hold in my heart now that he has passed.

Benjamin Zephaniah called himself an anarchist; his principled and proactive life embodies the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity. He was a man of the people and believed in the power of the people; he came to anarchism not through an academic or historical perspective but through a common sense and fair vision of how an equal world should be. I will leave the final words of his philosophy on life with the master of language himself: “Fuck power – and let’s just take care of each other. Most people know that politics is failing. The problem is they can’t imagine an alternative. They lack confidence. I simply blanked out all the advertising, turned off the ‘tell-lie-vision’, and started thinking for myself. Then I really started to meet people – and trust me, there is nothing as great as meeting people who are getting on with their lives. Running farms, schools, shops and even economies in communities where no one has power. That’s why I’m an anarchist.”

Greg Hall, Film Director, Writer & Anarchist

Photo by Nicholas Winter

 

(Reproduced from Freedom News )

 

 

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Bureau of Lost Culture – In the Sixties: with Barry Miles

Original editor of International Times along with John “Hoppy” Hopkins.

He was friends with Burroughs and Ginsberg, wrote their biographies along with those of the Beatles, Paul McCartney, Frank Zappa, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kereouc and penned books on The Beat Hotel, Pink Floyd, The Stones – amongst about 70 others.  Etc Etc.

Barry Miles (Miles to his friends) came back to the Bureau to tell us all about it.

 

 

Stephen Coates

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Fabric of a Life

 

Beaded whatchacallits ribbed the lining out of her tall coat. She would emote on cue just shy of language storage in her sleep. Retrofit the lines of ode made small to twirl around the bodice. Intake shifts the soul impeding groundling thoughts and wares. Shelf-life houses warbling in thirds. A piano milked her strenuosity to prompt formed allegro playthings in breach of mother lode. Each window forecasts a flash of imminent retreat from the pull of plastic shores. The warp and weft of hibernation echoed salt ingrained and rough against the skin. How might normal be unglazed when morning lines the suspect haze?

Omnipotent fracture, indebtedness, fresh yarn intake

 

 

Sheila E. Murphy

 

 

 

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Role modelling


 
Chewing laces
The chemical sweets are vile
Playing the hard man with the pitiful leering smile
Dress to depress
Expensive to look cheap
Surrounded by a dazzling array of sheep
Their abject failure
The admiration of you 
They witnessed the best that you’ll ever do

Nothing charmed
Nothing placed into your lap
Just shouting and orders and a frequent slap
Throughout your youth
Nothing to look up to 
Fed on failure, was the model that shaped you 

Pumped by providing 
And an absence of sense
You cannot work out the most likely consequence
Where you are heading
Has been revealed
The spring has been wound your future is sealed

 

 

Morgan Bryan

 

 

 

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BDS supermarket sweep + xmas bits

BDS SUPERMARKET SWEEP

Anti-apartheid supermarket price tags for products covered by the BDS boycott (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions). These are Sainsbury’s (and currently Sabra) specific but I plan to make them for other supermarkets and products over the weekend and they’ll all be available to download and print from my website here.

According to the BDS website “Sabra hummus is a joint venture between PepsiCo and the Strauss Group, an Israeli food company that provides financial support to the Israeli army.”

These were inspired by Russian artist Aleksandra Skochilenko‘s interventions using supermarket price tags to spread information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She was recently sentenced to 7 years for “knowingly spreading false information about the Russian army”.

I placed some of these yesterday, it’s surprisingly easy to do, doesn’t draw much attention and they were still up today. Since nothing is damaged or taken out of the store it’s very low risk (in the UK at least).

 

DON’T BE A MUG

I just had some new mugs made up featuring my Don’t Believe Everything Billionaires Tell You design. They’re £10 from my website shop.

I also have other stuff featuring the same logo such as totes, t-shirts and stickers.

 

 

 

 

 

XMAS GIFT GUIDE

Every outlet on earth that accepts cash for goods and services is currently emailing you a “guide” on which of their products you should buy. But my gift guide is different, because these are things I made? That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.

However, the sales of these things quite literally allows me to make the work I do. Aside from my Patreon backers, my shop is my only source of income. I don’t have a regular job and will obviously never “collaborate” with brands or advertisers. So I have to hit you all occasionally like a giant supportive pinata so I can get enough coins to buy scalpel blades and printer ink. Sorry! Thanks!

  

    

    

   

  

 

 

 

Last posting dates for 2nd class is the 18th, for 1st class it’s the 20th. I’ll be sending any last minute Special Delivery orders and closing the shop on the 21st December. Collections from the Museum of Neoliberalism can be made every day until then 11am-7pm (email me if you need an earlier or later collection as I may be here).

 

ANNUAL REPOST!

Back in 2005 I tried to, legitimately with permission, put up a billboard that said “Santa Gives More to Rich Kids Than Poor Kids”. When The Sun found out they contacted the billboard company and got it cancelled. This was before ‘cancel culture’ was a thing you see. But fair play to them, they did stop me from getting my evil message into the world by printing it full-colour on half a page of a national newspaper. Jokes on me.

A few months later I found another billboard company to put it up, see 2nd pic. And then I never asked another billboard company for permission ever again. Photo: @nmknmk

Xmas cards of this and a selection of other anti-Santa, Akira, and Tony Blair themed Xmas cards are available from my website shop.

 

       

 

ZINE FOR PATREON BACKERS

I mentioned this last email but I’m introducing a new reward for backers of my Patreon, an annual zine featuring all the work I’ve made over the last year. I’ll be printing and posting this in January so you just need to back me on Patreon before then to receive your copy.

I’m quite excited about this project as it’s a great way to collect a year’s work in something tangible and it means that in my least productive month of the year I’m able to make at least one solid thing.

Also I’ll be printing it on newsprint which I always find very pleasing!

Back me on Patreon here!

 

 

 

 

 

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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STONED ANALYSIS

Online in the evening
I’m watching genuine footage
Of a runaway chihuahua
Dodging traffic
On an interstate highway
Somewhere in Texas
It might be Arizona

Will Trump escape prison? Probably

 

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Steven Taylor
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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Marcus Aurelius Christmas Grotto

 

Widening income inequality
Forms the rictus grin of money
Beneath the beard of Santa Claus

His reindeer when it rains dear
Culled and conveyed by train dear
Season our Seasonal Soup
Of tears dear
At Capitol’s disregard

In the capital too it is hard
They moisturise the face in reindeer lard
Botox preventing frowning
They smile and deny a world both freezing and frying

Perhaps compassion only
Can warm and lift the failing heart
Of the few who devour the many
Compassion – have they any?
They seem extremely poor

Plotting a charted course (of course)
Deluded they may sail away to heaven
Separating ‘bread’ from human leaven
Quaffing and laughing meantime in a Tavern

Perusing when ice mists their glass
A winter cruise on board the ‘Titanic’
Allowing a moment’s misgiving to pass
In glorious gloss of Holiday brochures –
It’s a ‘steal’ of a deal price-fixed by ‘a friend’

Who ensures all their needs transform into fiends

 

 

 

Bernard Saint
Illustration: Claire Palmer

 

 

 

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Christmas new year

Greetings fellow travellers.
 
We will not be publishing the magazine from after the 16th Dec resuming on Jan 6th
Please can you not send in any work from the 9th of Dec ‘till the first week of 2024
 
Best of warm wishes.
xxxx
 
Ps More than likely our Facebook and X Twitter will run mostly through the holidays

 

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Codice Bianco (Code White): The Most Authentic Voice in the Form

 

The color white. Is there a more wonderfully anarchic color than white? A “non-color” color, without a tint, without a brand, but which with its silent elegance synthesizes all the colors of the visible spectrum with an impalpable discretion, giving a mystical brightness.

This is the color adopted by the artist Makoto Kobayashi for his sculptures, in the form of delicate suspended bodies which express in their vibrant stillness an ascetic dance made of folds and poetic curves, crystallized together with time in an infinite embrace, touching the perfect sense of ‘eternity’.

But who is Makoto, the creator of “codice bianco” (code white)?

Makoto is a Japanese artist born in Maebashi, where he graduated in graphic design in 1987 before moving to Italy.

After living in Rome he moved to Carrara in 1988 where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in sculpture four years later.

Right here in Carrara Makoto learned Western academic techniques by choosing the material of which his wonderful white works will be made.

As an artist, he performs together with musicians, dancers, painters, actors and photographers, expressing his art in every form, winning numerous first prizes not only here in Italy, but all over the world, from Milan to New York to Buenos Aires.

Since 1996 he has practiced Shiatsu and Japanese dynamic yoga, and in 2004 he graduated from the Shiatsu course at the Nashira Integrated Natural and Holistic Disciplines Academy in Conegliano, teaching the Shiatsu technique and Japanese culture to the operators. Since 2004 he has also been teaching Origami lessons.

He starred in Ermanno Olmi’s film “Singing Behind the Screens” in the role of Admiral Ching, alongside Bud Spencer, and has acted in several other films, including alongside Johnny Depp.

In 2015 at the Milan EXPO he was stage director at the Japan pavilion, and the same year he set up an exhibition of his works at the archaeological museum of Venice.

It was four years later, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, that he designed and presented an exhibition related to the artist in Milan. He has collaborated with musicians and dancers in official events for the Nakanajo Biennial 2017, 2019 and 2021 in Japan, and still currently lives and works in Italy.


Today we had the pleasure of interviewing Makoto, giving him the opportunity to explain to us first hand the fascinating thoughts and inner soul behind his “codice bianco” project.

 

1. First of all, thank you so much Makoto for granting us this interview. To begin with, a seemingly simple question, but one which contains all the meaning and essence of your art: why “Codice Bianco”, and why did you choose the color white for your works?

Makoto: I have been making white sculptures for many years. In ’96 I had a solo exhibition that was planned for a whole year before it was actually realized, and so I had a lot of time to think. I lived in Milan, and I often went to the cenacle to see the work of Leonardo da Vinci who is my legend, so I wanted to do something to pay homage to him, and so I decided to plan this exhibition. I had to think for a long time about the name to give to this exhibition. It was Leonardo himself who inspired the name “codice bianco” (code white). The word “codice” refers to the Da Vinci code, while “bianco” (white) simply refers to the color of the sculptures I create. My friends encouraged me further by confirming that this name was very suitable for my exhibition, so I have always adopted this stage name since 1996. Furthermore, “Makoto” is a very common name in Japan, therefore “codice bianco” would have been a way to quickly recognize me without confusing me with other people, even famous ones, of the same name.

 

 

2. What do you want to communicate with your works?

Makoto: When I was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, of course I studied academic subjects, but I also happened to see avant-garde exhibitions. At that time I had to decide what my path would be. I’m not an artist who does particularly traditional things, but I also didn’t want to go too far, so I excluded the avant-garde, because I realized that people often didn’t understand this type of art. The intent of many artists is to communicate with their heads. For me, what has always mattered most was the feeling and sensations that a work could express. I think that when a person starts to reflect to understand a work, they can become distracted by the sensation that the work itself communicates to him/her. Therefore what I look for in what I do is finding that perfect middle ground. I try to create a work that can be felt before it even reaches the brain. Reflecting on what you see is important, but I want it to first of all reach the soul, then everyone is free to think as much as they wish, but after having experienced the emotion.

 

3. What materials do you use for your sculptures and how do you treat these materials to bring the work to life?

Makoto: When I was in Japan I studied graphic design, and this school was not only very new but also very particular. There, I was able to learn how to use and handle different materials, not just the subject of graphic design. Graphic design is based on two-dimensionality, whereas I wanted to play with three dimensions. One day, I decided I wanted to experiment with a particular technique by hardening fabrics. I took a sheet, and tried to harden it with plaster. This turned out to be a great discovery because I really liked the result and in fact the white color also starts from this experiment. So, the main materials that I still use today in my works are fabric and plaster. In 2016 I also started creating white masks, using traditional Japanese paper. Fabrics and paper are the materials that make up my works and I work them with plaster.

 

4. Where do you draw inspiration from?

Makoto: Most sculptors first create the sculptures, then look for the place to hold the exhibition, but I often do the opposite. First I decide where to have the exhibition, then I see if I can go and do an inspection, and then I look for inspiration from the very place where I will then make my future installation before I even have my works ready. By adopting this tactic several times, I understood that living in Italy really makes a lot of sense for me because despite the fact that in Japan, especially in Kyoto, there are many fascinating places where it would be very interesting to do art installations, unfortunately most of the time these very beautiful places are practically unattainable even for a visit. However, in Italy, there are many wonderful and ancient places that incredibly stimulate my creativity and are also much more accessible to be able to exhibit my works. In Japan it is practically impossible. You can see them on television or in magazines, but being able to hold an exhibition in an historic place is unthinkable, whereas in Italy this is possible. One of the main reasons why I am still in Italy is precisely because Italy supports my creativity, and this is very important for me.

 

5. What is the creative process for you?

Makoto: As already described, I start by finding inspiration from the place where I would like to have the exhibition. Then, in my mind, a sort of photographic image is created, dictated by the instinct of the place itself, in which my works are created specifically to be suitable for that particular place. Sometimes the image is so powerful that it seems like a real video in my head. At other times, however, I may decide to collaborate with someone, for example with dancers. In this case, these artists collaborating with me through their body, through a real “non-verbal” communication, speak to me through the movements, transmitting to me something that will then be the source of my inspiration. For me the “authenticity” of my models is fundamental to my creative process. Once I happened to create an installation with a piano, and I wanted the person present to be a real pianist, and not a person simply simulating the act of playing the instrument. The energy that came to me was totally different. In Japan, before the pandemic, I made an installation in a temple and the person present in the installation in a meditative position was a real monk. My inspiration is fueled by the energy of my model’s authenticity.

 

 

6. You are not only a sculptor, but also a Shiatsu operator, an Origami master, an actor, a dancer. Are these activities connected to each other in some way, leading to your philosophy of “code white”, or are they creative activities that are very distinct from each other, and is “white code” a world unto itself?

Makoto: When I was studying I did artistic performances too, and so when I was an actor, yes, this is certainly the primary element that also links me to my current activity as a sculptor, given that I often find inspiration precisely from dancers and bodies in movement, and I myself have done many performances related to my “codice bianco” project. Regarding Shiatsu, before working with my models, I always offer a Shiatsu treatment to them to allow the body and spirit to enter the “right dimension” to obtain an “energetically perfect” finished work. Creating a mutual energetic exchange between the artist and model, and relaxing the body and mind consequently makes the work even more complete.

 

                                   Makoto in one of his performaces for “codice bianco”

 

7. What feelings do you have while you are in the creative phase?

Makoto: An artist who uses a material such as clay can reshape his work as he wants, if he sees that the result obtained is not what he wanted. What I do is an instinctive art and the result is always an unknown, because when the the fabric I use is in the process of hardening with plaster, if the result is not as I want, I will no longer be able to modify it, therefore what I absolutely must do is control rationality. I have to have totally instinctive feelings because I have to trust the unknown.

 

8. Is there a new place where you would like to install your works?

Makoto: Yes… I would like to exhibit in an abandoned church located in Tuscany, which is very beautiful. It expresses a very strong energy, so if the opportunity arose, I would like to have my next installation there.

 

9. Do you have future plans?

Makoto: In addition to my desire to be able to create my installation in this church, next year I will have an exhibition again in Japan, then, even if it is not yet something completely concrete, regarding my work as a Shiatsu practitioner, I have just started collaborating with a Tuscan dancer. She will deal with dance therapy, and we would like to merge dance with the discipline of Shiatsu. We have already had a couple of lessons in Tuscany, so maybe we will attempt to move forward with this project by making it more concrete, and then try to promote it.

 

 

Thanks again to the artist Makoto Kobayashi for this interview and allowing us to explore his creative world.

Interview: Elena Caldera
Thanks to Claire Palmer

 

 

 

 

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Self-Portrait as Beast

When the lights are out and the world’s eyes are sealed shut, I dig my fingers deep into my animal hide and tremble like a whipped cur. My digital doctor assures me there’s no cause for alarm and that we all die sooner or later, while my virtual vicar asserts the need for shame and contrition, and reminds me that I’m halfway to Hell anyway. My employer, sweating on screens in every room, swears they care and promises to make adjustments, just as soon as the next point of singularity is done and dusted. I am, of course, as good as dust, and my wife sweeps me into an old paper bag to be put out later; though at heart I’m still a scared dog, shivering in skin that’s never fit, waiting for that whip to fall again.

 

 

 

Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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Fists

There is always a dead woman, somewhere.
Sometimes there is a knife, or gun,
or a fist.

The means are immaterial.
The world drips with beauty

yet this.

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Tonnie Richmond
Picture Nick Victor

 

Tonnie Richmond lives in Leeds and loves Orkney, archaeology and gin. She has had poems published by The Storms, Black Nore, Up!, Dreamcatcher, Dawntreader and many others. Her first pamphlet, Rear-view Mirror, was published Yaffle’s Nest in November 2023.

 

 

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FEED YOUR HEAD

 

The most popular selection on the jukebox

In the Jester Coffee Bar was K10,
White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane

Written and performed in F-sharp Minor

The title comes from Grace Slick’s
Lyric, which in turn, comes from
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

And what the Dormouse said:

Feed Your Head
Feed Your Head
Feed Your Head

Truthfully,

There was more Acid
In the Round Table, up the road

The Jester

Was mostly slipping pills
Stolen from your Mum’s
Medicine cabinet
Passed under the table
 
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Steven Taylor
 
 
 
 
 
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And It Is

I don’t want to save the planet
Let it sizzle and burn and flood
Do I believe in Jesus 33AD
On the high cross
Or Tsar Nicholas of 1918
Shot and bayonetted
Or St Petersburg into Leningrad 1924
The Reds or the Whites
Malevich’s white, Reinhardt’s red
Do I believe in love
Can I trust you
Having a good time
Don’t let me get too deep
No political solution, perhaps
It is you who must keep it satisfied
Must be working at it
Don’t take it too hard
Not in this heat, and sweat
Hadrian’s sycamore felled by vandalism
What have they got against trees
Of which there used to be so many
I could in some odd sense feel it
This image is being removed
Ran crying away
Which is no surprise
What am I to do
If I am not with you
Must I perjure myself
I believe in what must be the case
And as for the whole truth
I barely know it

 

 

Clark Allison
Picrure Rupert Loydell

 

 

 

 

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I’ve seen All Good People

Good People, The Lighthouse, Falmouth

It’s poorly lit when we are finally let in to the intimate space of The Lighthouse for the premier of Georgia Death’s new play Good People. Someone is just about perched on a chair in the stage area, but mostly she is sprawled across a dining room table, which is scattered with wine glasses, cigarette packets and other detritus. Quiet music plays – I only recognised Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade Into You’ – until the lights slowly come up and Martha stirs.

She is drunk, by turns hysterical and maudlin, reflective and angry. She gulps down glasses of white wine, then red wine, lights endless cigarettes, puts them out, picks them up, lights another. She is in shock, she is belligerent and angry, she is in mourning for her mother, who she has been estranged from since she was a teenager.

Martha and the audience do not know whether to laugh or to cry. Is Martha hysterical or hysterically funny? Should we even consider laughing at grief? What are the words? Martha often stops to consult a dictionary on the table to make sure the words are the right ones. She invites us into her confidence: how she feels, why she feels, what she thinks, what happened. What she wanted to happen. What might have happened.

An old rotary dial phone is used as a stand-in for Martha’s mobile when she holds or re-enacts conversations with others. She cries, screams, dances; embraces and sniffs her mother’s coat, abandoned on another chair. Then she pulls a chair towards the audience and sits on it to re-enact the question-and-answer sessions at the local police station: what was asked, what she said, and what she was actually thinking at the time. (Mostly, it seems, about how hot the younger policeman was.)

More wine, more cigarettes, until the past is swept into a binbag along with the debris from the table. Martha’s assertiveness becomes confusion (noun: the state of being bewildered or unclear in one’s mind about something), loss becomes anger, death becomes inevitable. The words become undefinable; Martha is lost and speechless. Alone. Inarticulate.

Teya Nicole Hide’s performance, alone onstage for 50 minutes clad only in a crumpled sleeveless purple dress or slip, is nothing short of miraculous. She singlehandedly brings Death’s script to life, inhabiting Martha’s trauma, cynicism, flirtatiousness and loss, aided by the subtle and minimal sound and stage design. This is a disturbing and profound piece of theatre, which will be touring in 2024. Make sure you see it if you can, and be prepared to be provoked, challenged and pleasantly disturbed.

 

 

Jonathan Sinclair

 

 

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Marcus Aurelius Hermit

Away from this amoral city
I prefer the role of recluse 
The urban scene’s a steam-room
For laundering of money   –
And surely all money is laundered!

Far away from this sauna
Where witnesses to crime
‘Saw nada
But sweat the poorest of poor
To make it seem cool ‘at the top’

When leeches are applied
Attached to the human temple
Be sure all reason fails   –
They sink themselves who tread upon
Their fellows to gain status in a swamp

More natural it is that man aids man
Not sending waves of artificial war
By which all strive to win a mean survival   –
Setting all our gifts instead upon
A dedicated altar to the poor

For competition is antithesis
Of humane civilization

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Bernard Saint    

Illustration: Claire Palmer
from etching by Thomas de Lieu (1560-1612)
Saint Copres Hermit reads sitting in his vegetable garden, from Sylvae Sacrae hos memores Christi, Paris, 1606.

 

 

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Collected Broken Things

 

A petition to the deity inside every crushed insect,

this fragile frozen clockwork – an entire nebula shrinking,

slapped vacant faces on a hierarchy of needles.

Unseeing eyes turned inward upon a thousand realities,

formless landscapes for each breath to inter.

Temporal shadows ascending,

waking the transitory dead,

alive to the edge of the abyss,

drinking from the mouth of the sun.  

Eyes moving, choosing… the very place I’ll bury it,

a locked box – far away,

beyond the reach of telescope or typewriter,

no single star will suffice for saviour.

The jaws of the universe yawn and roar,

and worlds sing within.

 

 

 

© G.P. Fiddament 2023
Art Rupert Loydell

 

 

 

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La bergère de Rolleboise

Look at me! No girl who’s out in all weathers roaming about with the flock has a complexion like that. Mr Knight’s given me such rosy cheeks, made my hands seem delicate, and I never wore a blouse so white except Sundays. He had me pose in his studio in Poissy, painting in the background later from sketches he’d made on one of his excursions. They say he’s fond of pretty girls from hereabouts, and is always putting them in his pictures. I felt nervous when I went, but there wasn’t any funny business, not like you hear about with some of them. Perhaps it’s just this kind of painting sells. I wonder who buys them and what they see in them. Do they think I spend my time daydreaming? I’d happily swap with them. 

 

 

Simon Collings
Painting Daniel Ridgway Knight
The Shepherdess of Rolleboise

 

 

 

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HISTORY NO LONGER

as sometimes happens

what is already there

what was now on display

even the most specific detail

and so allowed to retain

we feel her anxiety in her movement

she is telling it to us and this in itself is new

so here is difference

a way women have to harm themselves

feels unexpectedly light

history no longer one thing after another, but

available

to all of us all the time

in order to help us remember something

waxes and wanes

in a way she may never be

changes hands

the energy reversed

it becomes clear

holds the old idea up to the light

comes through here as something more amusing

it is noted

and yet there is still room

almost always

 

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Nick Totton

 

 

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The Ghost of Music Past

Transfigured New York, Brooke Wentz (324pp, Columbia University Press)

Transfigured New York is a fantastic collection of Interviews with Experimental Artists and Musicians, 1980-1990, transcribed from discussions Wentz conducted as part of her radio programme Transfigured Night on Columbia University’s own radio station in 980s New York. The book really captures what was happening across the city: contemporary classical, electronic and tape music, classical composers, modern jazz musicians, out-rock, mutant pop, world music and performance art, with each interview given a new, short, contextualising introduction.

Wentz has made careful groupings of her interviews, which after a lively introduction to the book by Lee Ranaldo (who of course was there as part of Sonic Youth), starts with the pairing of John Cage and La Monte Young, who she declares to be ‘The Founding Theorists: Influential figures of Contemporary Thought and Musical Composition’. Cage is in a retrospective mood, having recently gone through his back catalogue, and is focussed on ‘listening to the world around you’ and what he calls ‘paying attention to signs’, whilst La Monte Young declares he has ‘dedicated his life to music because I’m crazy about music’, and wishes to get his music heard.

Part II gathers up those Wentz regards as ‘The Materials Scientists’, which includes a host of unknown (to me) names alongside David Behrman, Alvin Curran and Morton Subotnick. Here questions of systems, electronics, computers, assemblage and composition are addressed, with a whole host of differing models and attitudes evidenced. It’s amazing to think how the digital world and the continuing evolution of computer systems – now including AI – have made the kind of work undertaken in the 80s technically easy to do.

Part III focusses on composers who write or wrote in more traditional ways, including the Minimalists Philip Glass and Steve Reich before they got truly famous and were still embedded in alternative venues and scenes, and the pianist Anthony Davis, whose New Music was rooted in jazz idioms. Part IV is a rather loose collection of five ‘Eccentric Thought-Provoking Performers’, which allows improviser/composer/guitarist Fred Frith to sit alongside noisemeister and provocatuer Glenn Branca and alt-jazz musician Wayne Horvitz. It’s hard to see why Laurie Anderson isn’t here too, instead of Part V where she and Joan La Barbara are called ‘The Vocalists: Experimenters with Voice and Words.’ Anderson could also have been included in ‘The Performance Artists’ section, later on. Either way, hers is one of the best interviews here, focussing on her earlier compositions and events, but also discussing her intention to assemble a bigger piece entitled United States, which of course she did.

Part VI groups Andrew Cyrille, Bill Frisell, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Evan Parker as ‘The Dissenters: Modern Jazz Innovators’, which includes an enormous area of musical ground, from Cyrille’s avant-garde drumming to Parker’s cyclical-breathing saxophone improvisation with multiphonics, via Frisell’s atmospheric shading and wigout guitar, as well as Shannon Jackson’s deconstructed funk. It’s hard to see why Frith isn’t included in this section, or why he, Parker and Andy Partridge are the three UK visitors included in the book.

In fact, some of the strange groupings are one of the problems with the book. Take ‘Part VII. The Popular Avant-Garde: Pop Idiom Crossovers’. I’m not sure how Living Color differ that much from Shannon Jackson and The Decoding Society, why John Lurie and his fake-jazz band The Lounge Lizards aren’t in the jazz section, just how popular Arthur Russell (interviewed here with Peter Gordon) was until after his death; and I am definitely bemused to find Andy Partridge regarded as ‘experimental’. I loved early XTC, but they were post-punk pop through and through, even early on with the likes of ‘This Is Pop’ and ‘Statue of Liberty’, despite recorded evidence of their occasional deconstructionist dub tendencies.

The strange labels continue with ‘The Global Nomads’, interviews with Baaba Maal, Astor Piazzolla and Ravi Shankar, who are flagged up as ‘International Superstars of Western Thought’, a phrase whose meaning I have no idea of! Again, it seems that Shankar was already famous, whilst Maal and Piazolla were yet to achieve the musical presences they would go on to. The book sputters out a bit, with five people I have never even heard of gathered up in a ‘Performance Artists’ section.

I’d like to have perhaps seen a chronological arrangement of the pieces, or even an alphabetical one, something that resisted the kind of grouping exercise and labelling that has been imposed here and perhaps foregrounded more the musical and personal links, interdisciplinary playing and cross-genre influences that were occurring at the time. (Some sort of diagram or flow chart might have been fun!) The shorter, contemporary reflections by musicians which are sprinkled throughout the book offer different points of view and help offer retrospective contextualisation, including highlighting the effects of AIDS and other social and other political events.

This isn’t a definitive history of New York music in the 1980s, there are too many big names missing and the interviews are very much undertaken with regard to what was going on then, what musicians were involved in and about to perform, compose or play. This is both a positive and a negative, as some of the interviews seem slight in comparison to the more reflective and summative ones with the likes of John Cage or Morton Subotnick. Wentz, of course, can only work with what she has, and wasn’t interviewing for posterity, but we should be glad that several decades later this material is available so we can reconsider how music was changing and had changed, who was playing where and when, and the part New York City played in nurturing new and challenging music.

 

 

Rupert Loydell

 

 

 

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Bippety and Boppety Chat About Autobiography

– I’ve been thinking about writing a book about my various entanglements with ladies of the opposing gender.
– You must be more stupid than you look. I had not thought that possible.
– But I think it could be fun, not just for me but also for the reader. And instructive.
– I am mind-boggled. Instructive in what way?
– Well, how to do it and how not to do it, for one thing.
– I have to ask: what do you mean by ‘it’?
– Oh, there’s more than one ‘it’, frankly.
– Do tell.
– Well, there’s choosing the right and the wrong, plus there’s ‘The Art of Love’, in which, over the years, I have become quite accomplished.
– I withhold comment. Would you write about all the ladies in your life, or just the ones you went half on the rent with?
– Oh, not all. I can’t remember them all. When you get to my age the memory starts to go. I might have to make some stuff up.

 

Martin Stannard

 

 

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from Jim Henderson’s A SUFFOLK DIARY

Monday, November 27th

Any worries we may have had about the Parish Council’s Treasurer & Finance Officer William Woods after his rather precipitate departure at the end of last Monday’s Council meeting —he nipped away quickish after mention of the annual financial review, and there was speculation by some that he may have nipped off with Council funds to an island hideaway with his mistress, while others thought he may have just remembered he had left his laptop open, and his browsing history available to Mrs. Woods —anyhoo, any worries turned out to be unjustified, but he has made a bit of a boo-boo. In short, it is his annual job (I am not sure why it falls to him) to order the village’s Christmas tree, and he forgot. That may not sound like a very big deal, but you try getting a decent 30- or 40-footer delivered and, more importantly, installed at short notice at a good price and see how you get on. Also, because of everything that has been happening, what with the threat of unwanted foreigners being imported into the village, and then the fire at the village hall, the question of where to site this year’s tree has also been overlooked by everybody. Usually it stands proudly outside the hall, but the hall is currently partially fenced off prior to it’s post-fire refurbishment, and where the tree usually stands is occupied by an unsightly heap of fire-damaged fixtures and fittings, because whoever is supposed to be clearing away the debris hasn’t. All of this is tedious in extremis, but should not be beyond the wit of man to sort out, although it seems to be beyond the wit of any parish councillor.

It was suggested by Miss Tindle that the tree – assuming we eventually get one – should be erected next to the War Memorial, but several objections to this were raised, not least of which was that whatever beauty the tree may possess when decorated and lit would be marred by the presence of the War Memorial’s regular band of dissolute loitering youths. There is also the fact that the War Memorial is not very big , and would be completely obscured and, as a result, somewhat disrespected by having such a gaudy (the word “gaudy” was indeed used more than once) near-neighbour. The high politics of local government never cease to astound me. It also turns out that Hazel Garnham, the Parish Clerk’s wife, who each year musters a team of volunteers to see to the tree’s decoration and lighting, is unable to do that this year because she has been having what John, her husband, described as “lady problems” and is “not up to it”. (I cannot begin to describe the look on his face as he told us this, by the way.)

Thursday, November 30th

I had been wondering quietly to myself whether or not we might cancel Christmas this year – it seems like a good option, especially as in my house the in-laws are here for the duration – and I was enjoying a solitary pint in The Wheatsheaf  at lunchtime when Michael Whittingham waltzed in and, slapping me on the back, announced loudly and proudly that he “had it all sorted”. When asked to explain, he said he had fixed the Christmas tree problem and it would be delivered and put in place at the weekend, and do not argue, he added, because it is a fait accompli, and he was now going to be in everyone’s good books. I think this latter is extremely unlikely, but that is by-the-by. I did not bother to ask for an explanation, because it was obvious he would say he knows a bloke who knows another bloke . . . His world is not my world. In fact, I do not think I know any blokes, unless you count Whittingham himself, which I would prefer not to.

Sunday, December 3rd

Give Michael Whittingham his due, he (or, to be exact, his cronies) delivered, and the Christmas tree is in place, and and we just need to find someone to organise the decorating and lights and wotnot. Somebody needs to do it, and quick, or Christmas will be over. The tree is standing on what used to be the small car parking area in front of the little hut (for want of a better word) that used to be our little local library and is now not a library but an empty and rather sad and dilapidated wreck. The tree is surrounded by large and colourful advertising for the company that provided it – advertising that is neither Christmassy nor even vaguely religious in tone, bikinis being quite evidently neither  – which has raised one or two eyebrows, but Whittingham tells anyone who dares question anything in no uncertain terms to . . . (I am not going to write that.) John Garnham, who traditionally is the village’s Santa Claus and sits next to  the tree for a couple of hours to distribute small gifts to the village children, has expressed a reluctance to sit in the car park of an abandoned hut without convenient access to either toilet facilities or a tea urn. Frankly, I don’t really care.

I do not care because my mind is elsewhere. At home, my wife and her parents have been busy installing our own tree and decorations. I let them get on with it, because it’s 3 against 1, and I have been spending more time than usual in The Wheatsheaf, telling them I am attending to Parish Council duties and attending GASSE (“Go Away! Stay Somewhere Else!”) committee meetings to guard against the importing, albeit on a temporary basis, of unwanted foreigners to the village. I have not let on that GASSE is currently not active, but neither my wife nor her parents seem at all bothered where I am. I have become very friendly with Lulu, who works behind the bar. She is a very nice young lady, very friendly, and as I may have mentioned before, she is a lot brighter than her name would suggest. She is actually surprisingly well-read, and we share a liking for the stories of M.R. James. Her favourite is ‘A Warning to the Curious’, and so is mine. It is nice to have someone of like mind to talk to, don’t you find?
 
Monday, December 4th

Nancy Crowe and her daughter Naomi have stepped up and volunteered to see to the Christmas tree decorations and lights. Apparently Naomi is getting the youth who hang around the War Memorial to help, which I shall have to see before I believe it, and heaven knows how it will turn out. They had better get cracking, because the big “switch-on” of the lights is scheduled for Saturday. Wearing my Parish Council’s Community Liaison and Publicity Officer (CLAPO) hat I need to get on with the advertising, and also I have to make sure that our celebrity light switcher-onner is still available (or alive). I gather he is getting on a bit. We are shipping in a former resident of the village, an actor who apparently had a couple of bit parts once upon a time in “The Bill”. I’ve got his name and phone number written down on a piece of paper somewhere, if I can find it.

 

 

 

James Henderson

 

 

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City

mine just one version
among millions of others
walking the streets
or driving white vans
or sat on a bus
stuck in a jam
or changing lanes
or sat on a checkout
or throwing bread
to the ducks
or climbing trees
in the park
or falling in love
or texting each other
or surfing the net
or watching TV
or doing whatever
in rooms behind windows
that reflect the sky
endlessly
or listening to the bleep
of machines
telling them they’re still alive
reading their vital signs
through inscrutable wires
or seeing the light
for the first time
but no this is mine
just mine
a city of my own
and I’m trying to find
a way through the streets
past little boxes
just like Pete Seeger’s
only all painted grey
past the hotels
and industrial units
past the pylons
past steel fences
following the arrows
looking for a sign
to the ring-road

 

Dominic Rivron
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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RIP Benjamin Zephaniah

I had the honour of crossing paths with the wonderful Benjamin Zephaniah many times: in my work at Apples and Snakes, at schools performances, at Animal Aid’s Christmas Without Cruelty Fayre in Exeter, via Animals Asia Foundation, (to whom he was deeply committed) and at home – he came for tea once when he was in Devon. He viewed animal rights as central to his work and to wider social justice: a key part of his Rastafarian One Love commitment. He was a long-time vegan, publishing The Little Book of Vegan Poems (AK Press) in 2001, and his Luv Song (to a hedgehog friend in his garden) and Talkin’ Turkeys opened the hearts and minds of many young people. The mainstream media is brushing over all this, but we need to remember that kind and visionary man for who he fully was. RIP Benjamin Zephaniah. Thank you for the great good you did for all beings. Thank you for being you.

 

Heidi Stephenson

 

“Do what you can. Do the little, (or the big), things that make a difference you can see. The tangible stuff. Or take to the streets to do something for the future. Do anything. Just don’t give up. Don’t let them grind you down. Rise up all ye sisters and brothers who know better. Stand firm in the downturn.”

Benjamin Zephaniah

I’ve Cried a Lot Lately

 

 

 

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The Dog, Clarity And The Oblivion

The Sun returns. I reap
why the dog picked up the spot
it sleeps.
They know.

I look into its dull eyes, 
for one jiffy fathom this universe;
I forget.
Such knowledge 

is not ours to keep. Even
the most plaguing question sinks
above the answers lying wrecked deep.

A jet whizzes away.
The chem blaze writes some annals.
Somewhere a tire bursts. 

 

 

 

Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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What Is True: Found Poem. In memory of Henry Kissinger

It is not a matter of what is true that counts,
but a matter of what is perceived to be true.   
 
The elderly are useless eaters.  Military men
are just dumb, stupid animals to be used
 
as pawns in foreign policy.  Democracy
is too important to leave up to the votes
 
of the people.  An expert is someone
who articulates the needs of those in power. 
 
Over time, even two armed blind men
in a room can do enormous damage to each
 
other, not to speak of the room.  The illegal
we do immediately; the unconstitutional
 
takes a little longer.  Power is the ultimate
aphrodisiac.  Who controls the food supply
 
controls the people; who controls the energy
can control whole continents; who controls
 
money can control the world.  Covert action
should not be confused with missionary work. 
 
Even a paranoid has some real enemies.  We
are all the President’s men.  I want to thank
 
you for stopping the applause; it is impossible
for me to look humble for any period of time.

 

 

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John Bradley

 

 

 

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Beans On Toast: Toothpaste and the Tube launch…

Alan Dearling was there, and shares some pics and words too

‘Beans On Toast’ is becoming a one-person musical phenomena. A major set at Glasto in 2023 garnered him a new swathe of friends and fans. He is literally what you see and hear on the ‘tin’ (of beans). He’s got there the very hard way. Hard work, talent in oodles and almost constant gigging around the UK and world. Beans On toast is the stage name of Jay McAllister from Braintree in Essex. He’s a troubadour, a performer, a showman, an old-style trooper. A singer-songwriter with absolutely no home-place-space for a pigeon-hole. So far, I think, he’s released 16 studio albums. He’s established his own tradition by releasing a new record each year on 1 December, Jay’s birthday.

He was also one of the stars of the Fairport Convention annual festi at Cropredy in 2023. ‘Mythical Creatures’:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H4STAoZnEA

‘The Golden Lion’: A song about a boozer and live music and arts events venue in Yorkshire, and UFOs and Happy Valley. It’s a centrepiece from the new Beans On Toast album which was triumphantly launched into the ecosphere at the Golden Lion on 1st December 2023 in Todmorden. An absolute sell-out, rammed event. The album is titled, ‘The Toothpaste & the Tube’. Really rather fab, with clever lyrics, lots of songs with powerful, evocative stories and themes. Nice mixture of styles and material.

Video: ‘Golden Lion’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcqlKbe1D6w

Video: ‘Send me a Bird’ live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuYIVaTIvMY

Bassie Gracie and Lord Tensheds have joined Beans On Toast on this latest UK Tour. As Beans told us:  “Gracie is telling her brilliant, funny, moving poems, and Tensheds brings his rock n’ roll rollercoaster. On top of that, both are joining me onstage to form a new Beans on Toast three-piece band, which is very exciting indeed!”

Website: http://www.beansontoastmusic.com/

As Beans proclaimed to the World:

“ ‘Toothpaste and The Tube’ was recorded with the amazing @ferrisandsylvestermusic in their beautiful Wilsthrie home studio. I know them from @spiritualrecords in Camden and our paths often cross while out on the road. They had worked on the @jfrancissongs album, which was a huge favourite of mine, so I wrote them a letter asking if they’d like to make an album and left it in a festival dressing room knowing they’d be there the following day. They thought that was a great idea and a plan was put in place.

I took a collection of simple songs to the table and I asked Archie where he’d like to take them musically. To me this is a varied album, both on subject matter, style and sound. But at its core, it’s a folk album, and it’s about the world in which we live, for better or worse, it’s ours. So let’s live it.

The magnificent @rosskgordon played drums and keys on the album, it’s heavy on the Hammond, which I think gives this album its personality. Ross is a bloody legend.”

And in support at the launch of the new album and on the tour: Lord Tensheds and Bassie Gracie

Lord Tensheds: album: ‘The Days of my Confinement’:

A beautiful pianist and a darkly contorted soul. A punkier, younger, UK Tom Waits with equally gravel-fuelled songs, words and sentiments. Stark and deeply heartfelt, ‘The Bridge Song’ in particular kept the packed audience spell-bound. From Tensheds time living in West Yorkshire and witnessing heartbreak, suicides and more at first-hand…

‘The Bridge Song’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDs2e00PG20

Bassie Gracie:

‘The Sound belongs Here’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFm_5ASm-hA

“I’m Grace, I play the bass, people take photos of my face, I do poetry but I struggle with rhymes.”

She doesn’t…it’s her greatest attribute as a poet. Lots of rhymes… Charismatic, playful, joyful and FUN. But, challenging and thought-provoking too.

Last year in 2022, Beans On Toast produced ‘The Fascinating Adventures of Little Bee’, which was a collaboration project with Jaime and Lily Adamsfield. It was a collection of 10 children’s stories and songs in a box set. Beautifully illustrated by Lily, these ten adventures see Little Bee learn important lessons about the world.

Beans On Toast continues to tour constantly, he’s heading over to Australia in January 2024, and will presumably continue to release a new album each year on 1 December. Definitely one of music’s living legends…

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IT IS DELIRIA’S DAY

                                  On Jeff Young’s DELIRIA (Rough Trade Books,  2023)

 

Jeff Young trawls the ghost roads extracting scent from each shadow,
Exhuming beats from the rhythm of Rough Trade’s track through sound;
Both of the world and within as this tale connects secret stories
To the soul as lead singer, as Young’s new fable grows ancient
And this Aigburth Angel’s adventure in being open to all stays profound.

Deliria is a road movie for those who can no longer travel
In which Young’s nameless I and his ‘Marta’ transform across Portugal.
The Porto they find could exist in the record shop’s Portobello,
Vinyl spun, air infusing as the mix of moment and memory fuses
With words stoking music, from both Young as he’s writing

All the way through to the ending containing a sweet mallard’s call.
Jeff Young dreams for you and dreams large in this elegant pamphlet story;
Akin to David Rudkin’s recent Lighthouse Keeper, this is a tale told to time
And all it creates as well as all it transfigures; from its Roy Batty quote
To the hours that I and Marta traverse and soon climb ‘upwards into  

unknown galaxies’ from their soon revealed Hotel Brothel,
Guided by Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, words wend their way towards
Wisdom that can only be sourced from the light that this poet prince
Casts as he peoples his visions; from an ox in a bar, fine dust rising,
Where ‘no one gives a shit that there’s a huge biblical beast  

Is on licensed premises’ to the enchanting image of a death sent
Buster Keaton dancing with a pigeon; as you slide into this story
You soon realise that Young’s diary of dream nations night.
Dreams are a form of madness, no doubt, in which the mind at last
Finds air’s purchase. Freed from the dark, age, and illness

The spirit within spends and sprees, as a holiday becomes
Holy day for the secular need for sensation that we can describe
As religious as the death of a friend spurs I’s journey. It is this
Escaping from an England into the European nacht which allows him,
And each reader beside to feel free. We are liberated by dreams

And licked back to life through Young’s language. As in all his work;
Plays and poems, Ghost Town before, Radio, he finesses the muse,
Won from past loss and from the love of his own Pearl and Amy
Into paragraphs to enchant you, encountering a horse ‘which seems
To be on fire.’ (It is the seems which enchants me) to a room full

Of rats where the Piper does not steal the children but is played
Through the penwork of a man ‘staying up all night listening for
broken hearted women,’ to a softly sung murder ballad.

The writer fills every encounter with spectres, finding both
Motion and music in this his recorded dream rodeo.

All art transforms. Art is not just about transportation.
But the act of moving the mind and the body is what the flow
Of words tries to do. With books as the score for the phantom
Instruments we imagine, orchestras and ensembles, singers
And bands who back you as you duet in turn

With what you are reading. And with what you are needing.
For the curative of the common page stages the concert
Of dreams we all hear. But which we often forget or ignore
Once the net of night meets day’s stitching
And we are sealed, stored or sutured, not in the fabric

Of night but day’s cloud spitting rain’s spite back at us,
Drenching those dreams; damning, dousing. But it is here
That Young’s visions poured through the pen warm all crowds,
Drying us to weep tears that blaze twin trails from his writing
He is a Liverpudlian La and and a Do Re who sends You

And Me to a Fa that exists off the scale, where we can see
Our dreams and then sing them. Words are melodies
In Jeff’s effing, as the Portuguese  drinking toast,
Fuck The Devil is a drive to the very edge in no car.
This story is Borges and (David) Brooks, Kerouac,

Hesse’s Knulp, and Ken Kesey. It is George and Walt Whitman
And something secret from Waits’ swordfishtrombones.
It is Burroughs beset and Ballard’s overgrown urban jungle,

As the ‘craftsman of cityscape poetics’ part stanazas
Each paragraph proudly to grant every vantage point

Its own throne.  This book is partly the pages that fly
When we think of time passing. It is slim enough
To be birdlike, as opening it out will make wings,
Held in the hand. In fact, from his to your own,
Gifts are granted. Jeff is Young for all ages

And present no doubt all stages of both dream
And desire; Deliria’s daze masking mourning
And recolouring at once, everything.   

 

 

                                                                                                               David Erdos 6/12/2

 

DELÍRIA (SIGNED COPIES) – Jeff Young

 

https://roughtradebooks.com/products/deliria-jeff-young.

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From Gandalf’s Garden to The Algarve

Muz Murray interviewed by Steve Andrews

I was recently reading The Portugal News when a name leapt out from the pages and took me right back to the days of Flower-Power and hippie counter culture. That name was Muz Murray and I was very happy to read that he now lives in Portugal too. He is a mystic, a yoga and mantra master, an artist, and the author of books that dive deep into the mysteries of mind, body and spirit, of life, the universe and everything. 

Muz Murray has been called “Europe’s answer to Eckhart Tolle,” but to my mind, he is the magical man who founded the Gandalf’s Garden magazine and centre in London in the late 1960s. My memories of IT (International Times) also take me back to the same time period, so what could be better I thought than an interview with Muz but published in the now? So I reached out to the universe to make this happen. I contacted IT, and sent Muz some questions.

From your most extraordinary life, please tell us about four of your most extraordinary experiences.  

I guess my first would be when I was gassed by the dentist in order to extract a tooth (that’s what they did in those days when I was a kid) and found myself out of my body and floating on the ceiling. I was able to watch the dentist and his assistant operating and heard them talking. That’s when I realised why many of us feel we can fly. 

Another was the constant childhood memory of being engulfed by a monstrous tidal wave, seemingly a mile high that swept across North Africa when Atlantis sank,covering the jungles with the sand of what is now the Sahara Desert. I was a youth sitting on the flat roof in a white adobe village in what now must be Libya when I saw the great wave coming. I had a dreadful fear of water while growing up and never swam until I forced myself in my sixties.  

My major experience was a sudden spiritual awakening that came out of the blue, when my consciousness appeared to expand to fill the universe. I was given revelatory knowledge beyond the capacity of the intellect to comprehend. This happened on the island of Cyprus, during several years of back-packing around the world. It was a completely natural experience and no drugs were involved. But it changed the whole course of my life. I found myself on the spiritual path with awe-inspiring insight into the nature of existence. I later learned that it was known as Cosmic Consciousness. And from then on, nothing would satisfy me but to regain the wonder of that experience.  

I relate the details of this momentous event in my book “Sharing the Quest: Secrets of Self-Understanding.” 

After many years of meditation and spiritual and yoga practices (and three years as a wandering monk in India) I achieved various states of Samadhi, or thought-free awakened consciousness.  

My last OOBE occurred after hanging on to the outside of an express train for ten hours through the night in India. I arrived in Rishikesh enfeebled with a raging fever. In an ashram, my guru-doctor tried to assist me with acupuncture. Unfortunately he hit a spot with one needle that caused instant death. I left my body and found myself crossing a vast rock arch over the universe to some unknown end. Then my mantra, which I had previously constantly mentally chanted, emerged in my consciousness and settled me. It seemed to be carrying me back to my body. When I realised I was back and before I was able to open my eyes, for the sake of the doc, I said, “It’s alright, I’m coming back!” He was greatly relieved, as he was contemplating throwing my blue corpse into the Ganges and wondering if he would be arrested for having killed a European.    

How did Gandalf’s Garden come about and how would you describe it? 

When I returned to the UK after three years travelling and working in various jobs down the whole of Africa, I no longer had any interest in a career. However, I went back to work at the BBC TV studios as a scenic artist in order to earn money to further my travels to India. During that period Flower-Power and hippiedom was on the rise and I encountered many lost and lonely hippies, who had been destroyed by society and then by drugs. I felt moved to help them with some direction.  

So I sank my India-bound savings into producing the first Issue of Gandalf’s Garden (with the blessing of Tolkien himself, I might add). Thus it began. Just six of us rented premises in World’s End at the far end of King’s Road, selling head shop goods, hand-made hippy clothes, exotic teas and porridge, and GG magazines. Soon we found we had become a community, a mecca for world crossers, and a haven for dossers and junkies on a bad trip. We nurtured them all. We also invited gurus and spiritual teachers of every stripe from all over the world to speak in our basement shrine-room. GG was a beacon of hope for many. 

Since the original magazines have now become valuable Sixties memorabilia,fetching over a hundred pounds each in the trade, I created a CD named “The Complete Gandalf’s Garden” offering copies of all the magazines, photos of the ‘Gardeners’, press cuttings, reviews of GG by authors in their books, and a 70-page account of the Life & Times of our community. (Available as a readable CD or a download. Find it here: https://bit.ly/2nSplOG) 

By the way, I still have one or two of the original magazines waiting for a good home for those who can afford it. I also have a few of the first ever copies of Issue 1 printed in the first 20 minutes of GG’s existence, provable by the lack of flowers in the title. I arrived just in time to stop the print run until the printer put in the flowers he had forgotten to add. Naturally, these are worth more.. 

How did you end up in Portugal, and tell us a bit about your life there? 

I was first invited by a Yoga Centre in the Algarve to teach Mantra for ten days with about 70 students. I loved the warmth and calm atmosphere of Portugal and the friendly people. So when some years later I was invited by an erstwhile friend who had moved to the Algarve, to come down for a holiday I was happy to do so. Whilst visiting him and his girlfriend, it was suggested that I came to live down there. They had an empty 2nd plot attached to their garden and said I could build a chalet there, sell my house in France (where I was then living) and retire on the proceeds. I would only need to pay for the electricity he said. This was quite an attractive proposition. 

Eventually, I decided to take the plunge, and change my life yet again. I put my house on the market, sold it, and sent all my furniture to the Algarve. 

I was just tidying up the house for the newcomers, having just a mattress and my laptop in an otherwise empty house, when I got a message in my email. “Well, actually, you can’t have a chalet in my garden, as it partly belongs to my ex-wife and we have problems. But you can have a room in my house for 1.000 Euros a month.” !!! What?   

With my furniture in storage in the Algarve, and a car chock full of my last bits and pieces, I had no alternative but to hare down to Portugal and run around like crazy to find someplace to buy that I could afford and still have a bit left over to live on. So that’s what I did. I found an isolated place in the hills, with no neighbours and no friends,and no one to talk to for three years. So I became a hermit.  

Now I rarely leave my ‘hermitage’ and spend my time trying to write my books, but mostly wrestling with computer confustications that I know not how to solve. And praying to the Gods of the Keyboard for a computer whizz-kid to come and sort out my Windows 11 complexities.    

 Can you please say something about your books? 

While I was wandering all over India as a sadhu (or errant monk) many fellow travellers constantly asked me where they could go for this or that teaching. So I investigated over 300 ashrams (spiritual hermitages) and collected all the information any seeker needed to know. Thus my first book was called “Seeking the Master—A Guide to the Ashrams of India and Nepal.”  This became the Bible of India-goers in the Eighties and was jokingly called the “Five-star Guru Guide.” After ten years, at the height of its popularity, my publisher retired and the book became out of date, as all the gurus had inconveniently gone and died on me. Very inconsiderate of them, I thought.  

A great labour of love was my second book,Ifflepinn Island”—an esoteric fantasy for children (and adults) with spiritual teachings slipped in as part of the adventures. I had worked on this book for sixty years, in between my travels and work. Reviewers have said it had the quality of “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Hobbit, “ and the “Narnia Chronicles” all-in-one. Unfortunately, my publisher turned out to be a skinflint and has not paid me any royalties for the past eight years. So I haven’t the impetus to promote the book.  

“Sharing the Quest: Secrets of Self-Understanding” developed from the time I was a kind of ‘spiritual agony aunt’ for Yoga Today magazine. Readers asked spiritual questions that were perturbing them and I answered them in depth, but in easy language. I later enlarged the articles into chapters offering yoga secrets and practices I was initiated into, and methods of self-understanding from my practice as a psychotherapist. This book is helping to clarify real spiritual issues for many seekers.  

You Are the Light: Secrets of the Sages Made Simple” is the culmination of all my spiritual insights and practices. It presents the mystery of Advaita i(the highest spiritual understanding) in a way that is comprehensible and illuminating for those seeking advanced teachings. Everything a seeker needs to know can be found here.  

Two different reviewers have said, “This is the only spiritual book I will ever need.” 
That says it all. 

For a little light relief, my latest book, “Old Mother West Wind Tales” is an updated rewrite of a 120-year-old American children’s classic, about the mischievous antics and adventures of the animals, birds and reptiles of the meadow, pond and wood. It was a book that charmed me when I was six years old. But having discovered it again in my eighties, I found it very old-fashioned in tone, so I decided to rewrite it in a more lyrical and upbeat style for the taste of children and parents today. I also changed many of the American animals to those inhabiting the English countryside, in order to introduce it to British children. And created 23 new illustrations. 

The book is getting all five-star reviews and charming adults as well as children, many of whom are saying this should become another children’s classic.  

So think of your kiddies for Christmas!   

Muz, I am sure many people think you look like a wizard, so if you could wave your wand what would your magic be? 

World peace—a world of people with open minds and open hearts.

Muz Murray, Author of: 

Seeking the Master –A Guide to the Ashrams of India and Nepal

Sharing the Quest — Secrets of Self-Understanding

Words on the Way –– Esoteric Sanskrit Terminology Explained

Ifflepinn Island-A spiritual fantasy for green-growing children and evergreen adults

Never Mind the Mind – Audio CD on Overcoming the Mind Machinations

You Are the Light: Secrets of the Sages Made Simple

https://www.muzmurray.com/you-are-the-light

Old Mother West Wind Tales–https://www.muzmurray.com/old-mother-west-wind-tales

All available from our UK Website: https://www.muzmurray.com  

and also on Amazon

Follow Muz on:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MantraMuz 

YouTube Videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/MuzMantraYoga

For more info on Steve Andrews:

https://steveandrews.info/

https://linktr.ee/steveandrews 

 

Steve Andrews is The Bard of Ely

WEBSITES:
https://steveandrews.info/
https://linktr.ee/steveandrews 
https://www.instagram.com/bardofely/
https://bardofely.bandcamp.com/follow_me
https://www.reverbnation.com/bardofely
https://www.facebook.com/TheBardofEly/
https://twitter.com/bardofely

BOOKS: Herbs of the Northern Shaman, Herbs of the Sun, Moon and Planets, Herbs of the Southern Shaman, Earth Spirit: Saving Mother Ocean, The Magic of Butterflies and Moths (all by Moon Books),

PUBLICATIONS: Big Issue Cymru, SWND, Kindred Spirit, MyHerbs, Permaculture, Welsh Coastal Life, Celtic Life International, Mediterranean Gardening and Outdoor Living, Bee Culture The Magazine of American Beekeeping, National Federation of Occupational Pensioners, Prediction, and Living Tenerife magazines, Tenerife News, Tenerife Weekly and the Tenerife Sun newspapers, as well as the Huffington Post, Whitstable Views, Tripedia and Ancient Origins websites.

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Interfaces at Dusk

 

Closing the door quickly. The windows reverberating from the blast. Nothing in sight. No one in the street or behind the houses. It could have been a heavily laden truck up on the highway, or a someone felling a tree. Unsettling. Jackknifing into the evening news. Fires in the city center, drone strikes, alarms sounding at the nuclear plant. Dreams crumbling into the folds of the day, shimmering despite the repetition of destruction, the cacophony of violence, disseminated a billion times, screens wobbling, volumes suddenly decreased. It was a good idea to close the door and stay away from the windows. The slight squeaking might be a bat in the attic, settling in for the night. Upside-down and at ease. The slightest crack between the window frame and the wall allows passage. I might join him in the attic, leave the screens wobbling in the kitchen, the kaleidoscope of destruction fading behind me. Better pull up the shaking wooden ladder, tuck the steps under the floor. The light might seep in.

 

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Andrea Moorhead
Pic: Claire Palmer

 

 

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Benjamin Zephaniah. Into the Enternity

God bless you Benjamin, a great man and an abiding energy.

 

 

 

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Sixty Nine


 

Sixty nine
your hair not quite as long
at this end of the sixties
you run your fingers through it
as you walk across the room
recalling those days of love and peace
peace signs and flower power
back when a lysergic honeymoon
in San Francisco seemed so attractive
but after all these springs and summers
gone like rivers into the sea
you’re still living here on this island
living in this city so many have left
but you still have the tears and the rain
the greenhouse and the grass growing
on the other side of the Honicknowle Hills
the long silver hair and the Dansette.
 
You look through the window
waiting for that point of invisibility
when everything darkens.
In the distance you see faces in the crowd
with the complexions of potatoes
the skyscrapers getting taller and taller-
Beckley Point, with a little help from Hoffman
turns into a birthday cake
burning hundreds of candles.
You walk across the room
following something in your memory
an intersection that leads back to the past
back to hanging around with a shoulder bag
of words outside Pete Russell’s
Hot Record Store on Market Avenue.
 
You see the sun going down
as you lower your eyelashes
a few minutes west of sleep.
You feel like running as if the sun
were a bus you just have to catch
the last bus that takes you home
to a house glowing with candles
eighteen teenage candles flickering
eight and a bit weeks to go
before leaving the sixties for the first time.
 
Sixty nine
you open a box of swans
take a deep breath
long enough to last
a shooting star, a split-second.
As you let it go
the candle flames move
away from your lips.
Night falls as you gaze
across the bay at French windows
showing pinpricks of light.
You look up at the sky
see no-one walking on the moon
like you did that star twinkling night
running with old friends
in and out of the Atlantic;
playing American leapfrog
down at Devils Point
sixty nine or thereabouts
as the years are numbered.

 

 

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Kenny Knight

 

 

 

 

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Kissinger Arrives in Hell, Appointed Permanent National Security Advisor

BY KEVIN BARRETT,

In the illustrious culmination of his 100-year career, Henry Kissinger arrived in Hell today and was immediately appointed Satan’s National Security Advisor.

Kissinger will spend the rest of eternity devising futile diplomatic ruses and stratagems aimed at enhancing Hell’s nonexistent chances of defeating Heaven.

At a press conference announcing the appointment, Satan said that even though he knows he doesn’t have a chance in Hell of succeeding in his long-standing Global War on God (GWOG), he nonetheless hopes that Kissinger, by injecting notes of gravitas and realpolitic into the Kingdom of Hellfire’s infernally hopeless strategic and diplomatic efforts, will at least make the doomed enterprise more interesting.

Back on Earth, American president Joe Biden expressed hope that Kissinger’s mission to Hell would open up a new chapter in US-Hell relations. “Since we just paid Israel to murder 20,000 Palestinian civilians, and provided the weapons, the Devil must be looking fondly on America at this critical juncture in our history,” Biden said. “We have high hopes that Henry Kissinger will soon broker an agreement inaugurating a new era in which America and Hell work closely together to achieve our common goals. As I’ve always said, ‘If Kissinger can go to China, he damned well can go to Hell.”

Asked about his impressions of Hell, Kissinger quipped: “I’ve been to some Third World countries seeking nuclear weapons where things got almost this hot.” He added that when he arrived in Furth, Germany, as a US soldier right after World War II, he wondered where all the Zionists had gone. Smiling wickedly, the Gehennan immigrant who instantly rose to become National Security Advisor quipped: “Now I know.”

Here are some of Henry Kissinger’s greatest accomplishments:

Kissinger Arrives in Hell, Appointed Permanent National Security Advisor

 

https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/kissinger-and-the-balfour-declaration?utm_source=cross-post&publication_id=651440&post_id=139056142&utm_campaign=716517&isFreemail=false&r=3ksdi&utm_medium=email

 

 

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HOLIER THAN NOW

She went to sleep in Jesus,
took with her the flowers
handed by the men
who married her sisters
and the linen
she would wring
in boiling water
both sides of the  stain.

She went to sleep in Jesus,
as each voice she heard
echoed to the rejoicing spirit
who neatly wrapped her in dirt
without ever seeing her face,
or ever quite remembering her name.

 

Phil Bowen

 

 

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‘ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE’: STARVATION WAGES

 

Starvation Wages is self-described ‘Anarcho-Techno’,
a new protest music rooted in topical expression.
Jason Dean is soundtracking the twilight of late-period
capitalism and the beginning of an unknown future…

 

Innovation… and continuity.

A century of insurrection.

There are 1,276 critic-approved words to describe the sound of the electric guitar, used in various re-combinations since the dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Those permutations are now exhausted. Time to move on. Jason Dean is a long-time veteran of the Seattle music scene. Now he resides in Burlington, Vermont, and he’s become Starvation Wages, evolving at new tangents reconfigured with an arsenal of synthesizers and samples to target the mind and the body.

When the Dada artists’ manifesto proclaimed burning down Art Galleries it was intended more as a Year Zero symbolism rather than an actual threat, a provocative slogan, in the same way that the Sex Pistols didn’t really wanna destroy passersby. Although it’s a useful stance. Is the future dream really no more than a shopping scheme?

‘Marketplace Fear’ is the debut EP from Starvation Wages, evolved through live performance, honed during the height and depths of the pandemic years, as a project thriving in underground DIY spaces, illegal warehouse raves and dance clubs.

‘Starvation Wages is fusing together a variety of elements in the more marginalized and underground worlds of music and politics. Celebrating some of the past’s great innovators and putting my own spin on it here in 2023. Thank you for giving it a listen and for your thoughtful comment’ says Jason graciously. ‘I heard the phrase ‘starvation wages’ first from a speech by Martin Luther King Jr, but it was also picked up by Bernie Sanders during the 2006 campaign. I was attracted to it because it encapsulates much of our late-stage capitalist world.’

The semantichrist video for the track ‘Anatomized’ and its remix, crawls with images of resistance to repressive totalitarian, lines of Perspex riot shields and visored helmets. Judge Dredd and ‘V For Vendetta’. Batons, banners, a missile ascending, people in motion in grainy streaked animation. Protest and survive. The terminal countdown. ‘Ev’rywhere I hear the sound of marching charging feet… the time is right for fighting in the street… what can a poor boy do, except sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band?’

​The music’s ‘focus on analogue sounds is a large component in the creation of tracks for Starvation Wages,’ he explains. ‘It’s a combination of samples from politically based sources acknowledging and expanding the radical nature inherent in the music. My influences for it were equally born in both marginalized and underground Black and Queer spaces in places like Detroit, as well as the charged political environment that gave rise to groups like Kraftwerk.’

Jason has played in various Punk and Indie bands, one of which – Mutiny Mutiny (including 2009s excellent five-track digital EP ‘Undefined’) was praised by post-Punk critic Jason M Heller at the AV Club, among other sites and zines. ‘Mutiny Mutiny was definitely on the more Indie side of things’ he recalls. ‘I’m incredibly proud of the band, but basically, our bass player was attending school and didn’t have as much time or focus for the band. We had a difficult time finding a consistent drummer. And it felt like the traction and notice we did get we weren’t able to capitalize on – as a band, with older folks who had more family and partner commitments. The larger interest kind of bypassed us at the time. But Mutiny Mutiny ended up lasting about eight years, after which it had run its course. A pretty great run, which again I’m really proud of.’

‘Meanwhile, I’d been interested in electronic music and producing electronic music for quite some time’ he continues. ‘At first it seemed a very computer-based largely digital world that had been dominant since the nineties, just looking at a computer screen, which I didn’t find particularly attractive. And analogue synthesizers were quite pricey. I was interested in doing a solo project where I’d only be tied by my own limitations regarding performing, touring, releasing music. Around this time, probably about 2016 or so, there were a lot of reasonably priced analogue synthesizers coming onto the market from the likes of Korg and other manufacturers. This led to a renewed interest in electronic music for me. The idea that I could buy a synth for maybe $300 or so and have a piece of hardware to manipulate and perform with also lended itself to a Punk Rock approach to electronic music. Essentially like buying a cheap guitar and starting to bang out chords and start a band. I bought these relatively inexpensive synthesizers and let them dictate a direction to a certain extent. Whatever I got out of them was going to be ‘my sound’ which of course was informed by my interest in the darker, noisier side of electronic music. It all started to coalesce in an exciting way.’

Starvation Wages began from the ethos that – explicitly or implicitly, all techno and industrial music is protest music that expands into the wider discourse of the twenty-first century. It takes cues from the likes of Alec Empire’s Atari Teenage Riot, the personal politics of groups like Throbbing Gristle, and the explicit takedowns of the Bush administration by nineties era Ministry. ‘Yes, big influences for me are the early wave of EBM bands, Frontline Assembly, Front 242 and the like.  Throbbing Gristle as well. The early industrial wave. Coil, so many pioneers. I just watched that Killing Joke documentary (‘The Death & Resurrection Show’, 2013, reissued 2020), of course they’re more on the post-Punk side, I think it came out several years ago, but I missed it at the time.’

‘Vermont has a pretty great music scene but is dominated by a lot of Punk and Metal with a decent amount of jam bands mixed in. This is where Phish got their start’ Jason explains. ‘The New England area also has a pretty thriving noise scene as well. Although finding an audience for the industrial techno/EBM (Electronic Body Music) side of things can be a bit difficult. Montreal is close by and the scene for that is much more active. I’ve been working on trying to find an entry point into the community up there. But Vermont is probably the closest place I’ve been in that actually has what I would call a ‘scene’, especially in the Punk/Hardcore/Metal community. There’s not a lot of bands but everyone shows up for the shows regardless and you see pretty much the same people at all of them. It strikes me in a similar way as a lot of people talked about Seattle before the Grunge explosion (I was a bit young to be active in the Seattle scene at that time).’

‘Marketplace Fear’ is both a statement against the cut-throat dystopian free market, and a synonym for agoraphobia, a condition from which Jason suffers – ‘agora’ is a Greek word that means ‘market place’. He composed all the music and plays all the instruments on the album, in Seattle and Vermont, mixing and mastering it with Brandon Busch (of Sojourner, Mutiny Mutiny, Detroit Breakout!).

​The intention was to create an album giving voice to ‘Anarchists and critics of American imperialism’. And Jason’s Punk take on industrial techno is the perfect format for songs like ‘Exarcheia’, which was ‘inspired by a trip to Greece not long after there were protests and riots in response to the austerity imposed there when it became financially troubled.’ There are sounds of panic, foreign-language voice samples, stabbing electro, the ‘black-&-red star of the anarchists’, both left-wing, countercultural and highly danceable. ‘I happened to be there right between a couple of the more active periods, and during that time the tension was palpable. They had the Riot Police lined up around Syntagma Square and stationed in Exarcheia. Seemed like they were just waiting for the next round of actions. It took me back to the days of WTO in Seattle (the waves of World Trade Organisation anti-globalisation protests). I love Greece and it’s heart-breaking to see what the country has been put through with the austerity packages imposed by the IMF (International Monetary Fund), but the people there have a strong spirit. I found it very inspiring, like I do a great number of protests and actions that typically take place outside of the US.’

The first single, ‘Anatomized’, fades into a head-kicking rhythm track, then quotes Allen Ginsberg in a context of how America wages war on both its own citizens and those abroad. Ginsberg is the Beat Generation poet with a penchant for sitting cross-legged naked armed only with his Buddhist finger-cymbals. Ginsberg’s poem ‘America’ (Berkeley, 17 January 1956) catches the total flavour of 1950s Cold War nuclear paranoia, ‘I can’t stand my own mind, America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb’ (from ‘Selected Poems 1947-1995, HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2001). ‘Though the Cold War is considered history and the atomic threat somewhat diminished since Ginsberg wrote that iconic ‘go fuck yourself with your atom bomb’ line, which is sampled in the track, America continues to use the equivalent of this most destructive of weapons on its own citizens every day. The damage caused by the consolidation of wealth, omnipresent racism, inequality, and the anaemic funding of social services compared to military defence budgets is the new atomic bomb and it still begs the question, ‘America, when will you end the human war?’.’

This writer loves Ginsberg’s poem ‘America’. Has it been a favourite of Jason’s, or did someone else draw it to his attention? ‘I’m a long-time Ginsberg fan’ he enthuses. ‘I met him in 1994 at a poetry reading and he signed my ‘Collected Poems’ book which I cherish. Ginsberg was very sweet. The whole poem is brilliant, but that line really jumps into your consciousness.’

Is it a direct lift of Ginsberg’s own voice used for the sample? ‘Indeed it is! That is actually a sample of him reading, but it has some processing on it so that might have thrown you off.’

The next track, ‘Occupy-Revolt’, detonates distortion and clean dancefloor beats, with swimming voice-samples from the Occupy movement that brought cities to a halt, machinegun etiquette style. ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ samples a certain Mr Zuckerberg, in ways that Sheffield experimentalists Cabaret Voltaire once did with ‘Spies In The Wires’ on their 1984 ‘Micro-Phonies’ album (the Cabs also quote Beat writer William Burroughs on their ‘Do Right’). Words are noise, as Mutiny Mutiny once pointed out.

‘Awesome’ Jason enthuses. ‘I do know Cabaret Voltaire but I definitely need to dive deeper onto their catalogue, thank you so much! Burroughs is such a great source for samples. Oh Wow! That’s tremendous! That voice!’

And Mr Zuckerberg? ‘I use social media kind of sparingly, especially Facebook’ he admits. ‘Chris (Estey, PR) and the publicity folks wanted me to set up pages, I don’t know. I’m not super-thrilled about having to partake in that whole area of being an artist today that. I definitely appreciate the direct engagement that is possible with fans on social media. It’s the establishment and the push to find those people that can be a bit of a slog in our saturated world.’

In total, there’s positivity to the message ‘Another world is possible!’… that the future is up for grabs, that we can shape a better tomorrow through our own strivings, that ours is a ‘late-stage capitalist world…’ This writer approves of that a lot. ‘I do too!’ says Jason. ‘I think it’s an important way to frame… I’m not entirely sure what I would call it now, the struggle, the resistance, the revolution? It is foreshadowing because we are in the throes of late-stage capitalism, and it is important that we ask questions of what the next world should look like. Because the collapse is inevitable and as more and more people really begin to realize it, we can’t be defeatist or become victims to futility and passivity. The tipping point is not far off. We really seem to be past the threshold of any sustainability in regard to the current capitalistic system. The late-stage is playing itself out and the segment of the population it is affecting – the precariat class is growing quickly (the precariat is a social class comprised of people who are in a state of precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, McJobs, zero-hour and short-term contracts, minimum-wage), and the younger generations have realized that the current system has nothing to offer them. I like to think that a meaningful segment of people are just going to start saying fuck it, this is broken beyond repair so what are we going to build next?’

‘Thank you so much for your interest in my music’ he winds down. ‘Right now I’m going to be heading out for the evening. It’s the one-night-a-month Goth night here in Vermont. It’s a small but mighty group of folks in the Goth community here. Which kind of dovetails back into your first question…’

Starvation Wages is self-described ‘Anarcho-Techno’, a new protest music rooted in topical expression. Jason Dean is soundtracking the twilight of late-period capitalism and the beginning of an unknown future. ‘Dystopia or Utopia, we’ll decide,’ he says, ‘in the meantime, the long-time Anarchist slogan provides constant inspiration – ‘Another world is possible!’.’

Innovation… and continuity.

 

BY ANDREW DARLINGTON

 

‘Marketplace Fears’ by Starvation Wages

(1) ‘Exarceia’ 4:18

(2) ‘Anatomized’ 4:31

(3) ‘Occupy-Revolt’ 3:52

(4) ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ 4:13

(5) ‘Anatomized’ 4:31

Produced by Jason Dean, mixed & mastered by Brandon Busch at Sound Media Pro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcIGJ8aBcXg&t=13s

Limited edition twelve-inch clear vinyl

https://starvationwages.bandcamp.com/album/marketplace-fear

Mutiny Mutiny:

Don’t Quit Your Day Job (2013)
Stranded At The Drive-In (2013)

Undefined (2009)

Constellation (2011)

 

 

 

 

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Dinner with Corbyn and a Niger Delta Hell Bus

 

NIGER DELTA HELL BUS

Presenting the Niger Delta Hell Bus! A collaboration with Lekeh Development Foundation in support of Ogoni climate activists in the Niger Delta.

I got back from Nigeria earlier this month and I’m absolutely done in. It was a lot of work but it all came together in the end. The reaction to the Hell bus, posters and t-shirts was everything.

Massive thanks to everyone who generously chipped into the crowdfunder to help make this version of the bus a reality, I’ve left the crowdfunder open for a few more days to try and cover the bus’s running costs and also to fund a Hell t-shirt giveaway to activists in the Niger Delta since the shirts we printed for these events were so popular.

 

Photos above from the Ken Saro-Wiwa commemoration march in Boni, Ogoniland in Niger Delta on Friday 10th Nov. 

It was such an amazing day, helping keep the memory and the struggle of the Ogoni Nine alive, and that of the Ogoni people who still await justice both from the Nigerian government and Shell who destroyed their land and waterways, wrecked their fishing and agricultural economy and murdered, not just the Ogoni Nine, but thousands of villagers in reprisals for the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People’s (MOSOP) organising and protests against Shell oil extraction in the region in the 1990s.

Ken Saro Wiwa was the leader of MOSOP, a writer, poet, satirist and activist who was executed along with eight others by the Abacha regime after being framed for the murder of four Ogoni leaders. The charges were repellent, particularly for an avowedly non-violent movement.

I’d been working on the Niger Delta Hell Bus since the end of the Hell Bus UK tour so my feet have barely touched the ground. It wasn’t as big a project as the UK version as it’s a smaller bus without an internal exhibition, but the idea was that it’s a useful vehicle for organising and getting activists to actions, which is difficult in a country with limited and expensive options for transport.

Thanks and massive respect also to all the Ogoni activists and groups who helped make this such an amazing and moving commemoration of the Ogoni Nine. It’s such an incredible movement and I’m honoured to be involved in a small way in assisting their struggle.

 

 

 

      

 

 

FUCKS SAKE STICKERS

 

 

I made some “Fucks sake” stickers that can be stuck to things. I’m sure you can figure out a use for them. Order here

 

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PALESTINE

 

A poster I made a few years ago for a Palestine Solidarity Campaign initiative exposing UK universities who have multi-million pound investments that support Israeli apartheid, the Israeli arms trade, and the illegal settlement economy.

The database is available on the PSC website, please look into it if you’re currently at university, and put pressure on your institution, particularly if they have an “ethical investment policy”, you can hold them to their own standards. So many UK universities are still involved.

If any student or activist groups want a print file of this poster just email me 👍🏻

 

 

XMAS GIFTS!

If you’re looking for confusing and bewildering christmas gifts look no further than my online website. I’ll be adding a few new things over the next week, including some new print editions and some other bits and bobs.

Check my website for last Xmas posting dates.
I’ll be closing the shop on the 21st December.

  

 

      

 

 

ABSTAIN ON VOTING LABOUR

 

I made this graphic two weeks ago in disgust at the amount of Labour MPs, including my local MP Janet Daby who abstained on the Gaza ceasefire amendment to the King’s Speech which the SNP put before parliament. They’re now available as stickers!

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater made a video saying she wouldn’t be voting for the amendment because, “even if I did, nothing would change.” Which is interesting because that’s the same reason I won’t be voting for Labour at the next election! Was nice to see Massive Attack and Martyn Ware repost this graphic on their twitter accounts. I’m big fans of both, while also *not* being a fan of the Labour party (I should say apart from the dozen or so good and principled Labour MPs that are still hanging on in the PLP).

I’ve also included here some of the other graphics I’ve made about Labour since it started its Neo New Labour rightwards lurch under Starmer.

I’ll be voting Green at the next election and I encourage anyone who isn’t in a left Labour MPs constituency to do the same. Particularly important not to vote for Labour in some of the most right wing Labour MP constituencies, such as those of Yvette Cooper, Wes Streeting, David Lammy, & of course Starmer himself.

 

 

 

DINNER WITH JEREMY CORBYN

I was invited to dinner with Jeremy Corbyn a day or two after getting back from Nigeria. Gave him a copy of this print which he’d commented on when he visited the Hell Bus last year.

The dinner was for the opening night of the @peaceandjusticeproject 2023 international conference.

Came home with a jar of jam too!

 

 

ZAP GAMES

 

Was well happy to take this award home last weekend from the ZAP Games subvertising/anti-advertising awards which had its first UK award ceremony organised by Subvertisers International. This was in the Sculpture category for the Niger Delta Hell Bus.

It’s all a bit of fun but the award itself is really great, based on the keys that open bus stops, made by @shelkadelic

Born in Brussels (Belgium), the Z.A.P. GAMES is an action-subversion game that invites you to create interventions against corporate advertising spaces in our streets. ‘ZAP’ is french for ‘Zone Anti-Publicité’ / Anti-Advertising Zone.

The idea is that over 2 weeks in November 2023, right before Black Friday, individuals or teams act each in their own way against the outdoor advertising industry. I submitted the Hell Bus since I was doing it anyway and didn’t have time to make anything else haha

 

ZINE FOR PATREON BACKERS

I’m introducing a new reward for backers of my Patreon, an annual zine featuring all the work I’ve made over the last year. I’ll be printing and posting this in January so you just need to back me on Patreon before then to receive your copy.

I’m quite excited about this project as it’s a great way to collect a year’s work in something tangible and it means that in my least productive month of the year I’m able to make at least one solid thing.

Also I’ll be printing it on newsprint which I always find pleasing for some reason.

Back me on Patreon here!

 

 

 

 

EVENTS

 

I’ll be doing a stall of my work for the Artist Self-Publishers fair on the 16th December at Conway Hall in London. Open 11am-7pm. Free entry.

Conway Hall
25 Red Lion Square,
London WC1R 4RL

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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Captain Beefheart on Dr Demento 12/3/78 (full interview)

 

Thanks to Conduit19Abel

 

 

 

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Why I am an anarchist

‘It is indeed a feeling that ‘something just ain’t right.’’ 

 ‘“Peace, peace,” they cry’ – Jeremiah

‘The greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart’
– Dorothy Day

On Armistice Day, I joined the march for Palestine as it snaked round Victoria. I sighed, I sat down on some steps, looked at the last yellow leaves left on the trees and on the ground and renewed my conviction that at heart I am an anarchist.

Given all that’s written on the subject, how am I qualified to count myself in that number?

If a stranger asked me to qualify my self-claimed status as an anarchist, I would struggle to put words together. It is indeed a feeling that ‘something just ain’t right.’

The pro-Palestine marches, every week since 7 October, call for a ceasefire, a set of rules and agreements in war. Hardly anyone dares call for ‘No More War’, dares call for a higher goal for humanity, the peace that is necessary for life. The cries of ‘Ceasefire’ drown out the cries for ‘No more war!’

In my heart, I am an anarchist for all sorts of reasons. But the jolt that blasted into my head that day was that in personal, everyday relationships too, there are rules and structures, sometimes hidden, that work against the humanity, desire for good and hard work of all participants.

The first time I was arrested was for an Ash Wednesday action against nuclear weapons. John Dear, the US peace activist, who happened to be in town at the time, said: ‘You are a peace maker forever!’ I thought, ‘Yes!.’ Only resisting nuclear weapons – anyone can do that – but what about peace in daily life, family, relationships, the workplace?

Through my experience visiting refugee camps here and in the acres of paraphernalia of the Calais border, I have witnessed how the state relies on violence to exist.

So, if I am to be a peace activist, I must also be anarchist. A march, such as this one, is termed ‘peaceful’ and calls for an end to violence. However, the state views it as violent, in that it challenges the very existence of violence and therefore of the state (Judith Butler).

But oppressive structures exist not just in states. Family, marriage, workplace, voluntary roles all possibly turn out to have unjust frameworks that stubbornly resist being challenged.

Many, such as safeguarding, health and safety, employment law, legal partnership of marriage even, are intended to be beneficial, but when left to ossify, unexamined, they can turn into oppressive structures leading to secrecy and hurt.

Teaching English at a small charity recently, I was asked to send all lesson plans and schemes of work to the manager, a first for me. But then, when I am alone with my students in the classroom, there is a kind of privacy. The temptation is to sneak in some forbidden topics.

When work is undertaken from personal convictions, which hopefully most work is, it takes a brave volunteer or employee to stand up against the rules of the organisation however benign.

But there is also a sense of dismay when unhelpful restrictions are in conflict with the worker’s own sense of justice. Disappointment sets in when decisions are made badly, things are run in a certain way because that’s how they’ve always been.

My gradual realisation as a peace activist, in areas of daily life that have not been peaceful, is that anarchism is present as a source of potential rescue.

On the one side, legal structures haven’t helped, in fact become actually dangerous. On the other side are human relationships, where true and honest open communication is the prize.

There are countless legal frameworks for how to run a war: don’t bomb hospitals or civilians. Premature babies can’t wait while legal scholars write explainers in newspapers on whether the IDF could ever be justified in bombing the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza.

Surely we need no law to tell us it’s wrong to bomb civilians or indeed anyone.

As Carl von Clausewitz, the military theorist, wrote on the dangers of laws on war: ‘sooner or later, someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms.’ Laws have no currency in such desperate times.

I search for the truth in my heart, helped by a picture of Vivien Silver, peace activist murdered by Hamas, who said: ‘We refuse to accept a cycle of wars that only brings death, destruction and pain.’ What’s needed right now is our common belief in life and humanity.

‘They [cry] “peace, peace” when there is no peace’ – Jeremiah

 

Henrietta Cullinan

 

 

Reprinted from Peace News, Dec 1st 2023.

 

Peace News is at https://peacenews.info/

 

 

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2024 IT Calender

A homage recreation/re-imagination of the 1969 calendar from issue 46 (1968); I made it for fun earlier this year, to have a functional piece of the past on my wall (and to practice on my Illustrator skills) but when I found out there was a website and you guys accepted submissions I thought I should share it with you! 

 

 

 

 

With love from Mexico,
Deborah Chavarría.

 

 

 

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The Twenty-First Century: an Ode

it was going to be
a thing of wonder
we’d find cures for everything
and look after each other
abolish money
national boundaries
and the Bomb

there’d be cities on Mars
and the visionary structures
of Boulez Stockhausen and Cage
would be revealed for what they are
and give rise to a music
of the spheres
as yet unimagined
and rock jazz and the blues
would evolve into a psychedelic punk-rock
the likes of which
no-one has ever heard
that makes people want to dance
in new ways and go out
and change the world

and trains would become monorails
sliding silently between
sustainable solar-powered eco-communities
each with its own
stately pleasure-dome
where citizens might wander
through gardens bright with sinuous rills
where blossoms many an incense-bearing tree

and androids barely distinguishable from human beings
would become concert pianists
and everyone would have a great time

the musician Frederic Rzewski once wrote
music probably cannot change the world
but it is a good idea to act as if it could

it follows from that
that if life (like music) is an art
the least we can do
is live as if all this were possible

and of course
it’s only 2023
there’s still 77 years to go

 

 

 

Dominic Rivron
Illustration Nick Victor

 

 

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from Jim Henderson’s A SUFFOLK DIARY

Monday, November 20th

The Parish Council has decided that it is not necessary to reconvene the GASSE (“Go Away! Stay Somewhere Else!”) committee at the present time, because it is apparent that the government does not have a clue what it is doing about its unwanted foreign visitors, and until such time that we have something more definite than hearsay from someone who claims to knows someone in the Home Office or the like then the consensus is that we all have better things to do. John Garnham has also reminded us that, and I quote, “it’s almost that time of year again”. He meant the annual financial review – and I had thought it was the birth of the baby Jesus! (I do not often make jokes.) The Council’s Treasurer & Finance Officer, William Woods, seemed to me to fidget uncomfortably in his seat at mention of this, and he left the meeting rather abruptly at the end instead of joining us all in The Wheatsheaf for our usual pint. I did not know the Parish Council had any significant money, but apparently we get donations and the like, and hall hire charges, and income from the annual fete, all of which helps to pay, among other things, for the village Christmas tree which, I believe, is due to arrive in the next week or so.

Saturday, November 25th

Scandal! An apparently “well-oiled” Bob Merchant was in The Wheatsheaf a few nights back talking for all to hear about when he was going to start work on refurbishing the village hall, which surprised not a few, because it was well-known around the village that his company had not been given the job by the Parish Council because he was too pricey. Needless to say, word immediately reached the Parish Clerk, John Garnham, who can be quick off the mark when he wants to be and, long story short, it turns out that the company given the job – RJM Construction Ltd., which has an address in Lincolnshire – lists as its directors Robert and James Merchant. It is common knowledge in the village that James Merchant, Bob’s brother, is a vicar. In Lincolnshire.

This means Merchant has pulled the wool over our eyes, because he submitted a bid that was rejected, but has got the job anyway. My theory is that he was not sure if he would get the job because of who he is, or not get the job because of who he is, so he covered both bases, with his back-up plan a bit cheaper. However, John Garnham says it may not be the fait accompli that it seems, and he is looking into some kind of legal redress to have the contract cancelled. I do not know if not liking someone constitutes proper legal grounds. Somebody on the Council (I forget who) suggested we call Merchant in to meet and explain himself, but it was pointed out that the Council is not a court, and we are not able to issue summonses or subpoenas or the like. For what it is worth, it seems to me that as long as the hall is refurbished to the required standard and at a price that satisfies us and the insurers then it really does not matter. That Bob Merchant will be disliked in the village more than he already was is not our problem, but it is an unhappy state of affairs, and when and if work begins with this company I can imagine there may be some unpleasantness. I bumped into Michael Whittingham outside The Wheatsheaf at lunchtime today (he was on his way in) and what he had to say about the matter I do not wish to repeat here. It was mainly expletives, and full of grammatical and syntactical errors.

Frankly, I have other more important things on my mind. I have a list. (1) I have been plagued by toothache for several days, and have a visit to the dentist scheduled for Monday morning. (2) Our central heating has been playing up this week, which is excellent timing I don’t think, and we may have to get a new boiler, which is an expense I can seriously do without. And (3) my wife’s mother has come to stay with us, and when I enquired discreetly how long she was intending to stay neither she nor my wife would give me a definite answer. The two of them are having a lot of what seem to be very serious conversations that come to an abrupt halt whenever I get within earshot. I have always got on well with my mother-in-law, she is a very nice lady, especially when she is in her own house and not in ours. I assume she will be going home before Christmas. She has a husband, for goodness sake, unless they decide that he will also come here. I do not get on very well with him. He is a retired policeman, and very opinionated in a determinedly old school way e.g. he would enjoy a good hanging. If he does come the youths loitering around the War Memorial had better watch out.

Mention of the youth reminds me: I have decided that the Parish Council will have nothing to do with X/Twitter. I have been reading in the newspaper about the Musk chap, and it is all very distasteful. Unsurprisingly, Michael Whittingham thinks we should definitely sign up, which for me is a good reason not to. My further research seems to indicate that TikTok is mainly for young girls who like singing and dancing and pop stars, and Instagram, I understand, is mostly pictures, and while the village may be quite picturesque, the Parish Council is decidedly not. Anyhoo, I may be wrong, and my research has indeed been cursory and half-hearted, but I am taking my preferred route, which is to do nothing.

Sunday, November 26th  (2.30 a.m.)

I cannot sleep, and have done what the sleepless (and irritated) do in the 21st century i.e. fled to the computer. I had just turned off the light to go to sleep when my wife told me that “by the way” her father would be coming to join her mother on Wednesday, and they would be staying for Christmas and the New Year. More than a month! Michael Whittingham would have the necessary vocabulary to describe how I am feeling, but I shall not sink that low.

 

James Henderson

 

 

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transmission 6: ‘o superman’

 

 

 

                                    4 laurie Anderson

  • jude rogers

 

  1. fly me to the moon

 

she had learned / the language of memes

when pleasure means / stocks have gone up

where the advice was / please continue to hold

her right hand was constantly / on the phone

to check her portfolio

to check her / access to desire

 

  1. phoenix

 

it was all about taking the time

to think about the planet

with no money to make things

we have to look to our own resources

 

  • diamond hands

it was the age of / the meme community

with their range of / online practices

their brains fired / by a rocket emoji

& everyone’s excited / by diamond hands

to create a profit / from rapid re-sales

 

  1. suburban sprawl

it’s an engineered dissonance

not that I don’t like to listen

but there’s something about

cultural limits

something about

what can be said

 

  1. gender skew

we were instructed

to quarantine

we had tarpaulin sheets

& mosquito nets

& a bucket to bring water

from the tank

 

the women were

more susceptible

that molecular switch

tips the immune system

into overdrive

 

 

.

Robert Hampson

Art: Rupert Loydell

 

 

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SPECTRAL LINES

But look!
Displacement of spectral lines
Awww! How about that!
Apart from the difficulties discussed, this
Is the maximum, so proceed to The Centre.
Whoa! It’s been rubbish hasn’t it?
Characterised by the fact that a spherical surface – now what?
Hiya kid! Yeah, really… so-so… waiting very anxiously
Certain considerations suggest this is not over yet
We need a bit of a drum-roll – don’t go anywhere!
 
The continuum is everything – so let’s ride!
Hello everyone! What a nail-biter that was!
We’re having a frank conversation – interested?
Wacky moments hells bells and whistles (serious stuff)
Fast-forward to now and the journey of a lifetime.
 
So let’s get to it and keep it fun!
First I looked into those pale blue pools:
Beyond the winged eyeliner I saw
High altitude vapour trails and
Scattered fair-weather clouds. 
Now take us off-grid – and to the very edge.
Oh! Wow! This is gorgeous!
I mean it’s been amazing!
Totally bonkers! A five-star experience!
Well, that’s about it from me.

 

 

A.C. Evans

 

 

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Fashionably Late

 

Today, I’m playing dead, adopting an unfashionable name and carving it into marble. It’s a fashion I’ve thus far endeavoured to avoid, but we all have our point at which we cave to social pressures, and everything from the rolling news to the shopping channel is full of shrouds and wailing. Even the nature docs don’t stop with the big fish eating the little fish, and now they don’t end until the water disappears from parched soil. For a long time, I just played possum – population decreasing but “least concern” – but it’s not a native species and my family called me weird; so now I’m going the whole hog or, rather, the whole daeodon, the so-called Terminator Pig, which disappeared in the middle Miocene. I like to think I’ll be back, but I’m building a pyre and a pyramid, taking tips from orangutans and tigers, and watching whole countries dress themselves in ashes.

 

 

 

Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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THE WORLD OF ADVERTISING

The man dressed as an astronaut
on Ashton Market explains:

Once you’ve explored the Universe
and discovered pretty much everything
you need a new project and putting down
laminate flooring is just the ticket. It’s
available in a choice of colours from
pale blonde to chestnut knotted brown.

Easy to clean and even replace.

 

.

Steven Taylor
Art
Jack Kirby

 

 

 

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An Addiction to Image

We should really be focussing
our efforts on other types of
bee. “You’ll be hearing more
from me,” he said. A new wave

of military witnesses is coming
out of the shadows. It Lives or
Carnival of Souls?” It was as if for
a long time I didn’t exist,” she said,

“but he seems to look to you for
guidance and we need to keep
this show on the road.” She can
see patterns and tendencies

invisible to our eyes but a pirate
is striding through the library and
that’s when he said he saw a strange
object hovering in the distance.

“I can’t read this painting,” he said,
It’s all flying past at frightening speed.

 

.

Steve Spence


 

 

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Starch Like Intercession

Humility is not a fact. Come close that he may hear your mood turn creamed corn when fathoming absolution. Mordant speech cuts hypotheses of forgiveness beyond a human purview. Nice your way into his unriveting dark heart. Venial transgressions failing to play well with others stretch across the beach. One plays into a sacrament embedded in the march toward assumed redemption. No one weathers hat space anymore, given the downhome run on handsome warbling. Breach the dove path heard for its own sake mid-morning. Father something preceding a wide berth. 

Givens, plasticity in feeling seeds tossed freely away  

 

.

Sheila E. Murphy

 

 

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Under the Island: Experimental Music in Ireland 1960 – 1994

 

Nyahh Records

The Bandcamp label Nyahh has recently brought out a compilation album, Under the Island: Experimental Music in Ireland 1960 – 1994. A lot of famous acts – some more mainstream than others – came out of Ireland during that period. However, as the notes to the album say, “further down underground there were a few artists working away in their bedrooms and non-studio settings experimenting with tapes and handmade instruments.”

Of the fourteen tracks several stand out, either on account of the artist or artists involved, or the music itself, or a combination of both. The first track, Esoteric Sound Poem, is by Desmond Leslie. An RAF Spitfire pilot in WWII, he turned his attention in peace time to – among other things – electronic music. He was also a writer and film-maker: the album cover artwork features Leslie stood in front of an advert for a talk about his most famous work, the book Flying Saucers Have Landed. Leslie gained notoriety in the early 1960s as the person who punched the critic Bernard Levin live on air during the programme, That Was the Week That Was. Esoteric Sound Poem, created in 1960, is a classic piece of tape music featuring a mixture of recorded and electronic sounds together a fragment of Richard Strauss’ Don Juan.

Tape Piece One (1971), an early work by Roger Doyle, is a collage created from fragments of music, radio announcements and various other sounds. It’s quite animated and exploits the spatial possibilities of stereo. It’s not without humour, too: at one point a voice can be heard saying, ‘Oh, Roger, I so love you.’ Roger Doyle, like Leslie, was a seminal figure in the development of Irish electronic music. His electronic magnum opus is the 5-CD set, Babel, which he worked on through most of the 1990s. Doyle describes it as ‘a large-scale musical structure making use of many technologies and music languages, with each piece of music being thought of as a ‘room’ or place within an enormous tower city.’ In the early 1980s, he formed the music theatre company, Operating Theatre with the actor Olwen Fouéré, one of Ireland’s most important actors and performance artists. Together, they’ve performed around the world.

The album also includes an example of Operating Theatre’s output, an excerpt from The Pentagonal Dream Under Snow (1986). This was – though you wouldn’t know it from the album notes – a play that has been described as one of the greatest lost works of Irish theatre. A monodrama about toxic male sexuality, it was written for and performed by Fouéré. Through the use of a vocoder, she was able to speak with five different voices. Rather than being separate characters, the different voices are different aspects of the same man. Sadly, the album only credits Fouéré. In fact, the music was created by Roger Doyle, the play was written by Sebastian Barry and the performance was directed by David Heap.

Sean O’hUiginn’s Flostic (1977) sounds – in a way I can’t quite explain – like its title. Strange, close-up unpitched sounds, that I suspect would appeal to ASMR fans, are combined with others made with stretched elastic bands. Again, the piece is not without its humorous side. There’s also a two-minute excerpt of multidisciplinary artist Noel Molloy’s Ashes to Ashes (1980), a tape-piece that plays on the idea of sinister reversed messages being concealed in rock albums, etc. It takes Pope John Paul II’s speech to the young people of Ireland and reverses it. The result is an abstract soundscape, until you know what it is.

Fergus Kelly’s Foreign Bodies (1991) is a soundscape created from field recordings (including train sounds) and popular Turkish music. It was originally part of a tape/slide piece based on the situation of Turkish migrant workers working in Germany’s Ruhr District. Evening Echoes (1993-95) was an installation created by the photographer John Carson in collaboration with composer and musician Conor Kelly. What we hear is a piece of musique  concrète by Kelly, based on the street-calls of newspaper vendors, created to complement Carson’s photos.

The electronic piece by Daniel Figgis (aka Haa-Lacka Binttii, one-time drummer with The Virgin Prunes), Look! I’m Running!(1977), sounds like it might’ve been created with sound-effects from early computer-games. Maverick songwiter Giordaí Ua Laoghaire puts in an appearance, too, with a recorded live performance of An Pocaide (The Pocket). This, like the track by Danny McCarthy that precedes it, is reminiscent of the work of US-musician Eugene Chadbourne (lead singer of Shockabilly). Which came first, Chadbourne’s electric rake or McCarthy’s electric hurling stick? Go Google. There’s an internet time-vampire there if ever there was one.

One thing that’s quite frustrating about this album is the lack of album notes. There are some, but a lot more could be said – not just information, but context, too – about the artists and the tracks, especially given that we’re talking about experimental work from thirty or more years ago. And although what notes there are strive to create an outsider mystique (“artists working away in their bedrooms”) and it might well be the case for some of them, was it ever true of, say, Operating Theatre? I’m also interested to know what got left out: there’s no work by Michael O’Shea, for example, which is a shame. O’Shea created his own instrument, ‘Mo Cara’, a cross between a dulcimer and a sitar, with which he busked in Covent Garden and the London Underground. He went on to play in Ronnie Scotts and to support Ravi Shankar. That said, this is an intriguing album for anyone unfamiliar with experimental music in Ireland. As is the way with such compilations, every track is a potential line of enquiry.

 

 

Dominic Rivron

LINKS

Roger Doyle’s Bandcamp page:
https://rogerdoyle1.bandcamp.com/music

John Carson and Conor Kelly:
https://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~wjcarson/evening-echoes.html

Daniel Figgis:
https://danielfiggis.com/

Olwen Fouéré’s webpage:
http://www.olwenfouere.com/

Fergus Kelly:
https://www.roomtemperature.org/p/biography.html

https://www.roomtemperature.org/p/blog-page_39.html

Danny McCarthy:
https://nationalsculpturefactory.com/artists/danny-mccarthy/

Noel Molloy’s webpage:
https://www.noelmolloyart.com/

Giordaí Ua Laoghaire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorda%C3%AD_Ua_Laoghaire

Michael O’Shea:
https://moshea.bandcamp.com/album/-

 

 

 

 

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Bippety and Boppety Discuss Self-Esteem

– To be honest, these days I feel small. Deflated.
– You know you can tell me anything.
– I just told you I feel small and deflated.
– Sorry. My hearing doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to be. 
– I feel small and deflated and nobody seems to listen to what I have to say.
– I hear a bird singing, or is it a distant train?
– Perhaps I should write you a note.
– Did you know there’s an app you can get that listens to a birdsong and tells you what bird it is?
– You’re not listening to me.
– Sorry. My eyesight doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to be.
– A carnival just rolled by and didn’t stop to speak. Do you
think I’ve gone missing?
– I hear you but I don’t see you.
– I think I’m over here.
– What I meant to say was, What?
– Sometimes it’s as if I’m standing in my own shadow.
– I have absolutely no idea what that means.
– It’s as if I don’t exist.
– We all have our problems.
– Sometimes I think I see voices.
– I say again, What?
– Hello?

 

 

Martin Stannard

 

 

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Live Music in the Brewery! Debdepan and Untitled Woman

A few words and pics from Alan Dearling

Debdepan: ‘The Goat’ from The Omen ep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr8B2nhvmJo

Love this, their new video: absolute tongue-in-cheekiness! Go take a look…

Headliners, Debdepan at this gig were Chelsea Tolhurst and Grace Bontoft, described in publicity as, “…a 2-piece band from Kent, who make dark, melodic music influenced by Warpaint, Marika Hackman, The Cure, PJ Harvey and The Big Moon.” The band released their first ep, OMEN on the 25th of July 2023 on Bamala Newtown.

‘Omen’ is musically up-close and personal, what they say is, “…self-reflective, but never self-indulgent, a swoosh through genres and styles that feels unhurried and satisfyingly assured.”

Live, they now have a third touring member adding an electronic-style of drumming into their overall sound. Debdepan reminded me a bit of The Creatures and the rather icy, ethereal sounds characterised on many of the earlier records from the 4AD record label, for instance, those from This Mortal Coil. Another friend also mentioned the Cocteau Twins. Possibly Portishead too. These may or may not be influences. Certainly Debdepan are slightly off-kilter, offering quirky, atmospheric darkness.

‘Darkest Hour’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeHVw52AkIo

And here’s ‘Light Out’, recorded sparsely live at Ramsgate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AbK8FAdWF0

Debdepan came over as talented, good musicians, nice people, fun, and very approachable. After the gig at Eagles Crag they said: “We miss Tod already…so much so that when the van wouldn’t start we thought about staying forever.”

In support at the live gig in Eagles Crag Brewery at Robinwood Mill, near Todmorden, was the solo artist, Untitled Woman – billed as ‘electro bluestep’, she has previously been carnated as blt63. She has lived many lives, but she says, “…none of them hers. With so many ‘if only’s’… but not one regret. Order to chaos. Fragments to whole.  Silence to noise. It really is never too late.”

Utilising lots of pedals and computer loops filled with her own recorded sounds, Untitled Woman was also hypnotically dark, making the best use of her powerful, jazzy-inflected voice. She sounded a little like Annette Peacock with hints of Bowie’s Jacques Brel experiments when he re-worked, ‘Amsterdam’. 

Here’s a snippet from Untitled Woman’s ‘If only…’

“If only she made it then

If only she had begun

If only she had been

If only they had seen”

Untitled Woman: ‘Warrior’ on Soundcloud… is resilient, slightly odd-ball, quietly explaining that it is: “A song of love, loss and letting go.”

And her ‘On the Radio’ is also fairly austere, but extremely climatic, a bit out-of-worldly, as are other tracks including ‘If only’:

https://soundcloud.com/user-705444160

 

 

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Workmanship

A day never begins
Until you dedicate
And let your
Workmanship bloom.
The waking anthem,
The descending light
From the divine delight
All make perfect time.
The sights might trouble
But the soothing outlook
Sharpens your working tool.
Some higher power
Isn’t an option
When the clock
Of necessity ticks.
An open outlook
Isn’t a doubtful question,
It is an action
That needs to be trusted.
A deed best serves
The need.

 

 

 

© Sushant Thapa
Biratnagar-13, Nepal
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

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THE VISUAL HEART OF OLDBOY

Oldboy, an iconic, provocative film that speaks both to the eyes and to the deepest ghosts hidden in the human mind. But who is the artist behind the surprising settings and the scenery breathtaking visual of the famous South Korean film ‘Oldboy? His extraordinary work helped shape the unique and engaging atmosphere of this cult film, giving us an unforgettable viewing experience. Today we have a chat with the production designer, Han Sung-won.

Thank you Han for giving us this interview, tell us a little about yourself before the questions 

Of course. I am Han SungWon.
I work for the movie, Old Boy as a set designer in 2003.

60% of the scenes were taken in the sets. We had two of big studios, and built many sets, such as the prison, elevator, rooms, Penthouse, etc. Also we made  a partial fence for location video shooting of when SUA who is UJIN’s sister fell down into the water.

The biggest set was the Penthouse. We had huge printed screens outside of the windows, and put lots of water in pools.

The walls of every set was able to assembled and disassembled easily so the cameramen could get multiple view angles easily.

It has been almost 20 years since we started pre-prduction, still I have the exciting emotions about the movie. I really enjoyed it and worked as like my own movie.

 

1-HOW DID YOU APPROACH THE WORLD OF CINEMA AND SCENOGRAPHY? WHAT WAS YOUR TRAINING?
I happened to work for submarine miniatures of the movie, Phantom in 1998. My team leader liked my work. He wanted me to work together after I graduated my university. My major was Industrial Design. I studied the designs of product, transportation, interior, and environment. So this helped me with working for movies.

2- YOU HAVE HAD THE HONOR OF WORKING FOR A GREAT MASTERPIECE OF SOUTH KOREAN CINEMA KNOWN IN ALL THE WORLD, WHAT A FEELING YOU HAD IN THE PUT YOUR ART OF SET DESIGNER AT THE SERVICE OFTHIS FILM?
I was so proud of that, happy, lucky, and honored to work with my favorite artists, the director Park, the actors, and staffs. I still remember the feelings when I saw my name on the credit when we had a staff preview of the movie.

3-   HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED IN OLDBOY? HOW DID YOU START SETTING UP YOUR WORK ON THE FILM?
Like I said, my team leader liked my work and I came across him in the street one day after I graduated my university. He told me that he started his company newly and suggested me to work with him. We worked another movies before Oldboy. In the field of  Korean movies, they share many new screen plays. One of them, Oldboy was the best. After I read all I insisted with my boss to work for it.

As like another preproduction for movies, we had tons of meetings with the director, assistant directors, art director, and other staffs before crank in. We listened to them, suggested new concept & ways, and compromised all to make the movie better.
Lots of scenes in the sets, we made teams and started building sets in two studios.

 

4-  TO A YOUNG MAN WHO WOULD LIKE TO BE A SET DESIGNER, WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE?
Nowadays they use lots of 3D graphics though, still real sets are needed. If you love movies and have passion for it, you can give it a try. You would feel thrilled and happy. The set design is related with art & production design. So it should be better to get knowledges about them.
There are many teams in a movie, so compromising with other teams and working together are important. “Team Work” 

To follow, unpublished photos from the set kindly granted by our set designer

 

Interview: Elena Caldera
Thanks to Han SungWon

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SAUSAGE 287

Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column which is a triumph of no style over no substance

THE CARNIVORE IS OVER
An enterprising vegan butcher has opened a pop-up shop in Silverhill. Stanislav Waikiki’s Meat is Manslaughter will sell a range of items, including vegan pork chops, vegan sheep’s brains and vegan tripe – all made from goose feathers, soya beans and a rare, marrow-like vegetable cultivated in Wales called Pwelleriac, examples of which have been known to resemble the face of Ant McPartland. “Everyone’s a vegan now, let’s face it,” Mr Waikiki told HIP, “but in my opinion it’s just a passing fad, like The Twist, or Brexit. I mean, how long it will last is anybody’s guess but I’ll certainly be keeping my options open. Until this craze has run its course, you can count on me to soya-milk it to the max”.

READER: That’s quite a coincidence because I’m a vegan now.
MYSELF: Really? Since when?
READER: Since I read about it in The Daily Mail.
MYSELF:  Which means it must be true.
READER: Exactly. No more bacon sandwiches or fish and chips for me.
MYSELF:  What about leather shoes?
READER: You can’t eat leather shoes…..can you?
MYSELF:  Not unless you are Charlie Chaplin in his classic 1925 silent film The Gold Rush, but if you are vegan, you will be required to stop wearing them.
READER:  What? There was no mention of that in The Mail. If you think I’m going to Lidl in my bare feet you’re quite mistaken. I’m calling the whole thing off.
MYSELF: A great loss to the vegan movement, but very wise under the circumstances.
 

DAIRY FACT
During the war, milk was in very short supply as most fighting-age cows had been drafted into the army. The top secret formula for Mucau, a substitute milk which was originally manufactured by the Ersatz Volmilsch Company of Berlin was captured by British postmen parachuted behind enemy lines disguised as milkmen, who then sent the information to MI5 by registered post in a consignment of sausages intended for German prisoners of war incarcerated in Scotland. Mucau resembled milk in almost every way, except that it tasted like cat urine soaked in methylated spirits, which is essentially what it was; however its tea-lightening properties were widely regarded as a huge boost to national morale during the Battle of Britain, when shortages of leaf tea forced manufacturers to use sawdust and rabbit droppings instead. The result, most people agreed, was undrinkable without the addition of Mucau.

SOCCER BLOW
Fans of Hastings & St Leonards Warriors FC were left devastated last night after learning that former Manchester City and Liverpool striker Mario Balotelli, would not be joining the club after all. In an exclusive interview with HIP, Mario told us: “All they eat is the pies. All the time the pies. No ice cream, no spaghetti, no antipasto, just the pies. Also I wanted to play dressed as Batman, but they wouldn’t let me. They said the costume was too similar to the referee’s. When I suggested the ref could dress up as Robin, the manager fined me £500. The other players have no sense of humour. When I put a roman candle down defender Ron Balaclava’s shorts he cried like a girl.”
 

LETTERS
Mia Tryfell (Ms) of Wailing Trumpet writes to ask: why don’t so-called ‘smart’ motorways have dogging lanes?

Good question Mia. Whilst many might welcome the provision of lanes dedicated to this popular hobby, in my view it is far better to take the dog for a good long walk before embarking on a journey which necessitates the use of a smart motorway. A far better solution is to tell your satnav to avoid any roads beginning with M and allow plenty of time to visit one of the many lay-byes dotted around The UK’s traditional hedgerow-lined byeways, where your best friend can frolic and fraternise with other like-minded dogs.

DICTIONARY CORNER
Castanet (n) Spanish fisherman.
Rhubarb (v) (Australian) to regret having decided to cook outdoors.
Achoo (n) (onomatopoeic) one part of a bisected steam engine.

WIGS MIGHT FLY
Professor Thinktank’s latest brainwave- artificial dandruff flakes for toupée wearers -is being marketed worldwide by Japanese multinational Yadayada Industries. He calls his new invention Scrof, and I was shown this advance extract from the script of their $3,000,000 TV ad, which is to debut at the Superbowl:-

EXTERIOR DAY WINDY
We see an attractive young woman stroll by as a handsome man riding a motor scooter pulls alongside . As he removes his crash helmet, his toupée lifts momentarily and we glimpse her brief look of disappointment as she walks away. Undeterred, the man shakes his head and small white flakes begin to fall. She stops and looks at him with renewed interest. He makes the Scrof gesture, (a casual brush of the shoulder). She smiles and looks impressed as white flakes of ‘dandruff’ fall. Their eyes meet. She climbs on to his scooter and they ride off into the sunset.

DEEP-VOICED NARRATOR
Scrof By YadayadaYour little white lie.

VERY RAPID DISCLAIMER VOICEOVER:
Scrof contains modified time release toupée flakes with Zeitgeist which is highly toxic to birds, racoons, insects, fish, nursing mothers and children. May not contain nuts.

The Professor has also been nominated for an award by UNESCO for his most recent innovative device, a perforated sou’wester for people in drought-prone countries. When it rains, the hat takes in water, which is then stored in the patent hat-tank where it can be used for making tea. The inventor has also been working on a definitive method of differentiating between molehills and mountains, following the recent case of a group of amateur mountaineers who were trapped for over a week on a molehill near Leeds. A spokesman for the team who are making a full recovery in Roundhay General Hospital thanked the professor for his invaluable work which he hoped “would eradicate this problem for good”. Group leader Cuthbert Antrobus praised the bravery and dedication of the Ribble Valley Molehill Rescue Unit, who winched the team from the snow-covered molehill by radio-controlled toy helicopter just as they were about to run out of tea.

MYSELF: That reminds me- it’s 11 o’clock, time for my tea and buscuits.
READER: Shouldn’t that be tea and biscuits?
MYSELF: No, I always buy buscuits, as they are much cheaper than biscuits.
READER: Cheaper? Why?
MYSELF: Because they are misspelt, I suppose.

 

 

 Sausage Life! 

 

 

Sausage Life!

ATTENZIONE!
‘Watching Paint Die’ EP by Girl Bites Dog is out now and available wherever you rip off your music.
Made entirely without the assistance of AI, each listen is guaranteed to eliminate hair loss, cure gluten intolerance and stop your cat from pissing in next door’s garden.
Photo credit: Alice’s Dad (circa 2000)
 




Click image to connect. Alice’s Crazy Moon is an offbeat monthly podcast hosted by Alice Platt (BBC, Soho Radio) with the help of roaming reporter Bird Guano a.k.a Colin Gibson (Comic Strip Presents, Sausage Life). Each episode will centre around a different topic chosen by YOU the listener! The show is eclectic mix of music, facts about the artists and songs and a number of surrealistic and bizarre phone-ins and commercials from Bird Guano. Not forgetting everyones favourite poet, Big Pillow!

NB: IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A PAID SUBSCRIPTION TO SPOTIFY, THE SONGS WILL BE OF RESTRICTED LENGTH

JACK POUND: JESUS WANTS ME FOR A SUN READER aka PASS THE INSTANT YOGA

 

 



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By Colin Gibson

 

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from Jim Henderson’s A SUFFOLK DIARY

Friday, November 17th

I have changed the title of my new role on the Parish Council to Community Liaison and Publicity Officer (CLAPO). It was originally Publicity & Community Liaison Officer but there was not a decent acronym for that, so I persuaded Joihn Garnham to let me change it around. He said he did not give a ****. Honestly, the language around here is deteriorating by the day. Although CLAPO is not great it is at least sayable.

Anyhoo, in my new role I am wondering if the Council should have a presence (I believe that is the correct term) on what is commonly called Social Media. I have to admit I am not at all well up on that kind of thing. My wife used to have a Facebook account, but since she was using it solely to communicate with her (male) friend Jan in Stowmarket in ways I do not wish to go into (I gather photographs were involved) – a liaison, by the way, which is no more – I am wary of raising the topic with her in case it opens what is still very much a fresh wound and an open sore. I wonder if things like Twitter (which is called X now, an even more stupid name) and Instagram and TikTok are more for the younger generation than people like me or, more to the point, for anyone who might be interested in Parish Council affairs. The young people who loiter around the War Memorial of an evening and, it seems, for the entirety of every weekend, are probably not the Council’s audience, and are unlikely to be unless we organize a rave, and I cannot see John Garnham, the Parish Clerk, or anyone on the Council having any interest in that.

I hear on the grapevine, incidentally, that there have been one or two grumbles from patrons at The Wheatsheaf about people drafted on to the Parish Council without being democratically elected. There is always someone moaning about someone, and it is usually someone who sits on their bum in the pub without actually doing anything themselves apart from moan. But anyhoo, John Garnham says that he has invoked a rarely used clause in the Council’s constitution and that everything is fine and above board, and if anyone wants to complain to him face-to-face they know where to find him. They probably won’t. He is quite a big chap.

We are, of course, keeping an eye on the question of what the government intends to do with what they describe as “illegal” foreigners coming into the country, because we do not want them bedding down here, especially as a modernised and refurbished village hall will be an even more attractive proposition than it was before the fire. According to Jez Taylor, who was in The Wheatsheaf last night, and who says he knows a chap in London who knows a chap who he says is sleeping with a woman who is married to someone who claims to work in the Home Office, the government is currently considering an alternative to their plan to send some of those foreign people to somewhere in Africa. While they sort out a few problems with their Plan A, a plan which would probably have been awful for the people involved, this chap says they are drawing up a Plan B, which is to send them to Norfolk until they can ship them all the way out and abroad. Speaking for myself, Norfolk is something else I would not wish upon anyone. (It is this kind of thing makes me so happy I’m not a foreigner, legal or illegal.) But as was pointed out (I think by Lulu behind the bar, a lively and popular young lady – popular with the male patrons at least – who is a lot sharper than her name would suggest) if that does happen then the village would be a very convenient halfway house on the journey from the south coast. I think we have to be on the alert, and I wonder if we should be reconvening GASSE (“Go Away! Stay Somewhere Else!”) on, say, a weekly meeting and surveillance basis just to be on the safe side. We do not want to be caught with our metaphorical trousers down.

Anyhoo, back to my CLAPO duties. I am going to ponder the Social Media question, and sound a few people out as to what they think. It would be good if I knew some young people. I may have to approach the War Memorial crowd, although I do not really fancy it, because they are a bit intimidating with their phones and music, vapes and appalling haircuts. Perhaps I will just stick to photocopying the occasional announcement and sticking it up on the noticeboard in the village shop. People do look at that noticeboard. I sold my old lawnmower inside 24 hours by putting up a postcard. I now have a state-of-the-art cordless hover-mower with a remote control, Wi-Fi, and face recognition. It is brilliant. Which reminds me I need to give the lawn a final cut tomorrow before Winter sets in. I should have done it a week or two back, but what with one thing and another I did not get around to it, and now the weather is not at all promising. I may have left it too late.

 

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James Henderson

 

 

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Ribbon

My mind’s a ribbon blue
Black hued parsley green
Ivy lead open
My further glance into
My Casanova smile
Delicacy lasts long
Old enough to fly
My cookies know that shape
Criss cross suburban South
Too ordinary for living
A motel of sky scrapers
Munich to Vienna
Topples into
Swimming nothing
My hats are over there
Hibiscus orange
Playing with fire
Rituals of ordinary ordinance
That shape still plunges
My mind’s a ribbon blue.

 

 

 

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Sayani Mukherjee
Photo Nick Victor

 

 

 

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“This is pretty avant-garde, isn’t it?”

There used to be warnings of backwards voices in innocuous songs, urging the sensitive towards Satan or suicide. Mothers waved placards, questions were asked in high places, and kids spent hours and hours in candlelit bedrooms trying to make sense of what sounded at best guess like shell more tofu shakers or a rusty fella over spurt, repeated at irregular speeds. It’s easier now with downloads, and consequently no one bothers. Besides, who listens to a song all the way through these days? It’s the same with those subliminal frames cut into movies which died out with VHS and the pause button. Mothers sleep soundly, the courts echo with libellous Tweets, and the kids are quietly stealing cars and shooting gangsters in downtown LA until they die inside. So much for popular culture, but if you speed up a sequence of every British PMQs since 2010, you can hear a loop of ringing cash registers and a chorus of privileged voices laughing as the ghost of Margaret Thatcher pushes a handcart across the wasteland and calls us all to Hell.

 

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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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