An Existential Road Trip to Barrow in Heavy Rain (notes from a park shelter)

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Lawrence Freiesleben

Sandscale Haws from the slopes of Bank House Moor, a week earlier.


The pencil claimed it was a 2B but behaved more like a 4H[i]. Perhaps the cold had chilled its graphite? At least it was not affected by water: neither the marks it had made already, nor by the puddles lying in wait on the damp paper as it scrawled forward.

A distant town clock clanged 2, but knowing it was only a quarter past twelve, I felt neither alarm nor dislocation. It had clanged for 1 just after I arrived – at 11.14 according to one of the ladies in the charity shop. Don’t ask why I was in Barrow, I just was. Maybe I’ll get to that later. In case it’s not obvious, this is Barrow-in-Furness – in fact, you can add in-Furness to almost all the place names that follow.

The forecast had shown 1 to 2 drips of rain under a child’s grey cloud shape. Sadly, I’d seen no such shapes at all, just a sagging blanket of discoloured loft insulation, and 2 drips was wildly optimistic, several million must have landed just on me, not to mention everything around from Irleth onwards. Askam Brickworks was almost lost in the precipitation. Dalton’s centre, a confluence of rivers.

Without a map, reverting to instinct, I chose the road that ascended past Dalton’s railway station, encountering a building which despite replacement glazing, retains its symmetrical distinction:

It was raining too heavily to investigate this building’s purpose, and by now my feet were soaked. The gears slipped and I chose instead to squelch over the railway bridge pushing the bike uphill, not realising I’d missed my proper route – the once grand curving road westward from Dalton. Without sun the grandeur of Furness was bound to be diminished. Its mental image of green and maroon, echoed by the railway soon invisible below – impervious to the gradients of greyed hills by virtue of the red sandstone burrows of its tunnels: All that was lost too.

 

Beyond Bartlett’s Automotive Bodywork Solutions, the Barrow road was regained and soon the Vale of Nightshade, sight of Furness Abbey[ii],  was approaching. Prior to its dissolution and destruction in 1537 during the Reformation, Furness Abbey was the second wealthiest Cistercian monastery in the country – owning Coniston Water and much of the land around it and exerting great influence on, for example, the Isle of Man, many of whose mines were in their possession. Piel Castle[iii] on an island near the south of the Furness peninsula, was built or fortified by the monks (John Cockerham, Abbot of Furness, being granted a ‘licence to crenellate’ in 1327), partly as a place of safety and partly to control Cistercian interests in Ireland as well as goods from the Isle of Man.

All history however was slammed and swashed away by the heavy traffic overtaking me. Even the cycle lane was not advisable, much of it being flooded. So I took to the wide and abandoned flagstone pavement all through the superior leafy suburb of Croslands Park, where huge Victorian villas, often recast as retirement homes and nursery schools, mingle with detached, 60s and 70s houses – boxy and large-windowed in their generous though washed-out gardens.

Unlike from the Hindpool Road and docks area, approached from the east the shopping centre of Barrow is hard to locate, so I diverted to consult the map outside the station. Usually you get a sense of which way to go in towns and cities, an instinct for the centre, but the grid of impoverished terraces in lower Barrow are inscrutable. Punctuated by municipal and industrial buildings, churches and the odd charity shop, they give away nothing.

Barrow central was pretty much abandoned, whether due to the weather or the perpetual covid scare it’s hard to say. In one charity shop I overheard a conversation between two old women in masks that went like this:

            “Ridiculous! It’s all ridiculous. That numbskull in charge dithers like a wig in a windstorm.”

            “Well, the next lockdown should sort it out.”

            “If you’ve gotta go, you gotta go. I’m sick of all this fiddling around.”

            “Feel sorry for the nurses though.”

            “Aye.”

Then, as one of the women bustled through a curtain to make a cup of tea, to my delight, I unearthed Ordnance Survey map number 96, Barrow-in-Furness & South Lakeland area. There it was in their book racks for a mere £1.50. How likely is that? Usually, only a bush-whacked duplicate of a map you already have, presents itself – or one charting some obscure region far across the country, tantalising, yet beyond reach. Naturally, this Landranger 96 from 1988, was minus all subsequently constructed main roads, but this lack was itself to provide an interesting puzzle. At least I’d have some idea of which way to go on the return journey.

Next, through the empty and rain-soaked pedestrianised sector, I ventured to a Poundland where the three staff outnumbered the customers. To my amazement, I sighted just the very wool, apparently extinct, that K had been after since we first struck a multicoloured ball of it in Skipton. Unknown in Blackpool or London; not to be found in either Dorchester or Warrington; in Barrow there it was – 12 quid for 18 balls.

In a way, once I was warm, apart from the danger of the route’s busier sections (those without provision for bicycles), I was glad that the weather was so bad – or real, as I used to say. Not having to do such a journey every day, I began to relish the deluge, for generally, with age, I’ve become a fair-weather cyclist . . . in which perhaps you only get one side of the picture. On days of sun and calm, the elemental becomes a sensuous pleasure or better still, a mystical one. Perhaps for the well-protected and satellite tracked who can always afford to end the day in luxury, bad weather as a deliberate choice, a leisure pursuit – a few hours of extreme sport or a mountain walk – may function as little more than a virtual experience, liberating for being so far from the unreality they usually inhabit? Yet that same wind and rain might provide to others, not only the ground base of reality but also its potential opposite: extremes which both resist the cluttering societal illusions endlessly foist (or foisted) upon us.

Furness Abbey Lodge, 12th October 2020

For thirteen years, bicycle was my regular transport from isolated dwellings to local towns, so perhaps I was nostalgic, not only for that special feeling of arrival one entirely loses in a car, but even for the weekly slog of shopping in whatever weather blessed or blasted the day: fair sun and white clouds, ice, wind or downpour?

At various points to and from Barrow, the unfriendliness of the elements had been compromised when old sections of abandoned tarmac encroached by hedge, half-heartedly offered brambled cycleways, lethal with leaves; autumnal thickets within the aural swish and roar of barely visible traffic. Exposure at the abrupt ends of these tangled windbreaks made me long for those sudden reliefs or comforts experienced by the hunted, in for example, John Buchan’s adventures: the descent from moors after a rain-sodden chase, to find at twilight, a shepherd’s cottage or wayside inn alongside a sparkling burn . . . there to be offered ham and eggs, washed down with a quart of whisky by a peat fire. More than a dram on the roads around Barrow would not have been a good idea, but the image of a fireplace and the scent of smoke was encouraging.

Being virtually out of cash after the wool and the map, and in any case alone rather than in company, instead of a pub, I looked to Barrow’s park. This turned out to be vast and windswept. On a beautiful sunny day, I can imagine the views from the hill and the war memorial . . . but today was not that day, even the deep-water docks and shipyard[iv] had faded into the cloud. Park keepers huddled enigmatically in van cabs obscured by condensation, comforted by flasks and fags, smoke oozing from a gap at the top of the side windows. The trees were overloaded, and the bandstand was locked.

Presently however, in what at first appeared a dell, I spied a solid wooden shelter. For some reason this solitary roofed bench appears situated in one of the darkest zones of the park – or did the weather just make it seem that way? Not that I’m complaining, it did keep the rain and much of the wind off while I ate my lunch. For a time, I was joined by a friendly young man walking a Staffordshire bull terrier, a daily chore whatever the season. We lamented the political situation and he told me a little of his life in Barrow and laughed how this shelter was usually rowdy with “kids taking drugs and causing trouble.” The dog was after my slice of cold pizza, but I managed to keep its eager nose and paws at bay. Embarrassed by its “attention seeking”, the young man bade me goodbye and disappeared into another curtain of rain. Though she was not there, K suspects it was my eccentric clothes and demeanour that would have driven him away. Becoming too cold, before long, I was reluctantly forced to follow his example.

Using the map, I tried to fathom the way to Sandscale Haws nature reserve[v] on the coast at Roanhead – the area of dunes which on a sunny day, seen from Bank House Moor, looks like some tropical paradise. The trouble was that various new relief roads have chopped up the original network of lanes, cutting some off short, leaving others as dead ends. Postponing Roanhead for a brighter, sunnier day, I passed The Dunes Hotel, whose vast new board, offset by landscaped grass banks, promises that it will be “with you on the very special moments”. Does that even make sense? Would you want a hotel with you at such moments? Under the sound of wind in the buzzing pylon behind me, I looked beyond the empty, landscape-sculpted car park. The backs of two stone lorries were parked to the right and in the far distance the hotel looked more like a light industrial venture. This, the map indicated, had once been a “Golf Driving Range”.

Park South Signal Box, 12th October 2020

Via a narrow gate and steep path descending to the busy A590, a quiet route towards Dalton remains possible for those on foot or bicycle – provided you can find a gap in the traffic to run across the road. Reaching the top of the far embankment, the path joins the older tarmac of a lane, to resume its original course to Park South Level Crossing. Here, virtually under the bridge carrying the Dalton bypass, an 1883 Furness Railway signal box of “sturdy…type 3 design”[vi], stands guard in an increasingly gloomy valley.

In all, my loop only covered about 25 miles, but returning to my starting point I discovered that K’s car had failed its MOT and could not be driven, so I had to cycle back towards home over another section of fells in driving rain and wind in the hope that at some point I could intersect a train. Having no lights, I didn’t want nightfall to overtake me.

Back past Askam brick works, 12th October 2020

Reaching a station with ten minutes to spare, buying a ticket from an effing ticket machine proved impossible. The damned thing wouldn’t recognise a station just four stops away! Two school children came over and helpfully pointed out that the machine wouldn’t issue tickets for trains almost due – defaulting to the following service on the timetable. “You can buy them on board though, if you’ve got the cash.” At least I’d discovered the required fare and could just about scrape it together.

By the time the guard got to me, there was only one stop left before my destination. What caused the delay? Technology again. In this case people with tickets on gadgets. Each ‘customer’ took the guard about 10 minutes. I could see the poor man diligently trying to contain his frustration all down the carriage, holding their gadgets up at different angles – “There’s never a **** . . . blinking signal” – revolving them, praying, trying to resist throwing them from the occasional slots that count as windows. Yes, tickets were once made of paper – but not very big pieces! Phones – at least if your sole mission in life is to have the latest model – are far more damaging to the environment. As for all this aren’t-we-wonderful-for-going-ticketless cobblers, creeping disguised behind spurious ecological motives, like so many supposed technological advances (and almost every form of automation), it’s just another way to axe employees. Subtly or not so subtly, behind the scenes, the rich get richer and the poor – granted a few toys and distractions – get poorer . . .  End of rant.

Another view of Park South Signal Box – with real signalmen inside. 12th October 2020


Amazingly, for the last few miles cycling on from the station, the rain ceased – but by then I was so wet I might just as well have swum home.

 

 

© Lawrence Freiesleben,

Cumbria, October 2020

 

[email protected]

 

NOTES

[i] https://workshopsinfrance.com/tips-tricks-and-art-hacks/why-are-pencils-called-h-and-b/ 

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furness_Abbey 

[iii] https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/piel-castle/history/ 

[iv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Barrow 

[v] https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sandscale-haws-national-nature-reserve

 [vi] https://www.flickr.com/photos/feversham/27736622310/

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Lost to Addiction

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Editor

Even with clear skies finding alien
planets is no easy matter. Are you
a mud larker? There is no secret
as to how you build a rocky planet

yet the presence of so many visitors
may alter the delicate balance of life
on a river. When we return one month
later has everything gone to plan?

“It’s not just men on the mountain,”
she said. What’s your definition of a
law-abiding citizen? Exactly how are
planets formed? “We’ve since discovered

that it’s really all about you,” she said.
What’s the duration of a typical contract?
Here we have the forerunner of the
domestic vacuum cleaner but these days

we are also dotting our ‘i’s and crossing
our ‘t’s. What’s the policy on masks?
“The marbling on my buttocks beggars
belief,” he said. Who are we competing

with today? “We all need special attention,”
she said, “especially those lost to addiction.”

 

 

Steve Spence

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ROCK N’ REAL

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by David Erdos

                                                                              

                                        The  Gulps move The Windmill, London,  October 27th 2020

 

Social Distance defines a song’s declaration, and on a Tuesday night in South London, The Gulps declared loud and clear. Inbetween select space their hungry roar fed the vital, to make a sparse room seem crowded, these young men can play plenty, to make even a coronic room soar. The Gulps progress with each show, or certainly did before lockdown. Now, carefully released, they play images as well as their tight set of songs. From ripped shirt and jeans to Roxy like suits, 80s jackets; this group from all places seem to take in all music too. Their songs crash and soothe, they bump and grind, they seek glory, as frontman Harry All sings through both softness and sneering as his co-songwriter and guitarist Charlie Green smoothes the sound. While FAB, their lead guitarist artfully Ronsons with both light and texture, rhythm section Simon Mouchard and Raoul Khayat summon fire, which makes The Gulps forge corrosive and persuasive too, from the start.

STUCK IN THE CITY is pure strut in words and music. Power chords and a melody belie a craft beyond their small years. It is a truly classic sounding song, like the early Who or The Jam’s In The City; a ‘21st Nervous Breakdown,’ that the tyro Richards and Jones might have shared. The Gulps excel at short sets in which there is barely a chance to consider just how well crafted their music has continued to be since they formed. They are not in love with themselves; the trap that other bands their age can and often do fall into. They are in love with the music that powers and links eager hands.

MIRROR MIRROR is more than could be expected. From a jangling staccato line, the urgent call and New Wave NY stylings, complete with falsetto BV’s to break through. The rhythms collide, showing just how fast they are thinking, as if there were countless means to trap power and to structure and shape for the stage. LOLA COLA  is a sanguine gulp of pop that is passed like a kiss between partners. Its elegance made all the more perfect but its command of what it does to the form. The Gulps do what all great bands  do: play with the forms that engaged them, and this song is a staple for anyone wishing to bind style to sound. TIME GOES BY and THE ART OF WAR fully extend their first brief, heralding their new album, which produced by Youth is forthcoming and shows just how anticipated they are. Tonight, Alan McGee checks them out, and the Covid Crowd would have helped them, as whoops, swoons and wailing, making this Brixton Pub the arena they are destined to play, should we rise.

The songs define tonight’s space with compact precison. One can hear The Stones, Free and Pavement, Generation X, Talking Heads, early Blur. And yet in their international mix there is no imitation, only the reverb and echo of previous and  indeed, future times. The La las are clear, alongside the swagger. These GANGA BOYS will take no SURRENDER as their Art of War is raged for you, and so on your behalf they resist. FAB (Francesco Antonio Buffone) knits six string threads of electricified sound to the point of steam and smoke rising, as he fills every moment with angular shapes and curved  chords. Khayat plays his kit like a team or legion of drummers. While Mouchard ‘Bruces’ and ‘Entwistles’; his bass shapes are as dextrous as John and Jack early on. Green is the glue that binds this band together and his dignified stance at all moments elevates the groups class. Singer, Harry All wants to see the audience dance, but they are under strict supervision, with a friendly but still ruthless barman not permitting anyone in there to stand. And so the urgency is held down and perhaps made all the more potent, as OUT OF TUNE and OUT OF THE BLUE pass sly but still strident comment on just where the world has reached outside, and could be.

The Gulps are a band who would eat the air itself to breathe fire. They swallow sensation and spit out song that spreads taste from Pop to Punk, to Rock, to Funk, to points of near aural abstraction, as theirs is a canvas that’s stretching every single time that they play. If they remain within rock then they will colour that stone with a richness that will explore every crevice and replenish the moss as they roll, and if they extend across style, then they have a signature sound to connect them; one of youth, drive and voices that create a new Xperanto; an international brand that feels needed and which is also pure London, as they translate influence into action to make the kind of rock that feels real.

Closing song and lead track of their new Ep THE KING’S HOUSE is a trip in each and all senses. It shows how even a small room can transport us away from where we thought we were, to palaces of the mind where reality alters and finds fresh foundation in the dreams and dance the heart feels.

 Tonight, The Windmill turned fast, for anyone there to listen. Catch their air. Hear and swallow. The Gulps are more than the wine. They’re the way.

 

 

David Erdos October 28th 2020              
Photos: Domante Kaminskaite

 
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Driving Me Backwards

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Rupert Loydell

 

 

 

Film Music 1978-2020, Brian Eno (UMC CD)

Shadow of Fear, Cabaret Voltaire (Mute CD)

Film Music 1978-2020 is a strange release, which gathers up a kind of greatest hits of Eno’s soundtrack music, including some more obscure tracks from soundtrack albums, with seven previously unreleased tracks. The commercial release of Music for Films appeared back in 1978 (it had a first outing as a private pressing two years before), an LP of music Eno imagined could be used for soundtracks and that had been selected and arranged (and sometimes composed) for that very reason.

It proved an astute move, as most of the music was used and the album was a critical and commercial success; it also led to a long-lasting collaboration with Derek Jarman. The interesting thing is that the music also works as an ‘imaginary soundtrack’, with the listener able to conjure up their own scenes and events.

On this compilation, however, much of the music is very much attached to specific films or TV programmes, be that the opening credits to Arena or David Lynch’s Dune film, and if one is an Eno fan, as I am, it is only the seven new tracks which might be a reason the purchase this CD. Truth be told, the best music here are the more well known tracks, and 30 or 40 years on there is little innovative or new any more about this work. Much of the album sounds somewhat dated, much of it sounds the same; I’m not at all convinced by the sequencing or the need for this album. Eno has done much more interesting work, musically, artistically and conceptually, and this feels like a look over his shoulder, not a gaze ahead.

Shadow of Fear also seems like a look backwards, and perhaps a bit of a sleight of hand. Did Richard Kirk really need to resurrect the Cabaret Voltaire name, considering he had (and has) a perfectly good solo career going? I think not, especially as this new album feels more like his solo work and nothing like the best work that the Cabs made.

For me, what is lacking is the edge and rawness of early Cabaret Voltaire, as they grappled with old tape recorders and primitive synthesizers, all layered over stomping rhythms and slabs of abstract guitar and noise. Even when they moved towards dance music and some mainstream commercial success there was a sense of experiment and unease in the music.

At the end of Cabaret Voltaire’s original incarnation the band was just Kirk, so perhaps I am being a little harsh, but even then the music had become somewhat smooth and overproduced for my taste: at best one might have called it ‘industrial lite’. The press release for this new album wants to reposition the band though, it claims that ‘it dances across techno, dub, house, 1970s Kosmiche and general esoteric explorations’, also that it’s ‘a voyage through the history of electronic music that arrives at a new destination’.

Well, I’m sorry, but it isn’t. This is dilute middle-of-the-road Cabaret Voltaire which mostly consists of paint-by-numbers sampling and drum machines layered over dull rhythms and preset synthesizer bleeps. This music has had all the energy sucked out of it, it is lifeless and inert. I so wanted to like this album, but this Cabaret Voltaire is simply a shadow of itself.

 

 

 

 

Rupert Loydell

 

 

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Open Windows, Open doors

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Editor

PRESS RELEASE
for immediate circulation
October-December 2020
VANESSA VIE OPENS HER POETIC WINDOWS AND DOORS
FOR THE FIRST PRINTED NEW DEPARTURES ISSUE IN A DECADE


The first New Departures publication since 2007, OpenWindows,
Open Doors by Vanessa Vie, whose launch had been scheduled to
happen far earlier in 2020, is to be flagged up and promoted
between September and December this year instead, assuming the
coronavirus will radically recede. This dateline will mark sixty
years sinceMichael Horovitz originated the experimental imprint
and its performance-based siblings, Live New Departures and the
Poetry Olympics festivals.

Open Windows, Open Doors is Vanessa Vie’s debut volume of
diverse poetic writings, accompanied by a substantial selection of
her varied visual art inventions created between 1997 and 2019. Its
release extends the quintessential commitment of the New
Departures imprint to wonderment, internationalism, and multimedic
cross-pollination in the arts.

This book’s title and contents vindicate and respond to the
challenge ofLawrence Ferlinghetti’s ‘PopulistManifesto’: “Poets,
come out of your closets,/Open your windows, open your doors,/
You have been holed-up too long/in your closet worlds.”

Almost entirely self-taught, as both multi-media artist and poetwriter,
aswell as singer-songwriter-musician,Vanessa grewup on
the coast of Northern Spain, and came to Britain at the end of the last millennium.She decided to stay in Albion
for good in 2000, largely inspired by absorbing herself in the visionary art and poetry ofWilliam Blake. It soon
came naturally to her to converse, and then to write in English, with, as publisher Michael Horovitz puts it: “a
relish for the stimulus of adapting to a second language, whilst still retaining the passionate spirits of her inborn
duende.”

According toWilliam Burroughs: “The techniques of much contemporary writing are 50 years behind those of
musicians and painters”. “Vanessa Vie’s innovations,” says Horovitz, “invariably bring the interplay of her
poetry with highly original musics and visual art to the fore. Her prolific compositions and performances, solo
or in conjunction with others, can amount to a nimbly synthesised dance on two, or sometimes three artistic
trapezes at once.”
VanessaVie has presentedHappenings inspired by the poetries of Rumi andDylan Thomas, aswell as devising
transformative musical settings for those of William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Federico Garcia Lorca and
Horovitz himself.

“Many people have asked me throughout the years why I read and write in English,” says Vanessa: “Samuel
Beckett began writing in French because he wanted to get away from his mother tongue. Living, reading and
speaking in French had bestowed himwith a newpersonality.TheEnglish language has bestowedmewith a new
personality and freed me from my mother tongue. I find its nuances of sound and structure to be a restorative
victual for my intellect, imagination and memory.”

For more information about Open Windows, Open Doors (£14.99, 128 pages, ISBN: 978-0-9026892-7-5),
details of launch events, reviewcopies, use of images, or to arrange an interview, please contactNewDepartures
on 020 7229 7850 or [email protected], or Vanessa Vie on 07956 514 337 or [email protected]
PRESS RELEASE
for immediate circulation
October-December 2020
VANESSA VIE OPENS HER POETIC WINDOWS AND DOORS
FOR THE FIRST PRINTED NEW DEPARTURES ISSUE IN A DECADE

Notes for Editors
New Departures Publications were first launched exactly six decades ago as
miscellanies, in editor-torchbearer Michael Horovitz’s last year at Oxford. Early
anthologies featured works by the innovative likes of Samuel Beckett, William
Burroughs, JohnCage,StevieSmith,LangstonHughes,KurtSchwitters,AlanDavie,
Kathleen Raine, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, to be dubbed by the Times
LiterarySupplement “themost avant-gardemagazine inGreatBritain”.Horovitz has
taken the magazine’s spirit across continents over the last 60 years with Live New
Departures, Jazz Poetry SuperJams and the Poetry Olympics festivals.
VanessaViewrites: Iwas bornMariaVanessa FernandezAlvarez in 1973 inAviles,
Asturias. In 1990 I had been granted a scholarship to study Medicine in Salamanca,
the world’s third-oldest University, before I deserted the socio-academic pilgrimage
and stepped into the unknown. Embraced by circumambient creative circles and
prompted by a dream, I started experimentingwithVisualArt,Music, and Literature.
Two years later I tookmymaternal grandmother’s advice: “If youwant to be an artist,
you’ve got to prepare yourself”, and started taking private music lessons and trying
to complywith the rhythms of two art schools. This ran on for five years, in the course
of which I brimfilled notebooks with poems, songs, and whatnots, and covered
canvases, boards and paper full steam ahead. I formed my first rock band, exhibited
my visual artwork, and enjoyed a fewthrills, aswhen theHardRockBarcelona chose
a drawing of mine for its inauguration t-shirts in 1997. I made London my home in
2000, where I’ve continued to invent, perform and collaborate with diverse and
inspiring artists andmusicians, and to exhibit. In 2012 Imet and befriendedMichael
Horovitz. Our earliest collaborations were rooted, almost solely, in our mutual love
for and experiences of the oeuvre of William Blake. For the last eight years my
creative-writing focus has shifted from song-writing into Poetry (Michael has been
a major catalyst) and become integral to my performances. Poems have come out of
my notebooks’ closets and appeared inmagazines and anthologies in theUSA&UK,
up until the publication of ‘Open Windows, Open Doors’. www.vanessavie.co.uk

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Wanita Mix

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Editor

Lucky Cat collects a wide range of genres– all on vinyl– but true to her South London roots Reggae is her first love! In 2019 she competed in 2 Reggae DJ clashes Tradition’s Old Hits Clash and the Lover’s Rock and Revival Clash. As a solo DJ she has played in Switzerland, Ireland and Germany and specialises in late 60s/early 70s styles of Reggae.

Collecting records since age 12, Lucky Cat started DJing at parties in 2000, then progressed to hosting her own club nights in South London. In 2005 she debuted on Resonance FM and has since made almost 20 series of her show. A passionate broadcaster, she also contributed mixes to the BBCs cult programme On the Wire.

In 2016 she founded an all-female Reggae DJ collective – Sisters of Reggae. The collective of 5 DJs and 1 MC gig all over the world and encourage other women to get behind the decks with their popular Female DJ Relay Nights.

 

 

Lucky Cat Baxter

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Overheard

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Editor

 

Can you draw reality?

Yes, she replies,
When we get back
I’ll draw
A railway siding,
Electrified fences
Snarling dogs,
Wedding rings,
Shower heads
Piles of hair…           

And will you put in
Two rows of men
In shabby suits
Standing in the dock?

 

 

 

Kevin Patrick McCann
Illustration Nick Victor

 

From Still Pondering   https://www.amazon.co.uk/Still-Pondering-Kevin-Patrick-McCann/dp/1788768671/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Patrick+McCann+Still+Pondering&qid=1573366856&sr=8-1

 

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Ship-Shape

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Editor

Hand Print
By DENNIS GOULD

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Covid Connections: with Martin Slade in the Republic of Ireland

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Editor

 

Intro: Alan Dearling

Alan Dearling spent his first year at the University of Kent (UKC), way back in 1969, sharing a room in ‘digs’ with Martin Slade. It was in a bungalow about half an hour walk from the university campus, traversed along a dark, hilly, country road in the village of Tyler Hill.  One local pub, which had a friendly sign up in the door, refusing service to university students!

Martin and myself were two very unlikely bed-room dwellers. I was a scruffy, Afghan-coated, would-be ‘hippy’ intellectual. Martin was polo-jumpers and a natural-born ‘boffin’.

Alan dimly remembers that year with mixed emotions, saying,

“I was younger than Martin – Martin was a Science student: chemistry – I was studying Part One Social Sciences (politics, economics, sociology, law, social history) over four terms. Plus live music – big and small music gigs, theatre, writing, editing, taking photographs, attending lots of film-shows, student politics and protest (we had a big student protest and occupied the university admin buildings over secret files), sport, table-football, bars on and off campus. I wanted to play hard as well as study. And, of course, we didn’t know then that we were living in the heart of what became known as ‘the Canterbury Scene’.  Martin was at UKC to study!  Culture clash…

Our landlord and landlady were postgrad students. Nerdy and old fashioned. They provided a minimal breakfast and cocoa and a biscuit at about 9 or 9.30pm when they liked us back and tucked into our shared room. Not even remotely akin to my idea of wild university days! This suited Martin much more than me…but we had to co-exist…we decided that for vaguely harmonious relations we needed to find a shared interest. It was music. We had both bought a stack of vinyl albums with us and our room had a reasonable quality radiogram. Each night we each chose at least one side of an album to play, taking turns to play our favourites. We both pushed and provoked, testing the other person – Martin with classical music, me with the likes of the Doors and the Incredible String Band…it was funny, annoying, a bit childish, but we actually cemented a friendship over a shared love of the Beatles.

Martin adds: “Our landlord and landlady were recently married chemistry graduates. He was a small man and she was a hefty blonde. He was studying for a masters in chemistry whilst she was studying for a PhD. I do remember their joint bath-night sessions when we kept a low profile in our room, noting with some amusement the squeals coming from the bathroom!”

Fifty years on…Martin and myself keep in touch…We’ve lived very different lives, but both us have ‘lived lives’ and some. Martin recently told me a bit about his work-life: “After UKC, I found it was obvious that without a post-grad degree, I was going nowhere in industry so I went to University of Sussex, initially to do a masters (I would have something to show for the year if the money ran out) and this led to a DPhil in organometallic chemistry.  It was a wonderful time, working with FRSs and chemistry Nobel Laureates.  As an aside, my supervisor, now no longer with us, was on the last kinder transport train out of Prague in 1938.) Then a career in the generic pharmaceutical industry, with the last work being as a co-inspector with the WHO.”

Now you can hear about his current experiences having recently re-located to the Republic of Ireland…Read on…”

Covid times in the Republic of Ireland

Martin Slade

For various reasons, we decided to move to Republic of Ireland.  Top of the list was that our grandson is Irish by birth and has started his second year at school.  We want to see him grow up. Our youngest son had moved to Thailand to teach English and our eldest son is likely to move with his fiancé to her native Australia. Our immediate links to the UK are becoming weaker.

We finally moved to Ireland last December to temporary accommodation, rented to us by a friend.  It is north of Galway, close to Loch Corrib (which is the eastern edge of Connemara) and the town of Headford, just in County Mayo. This house is centred around a 250 year-old thatched cottage with a large extension, located on an acre plot in a rural area. We have always chosen rural rather than urban living and this suited us.  

A friend, who loves driving, drove a van for us with valuable items and freezers, last November and we took a car to leave in the garage. The main move was early in last December, with most of our possessions going into a self-store in Limerick with some going to a big garage owned by the mother of a friend of our daughter’s in a small town in County Clare, near Ennis. The removers treated our goods very badly and we still have an on-going argument with the insurance company. It seems as though the removers changed the terms and conditions after we had paid!  Unfortunately, this seems typical of the UK.  I’ve noticed that over the years the social etiquette of respect and consideration for others, personal integrity etc. has now gone and the attitude is now, “…me, me, me, me” and “stuff you Jack!”  I suppose that the obvious examples of this can be found in Westminster and Downing Street. 

The attitude in the west of Ireland is much more to our liking and how the UK used to be when we were growing up.  The concept of time is a bit elastic but attitude of people is much more civilised.

We were settling in for the winter in Headford and managed to get a reasonable internet connection.  As events began to develop, this proved to be invaluable.  We met the local farmers, who were very kind and helpful, and started to look into how we registered for the various formalities in Ireland. The key is to apply for, and be assigned, a PPS number, the equivalent of the UK’s National Insurance number.  Without the PPS numbers, nothing happens. Time was spent contacting estate agents, looking at the various websites to find a house or bungalow much closer to where our daughter and grandson live, which is in Shannon. After looking at several properties, in February we found the house near Ennis that we eventually bought, (finally moving in June).  Even though it is a rural area in the west of Ireland, we have been able to be connected to the internet with a fibre-optic connection direct to the house.  When I last checked with the laptop connected directly to the router, we were getting 450Mbps download.

The world was turned upside down around February/March when the Covid 19 pandemic started. Since I have a long-standing lung condition, we had to self-isolate.  This was no problem since we were in a remote area and could go for walks etc. and rarely see anyone.  When we did, the required separation distance was followed. (To this day, we have not heard of anyone who has contracted the virus in the local area – fortunately.)  A friend of ours with a family, has a son who is a junior hospital doctor. For a while, he was in the front-line at Galway hospital working with Covid 19, and it was a worrying time for him. He is now undertaking other duties and so away from direct contact with Covid. 

When we were in the house near Headford, we found that the local supermarket would deliver groceries.  We would send an email in the morning, someone from the supermarket would phone around the middle of the day to discuss the final order, we would make payment by card and delivery would be later that day. Compared with some people, we were fortunate and had it easy.

Just by chance, I have been interested in viruses for a long time and the lock-down gave me a chance to find a book on-line and start to learn the elementary aspects of viruses.  Also, I found a colossal amount of work being published. However, using Google was useless, but Google Scholar gave access to the original papers. Covid 19 is known as SARS COV 2 and is very similar to SARS (SARS COV 1), MERS, ‘flu and cold viruses.  A lot of work was being undertaken to examine the treatments for SARS COV 1 and MERS. There are papers, some published at the start of the pandemic, on face masks and studies on how respiration droplets can be spread. Also, a recent paper reports that SARS COV 2 can survive on some surfaces, such as stainless steel, some plastics, for up to 28 days at 20 degrees centigrade. Therefore, we think it is obvious that the way to curtail the spread of SARS COV 2 is for everyone outside to wear face masks and pay rigorous attention to hygiene. There are ways to treat the air in indoor spaces.

However, the general media appear not to be bothered/interested in this work. There seems to be a school of thought that the requirement to wear masks is an infringement of civil liberties and only part of the long-term plan for the control of the population.  I prefer the explanation that it is an effective way of controlling the spread of the virus, and displays concern and respect for others.  Since the effect of this virus can range from being asymptomatic to death, utmost care is needed.  I never bother with ‘social media’ and so have limited exposure to fake news. (Anecdotally, reports are that the content of social media range from drivel to on-line bullying which is so bad that some teenagers are driven to suicide.)

The number of science programmes on TV and radio is virtually nil. The way science is now ignored is disappointing. For example, a co-winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics is a British astronomer and there are two ladies who are joint 2020 Nobel Prize winners for Chemistry. The way that women have been ignored is a disgrace (e.g. Prof. Jocelyn Bell Burnell) but there were no reports of celebrations etc. for joint female winners. (Anyway, that’s one rant over!)

As I write this, there are concerns in the Republic about a surge of cases, particularly in Dublin and County Donegal. The latter is believed to be due to the close location to two hotspots in Northern Ireland, Derry/Londonderry and Strabane, on the eastern bank of the River Foyle. We are now in a lockdown with a maximum allowable travel distance from home of 5km.

 Restrictions in the Republic of Ireland will last until December 1 2020.

Under the restrictions:

  • Pubs, restaurants and cafes will only provide takeaways and deliveries.
  • Public will be asked to work from home, except for essential workers.
  • People will have to restrict movement to 5km of their homes.
  • No social or family gatherings in homes or gardens.
  • Non-essential retail, hairdressers, barbers and salons will close.
  • Funerals will be limited to 10 people.
  • Weddings will be limited to 25 people.
  • Schools and creches will remain open.
  • Elite level sports can continue.
  • Construction will be allowed to continue.

We moved in June, knowing that the new house, albeit high spec., had been neglected and, in some instances, not completed, but we are getting on top of the jobs. One issue is that we are close to The Burren, a unique landscape, and the limestone bedrock is very close to the surface on which the house is built. We are working on getting some raised beds constructed so that we can grow some fruit and vegetables. However, work is slow. In the west of Ireland, the pace of life is very laid-back and the concept of time somewhat elastic.

Photo: The view from the new house looking east. In the far distance, you can just make out some hills which are on the west bank of Loch Derg, a big lake which is part of the river Shannon.

In the middle of May, I was unwell and it was found that I had a low pulse rate. I was admitted to the cardiac department of Limerick hospital and received absolutely magnificent treatment which ended up with having a pacemaker/ICD implant. Not an event on the schedule, but it explained why I felt ill and am much better now. I was wired up to various machines and had cannulas installed for different procedures.  Following the suggestions on medication from the US President Trump, there was much amusement, debating which cannula would be used for disinfectant and which for the bleach…

Major jobs to get done when we moved included registering with a GP, transferring car registration and driving licences. All these have been completed successfully.  After the end of this year, UK driving licences will not be valid in the Republic of Ireland. It has to be seen what will happen at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Covid restrictions and different regulations either side of the border make that more complex. Although we personally have not crossed the border, it appears that the only indication is a notice regarding speed limits; km/hr in the Republic, mph in Northern Ireland. The vast majority of the population on both sides will not tolerate a hard border, so we will have to see what happens.

Photo: Loop Head, the most south-westerly part of Co Clare on the north of the Shannon estuary.  This is just a bit south of the Cliffs of Moher.

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Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real – Civilized Hell

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Editor


“Civilized Hell” (alternate version) is off the new album from Lukas Nelson & Promise Of The Real, “Naked Garden” available now. Video adapted from “A Short History of America” Copyright © Robert Crumb, 1979.

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time

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Editor

we struggle with time
The infinite nature of it
It tests our imagination
a time before us
a time once we are gone

we try to see the time we are here
and our place in the bigger picture
the world undoubtedly changes in our presence
yet our own contribution is hard to fathom

life is so brief, even though, at times, it feels lengthy
Shakespeares “flickering candle”
If we accept his view
and I do
that life has no purpose, no meaning
how, then to judge?

how then, to call a life, won or lost?

Power, money, fame, sex
Surely all false idols?
and will their glories not fade in our final days?

We spent our time over centuries
building, inventing, discovering
religion, philosophy, science
Pleased with ourselves that so much unknown is now known
yet
It’s the known that breaks our hearts

time, will tell
It will tell its own story
It is not on our side thoughIt never was.

 

 

 

Nathaniel Fisher
Illustration Ava Daniels

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INTO THE ABYSS

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Editor

 

(The Renegade)

Deathmasques V

                 “I know your sort,” the pontifex addressed a bloodstained man sprawled beneath a pillar. “You really fancy yourself – we get your type in here all the time – when it comes to degradation you are in your element. Today you live for kicks, tomorrow you’re the kicked – don’t come to me looking for tea and sympathy.”
                The man staggered to his feet and looked at his bleeding hands, his stigmata, wincing as sharp pains blotted out his thoughts. He tried to shut out the castellated images that floated before his eyes.
               The hierophant drew nearer.
             “Oh, yes, to your jaded palette life is dull. You judge things entirely by sensation. How many secrets have you betrayed?”
              The wounded man staggered forward. Behind him were a door and a blaze of golden sunlight. There was a mangled corpse and blotches of blood staining the ground. He tried to speak but all he could utter was an inarticulate croak.
              “Fool!” exclaimed the priest, “I cannot help you, this cannot help you…” he gestured at the gaping aisle of the cathedral. He spat in the face of the renegade, then, turning on his heel, he was gone.
               The renegade writhed in anguish, realising he was outside the law, outside human comprehension. He was beyond the understanding of other beings.
              “Remember,” laughed the crazed ecclesiarch from the shadow of the confessional, “suicide is as contemptible as procreation!”
               The renegade looked at the blackened thing on the ground outside. He sensed the miasma of death and burning flesh, the incineration of the victim’s soul. How many more?
                It was gloomy and cramped on the spiral staircase; his feet rustled on petals, the bricks of the wall were scorched as though some mysterious fire had drained them of all substance. He made his way through the desolate cathedral. There were open spaces. Gravestones lay at awkward angles. Scrubby plants with pallid, white flowers fought the grass for nutriment. There were cracked stones and splintered beams. Tarnished monuments leered from the gloom. Shattered windows opened onto dark inner rooms and torture chambers littered with skeletal remains.
                Eventually he came to a shadowy chamber – he came to a door rotting in the wall. The slats were so decayed that, with very little effort, he could prise away a sliver of decomposing wood and stare through into flickering torchlight.
                He could hear straining, gasping sounds – lewd, vile sounds.
                In the oblong cavity of an exposed tomb lay the archpriest; his sacred robes dappled with stains and messy blotches. His eyes were staring. His mitre lay discarded on the floor amid the detritus, amid the bones and rat’s skulls. One arm was held out at an angle, the hand clenching and unclenching in the putrid air. On top of him was a white female form, its mouth fastened to his neck. The two bodies swayed convulsively, now this way, now that. She was sucking the life from his veins, his contorted face blazing in a paroxysm of ecstasy. His whole body seemed to flow into her mouth.
                All around lay those white flowers in decomposing heaps. Dying floral scents, visible to the hyperactive sensations of the observer, arose and twisted about in the sluggish, narcotic atmosphere. All around bizarre figures carved from precious stones and metals leered with antique faces and rigid priapic organs. The crypt was a chapel of Hell. Jewels and glass artefacts littered the floor in a profusion of otherworldly excess. A great inverted crucifix, studded with blood-red gems hung above the scene, suspended on rusting chains formed like human hands, suspended in a zone of shadow. Guttering candles the colour of human fat stood in a wide semicircle, completing the picture.
                 The renegade gasped. He was transfixed.
                 Then he gasped again – not because of what he saw – that could have been a dream – but because of a footfall behind him. It was the sound of tortured, mangled limbs sliding along the floor, oozing along the corridor, driven by revenge, driven by hate. It was an incinerated soul, luminous in the dark with a single eye staring in pain – unbearable, unutterable pain – the cumulated pain of every victim in the world. The miasma of burning flesh assailed his jangled perceptions. Castellated images floated before his eyes as he turned, involuntarily, to confront his still-living nemesis.
                 The renegade descended into the abyss, a living hell of infinite remorse.

 

 

 

 

A  C  Evans.

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EMAIL BODY TEXT TABLE BUTTON TABLE

Posted on 31 October, 2020 by Rupert Loydell

You’re talking about the three buttons at the bottom.
If you look at the styles you have, you want the link
to jump to a new workbook and make it entirely clickable.

Select the piece of text you want to send and use columns
and rows to create cells which can contain text or images.
If everything looks good, you can achieve the perfect client.

Paste in content and put their data to good use automatically.
Send it to server via Ajax, send it in person with flowers
and allow users with permissions to access the source.

Optimize for sloppy swiping; references can be ignored,
vertical space should be optimized for artisan migration.
Remember to tell people what your poems are about.

 

 

   © Rupert M Loydell

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PINCHFARTISM

Posted on 27 October, 2020 by Editor

 

 

I just told the government to stop Dominic Cummings’s war on our planning system.

 

   
 

I just told the government to stop Dominic Cummings’s war on our plannin…

Can you help?

 

Dear Tory Government

 

I am writing to object to your Planning for the Future white paper. 

For starters, the introduction by Boris Johnson is as flatulent as it is untrue. 

Everything he says can be turned upside down to mean the opposite. 

His extended metaphor comparing the planning system to a building is pinchfart wit.  

He can’t get anything right it seems. His grammatical clause that ‘as we approach the second decade of the 21st century’ is bad writing, and plain wrong. We’ve had two decades. We’re approaching the third decade of the 21st century. 

But the whole document is a devil’s charter for developers. It is not about building the affordable housing so long promised and so long unforthcoming. It is about giving a green light to your developer friends to build anything they like – without check or regulation – by disempowering the public to oppose planning applications.  

I have opposed developments regularly since the Tories returned to power in 2010, in Hammersmith, in Norton Folgate, at Bunhill Fields, and even right now in Arnold Circus. I have observed how arrantly miniscule you politicians seem beside your builder chums, like kids at a Monopoly board. How they must laugh at you as – again and again – they make you look like financial amateurs. For a few brown envelopes you sell your reputations, your party, your constituencies and your country to these creaming profiteroles and their remorseless projects.  

We know they won’t build affordable housing. They are morally incapable of doing so. 

Be warned, things are changing around the world: Greece, New Zealand, Bolivia etc. 

But as PINOCHETISMO dies in Chile, all you have to offer in England is PINCHFARTISM.  

 

Yours sincerely 

 Niall McDevitt   

 

Pinchfart | Definition of Pinchfart by Oxford Dictionary on Lexico.com also meaning of Pinchfart   

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Covid Report from Eastern Europe

Posted on 26 October, 2020 by Julian Rose

Demonstrations against Corona virus have been taking place every week  in  Poland  during the month of October. However on 24/10 Polish police violently intervened and used tear-gas to break up participants who were marching towards the Prime Ministers residence in Warsaw.

 

 

This was a totally uncalled for action and has shocked many who had never  before  witnessed this form of violence by a government against it’s own people.


Poland  is  exhibiting  the same escalation of ‘positive tests’ as all other  countries  in Europe. The entire country has recently been put into the ‘red’  category  of  restrictions  on  movement,  social  grouping, shopping and dining-out.


Poles are becoming increasingly impoverished by the effect Covid-19 restrictions are  having  on  their  ability  to earn a living, particularly amongst those who run the tens of thousands of small businesses that operate in this country.


Anger  is  rising at the way these lock-downs are being enforced and at  the  fines being imposed on those who don’t comply. However, these fines  are  illegal  as they are not based on an act of parliament and the Polish courts have so far thrown-out the fines in all cases where citizens have appealed against the practise.


Just like all other European countries the actual rate of death from Covid-19 in Poland is on a par with seasonal flu epidemics.


The government is currently seeking to introduce an act of parliament that would make mask wearing an enforceable law. Just as doctors are describing covering the nose and mouth as a genuine danger to health.


More and more are waking-up to the fact that this is a globally controlled fake pandemic which is being used to usher in a central dictatorship and police state powers.





Report by Julian Rose, President, International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside




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Street writer part eleven – Spread Yourself

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

 

If you’re a poet that’s great!

Or a short story writer.

Or even a playwright or a screenwriter.

But, you don’t want to ‘just’ stick to one genre.

You want to spread yourself.

It’s like back when I was doing the training.

Some people only did striking but, you’ve got to remember there is grappling as well.

There is also the weightlifting that can help with strength.

There is also running that can help with fitness.

There are also the soft arts like Chi-kung and meditation that can help you even more than the really physical arts.

It is the same when you are on a skateboard.

It’s good to be able to do the basics on flat ground but, there are also slides and grinds to practice.

And it’s good to able to skate the street but it is good to able to skate parks as well.

And when you’re studying Jesus’s teachings – it is also a good idea to learn Buddha’s teachings…

It’s not like God only focused on one thing.

We have trees, we have the sun, we have the moon etc…

And if you don’t believe in God or prophets then look at the mind, like those great philosophers who took that on for their own amusement and you can see that the mind doesn’t just work on one level!

So, take all these analogies into your writing and spread it out like a vast ocean.

When I started off writing at the end of my teens I started off with journalism, poetry, fiction and film.

When I landed in my early twenties I got a little lost but…

I continued to write poems, stories, scripts and I also kept a diary in hopes I could maybe get some material for a column someday.

Once I landed into my mid to late twenties I unfortunately gave up that time to poetry alone because I felt that’s where it was at for me but…

I was wrong!

When I took that year out coming up to my thirtieth year I put a lot of preliminary work into spreading myself and getting out of mainly being a poet.

Obviously the poems were getting published here and there but I had a few stories lined up that were roughly written out in the past.

Now the fiction has taken ‘a whole life of its own’ and tipping the scales at 29 different styles of stories in one year.

I wrote half a dozen scripts for poetry films, but then, I started off a year ago putting my energy into real screenwriting, playwriting and TV writing.

And I always wanted to come back to journalism and I decided to pitch the idea for this column to the lovely Claire for this magazine and she went for it.

I haven’t written this diversely in quite some time but if I’m to be frankly honest with you: I’m fucking loving this right now!

I was on my morning walk with my dog and I realised this column is like a writing class but a hell of a lot more creative…

Well, for me anyway.

As you start to spread yourself as a writer and artist it is also good to pressure test your material with magazines or publishers to see what they think.

Don’t be discouraged by their feedback, criticism or rejections.

That is a ‘good’ thing and it will help your growth as an artist.

I think I’ve said everything I need to say for now in this one.

So, until next time… stay beautiful!

This articles poem is called: ‘why do you do that for’

I felt it was the right fit for this one.

Love

PBJ

<3

 

Why do you do that for

 

Even though there is a chance of permanent deformity when I skate

There is nothing like hearing the sound of tapping boards after landing a trick

Even though there is a chance of being knocked out when you train

There is nothing better than learning to master a movement or a form

Even though when I write and I continue to get rejected

There isn’t a greater feeling when you do get accepted in the form of publication

Even though I have read and reread great minds on life and thought

There isn’t any comparable glory when you learn to find your own truth of Love

 

 

 

 

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DEMAND LEGAL RECOGNITION OF ANIMAL SENTIENCE POST-BREXIT

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Heidi Stephenson
 

Imagine, for a moment, that the law doesn’t recognise your ability to feel joy, fear, pleasure, or pain – nor your ability to learn, or your consciousness of the world around you.

Unless the UK Government introduces new laws recognising animal sentience before 1 January 2021, that terrifying prospect will face every single one of the UK’s farm animals.

If you live in the UK, please email your MP today. Urge them to use their influence to ensure animals are recognised as sentient beings in post-Brexit legislation.

Email your MP

 
 

UK GOVERNMENT FAILS TO DELIVER

In 2017, thanks to a campaign spearheaded by Compassion – and the dedicated efforts of thousands of campaigners – the Government committed to include animal sentience in UK law post-Brexit.

Since then, the Government has repeatedly pledged to deliver on its promise. Yet, three years on, and with the end of the EU transition period rapidly approaching, it has failed to take any action.

A PIVOTAL MOMENT

When the EU transition period ends, EU law recognising animals as sentient beings will no longer apply in the UK – so it’s essential the UK Government introduces new legislation before then.

If the Government does not act by the end of this year, British animals will be left with no legal recognition of their ability to think and feel.

Future UK Governments could decide not to treat animals as sentient beings. We must act now to avert this unthinkable animal welfare disaster.

Please, act now: demand new legislation is in place to protect animals before the UK leaves the EU.

 

https://action.ciwf.org.uk/page/67354/action/1?ea.tracking.id=link&supporter.appealCode=CATWE_UK0920c&utm_campaign=politics&utm_source=link&utm_medium=ciwf

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Listen to Professor Snape

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by ElenaCaldera

 

Elena Caldera
thanks to ‘Burrobirra and Veritaserum (facebook page)‘

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Vitality 5

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Jan Woolf


G.B.M. (left) and Kevin Omosele (right). Photo: Jan Woolf

 

Other people.  An important part of my Covid avoidance day is what we used to call elevenses – and conversation.  Often on the phone, but better if I can get on my bike – or rather Susana Medina’s, who lent it to me (thanks Susana I’m looking after it) – and meet someone outdoors. Yesterday I met my fellow Pentameter’s writer/performer G.B.M. for coffee in West Hampstead.  We were later joined by Kevin Omosele, who works at the Keats library. They both read deep into the history of poetry as well as the moderns and contemporaries. They think about writing, where it comes from, why it hits a nerve, who with and why.  They read some of their work to me – lovely language cutting through the chug of traffic and pedestrian chatter.  Yet neither call themselves poets  ‘yet.’  I respected that ‘not yet’ as it suggests a process, that as young men they’re at the beginning of.  Café culture was all about this: conversation, ideas, and development.  Face to face, without a pheromone-zapping screen.  These are the poems.

 

IV

To His Last Young Oracle’s Old Night-Dance

 

Upon the dust, I kissed the young oracle
and slowed the cycles of ice,
and tinkered with the wheel of seasons
to grow the grail that births my might.

Dancing oracle, unwielding these nights
with sculpted taste and temperament
dreaming forth the mothering plethora
of blossoms offered to bellow
beneath the skull.

She walks like a thought that
unbolts the brain’s bustle,
and relieves the roomless ringing
to deceive damnation’s deforming
my bustling mothering might.

Again I grow in my grandeur and grief,
and sing of armless man,
armless and mirrored in this sullen fight.
Beholding nothing new, I missed
the time-slung prophet, I am now
left here waiting for old news again.

Eyes now gardened, eyes now gifted,
with tasks of gleaming thoughtless
guilds filled with hymns
the oracle flung deathward.

 

 

Kevin Omosele

 

 

After Some Time

 

You enter a dark room.
Something else is alive in there
all shrivelled up, abandoned and alone.
You pity the poor creature,

so you cover it up
and bring it into the light.

But when you finally see it
you are shocked by its ugliness,
horrified by this thing – this wounded animal,
this withered rose, this image of yourself.

It looks at you,
points at you,
accuses
you.

             You turn and run.

 

G.B.M.

 

 

 

Jan Woolf

 

 

 

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Gates Grows Global Ag Empire, Expands Large-Scale Biopiracy

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

 

 

By Vandana Shiva

Editor’s note: This is the introduction to the “Gates to a Global Empire,” a report launched by Navdanya International.

Agriculture is the culture of the land. Respecting and caring for the land has sustained societies over thousands of years. Diversity of agricultural systems have evolved in different ecological climates and across diverse biomes — from mountains to coastal areas, from deserts to rainforests.

Food and agricultural systems have evolved from the land in diversity, sustainability and freedom.

Diversity and decentralization in living systems are the basis of freedom in nature and culture, in our seeds and agricultural systems, and in our food and knowledge systems.

Nature knows no monocultures. Cultures know no homogeneity and uniformity.

This was the agriculture we inherited before industrialization took hold.

Diversity, self-organization and freedom.

Diversity is sustainability.

Indigenous communities have evolved the most ingenious farming systems down the ages. Some examples follow.

Sixty thousand years ago, Australian Aborigines cultivated rice and barley, desert raisin, wild tomatoes, yams greens, cooper’s clover, grass seeds, Nardoo, bogong moths and bunya nuts and created “the biggest estate or garden on Earth.”

Diverse indigenous peoples of the Amazon were gardeners and agroforesters, who grew crops among trees. Jennifer Watling, archaeologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, finds evidence of millions of inhabitants in the Amazon who carefully managed the soil and biodiversity, leaving both richer. “It looks a lot like agroforestry — managing the landscape, encouraging palms and probably other useful plants as well …”

In the Andes, indigenous cultures were growing peanut, cotton and squash 5,000-9000 years ago. Andean peasants of Peru and Bolivia evolved more than 4000 varieties of potatoes, grown alongside corn, quinoa, squash, and beans. The Aztecs, in 1265 AD, created floating gardens in the lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco that surrounded Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire.

Native American Indians began farming approximately 7,000 years ago. In Mesoamerica they transformed wild teosinte into the diversity of maize/corn varieties some 6000 years ago. By A.D. 1000, native American farmers had developed a complex agriculture based on three major crops — corn, beans and squash — which led to the breeding of a host of other plants providing diversity of supplemental crops.

In the Middle East, the land of the Fertile Crescent, earliest records of farming date back to 23,000 years ago. Cereals were grown in Syria as long as 9,000 years ago, while figs were cultivated even earlier; prehistoric seedless fruits discovered in the Jordan Valley suggest fig trees were being planted some 11,300 years ago.

In Asia agricultural systems evolved 40,000 years ago. The origins of rice and millet farming date to around 6,000 B.C.E. Indian indigenous peasants over time transformed a wild grass, Oryza sativa, into 200,000 rice varieties and have evolved a great diversity of crops with more than 30,000 plants and cultivated more than 10,000 species.

Creating monopolies over seed, food and agriculture

A century of chemical, industrial agriculture has destroyed the planet’s climate systems, pushed millions of species to extinction, desertified the soil and destroyed water systems.

One hundred years ago the chemicals produced by IG Farben and company (which today we know as the Poison Cartel) for use in the two world wars and concentration camps were then directed into agriculture and sold as agrichemicals. These chemicals found further fertile terrain In the 1960’s when the Green Revolution was imposed on the Third World by the World Bank, the U.S. government, and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and vast areas of monocultures wiped out thousands of years of evolutionary diversity and innovation.

Farmers seeds, evolved and bred by farmers over millennia, were gathered up and stored in newly created institutions such as the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Mexico. These institutions have today grown into the CGIAR systems which Bill Gates has now taken over as “One CGIAR” to be subsumed into his newest venture “Gates Ag One” or “One Agriculture,” towards controlling the world’s seeds. Any attempt to try and prevent this  take-over of farmers’ seeds to preserve their heritage has been bluntly prevented as in the case of India’s most eminent scientist Dr. R.H. Richaria.

Thus, we have today vast monocultures of the chemically responsive Green Revolution varieties of seed along with the conditionalities, credits and subsidies that come with them.

In the 1990’s, the Poison Cartel, having introduced chemicals in agriculture, were quick to adopt genetic engineering as a mechanism to patent seed. They freely took and patented the farmers seeds housed in the CGIAR and other gene banks, by simply adding the toxic Bt gene or the RoundUp Resistant gene.

Chito Medina, a leader in the struggle of peasants’ for Seed Sovereignty, Food Sovereignty and Knowledge Sovereignty in the Philippines outlines in his article how people’s movements are demanding the shutting down of the CGIAR institutions such as the International Rice Research Institute.

Monocultures of GMO corn, soya, cotton, and canola have spread over millions of acres. Monocultures intensified as did the use of toxic chemicals. Agriculture became decoupled from food, and crops were reduced to commodities to be used primarily as biofuel and animal feed.

Movements for Seed Freedom and Food Freedom against a globalised industrial agriculture grew stronger. Civil society marches against Monsanto and the Tribunal and People’s Assemblies against Monsanto widely made known the multinational’s relentless and innumerable toxic transgressions and violations — until its long time MoBay partner and pharmaceutical giant, Bayer, bought it up, thus conveniently taking it out of the public eye.

Long experience and research have shown that Agroecology based on Biodiversity, Seed Freedom and Food Freedom is essential to the future of food and farming.

The UN IAASTD seminal report showed that neither the Green Revolution nor GMOS could feed the world and at the same time protect the planet.

Nonetheless, blind to the thousands of years of farmers’ innovation and the biodiversity they had evolved, and dismissive of the voice of scientists and farmers, Gates continues with his vision of building an Agriculture Empire. Notwithstanding the scientific evidence of the failure of the Green Revolution, in 2006 he founded, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

Tim Wise’s contribution on AGRA in this report assesses the failure of this so called “green revolution” in Africa, which had already failed and caused more negative consequences in Asia, Latin America and the U.S.

To quote Einstein:

“A clear sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome.”

Mounting evidence shows that industrially grown and industrially processed foods contribute significantly to the chronic disease epidemic we are now witnessing everywhere. But the issue of the industrial agriculture system’s impact on health is not one which Gates is particularly concerned with.

Twenty years ago, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety was established to regulate GMOS in the interests of safety of the environment and public health. Golden Rice was one of many GMO propaganda myths the biotech Poison Cartel attempted to promote.

GMOs have a history of failure as with the first generation of genetically modified Bt Cotton and Roundup Ready crops. In 2011, India introduced a moratorium on genetically modified Bt Brinjal which Gates then took to Bangladesh. Farida Akhtar gives us the real story in Section IV.

Despite these warnings, Gates leads the way in the next step in disrupting our body’s metabolic systems and the symbiosis in the gut microbiome with his funding of industrially processed laboratory fake food — starting with his lab-made “breast milk” and “Impossible Burger.” Lab processed fake food is really about taking patents on our food, not about feeding people, as Gates and his fellow biotech friends would like us to think.

Since 2015, Gates has been swiftly expanding his empire over seed, agriculture and food, engaging in and funding large scale biopiracy.

Through digital technologies, he is voraciously mapping, patenting and pirating seeds from around the world, ignoring and eroding all international government treaties on the protection of biodiversity. And so, he continues to subvert and sabotage both farmers’ seed sovereignty and the seed sovereignty of countries.

False claims of precision and safety were made at the time for the first generation of GMOS, and today are again being made about gene editing technology.

Jonathan Latham’s article “God’s Red Pencil” shows how gene editing is by no means a precise “cut” and “paste” technology. It is scrambling the evolving tree of life and has unexpected and as yet unknown effects on organisms.

The European Court of Justice has ruled that gene edited organisms are GMOs. However, Gates is hastily pushing for deregulation with no regard for caution or potentially dangerous consequences. His “Gates Ag One” initiative has declared that time, essential to be able to assess and implement safety, is the enemy. He is rushing to impose untested seeds, foods, medicines on humanity, undermining all scientific and safety assessments, and destroying safe alternatives that have existed over thousands of years. Gates has no compunction in endangering life and people’s health in his pursuit of power and riches.

“Gates Ag One” is a clear declaration of his intent to create an empire over life and biodiversity, over food and farming, and over our daily bread.

As one humanity we cannot allow and must prevent this empire over life which builds on and reinforces the Poison Cartel’s century of  ecocide and genocide and is pushing us faster down the road towards extinction.

Choosing the path of diversity and life, as opposed to the violent path of monocultures and destruction, is our duty to the earth and future generations.

At stake is not only the biological and cultural diversity of the world, our seed freedom and food freedom, but our health and democracy, our life, our freedom.

Our very future as a species.

Vandana Shiva is the founder of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (India) and president of Navdanya International.

 

Gates Grows Global Ag Empire, Expands Large-Scale Biopiracy

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Pubs and cafes step in to help after MPs reject Rashford school meals campaign

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by ClairePalmer

PA
Oct 23rd 2020 5:31AM
 

Cafes, pubs and restaurants across the country have stepped up to offer free school meals for local children during half term, after MPs rejected a campaign started by footballer Marcus Rashford.

A vote on the measures was backed by Labour and made its way to Parliament this week, but it was defeated by 322 votes to 261.

Now dozens of hospitality businesses have shown they “stand with Rashford, not the 322”, by supporting families during the school holidays.

Among them is Andrew Mahon, who helps manage Aubergine Cafe in the Wirral, alongside his wife May. The couple are offering a free sandwich, cup of soup and piece of fruit to children over half term.

Slideshow preview image

He told the PA news agency: “My wife and I, we saw the vote in Parliament. And we were a bit dumbstruck. It seems like such an own goal by Parliament.

“They are talking about trying to balance the books, but you don’t do that by letting kids fall destitute in the middle of a national health emergency.”

Mr Mahon said for every request for help they have had, they have received more than 20 times as many offers of support, with people asking to donate money to help pay for the meals.

He said: “It’s very heartening. We weren’t expecting it.”

The acts of generosity come amid a difficult time for the hospitality industry, with many business owners struggling to cope with the effects of coronavirus restrictions on their trade.

May Mahon runs the Aubergine Cafe with her husband (Andrew Mahon/PA)

Rashford, who was recently awarded an MBE after forcing a Government U-turn on free school meal vouchers over the summer holidays, said he was “blown away” by the offers of support, and has been retweeting businesses offering free meals.

“Selflessness, kindness, togetherness, this is the England I know,” the Manchester United footballer tweeted.

“Add #ENDCHILDFOODPOVERTY to your tweets so I can track them. I will share as many as I can.”

A number of councils have also said they will offer free school meals for children.

Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson said he would fund free school meals over half term, feeding approximately 19,800 children.

Labour-led Hammersmith and Fulham Council will give every pupil in need free school meal vouchers, equivalent to a £3 Tesco meal deal per day.

Council leader Stephen Cowan said watching the vote was “cutting”.

He said: “I have seen a lot of kids who need food. I was in a school on Tuesday speaking to kids who have the free lunches now and they were explaining they have gone for days without a proper meal.

“They were very sweet kids, and then I looked at the MPs who were so callously indifferent to that and I thought, how can that be happening in the fifth richest country on Earth.

“There are so many things they spend money on, it’s a moral imperative.”

School breakfasts will be also delivered over the break to 600 pupils across the borough most in need of help.

Southwark Council leader Kieron Williams said the Government “failed, so we are stepping up”.

The London council will reallocate funds to pay for free meals over half term.

Some of the places offering support for families over half term:

– Summer House Interiors (Shrewsbury and Telford)
– Pearsons Bar (Hull)
– Castle Beach Cafe (Falmouth)
– Toast 2 Roast (St Helens)
– The Panda Cab (North Liverpool)
– Manjaros Restaurant (Middlesbrough)
– Mumtaz (Leeds)
– Berry’s Tearoom (Cumbria)
– The Rhubarb Shed Cafe (Sheffield)
– Elite on the Bail (Lincoln)
– The Marmalade Hut Ltd (Rotherham)
– Page’s Bakery Tow Law (County Durham)
– Ruddi’s Retreat (Huddersfield)
– The Vale Cafe (Rothbury)
– Warren’s Fruit and Veg (Watford)
– Jennys (Brackley)
– The Funhouse (Whitehaven)
– Jo’s Place (Wilmslow)
– Bowing Park Cafe (Shropshire)
– Green Fields Farm Shop (Telford)
– Chippy Chippy (Anglesey)
– Minikin Paint a Pot Art Cafe (Manchester)
– Babuls of Barnard Castle (Teesdale)
– The Sandwich Shop (Rotherham)
– Khandoker (Didsbury)
– Top Nosh (Hexham, Northumberland)
– Swiss Cottage Care (Ilfracombe, Devon)
– The Hawthorn (Warrington)
– El bar de tapas (Stevenage)
– The Watering Can (Liverpool)
– Laurences Tapas Bar (Blyth)
– The Pudding Pantry (Nottingham)
– Pabna Restaurant (Leek, Staffordshire)
– Barrow Community Kitchen (Barrow-in-Furness)
– Whitley Bait Sandwich and Coffee Bar (Whitley Bay)
– Astoria Bar (Urmston, Manchester)
– Belluno Italian Restaurant (Devon)
– Aubergine Cafe (Wirral)
– The Crown Inn Keynsham (Bristol)
– The Courtyard (Wigan)
– The Handsworth Inn (Sheffield)
– Taste Sandwich Bar (Liverpool)
– Baker’s (Bolton)
– Park Fish Bar (Cheshire)
– The Gingerbread House (Devon)
– The Loft Cafe Bar (Bingley)
– The Gilt Rooms (Essex)
– Olivers (Haslemere, Surrey)
– Delphine Fish and Chips (Sheffield)

Some of the councils offering support to families over half term:

– Redbridge Borough Council
– Southwark Council
– Hammersmith and Fulham Council

 

https://www.aol.co.uk/news/2020/10/23/pubs-and-cafes-step-in-to-help-after-mps-reject-rashford-school/

 

Who voted against free school meals extension? How your MP voted when Marcus Rashford campaign was defeated

See here…
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/free-school-meals-vote-who-voted-against-how-my-mp-marcus-rashford-campaign-733881

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The End of Money? Part 1 – The Cost of Everything & the Value of Nothing

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

Panic Strategies

People are realistically paranoid now, employing panic strategies in their daily lives due to the unreliability of money and threatened access to it. The end of money has been encountered many times already, through severe economic depression and hyperinflation, where money becomes practically unusable and replaced by bartering, or numerous alternative forms of exchange. This is the predictable historic progression of such circumstances and since the trading of global stock shares and financialization, can hit any country at any time. But the processes neoliberals have imposed that enriches them is a useful guide as to how society in general can empower themselves in a parallel system that replaces the necessity for money. Imagine what could be achieved. So how do we go about it? And is it necessary for monetary commerce to end?

Various writers have predicted even the end of capitalism – as a far back as Karl Marx who extrapolated the dynamics of monetary use in ‘Das Kapital’ – not as an assertion of moral or political ideology, but purely a mathematic projection of how money ultimately operates. To say no one as yet has found a replacement form of exchange that can cross boundaries the way money does is incorrect. Traders always find a way where money is scarce. So, what happens if capitalism crashes, or its consumer base disintegrates? This is something many people fear, but financialization will keep the wealthy sitting pretty, so long as political will and the environment accommodate their agendas.

The question of collapse is a real threat, but it is premature, if we first consider what capitalism would be capable of if it no longer depended upon money. This is the biggest issue that needs to be scrutinised now. Contrary to some socialist assertions, capitalism itself is not the problem, elite capitalists are. Whilst it is true, the association of value to products, currencies and assets impose a system of privilege and exclusivity, it is obvious to all that marginalisation is attributable to injustice. Not always illegality. They are two different things. So, capitalism’s ‘free-market economy’ is not free. It depends everywhere upon the ideologies of those who can afford to impose them upon the population. Capitalism itself does not do that.

Neoliberals believe even if they are the last people standing, it will continue until the planet ceases to support their lives and if it takes a reduction in the population and odds in the meantime, so what? Surely it will reduce the effect to the climate and industry by scale. Hence, protectionist policies and systematic undermining of human rights by covert tactics has made State the arbiters of corporate-imposed human misery and disempowerment. Every connotation of industry and care are subjugated by the prime objective of cost and profit. So, understandably, many would like to see the end of capitalism.

Yet such people fail to present any workable solution that isn’t equally based on moral ideology that somehow has to be adopted by all, imposed and policed. Most forms of communist, socialist and even libertarian economic systems show this approach invariably fails and becomes corrupt. Successful models remain small scale to stay manageable. But they all remain dependent upon the corrupting influence and power-dynamics of money and relationships and how it pressures and incentivises. This is to do not just with the power it affords but the core notion of the value placed upon it and the peripheral influences that constantly alter that value.

As long as any economic proposal for reform involves money, it shackles all of society to these inhibiting factors and its criminal misuse for centralised or selfish gain.

The cost of everything 

“That person appreciates the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” This is a derogatory term used to describe someone who has a short-sighted and unsophisticated evaluation of what is achievable through money. It can be said for most corporate manipulators and politicians. But in business practice and diplomacy it is a hypocritical assertion, as such complex business strategists are often well informed and fully aware of the externalities of their actions. But current neoliberal economic policies negate the true practical value of any transaction, prioritising the numerical value of the deal under consideration. It is the numerical figures that afford influence and control. Everything else is superfluous, even if the effect of the externalities of a transaction, down the line, have a negative impact that reverses its eventual profit.

The truth is as overt as the nakedness in the parable of the Emperor’s New Suit. Yet most people get caught up in the relationship they see between the figures and the power and what it gets away with. This is the reality to them. To the wealthy elite “if you have to ask the price of something, you cannot afford it.” Because they know it is simply a numbers game of Tombola. Liquidity affords debt, mobilising greater liquidity that affords greater debt. When the figures reach into the trillions, like the total of US debt, the wealthy only count in abstract figures with priority placed on what is achievable. What was once impressive in millions is now only impressive in billions. This is why the global economy and wealth of nations is a product of the grossest lie and consequently empowers the best liars and cheats. When legitimate debt, renders unprofitable business failures successful, people are no longer interested in the logic of profitable commerce or solvency, but who can callously manipulate the figures for most gain. Imagine that, if you had the means to tap into it. Most people who are ‘solvent’ are up to their eyeballs in debt. This is what we call wealth and as we know, the propagating of it caused the 2008 recession.

As of this writing, news media reports a trend in the USA of printing bumper stickers stating, “I pay more tax than Trump,” whose taxes for 2016 and 2017 amounted to $750 pa. For ten of the previous fifteen years he paid nothing. A big fat ZERO. Yet he gained a tax-rebate from the IRS of $72,900,000 running businesses with losses to the tune of millions. This is why wealth is not about money, or the value of it. It is simply about what level of oscillating numerical figures can leverage more oscillating numerical figures on calculating hard drives, not for individual economic powers but BETWEEN them. All economists will assert this is value, as even sitting doing nothing value is added to and subtracted from those figures, shifting power and influence. But currency value fluctuates within individual countries, so money’s intrinsic value is unreliable and with globalisation affects all individual national markets, regardless of independent economic policies. This is the constant struggle elite capitalists are enslaved to as automatons, constantly dancing to its tune not to be shot in the foot. Of course, they can afford to retire themselves, their families and friends from it at any time, but this kills their instincts, what they love and are good at. They’d have to find other motivations.

So the global economy and national protectionist strategies is basically laundering of numerical figures, a struggle to suppress and oppress to be the one always on top in the virtual tumble-dryer. Currently that tumble-dryer is regulated by the governors of the Federal Reserve – (a misnomer for a collection of international elite private bankers) – who, like any other bankers, can magic up numbers at will if it conforms to projections that benefit the bank eventually. That’s precisely what they do. You see a bank manager with your credible business plan and on his whim alone a number is conjured up out of thin air and abracadabra, from nowhere it appears in your account. It does not necessarily have to come from something of existing value. It can come from nothing.

Bill Gates recently declared – “we can do without banks, we don’t need them,” because he knows the peripheral legal and economic factors that inhibit the effectiveness of all these rotating figures, imposed by bankers, can be legally circumvented. This is why physical currency is preferable for primitive criminal use, black market deals and avoiding taxation; but elite capitalists can afford lawyers and accountants who know how to do the same things without cash, that are not regarded as criminal.   

The trickle-down theory was always a manufactured failure. The reason it didn’t fail the elite is because in practice it was initially a trickle-up process. Neoliberals never intended to keep their side of the bargain and trickle down profits; they could reduce labour and increase their power through financialization and still be viewed as benefactors. Capitalists for bankers, bankers for capitalists and what is not generally made public is politicians’ individual shares in this process, through party funding, lobbying and preferential contracting using tax-payers’ money. So, the figures are all that count.

But there is a realisation amongst governments and neoliberal capitalists – brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic – that a huge hole in this mechanism has opened up. More taxpayers than ever are becoming unemployed and having to depend upon philanthropic bailouts from ‘government’ money. Elite capitalists are presenting a case for even greater bailouts of their corporations on top of this, to save their ever expanding interest-earning multi million / billion dollar profits. Hence, the injustice and obscenity of how this is affecting not just the planet and its biosphere, but everyday people’s ability to clothe and feed themselves, has come home to roost in these most affluent countries. The preferential treatment by politicians is claimed to be in the interest of industry, that supposedly trickles down, but it is invariably to make friends in high places for personal retirement plans down the road, or to have a remunerative stake, whether that is a share or simply remains a private matter. Even a child can detect the trickle-down Emperor’s New Suit is a trick of con merchants.

The invisible economy

But this process can give us hope. Since neoliberals have reduced the necessity of labour and its value to minimal, it is clear they understand and exploit the value of ‘nothing.’ They have harnessed the power of nothing, through debt management and tax avoidance. Within time-sharing networks like LETS and TIME-DOLLARS, people understand the value of nothing can be linked to time and labour. It isn’t ‘nothing’ but it replaces what would otherwise be financial value even when it does not relate to any form of financial equivalence. In times of hyperinflation and economic depression, exchange without money often bears no equivalence to the monetary value of the things exchanged.

Barter would certainly become prevalent if there was a sudden global economic crash, but if there is another form of exchange that bears no equivalence of value placed on money that will economically empower every individual living, shouldn’t we be preparing for that prospect? Since it is clearly the way money operates that is the issue, is it time for the end of money? The reason there is a question mark after the title – spoiler alert – is that a parallel non-monetary economy (PNME) already exists and transforming it into an empowering system will never require the cessation of monetary commerce. Furthermore, it does not even need to conflict with it. A parallel economy that transitions away from money could actually save it for the minority who wish to stick with it; yet mobilise the entire global population with autonomous economic security without requiring a single penny of it.

The reason elite global capitalists will not bring this about is because they have Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy that they believe only money cures and they have plenty of that. The PNME, however, can cure everyone of this sickness. What would this system and ‘currency’ look like and who would bring it about?

Social-justice imperative?

Most expert appeals for economic equality insist elite capitalists adhere to some social-justice agenda, but why should they when marginalisation has provided their riches and they can misuse social-justice and climate agendas for mere rhetoric PR purposes? Even the UN uses this subterfuge as legitimate diplomacy. Some point to a reconsideration of Marx Labour Theory of Value as a good basis for equalising out wealth. Indeed, Trump blames ‘Marxists’ (his blanket term for the left to whip up patriotic anti-communist sentiment) as the current threat to the US economy. In his book there is no such thing as socialist capitalism, yet he appeals to the common masses in their vernacular as their saviour. But Marxism has already been tried and misappropriated and for the purpose of this discussion, it would be wrong to presume adopting any method proposed by Marx constitutes a Marxist agenda, or a form of communism, or socialism. This is about progression, not regression.

For many moderate left-wingers the compromise of regression to socialist agendas is preferable to any reform of the current system and they are willing to risk countless lives for it. Any such system entails imposing a moral ideology on who should be rightful owners of the means of production and full support of resurgent trades unions. The very thing neoliberalism negated. Yet in order to achieve it the moderate left must court hard-left militants amongst their ranks, to counter-balance the hard right militants appropriated by the ‘centre-right’ to swell their ranks, since democratic power relies on a minority vote from a disillusioned electorate.  

Currently, Marx’ Labour Theory of Value cannot work with money, as it necessitates on-going conflict with current powers only to re-establish centralised values and its never-ending power-dynamics, both macro and micro. Paranoid western conservative rulers within their own parties endorse fear-mongering tactics, oppression and suppression of facts, to support callous and sometimes illegal covert fiscal policies, because they believe any sharing of power means the dilution of it in a competitive economic power-grab. This is what they count on their electorate to swallow, both psychologically and practically, compromising their values, as money is the key deciding factor.

So the questions arise: can society appropriate what was successful for neoliberals, to support social and industrial reforms and conservation of our ecosystem? Can they do it without the same peripheral inhibitors and reliance on centralised agendas and control? Is there a way to invert the neoliberal process without needing money?

The value of nothing

Capitalists already exploit free labour to boost profits, so the key to subverting their objectives is to offer them a way to exploit it for more profitable economic incentives than money can ever offer them. The 99% need to incentivize elite capitalists to do what is best for them and for all, by offering them a market that supersedes monetary capitalism. It only does this by generating unimaginable profits from nothing, but crucially zero in monetary terms and inaccessible to the monetary economy. Then society control the terms of its benefits. How? For this, it is worth reassessing some aspects of Marx’ Labour Theory of Value.

When Marx predicted the end of capitalism, he also pointed much further to the prospect where people’s values and qualities became the ascendant value above currency. Most will assert a form of altruism and philanthropy is necessary and will reflect back to initiatives that were based on such – National Insurance; the welfare state, international treaties, forming of the NHS, race-discrimination law, ‘end’ of slavery etc. Such things are now worn as mere appropriated insignias for covert private enterprises, under conservative agendas that hoodwink the public to pilfer their pockets. Ideology is not a currency that alters reality any more, yet the extent of global social disquiet shows it is more prevalent amongst the general population than ever before. But even if what Marx predicted was initially related to his moral ideology, what he pointed to is a potential beyond that to a purely humanist calculation and right; something that would ultimately replace any necessity for monetary consideration.
___

Marx’s core question of why the labour force should provide the rich their wealth but not benefit from it is as relevant as it ever was. Part 2 of this discussion will continue to analyse the proposal of a new Labour Theory of Value, (a progression of Marx intention, but primarily capitalist) – and how it will relieve us once and for all time of the dependency upon money and value. It will allow the 99% not only to take back control of capitalism and our futures, but turn any remaining monetary economy solvent in the bargain.

 

Kendal Eaton. http://achanceforeveryone.com

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NOT DEAD STILL DREAMING

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

It was a door I barely stepped through
and a hole in the air I hardly skirted
and a dream I touched with wand-like fingers.

What was I looking for? Danger, oblivion
or a sexual thrill? It took me into the strangest rooms,
my mind and flesh a laboratory.

Others, I know, went further.
I dabbled then drew back to a bed-sit in Plymouth,
so far from the double-wanded orders.

The Rent-a-Beasts in Oxford Town Hall’s chambers
that autumn afternoon in 1987
must be middle-aged now, their cravats long-mothballed.

And splendiferous Suster is dead, his evangelical rant
in praise of Thelema resounding
only in occasional memory

and the Scarlet Woman with whom I conversed
on the train back to Leamington has gone into grey-shade.
A door has slammed on which a frieze was painted.

Still, I listen to Carl McCoy and the undertones of Crowley
buzzing under snare-drums.
‘We’ve remedies from the ancient gods

to heal the morals of our shadows’
says McCoy, in his jet-black growl, and I know
that I bottled it… wisely. Got out while the going was godless.

 

 

Norman Jope

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The Next Stage of Covid

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by ClairePalmer

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THE LAKE ITSELF

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

Anderson wasn’t sure if any heat came from the lake itself. Lazy bubbles of gas would surface as he trudged its dull circumference. But everything here suggested heat, accumulated over millennia, exhaled onto his pale face. 

He was exiled, not hugely unhappy. The entire culture operated this way: fierce dialogue; joyless, but febrile, debate…then a roundup of anyone who diverged from the pre-agreed consensus. 

Most television programmes were a litany of the latest arrests. 

The treatment used extreme measures, to turn those criminals into ‘blacks’. The combined academic, political and artistic worlds had decided mankind needed returning to a fabled African paradise. People could, if they chose, willingly accept. But any opposition necessitated enforced skin change. 

High above, he knew there were caves, where some of mankind’s earliest tracings had been found. 

In truth, they were at a level any six-year old could achieve. Yet queues of art historians and writers wilted in the sun – desperate to pay homage – in desiccated lines stretching to the lake itself.  

Solar noon, meridian sun. 

He needed to get back soon, for his session.      

INTO MY HEART 

The sessions themselves were extraordinarily painful. Every skin cell had to be swapped, requiring sixty drip infusions – via a PICC line – lasting five minutes each. 

Five hours, every fortnight.  

Throughout, he was shown images of his donor: an enormous LA drug dealer, celebrated as a secular saint by white liberals, after choking to death on a chicken burger when his mansion was raided. 

For Anderson, the greater suffering was mental. 

During the process, he was forced to recount numerous anecdotes and long-buried memories, from his childhood. 

These were to be made more ‘diverse’, by converting his past into that of a black youth, raised in London – Tottenham, Streatham or Harlesden, as he understood. 

For some reason, he could do this while remembering, yet concealing, his annual holidays with a distant uncle in the blue Shropshire hills. 

He would recite the obvious poem to himself, as various beepers signalled switches in the chemicals careering through his system.  

With practice, he could time it so that the final line – ‘And cannot come again’ – coincided with each new toxin. The five minutes allowed him to slow down every syllable, yet still routinely answer the nagging voices, rewriting his life.

It was to be his only victory, but he never once divulged this land of lost content.  

 

 

 

Paul Sutton

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Domestication

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

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the beasts in our zoo through the keyhole.
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remain in your vehicle. A lion born in captivity
has recently been reported missing.

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fourth in the queue. Apologies for the delay.
All our operators are busy at present. 
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someone will be with you shortly. For information
in your own language, access online tutorials.

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third in the queue. The operators hear
shouting and screaming outside the call centre,
high alert. Please remain in your vehicle
and lock the doors. Our clients’ welfare is
very important except in emergency situations
when staff come first. To survive the jungle,
you have to become animal.

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Maria Stadnicka
Illustration: Claire Palmer

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Untitled Poem

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

 

What are we to do with this new sense of
narcissistic decadence – there is a
sense of disparity – I intend to
keep these lights on. This is a new
experiment with the body: ‘oh no
these aren’t youthful indiscretions, they’re
middle age indiscretions.’ I have become
art-deco and baroque, regardless we
push this experiment forward: what do
you do with a man who spends the morning
listening to Bechet del Ray – I’m a
Dandy Lion! The perishable nature
of the emotions: why read an erotic
tale, when you can live an erotic tale.
She said: ‘I hate driving in the rain – but
I didn’t mind, I got laid that evening,
after it.’ And now we begin to write
the post-script of her life. This is nothing
other than an interzone: the weekend turns
to reading to keep the mind fuelled – Warhol
turns out be a futurist after
all. I do not wish to talk of the dead, I
only wish to talk of the living and
life: and so September begins – is this
what life comes to, just this simple piece of
paper. What is the sense of a man
suddenly released from his moral duty?
Everything coalesces down to one
minimal event horizon we all
pass over, and then carry on new lives.
There is always beauty in an age,
regardless of its temperament; with a
single line there is purity, with a
single line and purity there is peace.
Why is it I always feel stuck between
the saint and the sinner? I feel like
strange bouts of paradise – I want to
wither into something new. It is time
to go off the old road map and explore
a new territory. I’m thinking of
starting a new scheme in which you could ‘Adopt
A Psychosis.’ On the other hand,
I wonder if I could ‘Pimp My Psychosis.’
I spend a part of the afternoon listening
to Charles Mingus: I have this feeling that
the rest of the year may get a tad more
bohemian than usual – is this
total self-annihilation, or a
new phoenix rising? This is a savage
fight against entropy, I just feel like
becoming whole once more, to push through this
darkness into a new bright light. In this
box there was everyone’s engagement and
wedding rings – over a one hundred
years of love. I think I have a Dionysian
narcissistic impulse? Maybe in this
house there are far too many ghosts and
ectoplasm: now I know what hatred
sounds like. I have never known such a range
of emotions which thunder through my body
in one hour – I am a creative
reaction to the world. More threats congeal
through interior walls: everything in
life travels through the self – the new thinking
is how far can one push the new project.
Today the ship set sail for other lands.

 

 

Nick Ingram

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GORDON HASKELL: JUST ANOTHER NIGHT AT HARRY’S BAR

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

A previously unpublished interview in memory

of Gordon Haskell: 27 April 1946-15 October 2020

 

‘EASY LISTENING…?’

This might be the ‘New Roscoe’ Leeds LS7. But tonight it has become a virtual ‘HARRY’S BAR’ where the lost and lonely come to ‘listen to the jazz’. And it’s Gordon Haskell they’ve come to see, a muso who resembles some grizzled Beat Generation poet in his brown leather jacket and a black trilby pulled low. And his music is like poetry too – to paraphrase Eddie Izzard, only with more notes and less words. But then, some of the words also work as poetry. ‘What does it matter if it’s three or four? I still can’t make sense of it all.’ His face is a jigsaw that hasn’t been put together quite right. His career’s a bit like too.

‘There’s this term ‘Easy Listening’. It’s sort-of sneered-at, isn’t it?’ he considers carefully, drawing slowly on his cigarette. ‘But what is the opposite of that… ‘Hard Listening’? Why should we equate ‘Hard’ listening with something that’s good? And another word that keeps cropping up when people talk about “How Wonderful You Are” is ‘simple’. But it’s so very much HARDER to write simple. It’s very hard to write a song like “How Wonderful You Are”. I don’t get it. I really don’t get it.’ Probably BBC demographic repositioning is responsible. At first it threatened to make Radio Two a wasteland of Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, but bizarrely this also had the accidental side-effect of making it Britain’s most-listened-to station, and a strategic chart lift-off point for Soft-Rock ‘Easy Listening’ acts like Shania Twain, the Mavericks, and the Corrs. And ironically, Gordon Haskell – one-time member of the Fleur De Lys Mod-squad, the psychedelic trippy Rupert’s People, and Classic Prog-Rockers King Crimson, who also became its beneficiary. Especially Johnny Walker’s late-travel-time chat-slot which championed his “How Wonderful You Are” all the way up to a 2001 Christmas no.2 – just behind Robbie Williams & Nicole Kidman’s “Something Stupid”. True, his subsequent material hasn’t achieved quite the same high-profile level of recognition, but at least now they all know his name.

‘If – by ‘Easy Listening’, they mean ‘Easy on the ear’,’ he continues, chewing the concept around now, ‘that actually means nobody is thinking about it. ‘Cos the message behind “How Wonderful You Are” is pretty deep. It is reminding you of your inner potential. It is saying ‘you’ – the listener, ‘you’ the reader of this interview, are wonderful. I’m not interested in ‘art’. I’m interested in great songs. Songs which people remember and which give them pleasure. I’m not interested in what the critic’s idea of art is. Art to me is beauty. The study of beauty. That’s what mystics say. That’s what spiritual people say. Modern critics say that art is anything that disturbs. Something that shocks. So they classify the Sex Pistols as art. But they are just opportunists. And they create a bad example for people to swallow-up. What the hell does listening to the Sex Pistols tell you? That the world is a terrible place? You see that on the news every six o’ clock. You don’t need to be informed by a Pop group that the world is a terrible place…’

But surely Punk was a vital explosion of adolescent energy? And “Circles” by 1960s proto-Freakbeat band Fleur De Lys – with a teenage Gordon Haskell playing bass, has damn-near pre-Punk energy-levels? ‘Well – yes. That’s a balanced view’ he concedes warily. ‘OK. I’m still working on that.’

‘CIRCLES …’

Gordon Haskell started out ‘as green as the trees I grew up with’ he writes on the sleeve of his ‘Sail In My Boat’ album (Voiceprint, 1997). ‘But if I hadn’t been cheated, kicked, walked over, chewed and spat out, I might never have written “Time Only Knows” – and I’m glad I did’. But then – if any of those early records had become the huge hits they could well have become, then the entire course of his life would have been different. ‘I’m not sure. I think this was always meant to be my destiny.’ He sounds unconvinced. But check the Record Collector magazines, those early singles are currently worth ridiculous prices. ‘They’re fetching good money, yes. £200 for the Fleur De Lys single “Circles”” he agrees ruefully. Written by Pete Townshend, with ‘HIP YOUNG GUITAR-SLINGER’ Jimmy Page playing the session, and its sound-compression levels cranked up so high the reverb-OD warps the speakers, “Circles” is a collectable piece of Pop-Psyche sonic-overload from as long ago as March 1966. But Gordon is also an integral part of the trippy psychedelic Rupert’s People – for more well-respected singles, including “Dream In My Mind” with its solid morphine-shots of Gordon’s bass, now collected onto the cult ‘Acid Drops, Spacedust And Flying Saucers’ box-set assembled by ‘Mojo’ magazine. At that time ‘I was wearing big fur coats and flares with high-heel boots’ he recalls. ‘We’d wander down Portobello Road and everyone would be taking those strange chemicals popularised by Timothy Leary. There was a real feeling that this was a special time, that something was happening – and it was happening for Rupert’s People! But we were too hip for our own good. We even refused to promote our own singles.’

‘Yet when things did start going global – as they did with King Crimson, it’s embarrassing to be well-known around the world, and yet still be poverty-stricken!’ Ah yes, King Crimson! Gordon session-guests for Robert Fripp, and is then invited to join the band in time to work on ‘In The Wake Of Poseidon’, which soon climbs to no.4 on the album chart, and he stays on through to the ‘Lizard’ album. Viewing King Crimson from the outside it seems to have been an impressively serious and musicianly outfit. ‘No. It was fake,” he says abruptly. ‘It was business-like. His (Robert Fripp’s) eye was on the money. It’s very easy to blind people with technicalities and science. You can fool people with a lot of gymnastics. But you can learn that out of a book. You can’t learn how to write “How Wonderful You Are” – or “If I Were A Carpenter” out of a book.’ Strange Days. After he quits Crimson, he toured as part of Tim Hardin’s trio. But by then the doomed writer of achingly beautiful songs “Black Sheep Boy”, “Reason To Believe” – and “If I Were A Carpenter”, was coming off heroin, ‘sleeping on people’s floors. Sleeping with people’s wives. But Tim, to me, is what being a real artist is all about.’ Then Gordon gets to play in Cliff Richard’s backing band – and why not? Even the mighty Van Morrison couldn’t resist the opportunity of working with Britain’s first-ever home-grown Rock ‘n’ Roll Pop Idol.

‘Sure, I HAVE done a lot of work, but I’ve always been robbed, by people who are selfish and who don’t care. If I’d been paid for all the sales of all the records that my name is on, I needn’t have worried. But I was robbed and never received one cent from anything I’ve done. So I’ve always had concerns that I was going to have to adjust to a life that was essentially that of a hobo. Where you’re singing literally for your supper. I was troubadouring around Europe. I lost my house. I lost my wife. I lost my children. And yet my girlfriend at the time said ‘you’re very lucky, ‘cos you’re making people happy.’ She was good. She showed me that yes, we are lucky people. My brother – on the other hand, was a tax VAT-man, on a comfortable salary, with a house, raising his children in a proper fashion, but he spent his entire life making people miserable! It does seem a little unfair sometimes!’

He tilts the trilby back, revealing a resilient stubble of iron-grey to white hair. ‘And that’s what turned the writing around, because instead of saying ‘poor me’, I started saying ‘Folks, if it wasn’t for you, I’d be on the scrap heap’. I’d reached the point where I had accepted my life. And I was grateful. There are a lot of good people out there. All you hear is bad things. You see the garbage, the crime, the violence. OK – so, at a wild guess let’s call it what – 20%? 30% bad? That leaves us with 50% fantastic people out there. That’s thirteen million people really worth caring about…’ These simplified figures don’t add up, mathematically. It leaves a dark-matter mass of people unaccounted for. But music supersedes maths. ‘So I started turning the lyrics around, into looking at how wonderful people are. The good people…’

‘HOW WONDERFUL YOU ARE…’

Originality? Pah – remixes are proof that there are no new songs left to write. Right? Wrong. For Gordon Haskell there are solo albums. ‘It’s Just A Plot To Drive You Crazy’ (Voiceprint, 1992), and ‘Butterfly In China’ (Blueprint, 1998) which includes Gordon’s version of the Beatles’ “Things We Said Today” alongside his own “Test Drive”, a ‘pre-Margaret Thatcher electric Blues’ which he performs tonight with shimmering slide, to enthusiastic response. ‘Towards the end of that period I was actually making good money. I was playing five pubs, regularly. I had my own faithful – three hundred fans, they fed and clothed me. And I had the days free to write songs or whatever. Then this arrived… just in the nick of time.’

‘This’ – of course, was the 3:56-minutes of oozing lyricism which is “How Wonderful You Are”, which soon becomes the most-requested track EVER played on Radio Two. And the ‘Harry’s Bar’ album (East-West, 2002) on which it appears, embellished by the tastefully precise drums of Sam Kelly, Pete Stroud’s bass, and Paul Yeung’s rich sax. It’s an album that stretches from the authentically battered country of “Freeway To Her Dreams” to the easy jazzy swing of “A Little Help From You”, to the James Taylor timelessness and ripples of guitar enlivening “All The Time In The World”. It flaunts the kind of verbal-musical dexterity and assurance you only gather from decades of playing. This is slickly clever stuff. ‘Thanks to god for taking me on the road less travelled’ he comments on the liner notes. ‘It was never about money.’ ‘I’ve been a singer, songwriter all my life’ he confides now. ‘But I don’t always necessarily want to be just that. So I’ve had my hit. And now it’s a bit like – we all have the potential to be many things. I want to be more than what I’ve been…’

‘You need to be informed by music that there is an infinite amount of possibilities for all of us. And you don’t get that on the news. You get terror on the news. You get killing. You get crime and urban decay. Critics say that ‘real’ artists reflect and draw from all that. But you don’t need to. That’s negative. That’s saying ‘the world is coming to an end. It’s terrible.’ Well – OK, but how is that going to help you? You’ve got to go to work tomorrow. You’ve got to feed your children. So why not be uplifted, instead of pushed down? You’ve got to find something in music that you don’t get anywhere else. This whole thing about art is upside-down in my book. And I’m the only one saying it. So I don’t expect to get any support. But I know I’m right – for me. If beauty was encouraged we’d have a better society.’

Surely that level of optimism is a legacy of all that 1960s idealism? ‘Not so. It goes way back before that. I’ve read nineteenth-century books which say exactly the same. In fact, probably Jesus said it too. There’s always been music. There’s always been angels playing harps. Music, and the spirituality of music, is the closest you’ll ever get to god. I’m no virtuoso on guitar. But Jazzmen understand what I’m talking about. Music is harmony. Not disharmony. Music is being in tune. Not being flat or sharp. A band playing well together is in harmony. While a person who is out of tune with themselves, is somebody who needs a psychiatrist…!’

He could be right. Listen to the jazz in Harry’s Bar. And like he sings it on ‘Wonderful’ – ‘some things are built to last, we’ve only just begun, this show will run and run…’

 

 

 

 

BY ANDREW DARLINGTON

Website: www.andrewdarlington.blogspot.com)

 

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BORN TO BE WILD

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Rupert Loydell

Underland, Robert MacFarlane (Penguin)
Horizon, Barry Lopez (Vintage)
Lines Made by Walking, John Luther Adams (Cold Blue Music)

Robert MacFarlane is too macho for my taste, he is always overtly present in his own work, and always tries too hard to be what I can only call ‘poetic’, in a clumsy and overwritten way. In Underland, as in other books of his I have read, the author postures and stays centre stage throughout, leaving little space for the world he is supposedly exploring and reporting on.

I can’t put it better than a writer and smallholding friend did when were discussing the book. She wrote: ‘I’ve never been keen on MacFarlane because of the way he uses people: he gets someone to talk to him about things, to show him things, to take him places and then he trots out all their ideas/travel /experience as if it were all his own. When he does mention “help” he doesn’t acknowledge how substantive it is: that without these people he’s ignorant.’ For me this is because he is too busy writing about himself.


Barry Lopez is a more generous and readable ‘travel writer’ (though that term does him a disservice) who despite also being very much in his own writing, counters this by constantly questioning and informing himself, looking closely, seeking to understand the world around him and his and our place in it. I found Horizon hard work, however, and realised that I much prefer the writing he classifies as fiction, though to be honest it is often hard to see why these are not non-fiction, so full of information and wisdom are they. Presumably there is less science and more creative writing, perhaps more mixing up of people and place. Horizon is too dry, offering way too much science and archaeology, and is more interesting when the author settles into where he is, reports and stops to wonder, asking the kind of questions this reader might also ask, and shares his wide-ranging scientific and cultural reference points.

I was delighted to note that one of these reference points is John Luther Adams, an American composer who for many years lived and composed in Alaska, before moving to New York City in more recent years. Luther Adams’ music is rooted in minimal textures and drones, which uses slowly evolving and sustained tones and musical phrases to evoke desert, wilderness, and wild, empty spaces. Lines Made by Walking contains two compositions played by the JACK Quartet: the title work, a half hour piece in three movements and ‘Untouched’, which is slightly shorter and also in three sections.

Luther Adams’ shifting musical abstractions tell us more about landscape than many books of science and travel. His compositions are extraordinarily contemplative and calming; complex and careful invocations of place which reflect how small we are in the grand scheme of things.

 

 

 

 

Rupert Loydell

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Ov by Kevin Patrick McCann

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor


Kevin Patrick McCann is an excellent poet, and has recently written a novel for young adults.

We first meet ten year old Patrick on his birthday, and we learn that he has terrible nightmares and is a sensitive loner who likes making up stories in his head, rather than playing with the other kids. His mum worries, but the doc says it’s just a faze. His Uncle Liam talks to him about Irish magic, and suggests that if he knows he’s dreaming, then he could actively wish for other things to happen. A small cat turns up to his new house, and also an eccentric artist, who sells Pat a painting of a panther, which Uncle Liam thinks will be perfect for seeing off Nightmares.

A while later, Pat goes on a school nature ramble in the local woods, when the cat re-appears, and he follows it off the path and strange things happen. He’s flying blind into the mist, a panther snarls, snowflakes fall, and he encounters a small, thin, pale boy, who says his name is Of No Importance, Ov for short. When it’s time for Pat to go, Ov shows him how to spin back to his own world, and the nature ramble.

It’s an unsettled time at home for Pat, and he is drawn to being with Ov, who lives in a fairy rath on the other side of the fog. They go back to the past, to the big house in the woods and meet the owner, whom they see as a boy and as a man. They see the manifestation of malice, feeding on cruelty and fear. The man seems wicked, so will they help him? More importantly, there’s a terrifying evil entity abroad, who enslaves the dead and is looking for a human host. Patrick and Ov need to embark on a rescue mission to Somewhere in the Other Place.

This is a gorgeous book, and sometimes quite frightening. Yes, it’s a fantasy adventure story, but like all good writing, it’s also about the realms and lessons of love, forgiveness, fear, trust, inner child healing, and the need to toughen up through the challenges of life. A great story for all children, especially those who are eccentric or sensitive, troubled or bullied.

 

Claire Lewis Victor

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THE ELUSIVE ELEMENT

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by David Erdos

                                                                       

Reviewing PERKELT’S new album AIR AND FIRE (Perkelt Ltd, 2019)

 

From plaintive folk to the soar of an irish fiddle
Perkelt’s perfect music refreshes the western shore
From the east; as musicians both Czech and Celt contain
Air and Fire in this sublime album in which each element
Becomes sweet. Robin and Parakeet charms as separate
Songbirds enchant us, with Stephan Honc’s dextrous guitar
And soft singing and Paya Lehane’s soul spun voice,

Dave Maurette’s dundun drums, and Duncan Menzies
Miasma of fiddle, Lehane’s flute, and recorder and other
‘Rhythm makers’ deliver through sound the heart’s choice.
Morana extends their remit, capturing sky and cloud somehow,
While Little Prayer’s invocation and Honc’s word swirl
Chases birds. That Lehane serves with a voice that seems
To come straight from heaven, along with recorder

Moving through patterns played as fast as the sounds
God has heard. Air and Fire appears like a bank of cloud
Across landscape; the guitar arcs and covers the shadows
And light of Honc’s hands. Notes as transport, that recorder
Sets into motion, spinning us on towards beauty anyone
With an ear to the heart understands. Menzies’ fiddle cavorts.
Maurette spaces silence. The threads of sound claim us

And then warm us too as song soothes. What a cleansing.
How clear is the aim of the music. Song as sea, sky and country
From Eastern Europe to Eire each rhythm and sense truly move.
As the Celtic wheel spurs, in ecstatic travel the speed and need
For this music becomes all the more real. Waterflies sounds
Like proof, as Paya’s voice and jew’s harp call towards us.
Under the spell of her singing anyone bound is soon healed.

We learn how to feel through these songs as each aspect
Steals us away from the mundane and on towards
An entirely spiritual coast, in which the Dance of Ghosts
Is witnessed and even indulged in, as traditional Ireland
Casts shadows on the kind of truth we fear most;
That ours is not the ideal, and so these songs become
Timeless, the dextrous thread of recorder knitting the present

Air to the past. As we move across time powerful chords
And notes underpin us, creating fresh fabric to warm
And to clothe and to last. I’ll Be Right Back! Promises
And also delivers; Folk and funk find an echo in the ancient
Style the piece shapes. From old drinking song to seal
For seduction this piece has the power that only a kiss
Truly shapes. When the Water is Pure shimmers in,

Speaking of a romance long relinquished, in which the song’s
Story legends away, sounding royal. Betrayal concludes this enticing
Album, but this is a form of betrayal to which each listener
Should be loyal. Perkelt are perfect artists who know
That the muse is made to be captured. There is Clannad here.
There is Planxty. There is Nic Jones and Anne Briggs.
And then there is some lost ancient air that the force

Of this fire siblings; an elusive ideal music chases
And artfully claims. The soul jigs. And then it reclines,
To open up once more for you. So, ride on air
And dreams. Forge new fires.  For this is a record
That eases trespasses and teaches all
Who have been hurt

To forgive.

 

David Erdos October 19th 2020     
Live photos: Anouk Pross-Oosterhuis

 
 
 

 

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If you lose your voice

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

 

If you lose your voice, where does it go?

(Every night he still wakes up screaming)

If you lose your mind how will you know?

(Polish and spit, boots glassily gleaming)

If the soil is barren nothing will grow,

(Hung on the wire he’s half-gutted and screaming)

If you lose your voice where does it go?

(Can’t you see their bayonets gleaming?)

If you lose your mind how will you know?

(Can’t you hear their barrage screaming?)

If the soil is barren nothing will grow,

(A Bomber’s Moon is indifferently gleaming)

If you lose your voice where does it go?

If you lose your mind, how will you know?

 

 

 

 

                                      Kevin Patrick McCann
                                     Illustration Nick Victor

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Don’t Flop Rap Battle [REMATCH]

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

OGMIOS VS HARRY BAKER

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OTHER VOICES CALL US

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor


            In this the mystery: green mannerisms flicker cast-iron lightning across lace skies high over the city. We are not far from The Gates of Paradise; yet another message greets us as we arrive.
            Hypnotic guesswork is not enough to go on if we are to penetrate this labyrinth of darkness where your hysterical works dominate the minds of the rabble in the streets. This is all below acceptable levels, at least as we try to answer for the blue clouds suffocating the world – the season has opened – the doors have closed – it is a tissue of lies. The island drowns in the blood of reason.
           No – Nothing may exist.
           No – there are no waves.
           No – there are only memories.
           After sunset, the mystery; dark winged hyacinths fly away fluttering crystals behind my eyes.
          Teeth, breasts, hair, cats, umbrellas, cars, planets, mirrors, open airspace, tree-trunks, acid, windows… all defy the ultimate weight of time with a hideous quiet that flies in the face of fear. A ferocious purity incinerates your revolution in a lead-lined crucible of fire. Fragile sensibilities give way. There are only twenty-four hours…only…
          The Old Lion struggles out into the sun.
No more peace. No more. No more.
         Under the influence of my waking mind people in the sky have bombarded the village with mauve clouds. But now I look back over my shoulder. Other voices call us.
Skulls and princes move quietly, they have much in common.
        The landscape gasps a bitter irony, black birds hover low, preparing us for another life. We clash in The Temple of the Masses, eventually burrowing underground to take cover from reality and evade the rescuers. Treason walks behind the sun, afraid of the future, in love with menace, while a fatherless hand grasps the world by the throat uttering oracles and slogans.
       Survive in the rain from the fountains high above the city.
       The heart, the eye beyond self, is drained, listening to those other voices, those other cries. This space is somehow a new place to love or die.
       Once, or even twice, everything collapsed beneath the sea. Dead birds fall close to your bed, on the beach in the morning, enclosing us once and for all in their desperate embrace.
       Unnoticed, another cold essence from abstract space, denied existence by this ritual of lawless night, transforms itself into a shadow of disunity…there are only twenty-four hours…

 

 

A.C. Evans

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Remembering John Lennon and the UK underground counter-culture

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor


 (Artwork: Pip Pickles)

 

Some thoughts about John in these Covid times…from Alan Dearling

Many of my mates and co-workers from various times were centrally involved with the development and blossoming of the UK’s underground music, media and arts scenes. I was on the periphery (I was just getting ready for my university mis-education!)  and became much more involved from about 1968 onwards.  Among the early ‘movers and shakers’ were my two friends, Dave Robins and Graham Keen – both sometime editors of ‘international times’. Graham was significant photographer of that time – the mid to late ‘60s as flower-power and hippy ideologies overtook his more Bohemian world of jazz. But he was there at the opening of the Indica Gallery which Paul McCartney rather than John Lennon cofounded. You can see Graham’s pic of Barry Miles, John Dunbar, Marianne Faithful, Peter Asher and Paul, to the left of Terence Pepper who curated Graham Keen’s ‘1966 and All That’ photographic exhibition.


But to put the 1966 Indica Gallery and Yoko Ono’s show there in context, here’s

Paul (in the Beatles’ ‘Anthology’):

“People were starting to lose their pure pop mentality and mingle with artists. We knew a few actors, a few painters, we’d go to galleries because we were living in London now. A kind of cross-fertilisation was starting to happen.

While the others had got married and moved out to suburbia, I had stayed in London and got into the arts scene through friends like Robert Fraser and Barry Miles and papers like the ‘international times’. We opened the Indica Gallery with John Dunbar, Peter Asher and people like that. I heard about people like John Cage, and that he’d just performed a piece called 4’ 33” (which is completely silent) during which if someone in the audience coughed, he’d say, ‘See?’ Or someone would boo and he’d say, ‘See? It’s not silence – it’s music’.

I was intrigued by all of that. So those things started to be part of my life. I was listening to Stockhausen, one piece was all little plink-plonks and interesting ideas. Perhaps our audience wouldn’t mind a bit of change, we thought, and anyway, tough if they do! We only ever followed our own noses – most of the time anyway. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was one example of developing an idea.

I always contend that I had quite a big period of this before John really got into it, because he was married to Cynthia at that time. It was only later when he went out with Yoko that he got back into London and visited all the galleries.”


But this was the time and place, the Indica Gallery, when John first saw Yoko’s work (photo: Graham Keen), met her, and became gradually in thrall. The late 1960s was like that. A time of heady optimism, social upheaval and ‘dreams’.  And the underground press in the UK, first with ‘international times’ was launched on 15 October 1966 at The Roundhouse at an ‘All Night Rave’ featuring Soft Machine and Pink Floyd. Here’s what is says in ‘Wikipedia’:

“The event promised a ‘Pop/Op/Costume/Masque/Fantasy-Loon/Blowout/Drag Ball’ featuring steel bands, strips, trips, happenings, movies… The launch was described by Daevid Allen of Soft Machine as ‘one of the two most revolutionary events in the history of English alternative music and thinking.’ The IT event was important because it marked the first recognition of a rapidly spreading socio-cultural revolution that had its parallel in the States.”

Barry Miles takes up the story:

“It started at 11 p.m., the Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine played and everyone was given a sugarcube as they entered. People were still arriving at 3 a.m.”



John quickly became a fan of the underground media. In fact, throughout his sadly shortened life he fought for the underdog, the oppressed, and against war, capitalism, out-dated drugs’ laws, censorship, popular and less popular causes ranging from support for the Black Panthers and the IRA, to John Sinclair, jailed for possession of two marijuana cigarettes. But at times it was messy, John was wonderfully naïve. Despite the conflicting pressures of co-running the idealistic, but doomed business empire, known as Apple Corp, he wanted to be part of the ‘revolution’. He was featured in ‘international times’ in a rather wonderful advertisement attempting to recruit new talent to the label. A very mixed message regarding fame/money/talent!

‘Miles’ reminds us: “With very few exceptions, underground papers were non-commercial; written by and existing only to serve their community. The staff often did not get paid, no one made any profits. The people who made the papers created communities and a culture, and thus shaped the identity of each of the papers. A lot of IT’s readers smoked marijuana, and some of them took LSD. As the British counter-culture grew and developed, IT became the chief outlet for news of the alternative lifestyle with articles on ley lines, numerology, Arthurian legends, Eastern mysticism, Tim Leary and his cohorts, macrobiotics, vegetarianism, ecology, communal living and of course drugs.”

John Lennon was frequently featured in both ‘international times’ and Richard Neville’s ‘Oz’. And the Beatles helped support the underground media by placing adverts for their albums in the papers.

John Peel’s career was virtually created by ‘Beatlemania’ over in the USA. By becoming an instant Liverpool and Beatles’ expert, he started work in the US, post- a short period in the army. Peel’s ‘Perfumed Garden’ column in ‘it’ and programme of the same name on Radio London in 1967 were much loved. Along with his colleague, Kenny Everett, they absolutely championed the new psychedelic Beatles. Miles suggests that, “…Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’s first play reduced Peel to tears, and became an essential part of the Perfumed Garden playlist; its atmosphere, a mixture of psychedelic strangeness and images drawn from everyday British life, was reflected in Peel’s presentation style, alternately dreamy and down-to-earth. As a Liverpudlian, he sought to distance himself from the fashionable cliques of ‘Swinging London’, hoping that his programme, its ethos expressed in the Beatles’ song, ‘All You Need Is Love’, would appeal to a wider audience.”

Peel wrote regularly for ‘it’ and in 1968 according to the Beatles’ Fandom page on the web they published a somewhat mysterious ‘Memo to J.L.’ – but I cannot locate it – despite a fairly serious search on the internet!  John Lennon certainly was a guest on Peel’s ‘Night Ride’ on 11 December 1968. Less known, perhaps, is the fact that John Lennon also provided financial backing for a re-launch of ‘international times’ in 1974.

Both ‘international times’ and ‘Oz’ were regularly harassed and raided by the police. In fact, Oz magazine was at the centre of the longest obscenity trial in British history in 1971, after it was raided by the obscene publications division of the Metropolitan Police.

Felix Dennis, Jim Anderson and Richard Neville were charged with conspiring to corrupt the morals of the young after the magazine printed an issue curated by a group of school children, which included a rather naughty and sexually explicit parody of the cartoon, Rupert Bear. The Friends of Oz campaign group was established and The Elastic Oz Band was formed.  ‘God Save Us’ featured John Lennon and Yoko Ono as part of their fund-raising protest over the trial.

Again quoting Barry Miles, he provides a link between those heady times in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s with 2020:

“But I think that there is a lot of brave journalism out there, mostly on the net, including Wikileaks (despite what has been happening recently with Assange). The fact that the police feel it is necessary to have undercover agents in the students’ movement, in the animal rights movement, and presumably in any left wing radical groups, shows that there is still a spirit of dissent in Britain (I don’t follow the USA closely enough any more to say what’s happening there). Not everyone in Britain has become a mindless consumer and I think there is only so far that you can push people, even if they are being brainwashed by the right-wing press. Maybe we will see the return of the legendary ‘London Mob’ and people will carry Gove and Hunt and Johnson’s heads through the streets on pikes. After Trump getting in and Britain voting to leave Europe anything can happen, even the most unlikely. I am pleased to see that IT is, in fact, still publishing. There was even a paper edition a few months ago, so 50 years on the old underground is still putting out roots.”

The UK’s underground press was a major force for counter-cultural change. At its height International Times was printing 44,000 copies and each copy was often read by four or five people. Oz, in the ‘60s, was selling about 30,000 and a great deal more during the obscenity trial of 1971. John Lennon and Paul McCartney played a significant role.

Another quirky episode in John and Yoko’s life maybe has a tenuous link with ‘international times’ and the underground counter-cultural scene. Sid Rawle, frequently hung around the ‘it’, Release and BIT alternative information and publishing offices, probably Oz too (the ‘counter culture’ was like a small ‘family’, friends and fall-outs included!). I think it is probably where John Lennon and Sid Rawle first bumped into each other. According to Tracy McVeigh in the ‘Observer’ newspaper (22/9/2012):

“John Lennon bought Dorinish – twin green mounds linked by a natural causeway, lying just 15 minutes from the west coast of Ireland – in 1967 and got planning permission, although he never got as far as building. He shipped in a multicoloured caravan and took both his wives there.

‘He was besotted with the place by all accounts,’ said Andrew Crowley (a local estate agent). But at the height of Beatlemania Lennon wasn’t ready to settle into his island retirement and so he offered it out, rent-free, to Sid Rawle. Rawle, the man the newspapers liked to call the ‘King of the Hippies’, was the founder of the Digger Action Movement. He was a New Ager, interested in self-sufficiency, when he was summoned to the Beatle headquarters in 1970 and offered the use of Dorinish by Lennon to try to build his utopia. Rawle had great plans for livestock and lobster pots and vegetables. But as 30 hippies with their Carnaby Street costumes and teepees arrived, local residents were horrified, remembers Sam Kelly, 63, a retired farmer from nearby Westport. ”



In my book, ‘Travelling Daze’ I included a long section about Sid, who, for better or worse, played a significant role in new Traveller history in the UK. I put a lot of it together with considerable help from the Jeremy Sandford (author of ‘Cathy Come Home’ and many other fabulous books). Jeremy and myself were involved with Sid, getting him to tell his life story orally. He wasn’t very trustworthy – a born ‘story-teller’.  But Lennon was impressed with Rawle’s ‘revolutionary rhetoric’ and gave his group ‘custodianship’ of Dorinish for the ‘common good’. Here are a few extracts:

Sid Rawle: “We decided we would hold a six week summer camp on the island. Then we would see what came out of that and decide whether we wanted to extend our stay. It was heaven and it was hell. We lived in tents because there were no stone buildings on the island at all.”

The ‘Connaught Telegraph’ reported in March 1971: “After a year of seething anger, Westport has finally declared war on the ‘Republic of Dorinish’ – but the commune finally closed down of its own volition the year after, when a fire destroyed the main tent used to store supplies.”

You can see why John Lennon admired the visionary hippy, Sid Rawle, who told Jeremy Sandford:

“There’s talk of community in war time. We can be ordered to go and fight and die for Queen and Country. In peace time, is it too much to ask for just a few square yards of our green and pleasant land on which to rear our children on?  That’s all we want, myself and the squatters and Travellers and hippy movements I’ve been involved with… And if we achieve that, what else? ‘What else’ is what I call the ‘Vision of Albion’.

We have to reclaim some of the ancient wisdom. The wisdom of ancient Albion.”

Video of Dorinish by Shay Fennelly:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrK8ejzWD9Y

Sam Kelly in ‘The Observer’ article adds:

“ ‘You saw them waiting to go out, and some of them were back pretty quick, too. It didn’t suit too many of the rich, pampered kids. In town we just all thought the man must be making a lot of money out of it all, but then thought, fair game to him when he made it through that first winter. We thought the place would be flooded with drugs, but not a sign of them – flooded with letters is all. People writing to him and sending money from all over the place.’

‘You never saw them in town. Only Rawle himself came in for anything they needed – the welfare cheques, of course. He didn’t even have a boat: he’d hoist a white bedsheet up when he wanted Tommy, one of the local guys with a boat, to come and get him,’ said Kelly, who said he doesn’t think that the hippy era left a lasting legacy.

‘We’re maybe a bit more bohemian than most parts of Ireland, but we had pirates living here long before the hippies. Sid Rawle was more a dreamer than a drug crazy.’ “

And that is even more of a truth for John Lennon too!

John from ‘Anthology’:

“I’ve grown up. I don’t believe in father figures anymore, like God or Kennedy or Hitler. I’m no longer searching for a guru. I’m no longer searching for anything. There is no search. There’s no way to go. There’s nothing. This is it. We’ll probably carry on writing music forever.”

Would that it were true.

Alan Dearling with the statue of John Lennon in Vilnius, Lithuania.

 

 

 

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Apple

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

Hand Print
By DENNIS GOULD

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Welcome to His World of Bass

Posted on 24 October, 2020 by Editor

When the national lockdown suddenly wiped all his forthcoming live gigs off the map in March, Jah Wobble’s answer was to regularly post his new tracks on bandcamp and use the time to compile a second dub anthology, Jah Wobble in Dub II.

Wobble’s first dub roundup, In Dub, appeared in 2016, the sheer breadth of the 34 tracks included showing the variety of his music: deep cuts with Youth and his current Invaders of the Heart rubbed up against adaptations of William Blake poems, experiments with Chinese dub crossovers, world music and turntable cut-ups, psychogeographical interpretations of London – all present, all built upon his characteristic throbbing, repetitive basslines and ferocious, omniverous work-ethic. For those new to his work, the signature Wobble bassline drives and shapes whatever else is going on sonically across a range of world-music influences, including a healthy dose of dub reggae. As the sleeve-notes tell us, this second double CD anthology is more personal, but no less wide-ranging and surprising than the first, resulting in an exotic, mostly instrumental mixtape, all linked by that bass still rumbling along underneath, promising unexpected soundscapes and vistas.

As with the first dub collection, there are a couple of older tracks here, dating back to 1988’s Without Judgement, very much a tentative step towards more mainstream sets like Take Me to God (1994) and very few tracks feature the complete Invaders line-up. Nevertheless, selections from Mu, released on Trojan in 2005 and ‘South London Dub Symphony’, from last year’s Electro Dub Extravaganza EP, prove that the urge to make rhythmic, dub-infused grooves that are pretty commercial still occasionally grips Wobble. More recently, at the other extreme, he has explored Asian music more fully, producing challenging tracks which marry Western dub techniques with more traditional Chinese and Japanese instruments – ‘K Dub 04’ and the brand new ‘Yangqin Dub’ demonstrate the success of this, Wobble’s family providing Chinese violin and drums to stunning effect.

When vocals are required, Wobble often collaborates with female singers: in the past, Sinead O’Connor and Natacha Atlas have featured and here that tradition continues. A disturbing, compelling cut, ‘Isaura’, features Julie Campbell (Lonelady), from her 2011 set Psychic Life, which reunited Wobble with fellow ex-PiL member Keith Levene. The real revelations here, though, are four tracks with Yulduz, the Uzbekistan singer and actress, whose 2004 release Bilmadim may have passed by even hardened Wobble collecters. Two of these are dub deconstructions, one featuring Jamaican session ace Ernest Ranglin. ‘Blilmadim’ itself is a passionate, loping track, Ranglin’s rhythmic arpeggios complementing Wobble’s low-end rumblings, but the dub version which immediately follows is a particular highlight, shattering the tune into a lengthy, indelible, stunning atmosphere, Yulduz’s voice broken into weirdly effective syllables and fragments.

Inevitably, with a work-rate which regularly sees him issue three or four different CDs each year, either under his own name or as collaborations, there will be some facets of Wobble’s music which don’t appeal or date badly. For me, the tracks included from Elevator Music 1A (2004) seem a bit uninspired, whereas ‘Asa’, from 2010’s Welcome to my World seems fresh and convincing; similarly the 2002 collaboration with Temple of Sound, Shout at the Devil, one of his most exciting, consistent projects, is always worth revisiting, one track being included here. Occasionally, a piece lifted out of context can suddenly seem experimental and newly melodic at the same time: ‘Umbra Sumus (Part II)’ is one of these, as is the jazz-infused ‘As Night Falls (Part 3)’ which concludes the whole collection on a suitably meditative note. A pity there are no completely new tracks with the current Invaders line-up and no evidence of his bass summits with Bill Laswell, but this remains a compelling survey of one of the most fascinating, distinctive, exploratory talents to emerge from the post-punk scene. Wobble continues to reverberate musical foundations with the force of his widescreen basslines: this generous selection ushers you into his world.

 

 

M.C. Caseley

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Vitality 4

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Jan Woolf


 

If you’d like the dialogue too, please order the play from janwoolf.com

Published by Pentameters Press – each copy signed and numbered. 

£4 (the cost of a glass of Prosecco in a pub).

 

 

 

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Humanity’s Great Fight-Back

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Julian Rose

Julian Rose

It must be occurring to millions of individuals, upon observing the depressing spectacle of top down politics in action, that in the great majority of cases what are termed ‘governments’ are no longer in any way fit to govern.

It must be dawning on many millions, possibly billions, that those who have been elected to represent the needs and interests of the people, are spectacularly failing in this role.

It must fast be becoming a reality for the great majority of people still able to think, that our world is in the hands of those who display none of the attributes that would pass for ‘leadership’, but an abundance of almost precisely the opposite attributes.

In fact, thinkers must surely observe that the majority of those holding the reins of power adhere only to their own private narcissistic agendas and have no interest in the health and welfare of the people they are elected to support. What’s more, they will observe that the politician of today is, by and large, a compliant puppet to the deep state whose agenda is totalitarian global dominance and mass depopulation.

The chimera called Covid-19 has been, and remains, extremely effective at highlighting the criminal duplicity of the planet’s leaders in almost all spheres of state and corporate administration. We have witnessed – and continue to witness – individuals in responsible management roles passing on the instructions sent to them by their puppet masters, without ever pausing to reflect on the value of these instructions. Each recipient simply acting as a thoughtless slave within an increasingly robotic technocracy – passing the buck on to whoever might be the unfortunate receiver at the bottom of the pile.

We can no longer hide from the realisation that a high percentage of ‘democratic societies’ are now under the dominant control of an overtly fascistic regime.

Recognising this triggers a kind of emotional shock-wave. What we realise is not just the extremity of the change taking place, but that we ourselves have allowed such a take-over to happen – right in front of our noses – and yet (mostly) barely registering a peep of conscious resistance.

Far too many have allowed the moral, ethical and spiritual values that underpin the existence of a healthy society – to be undermined by intellectual laziness, material comforts and the prioritising of the virtual gadgets of ‘convenience’. That is what has opened the door for rule by dictatorship.

To realise one is complicit in some form of treasonous satanic take-over of one’s country is a pretty nasty shock. But, at this eleventh hour, a vitally important one, I think you will agree.

What would be the rational next step to take after arriving at such a realisation? What is the natural emotional response to the threat of living as a slave under a totalitarian dictatorship – a techno- fascist regime with ambitions to reduce humanity to a race of genetically engineered cyborgs?

Is it fear – or is it fight-back?

To succumb to fear is to write one’s own death warrant. We know that the spreading of fear is the key weapon of our opponents. The dark medicine of the satanic anti-life cabal. We must therefore completely reject fear, for it fuels the greater ‘pain body’ that the satanic forces draw upon to maintain their powers. Without this fuel they cannot survive. So let us cut them off here and now – at the very root!

That highly propitious step immediately positions us for the great fight-back. Here we are, finally faced by dire necessity to draw upon those strengths coming to us directly from our intimate connection with the greater source of all life. The Divine source. And what an unprecedented privilege it is, at this critical junction of human history, to be right at the epicentre of a push-back that has the potential to forever change the world for the better!

What a hugely auspicious moment – to be brought face-to-face with the imperative to take action on behalf of Life Itself; to fully engage in fighting for the redemption of the creative adventure we call ‘freedom’ – the absolute birthright of every citizen of the world.

We are not going to be turned-back now. We are primed to go into action for the liberation of our planet and the liberation of all the deeply repressed and mistreated species that reside on it.

The very real responsibility for the future of life on Earth, in as much as already destabilised planetary conditions allow, is now firmly in our court.

Even at this darkest hour, humanity is poised at the edge of an extraordinary break-through; but there is a proviso: we must know that making this break-through come to be depends upon firmly taking hold of the reins we previously rejected – that fateful lack of action which allowed the cult of fascism to stake its hold over the greater part of this planet.

‘The order is rapidly fadin’ penned Bob Dylan back in 1964, but building the new one cannot be left to fate. If it is to be the road of truth and justice for which we long, it can only be built by each one of us individually making a bold commitment to stand strong for the great resistance, and equally – to press forward in helping to put in place the building blocks of a society based on truth, justice and love.

Let us all be aware: there is no future unless we make that future happen, individually and collectively.

This is the clarion call of the moment and we simply cannot shun it. So, swing yourself into the saddle, slot your feet into the stirrups, seize the reins and press the flank of your charger into a powerful gallop – having no other focus than a glorious victory for true humanity!

———————————————————————————————————

Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and teacher. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly prescient reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info

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Grave Concerns

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor

  

 

    My daddy says it’s a jolly good thing.

 

    Nightingale hospitals are springing up

    No more than 10,000 in each

    Some of them are called University halls

   With locked doors and a bed for each  

   Students housed in the toxic clad flats 

   Abandoned in the city centres

 

    There are some old steam engines

    On newly nationalized private lines

    Driven by tenders for End Of Life.

    Briefed by Test and Trace Covid Support

    Excel spreadsheets, Deloitte, Serco, PHE

 

    Government ministers order carriages

    To take patients from the hospitals

    Removed to die in a very safe place

 

    I.D.  stamped   QUARANTINE

    They will not see family, friends, visitors

    Except PPE nurses, care workers, doctors

    Hidden creatures, half-robot, half-human

 

    My daddy says the inmates

    Will be very comfortable.

 

    A TV entertainment allowance;

    The wise men, every day a broken theme

    Hectoring at their lecterns; a dream

    Hands, face, space, avarice and disgrace

 

    “You can act up, act out, dance about

    Make props, theatrical productions,

    Until you make your final bow.”

 

   They might, if you’re about to ‘pass on’

   Show you the brochures

   Give you a choice of headstones,

   Scatter your ashes, “no charge!”,

   “It’s dying with Dignity.”

 

    Eternal rest         Take to the skies

    Fly to the stars    Heaven in their eyes

 

    Promises to ashes.

 

    And if you’re behind locked doors

    We will deliver, or give you a food allowance

    “You can cook for yourself or others”

    Or eat from 1000 Trussell food banks

 

    No strings on our bows, but stars on earth

   Broke, we rent our musical instruments

   Show them up; busk on Westminster Green

   Making music while the sun shines

   Harping on, fiddling so much, trumpets

   Blasting off; The Planets with Gustav Holst

   Until they put pennies on our eyes

 

   The rest of us, survivors just now

   Sit quietly at home staring at a screen

   Choke alone in our cathedral cars

   Dodge each other on the pavements

   Forage along half-empty supermarket shelves

   Hidden behind our black and white masks

   Show our beckoning or lonely eyes

   Outside, ghost double-decker buses pass by

   Abandoned shuttered shops & minds

 

   My daddy says it’s for the best.  

   And I’m in no position to argue.                                        

 

©  Christopher 2020   [email protected]

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Signs of Life

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor


These days planet hunting is all part of
a night’s work. “All I’ve got is what I’m
wearing now,” she said.  We bring in
contract labour as and when required

but knowing what’s at the centre is a
vital clue to knowing how it was built.”
Are we talking about the long arm of
coincidence? Why do things grow where

they do? We all want a little piece of
the action but neon signs are always
collectable and these creatures are
fiercely territorial. What is normal these

days? “The exact nature of the process
is not entirely clear to us yet,” she said.
Yet we’re a halfway house and the changes
in layout make all the difference. “What’s

an anomaly,” she said. We have other ideas
for creating space but the notion that planets
could change orbit was a shocking discovery.
“I build robots for fun,” he said. When did

you last buy a film poster? “Signs of life are
what we’re looking for amid the ruins”, he said.

 

 

 

Steve Spence

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Mass Extinction O’clock

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor

 

The geologist stood inside a cave of giant crystals
The geologist stood on the lip of a live volcano
He spoke to the camera
It was on tv

The geologist gave a talk at a university
Somebody asked where in earth`s story are we
Although everyone already knew
the time

 

Sandra Tappenden

 

 

 

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apples for Apple Day

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Jeff Cloves
 

some Bramley Seedlings for mum’s pastry
a Golden Russet for our red-haired son
the juice of Cox’s Orange Pippins
for his baby brother to suck on
 
a Worcester Pearmain for my sweetheart
she is the apple of my eye
and in memory of my dear dad
fill a plate with perfect apple pie
 
Beauty of Bath and Newton Wonder
Laxton’s Superb – we kiss and pray
that for every home-grown Stroudie
there’s a home-grown Lodgemore Nonpareil
 
a deserved windfall for all teachers
be they average good or bad
sweet Sturmers for all shining schoolgirls
the pip for every sullen lad
 
a rotten apple for all preachers
young Eve was right – their God was wrong
apple maggots for all monarchs
and their sour corps of hangers-on
 
poisonous apples for Monsanto
organic apples for the Green
Golden Delicious for New Labour
so tasteless bland and in-between
 
apple fritters apple dumplings
charlottes crumbles glazed French tarte
chutney strudel scrumpy cider
each recipe a work of art
 
sharp apples served with demerarer
cloves and cinnamon clotted cream
almonds honey baked Alaska –
the stuff of everybody’s dream
 
so celebrate our apple history
keep apples ever close to heart
sow them grow them store them adore them
but never upset the apple cart
no never upset the applecart
 
 
 
 
 
Jeff Cloves
Stroud October 1999
 
 
Apple Day is the 21st of October and was launched
by Common Ground in 1990.
Common Ground was founded in 1983 by Sue Clifford 
Angela King and Roger Deakin (1943-2006).
In 1996 CG published Richard Mabey’s justly celebrated 
Flora Brittanica and campaigns for local distinctiveness 
and creative conservation throughout the UK.
 
 
Illustration: Claire Palmer
 
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THE FALL

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor

The only advice I can give
To live with less
Is care less
Feel less

It naturally takes years
To live without these fears
The fear of being lost
The fear of always being last
The fear you have no future
And still cannot escape your past

You will, naturally, catch a glimpse of more
My advice again,
Is don’t go through that door
The light that offers change
Is not what you hoped it would be
And you will wish you had stayed in port
When you find yourself
Again, hopelessly at sea

My advice has its drawbacks
That will be obvious to you all,
You may want to be still standing
Well, I will take the fall.

 

 

 

 

Nathaniel Fisher

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One Day I found

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor

 

Soft leather boots, fur lined,
A full pair just lying there
But when I picked them up
One’s extra weight says Occupied
And upending it did no good,
All that dripped out was some
Treacly blood so am there
Using me bayonet to winkle
Out whatever’s left when
This staff car pulls up and it’s,
“You there my man, what’s
That you’ve got?”
I hold them up
And he follows through with,
“How much?” so I name a price
Which is less than they’re worth
But still more than enough
To which he agrees with a nod
And a smirk as he hands me
The cash then drives off with them
Tossed on his back seat: it’s moments
Like that could turn vinegar sweet. 

 

 

 

 

Kevin Patrick McCann

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Covid Connections: In praise of the Artists from Chris White

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor

 

Alan Dearling contacted his new-ish friend, Chris White, asking him for permission to share his poem, his Ode in Celebration of Artists and Creators. Those fab personages, who, especially in these Covid-ridden, Strange Times, are like Oscar Wilde, very much “…living in the gutters, Looking at stars”.

Chris is a multi-talented, innovative, quirky and creative writer and illustrator. Go and check out his works. As he says, it includes Words, Poems and Drawings…Doodles and Scribbles, Books…and much, much more. He hit the ground running with ‘Bitey the Veggie Vampire’ in 2000 and seems to never look back!

His website is filled with lots of juicy bits, vids and invitations to get involved, including ‘Create with Chris’ at his Youtube Channel. It’s crammed with fun, joy and wonderment: https://veggievampire.com/ 

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Flight

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Lawrence Freiesleben


The Mad Hatter’s Tidal Tea Party. North Devon, Sept 30th 2020. (Photo: XR Global Newsletter, 44)

At the junction, choose hill or plain
To hide with me or be able to see.
Buildings interrupt the mind
Smoke, glove, hearth, hand –
To settle or be unsettled
What shall we say?

On the day we were meant to leave
The future was late, the past declined               
The locks all broke, the glass smoked blind
Wood, wound, crown, shield
To die or live
Which would be wiser?

Now from the corner I look behind
The tarmac brightens to sudden silver
The young become old except inside
Stem, voice, root, choir
To run or walk
Can we know what’s safer?

We always thought we’d end alone
Yet upon the sea are now together
The land gives up and the sky gets wide
You, me, our, hour
Never or always known
Do you ever doubt fortune’s favour?

Have we arrived or will we never?
The days keep changing sides – warm or cold, which is better?
But up beyond the cliff a white cross points inland
Rocks, waves, shore, shatter   
Here we might consolidate
Abandon hate, begin again, plant or scatter
Never to doubt fortune’s favour.

 

© Lawrence Freiesleben

Cumbria, 2020

‘Flight’ first appeared in: Don’t Touch Me Now – A collection of poetry, short stories and artwork. A charity eBook in support of Medecins Sans Frontieres: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/donttouchmenow

[email protected]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Boris’s Next Job…

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor

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School of Zen Motoring Ep 3 – Streets Of Rage

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor

Ogmios
ASMR DASHCAM

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Literature of my life

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor

 

 

 

 

I am neither moving nor stationary.
Yet, I see you everywhere, and see
all things in you. You are the brightness.
Neither the Sun nor the fire is brighter than you.

I bow to you, O light of my life.
I bow to you, O luster of my smiles.
Don’t restrain your love. Let it move.
I will be as stagnant as the paper boat
on the vortex of life, without you, my love.

Let me drink those naked verses
straight from the womb of your lips,
and feel evermore, the rapture of love
at the symposium of my heart with the soul. 

There is a verse, hidden somewhere
in your smiles. I am trying to rhyme it
with the monologue of my tears.
Beloved! You aren’t only you.
You are the literature of my life.

 

 

 

 

 

Bhuwan Thapaliya
Picture Rupert Loydell

 

Nepalese poet, Bhuwan Thapaliya is the author of four poetry collections and currently he is working on his fresh poetry collection, The Marching Millions. Bhuwan Thapaliya’s books are Safa Tempo: Poems New and Selected (Nirala Publications, New Delhi), Our Nepal, Our Pride (Cyberwit.net, Allahabad), Rhythm of the Heart( Lulu Publication) and Verses from the Himalayas. Thapaliya has read his poetry and attended seminars in venues around the world, including South Korea, the United States, Thailand, Cambodia, and Nepal. His poems have been widely published in leading literary journals, newspapers and periodicals such as Kritya, Pandemic Magazine, The Foundling Review,  Strong Verse, Countercurrents.org, myrepublica , The Kashmir Pulse, Taj Mahal Review,  Poetry Life and Times, Ponder Savant, VOICES( Education Project),  Longfellow Literary Project, Poets Against the War etc. His poetries have also been published in the CD’s and Books such as The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry (ISBN 1- 878431-52- 8) , Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry (The Poets Printery, East London, South Africa,2008, pp.118, Paperback, ISBN 0-620-41372-7), The Strand Book of International Poets 2010 , of Nepalese Clay, Pratik and in many more.

 

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D’YA REALLY WANNA KNOW?

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor

Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?”
Well don’t look too hard at what you might find…
My thoughts and dreams
Are not so serene
There’s room for my head under Bob’s guillotine
At a loss for words to express my disgust
Feeling I’m merely a quintessence of dust
For my loathing of Trump, while feeling perplexed
I had earlier to quote a Shakespearian Text

But now I’ll openly speak my own truth
This is what I have to say
When the ice cream which they have waited for melts
Is when the band can begin to play

 

 

 

 

Harry George Stanley Lupino
illustration Nick Victor
 
 
 
 
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Episode 2

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor


This show features tracks by

Bobbi Humphry – Smiling Faces Sometimes

Don Blackman – You Ain’t Hip

Donald Byrd – You and Music

Shuggie Otis – Sweet Thang

Creative Source – Who Is He (And What Is He to You)

Bill Withers – Kissing My Love

Blues Magoos – Can’t Get Enough of You

Walter J Negro and the Loose Jointz – Shoot the Pump

Walter J Negro and the Loose Jointz – Shoot the Pump (part II)

The Detroit Emeralds – Baby Let Me Take You

Tom Browne – Funkin’ for Jamaica

.. one hour of funk and soul to move ya and groove ya!

 

 

 

Steam Stock

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ULTIMA

Posted on 17 October, 2020 by Editor

 

                  A street with an old arch. Passers-by. Traffic.
                  Wes Barnes staggers slightly and steadies himself against some nearby railings. He is haggard with longish hair parted in the centre, dark glasses, upturned collar. He makes his way to an observ­ation telescope set up for tourists to survey the river and the flat, marshy countryside below the town walls. He peers through the eye­piece and focuses in on a desolate landscape – a long, deserted road. In the middle distance a squat, concrete blockhouse left from the war. There is a faint glimmer of light visible through one of the gun-slits.
                 Inside is a white, square altar, with a white head modeled in battered polystyrene. There is a circle emblazoned on its forehead. The place is illuminated by two glowing candles in cut-glass holders; all around, on ledges jutting out from the walls, are white flowers.
                Ultima (her real name is Lisa Firmston) stands looking up at the sky. She tosses a white flower to the ground. Observing from afar through field-glasses is a man in evening dress. He lowers the glasses, stares up at the sky, and then glances at his watch. Meanwhile Ultima has vanished. The man walks over to the spot, picks up the flower and puts it in his pocket – he has to walk along the top of a shingle ridge, noisily scattering stones. Several roll down towards the beach below. He scans the monotonous, blue-grey sea through his glasses.
                Ultima walks slowly past a row of wooden posts by the banks of a canal. She stops and looks across at the blockhouse, and then at the canal. Another flower falls to the ground.
                The man in evening dress leans against a strange, low, concrete structure, lights up a cigarette, exhales slowly and stares at the des­olate scene observing the canal and some distant mounds. His eye catches a round leather box not far away. He goes over and picks it up. Next to it is the tell-tale token of another white flower. Inside the box there is a pair of dark glasses like those worn by Barnes. The man stares as though hypnotized. Behind him, quite close, with her eyes closed, stands Ultima. Trying to dispel the soporific influence, the man turns round. But she has vanished. He looks at his watch again.
               Inside the blockhouse one candle has been extinguished. Through the gun-slits the man is seen walking around outside. He stops to stare in – the white head appears to stare back beneath lowered lids.
              Ultima walks along the road. Her pace is slow, her posture hieratic. She looks back over her shoulder. Behind her, on the concrete, are a number of white flowers.
              The man stubs out his cigarette and retraces his steps back towards the harbour. He walks noisily, scattering stones as he hurries along.
               Suddenly he stops.
               Not far away, directly in his path, is a white coffin.
               Drawn by some indefinable, magnetic influence he walks slowly towards it. As he approaches the lid falls off and slides down the ridge to the beach below, scattering shingle as it goes. He drops to his knees before Ultima as she opens her eyes, bares her teeth –                – a scream –
                Bystanders close in on the telescope as Barnes, clutching vainly at the instrument, slides down to the paving stones, his glasses reflecting the monotonous blue-grey sky.
               They gather round, shocked at the sight of a collapsed man. Is he dead? Someone, braver that the others, dashes to him and begins to undo the top buttons of his coat – a crumpled photograph is discovered. It is a portrait of Lisa Firmston.

 

 

 

A.C Evans

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Postcards from Paraguay

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

I’d never been south of the border 
before my recent journey
I am an American 

dyslexically & geographically
confused after crossing
the Rio Grande 

Somehow I found myself
on Highway BR-111 seeking
compassless destinations

Lost upon 
The Rio Plata
broke in Montevideo 

With this postage due note
I regret to inform you
they’ll be shall be no

postcards from Paraguay

 

 

 

 

TERRENCE SYKES

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THE NEAR CENTURY

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by David Erdos

                                                           

                                                         On Harold Pinter’s 90th Birthday

 

 

Henry Woolf is now ninety, of course and carries on
Your tradition; representing that grand world your friends
Peopled, in your young man’s pomp in Hackney.

And yet today all must pause at some of the perils
We’ve faced with, along with the doors your work opened,
And for which your poems and plays provide key.

You alone seemed to know that as a silence strikes
There is crisis. And that said (and unsaid) pause is not
Hesitation, but instead, the mind and heart’s truest line.

You defined the word and the world as we currently
Understand it. You were the force majure for the modern
And the most authoritative voice of your time.

How we miss its rich tones, the deep, dark resonance
Of the actor; baronial, as you started and empiric too,
In its way, as you commanded the air and commandeered

Our attention, a conscientious objector, equally able
To General and to wound with words each affray.
But in terms of the work, that work shaped the ideal

Means to see language. As both cure and cover
For what we do not understand or conceal. You lit the torch,
But then cast that torch into darkness, letting the light

Singe through shadow; but then as each shadow sings,
Truth’s revealed. You were the powerbroker we need
In a time where those who seek power only do so

For the ruin and near evisceration of all that others
Like you once held dear; simply the freedom to create
And surpass each bind, each transgression, and to forge

Fresh paths and approaches that in often unknown ways
Sound the call for both a new way to be and entirely
New colour, within which our deceptions will aura like

Start to rise. You would be Ninety today. Harold, look
At the world we have written. Start it again, I beseech you,
From wherever you are, breach each lie. You are not

Our Shakespeare, you’re more, for the greatest names ape
No other. As another actor, writer, director, screenwriter,
Poet and activist you’re an age that we need to reclaim;

In ten years time you’ll be greater. There will be a full century
Of you, and of Henry, too; this I pray. Somewhere you’re still
Marking your runs in your sacred game of star cricket,

Sun touched on a distant field, you’ll be running as full
As you were in your stride, for a further England we’ve lost
Which we may regain if hope stalks us, and deceives each day’s

Devil with some of the former force of your pride. But now,
I think of two friends who sit across the divide that life
Gives us. As Henry talks on with wise humour, so your silence

Speaks of the love that we all should have for our craft
And for the world you once mastered. Harold, can you hear?
My pen pauses as I send this birthday card high above.

I hope it reaches you at some point and on some future
Frequency of endeavour in which this celebration
And this honouring have some worth. It is a simple

Gesture of love from someone to whom you will
Continue to speak at all moments and to all of those
Who love and have loved you today and all hours

Some Ninety years on from your birth.

 

 

David Erdos October 10th 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Innes Watson

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

 

http://inneswatson.co.uk/

Alan Dearling spills the beans…

I absolutely love it when I discover a ‘new-to-me’ artist. In almost any genre. Innes Watson was such a find. A couple of weeks ago down in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, I was introduced to the music of Innes when I bought his album, ‘Innes Watson’s Guitar Colloquium’ (2018). I thought the cover looked a bit psychedelic, and read in the sleeve notes:

“Glasgow was a mad place for contemporary music between the year 2000 and 2015!…it was a hive of activity for tunes, sessions, gigs, parties and a LOT of fun…it was amazing, we were a community of pals…ferocious friendship! The declaration of ‘Waste’ was born and stood for, ironically, the immense bond we all felt through getting really fucked up and playing tunes together! It wasn’t a waste at all, on the contrary…from this era spawned most of my contemporaries’ careers.”

I was intrigued. Playing the music I was then rewarded with some drop dead gorgeous guitar playing. It’s instrumental, mostly solo, but complemented by some tracks with his erstwhile ‘Wasters’. Innes has oodles of talent, and his material has a uniqueness that offers immediacy combined with an edgy freshness that makes one smile with admiration.

Here are some samples:

https://inneswatson.bandcamp.com/

https://youtu.be/rvtSfp23NyA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4Zt3cNQB2I

Innes is also a fine fiddle player, and, with his mates in the Treacherous Orchestra, can kick up a Mighty Stushie (Noise/Party/Storm)! The Treacherous Orchestra: https://youtu.be/4aZO8XDl-4g

I read some more about him on line:

“Born in Glasgow, brought up in the Borders, Innes has carved himself a deep groove in the face of contemporary and traditional folk music of Scotland. Alumni of the National Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music in Plockton and a graduate of the Bachelor of Arts in Scottish Music at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Innes is now a leading tutor in instrumental performance at the RCS and the University of the Highlands and Islands. He is also renowned as one of Scotland’s best instrumentalists, being awarded ‘Instrumentalist of the Year’ at the 2009 Scots Trad Music Awards at the age of 24.”

He’s part of a Guitar Legacy. The Colloquium album reminded me of the ground-breaking guitar playing of my 1960s, growing-up days. The innovations of Dav(e)y Graham on string-bending, East meets West, from ‘After Hours’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9XkWbKBs80

Shades of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, before and after they were in folk-jazz fusion band, Pentangle. Here’s ‘Bells’ from 1967: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6Q_M6aTUbs

Memories of John Fahey’s weird tunings and strange timings of ‘In Search of Blind Joe Death’. Here’s ‘Red Pony’ from  1969: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSh-YsyjpXk

 Another guitarist with some fine instrumentals is Al Stewart. Here’s his ‘Small Fruit Song’ (1970): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRbhHxCnMhs

**********************************************************************************

So – as you do – I contacted Innes online, seeking an interview. A chat about music and creativity. I reminded him, prodded him. And now, this is the result! Enjoy – and especially go listen to his music, meet his musical mates. Make him your New Musical Friend!

Alan and Innes in a musical banter

Alan: Thanks for the chance of chat. First up – I really love the ‘Colloquium’ album. It seems a mix of the mellow and exuberant. Fun. It has a buzz about it. Tell me about making it.

Innes:   So glad you like it! It was a concept album that I wrote for a Celtic Connections’ performance in the New Voices series, 2011. I gathered like-minded players who wouldn’t usually play together as we were all accompanists within the scene, mainly. All being close acquaintances in a very friendly music scene in Glasgow helped my idea of a fun ‘living-room party protocol’ to take to the stage and I’ve tried to maintain that ever since. I feel that relaxed performances are better for audience and performer and I’m SO glad that comes across in the album as well. Due to availability it was tough to get everyone together to record but small groups helped that feel I guess. Initially Ali and myself played the ‘grounds’ of the album with Duncan (bass) and Alyn (kit). Barry was at the engineering helm on those sessions but joined Chas and myself in recording a later session with Andrea engineering. Then strings and guests were added at another later date. So we were all together in a way. The very end of the album has an initial reaction from the strings to a comical false ending by Alyn that spanned the whole project. A joke that started in 2010 and still lives on to this day at the end of the CD! Ten years and counting…

Alan: There’s more than a hint of jazz as well as Scottish music in the Colloquium album. Is that still part of your repertoire?

Innes:   Yeah, it is. I’ve always been in awe of jazz musicians and learned a lot from their dedication to spontaneity, in fact all the great trad/folk musicians I’ve listened to have had their forays into jazz or at least hooked up with musicians from the scene and in many ways our scenes are intertwined, especially now in Scotland. Traditional music has really taken on its role as an evolving art/culture as it always did and we’re really no different these days in that respect.

Alan: You seem to be a great collaborator…what are some of the highlights of those musical conflabs?

Innes:   Well, one of the things that got me hooked on music most was listening. I had a natural ability as a kid (so mum says anyway) to copy sounds I heard. That must have helped when picking up instruments after singing and making noises from birth. It’s really a continuation of learning how to speak: copying parents and sister and others’ noises they made. I like to think that musical communication has stemmed from that. If you listen to others’ well enough and can really understand what they’re saying (so much so that you can say it for yourself) then you can agree with them and complement their points of view. Something I’ll try to do in accompaniment or collaboration. With Ali Hutton, I listened to his guitar playing, piping and whistle playing and he opened up a world of understanding when I had to deputise gigs for him on guitar. Then I spent years filling the shoes of other great musicians on guitar, fiddle and in song: learning new voices all the time, allowing collaboration with so many great musicians.

Alan: Two of your link ups that I’m aware of are with Mike Vass and Jarlath Henderson…

Innes:   Just two of the close friends I’ve been able to work with in duo form. I knew Mike and Jarlath respectively during my early twenties. We’d party and play tunes together and they started performing their own music involving me in a few different ways but mainly on guitar. We’ve all now spent so much time together it really is a relaxing experience to do gigs with them. We read each other very well. Two other musicians that tends to happen with, are John Somerville and Adam Sutherland. It feels like I can almost guess what they’re going to do before any of us know, you know. You don’t know what you know until you know what you don’t know, you know?

Alan: Your favourite instrument to play? Guitar or fiddle? Or…?

Innes:   My favourite instrument is definitely my voice! Although when I sing songs now I try to convey my real voice, the one I speak with, but there is so much of the voice that I don’t use in performance yet! Noises and sound effects will creep into my music in future for sure. I started singing with falsetto and because it seems to come across as comedy people laughed. It will take some time for the ‘trad world’ to be comfortable with ‘pop vocals’ to blend seamlessly with traditional music. As ever, it’s a struggle between respecting the past and moving forward. Like my sister (Dr Lori Watson) says it’s very much like a see-saw. Balance is difficult, reach too far into the future and your past is up in the air. Reach too far into the past, where’s your future at?

I started guitar at 4 but didn’t really learn to play it until I had become competent on the fiddle/violin (years 7-23). Then becoming a notable guitarist among our scene I only then learned how much I had to offer on the fiddle. It’s been a back-and-forth until recently where now, I guess, I respect them both as tools with which I can convey everything I really want to, from the noises in my head… blah blah blah zip boing fizzle…

Alan: In my ‘Intro’ I’ve mentioned some of the guitarists who helped take folk into new musical dimensions…is that something you are interested in? Are they players you’ve listened to?

Innes:   Absolutely, yeah, every one of them I’ve at least heard of if not listened to thoroughly! My father taught me guitar chords with songs from an early age (it took a while!) and he has an extremely eclectic taste in guitarists, folk musicians, singer/songwriters and all sorts of other genres. So we were brought up in a household with respect for any music and I have to say that still exists. Seeing the best in even the most ‘terrible’ of art-forms. There is something for everyone, and all of it is for me!

Alan: I sometimes feel that ‘folk’ has become a bit of a backwater.  Contemporary folk got a shot of energy from the likes of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, the Incredible String Band and Run Rig… and there are always great new singer-songwriters, but somehow in current times, folk seems to mean Traditional Folk. I like it up to a point, but it sometimes seems a bit sterile, and up-itself. Sorry if that’s a bit confrontational!

Innes:   FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT! No, not at all. It’s good to be questioning these things. I would say that pigeon-holing has really F’d things up in this time of, almost, observed saturation. There are so many people on the planet that the exponential rise in youths taking up EVERY form of music is swelling so much that there comes a point when we all must eventually dislike the route something has taken. The pathways are motoring ever-outward from a point where we drew our understanding from originally. It’s natural for humans to seek out the new, but we are never going to stop feeling warm with nostalgia at the stuff that shaped us. Open-mindedness is harder than it’s ever been, and yet, without it, none of the fantastical evolutions in music would ever have been possible.

Alan: I also think that we need another generation of bands like the Pogues and the Levellers who gave contemporary folk a kick up the back-side…

Innes:   Punk folk is essential. Breaking moulds, brilliant. However, have you ever thought about fixing the broken mould? It’s still different. It’s like healing a smashed pot with golden resin so you can see where it has been mended. The journey is written in, respecting where it has come from, what it’s been through and what it is now. I got that idea from a potter called Stef Baxter: http://www.stefbaxterpottery.com/

The shiny new music you hear that sounds perhaps ‘sterile’ is a true evolution of the likes of Bach. Bach wrote rough around the edges music in a Baroque period and yet it is played now in a tuned-up world with Italian ‘sports model’ violins with extreme precision. Sterile, but beautiful. It has never lost its soul and we still respect it. New trad (nu trad) and traditional folk and folk rock and funk soul and pop rock…they are all ways we try to explain things by putting them in understandable sections for our tiny little minds to compute. It’s greater than us, though. It is whatever you want it to be. If you don’t like it, don’t worry because there are hundreds/thousands/millions of people that will. Some things need saved, some things need fixed, some things need mended, some things need to be forgotten. Mistakes are made, evolution itself is frequently mistake by ‘design’. By merely talking about it, a kick up the backside is exactly what has happened. Well done us.

Alan: In the last couple of years I’ve enjoyed seeing Seth Lakeman and Lau live, but again they seem to be stuck on bills that are labelled ‘folk’, and that too often means a bit of a geriatric and musically conservative audience. Who do you rate at the moment?

Innes:   Whipping up storms with younger audiences at the moment are the Elephant Sessions, Talisk, Rura (although they just grew up a whole bunch really quickly there in their last album), Ross Couper & Tom Oakes – I’m not an authority on what’s exploding in the youth market just now because, as I said before, there are SO MANY amazing young musicians out there doing it without regard for boundaries or partitions. In fact I think people may not emerge fully until such a time as they take a sharp turn to the diverse once they’re bored doing what they’ve cut their teeth on. Does that make sense? Younger audiences are very much made up of musicians themselves. At a festival gig you are likely to see faces of musicians you’ve encountered elsewhere and lots of them. We are all faces in crowds somewhere.

Alan: Scotland has always produced some powerful and individual contemporary folk musicians. I’m thinking of people like Dick Gaughan and Jackie Leven. Perhaps never household names, but very influential in musical circles. Do you see yourself as one of the new Scottish Pioneers?

Dick Gaughan, ‘Westlin’ Winds’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ7oYCx6tBw

Jackie Leven, ‘Your Winter Days’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4gowq-88SU

Innes:   Well I very much respect Scottish pioneer folk musicians whatever they have done with tradition, and I’d like to say I am a part of the great stream that is ever flowing. It takes a lot of us to bolster an ever-evolving culture through time. I would be honoured to be remembered as one of them, but it’s not essential.

Alan: In the last 20 years I’ve been heavily involved in the festival scene in the UK and particularly in Europe. Dance and EDM music is a huge part of that. A Scottish artist who died tragically young who was moving in that direction, mixing traditional music and Dj-ing was Martyn Bennett. Are you interested in that sort of mash-up? This is an amazing Danny Macaskill video featuring Martyn’s ‘Blackbird’ track: https://realworldrecords.com/videos/danny-macaskill-the-ridge/

Innes:   Funny you should mention him. He is one of my main inspirations. I was very fortunate to study in Glasgow and learned folklore from his mother Dr. Margaret Bennett. I also joined Croft No Five who were idolisers of Martyn and knew him well. So, although I never met him, I know a lot of the people who were close to him and because I devoured his music I feel a great affinity to what he was trying to do. I was very lucky to help Greg Lawson with scoring of some of the sampled sounds for the Grit Orchestra and earned myself a place in the orchestra as a vocalist! We played a live performance of ‘Blackbird’ with Danny doing stunts in the SSE Hydro as part of Celtic Connections 2019! That was spectacular.

Alan: I believe you’ve been recording a new album. Tell me about it.

Innes:   During lockdown I was lucky enough to be visiting my girlfriend in Skye and became ‘trapped’ here. The best thing that could have happened to me at the time. I needed space and time. Skye blended with lockdown to give me everything I needed at that time. I didn’t have any of my studio belongings with me as I had just made the decision to move out of Glasgow before lockdown so all I had was my iPhone. I decided to record an album on it. It is now available on Bandcamp and there will be a CD available too for the hardcore folkies who still like something you can hold in your hand! https://inneswatson.bandcamp.com/album/shhh-im-on-the-phone

It all seems to have tied together quite nicely with me enacting the voice of Martyn in the Grit Orchestra’s live rendition of ‘Aye’ whilst holding an actual phone lent to me by Gordon Mclean of An Tobar on Mull (where Martyn spent a lot of his time) whilst standing next to his son Sorren on stage at the Hydro where most people will have seen me saying, “aye”, holding a phone. So a whole album recorded during lockdown on my ‘aye phone’ just made me smile and I had to do it.

Alan: I’ve watched some of the videos of the Treacherous Orchestra. That seems like a whole different ball-game. High octane energy. Fun and Noise. Audience pleasing. Are you still part of that?

Innes:   Yes we are. The economy of a 14-piece outfit on the road was getting hard with people settling down and having kids, moving to sensible places, going to the pub less etc! So we are still gigging but few and far between and they have to be made worthwhile. We are happy working on our own respective projects and still doing what we can to invigorate the scene as much as we can. The 2019 winner of the Scots Young Trad Musician of the Year actually asked me backstage at a festival last year if I thought it would be a good idea if we had a new Treacherous Orchestra for this generation and I told him they should go for it but warned that it’s costly, hard work, but A LOT of fun. Still unsure if he was ripping the piss or not but let’s say he wasn’t for now!

Alan: Covid and the lockdowns have been hard on all of us involved in the live music scene. How has it been for you?

Innes:   As I said before it gave me space and time that was desperately needed. I suffer severe mental health issues exacerbated by the life I’ve led in the Scottish music scene. I had to take a break from teaching last year. Since then I’ve been floating around wondering what my purpose is and unable to fixate some positive energy on my career. I felt lost and privileged and guilty all at once so struggled to maintain focus amidst mental health issues. “The Great Pause”, as I have come to know it as, or Covid-19 has really brought some much needed space and time into my existence. I feel a lot more focussed and energised to do what I need to do.

I worried about a lot of people ‘stuck’ in cities during lockdown but gradually as we’ve all started to come out the woodwork a little it seems that most have made good use of “The Great Pause” to r&r in preparation for absolutely smashing the living bejeezus out of it when we’re all allowed to. I have felt that explosion of energy several times whilst thinking about it, quite worried for what comes next. I’m very excited.

Alan: I came across Duncan Chisholm’s Covid musical link-up for ‘Highland Cross’ – and you feature. Looks like fun… https://www.facebook.com/DuncanChisholmFiddle/videos/258712168910238/

Innes:   A close friend, idol, mentor, boss and contemporary  – I was very fortunate to become one of Duncan’s accompanists and we have played loads of fantastic gigs together since. I always loved his fiddle playing and getting to sit next to him on stage is a real treat. Little does he know I’ve been stealing EVERYTHING for later use whilst accompanying his awesome musicianship on guitar. An absolute joy to work with, and long may that continue.

Alan: A bit of crystal-ball gazing…what direction do you want to musically travel?

Innes:   I’ve had a few concepts in my armoury whilst supporting all the great musicians I’ve worked with so far. Now I guess it’s time to actually do them! I have writing, arranging, strings, orchestras, noises, samples, amazing musicians, wonderful scenery, beautiful instruments and time at my beck and call so I’ve no excuse. Who knows what is to come. Some loose plans are an album of self-penned songs, a good few albums of old and new fiddle music of Scotland, collaborations with all my favourite people and whatever else rears its head, I guess!

Alan: Many thanks for this chat. Enjoyed it, and getting to know you better. Anything else you want to tell me about?

Innes:   Thank YOU for your time. I enjoyed it too. I guess we’re friends now. Speak to you soon? I hope so.

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Song for Dominic Cummings

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

Dillie Keane

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come in cielo cosi in terra

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by ElenaCaldera

Elena Caldera

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COVID 21, ANYONE?

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by David Erdos
 
Separate freedoms abound all over the world, so they tell us:
Berlin, Sweden, Europe, rejected and spurned soldiers on,
While England retreats and begins to implode, fray, diminish,
As corrupt forces gather, placing gas in the throat to spear song.
 
Where once people believed in their land, now a strain of ash clogs
Impression. We smoke, drink and worry as fires are lit within
Homes and yet the hearth has not healed despite the warmth
You rouse for it, and the presence and change within people
 
Is set to make one feel more alone. Former sweethearts congeal.
As the past becomes a form of second hand fiction. The moments
Shared become pages both yellowed and weak from the need
To read and feel them again, and take from the shelf, resolution
 
To a mystery or stopped story whose last words and progress
Used to provide the heart’s feed. Nobody knows where to go,
Even as we move through the motions. Nor can we return
To that past, as its distance is literal light years from here
 
There is trouble at mill, and no moss is rolling stone gathered,
Rivers recoil. Beaches blister, peeling like gums from smeared
Teeth, as waves of plaque spangle foam and claim both
The former freshness and flavour, and Blake’s lost lands
 
Have been bitten, with the storm stung Lear knifed
And murdered while the Fool runs frenziedly on the heath.
Have we been set against each other by this? Or will we rise
To refine the cast template? Isolation’s distinction is that
 
If nothing else it grants time to design and refine
And to metaphorically polish the breastplate, heart
(As opposed to face) covering for the armour
To protect us from harm and to shine both in our
 
Own separate way, and for those we once fought for;
The loves and licked losses for which tongues are too
Often torn. When will we taste them again, now that
The country is plundered by the apparent forces of virus
 
Alongside those hidden behind Whitehall doors.
The news astounds here and there: Fascist cartoons
Passed and followed. Or, an American President
Whose clear madness would trade reality like bad stock
 
That he devalues at will, by exhaling toxic fumes: words
As poison, or a Home Sick-retary who sees immigrants
As livestock. The modern ghost is no sprite, or indeed,
Listless phantom. The Modern ghost is us living
 
Under the shadow not of death, but of life. It is not
Enough now to know and to try and diminish.
For even the satirists are bemoaning the blunting of trade,
Pen and knife. For when the air itself contains pitch,
 
Stoked no doubt by a crisis, that the very fabric splits,
We stand naked, exposed at last to all sin. Vulnerable,
Prone and not just to contagion, for when Covid 21
Happens, will we as cattle fall, will they win?
 
Whomsoever they are: Donald Mindtramp. Bore-is
Johnstain. Unpriti Prat preening. Jacob GreaseMop,
Michael Wouldnotgive..and so on. These are not
The farmers to fear. It is Dominic Cunnings and those
 
Like him. They will be our fence wreckers. They will
Write the sentence we’re in that runs long, in which
Even the Bible lays stained alongside the Quoran
And the Talmud. The Holy books that held wisdom
 
Will be gathering dust in closed shops. Who can no
Longer sell the sense of the soul through such chapters.
While tracts and novels, such as Huxley’s codes show
Hope stopped. And those of Ballard’s of course.
 
And Alan Moore. And George Orwell. Pierre Boulle.
Derek Raymond, whose murderous town matched
Boulle’s apes. For grimness and Noir, deeper than any old
Asphalt Jungle, as the wildness we’re in mars all borders
 
And makes each country abroad seem like Mars.
And so I turn my face from this air and search my tiny
Home for fresh cosmos. In which I grow immune
To this atmos,  as David moves towards Covid’s stars.
 
 
 
 
David Erdos October 9th 2020   
Illustration: Claire Palmer
 
 
 
.
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Vitality 3

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Jan Woolf

 

Drawing.  Drawing in limited time: against the clock.  As Ted Hughes said of the deadline for poetry,  can induce a sense of crisis in the artist and adrenaline is released.  My friend Deirdre Rogers did a drawing exercise with her zart (zoom art) group last week and had 12 minutes to draw what was outside her window.  After cutting a quill from the goose feather that had been on her shelf for decades she prepared her inks and drew quickly, capturing the meteorological mood of her part of the Exe estuary in Devon.  I asked if I could mention her age.  ‘Of course you can say I’m 91.’  That’s another aspect of limited time. You get on with it. I fancy drawing again – but I don’t do it. Not yet anyway. Deirdre’s got twenty years on me, so I know that when I do pick up the sharpened 3B pencil, or skinny felt tip that vitality can be there – if I look properly, like she does.  When I was a kid I drew horses.  There were a lot of gee gees in the fist part of my life in the 1950s.  The bay that pulled the milk van, Sheila the Shire that drew the hay cart,  on whose heaving shoulders I’d hitch a ride to school.  The ponies Bonzer and Snitch bought for rich kids, and that didn’t get ridden; yours truly offering to exercise them free of charge. The piebald out to grass in a nearby field that needed brushing. Then the race horses at the Epsom racing estate where my Granddad  (an ex jockey from Ireland) was a handy man. So I’d be picked up and placed on the back of thoroughbreds with names like Gilchemish the Second or Flying Ebony.  All this horseflesh before I was 12.  Horses – their charm, strength and beauty represented vitality.  Poetry as flesh.  We find it in what’s around us, usually in the natural world.  So look for it it now while we hang in the aspic of the next Covid lockup. I saw a fox at the bins the other day. It was beautiful.  But back to Deirdre.  She also does country dancing, but these days has to sit out the quick jigs, so she draws them, and her fingers dance instead. 

 

Jan Woolf
Drawings: Deirdre Rogers

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I’m neither a prophet or a priest

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

 

I’m neither a prophet or a priest –
all empires burn in a final decadence.
It is slowly becoming a summer
of meandering queues and lines, and this
strange sense of summer and time standing still:
in most of us the will to live still burns
brightly – we champ at the bit of freedom.
I remember once there was conversation,
brightness and wit, now faded, a dimming
of the candle light. I want to create
a disreputable middle-age – after
all you’re never too old are you? Do we
have to in any instance remember
our youth? It was spring and early summer
as if all of us were waiting for the
decade to start; the clock was ticking; the
weather was getting warmer; and our lives
were paused as a still of a frame
of a film. These are the days of burning
desire; unacted upon desire,
waiting to burn as the clock ticks slowly:
I just want the ecstasy and beauty
of re-creation, fully embracing
this new madness – remember today that
you are alive. These are not uncertain
times, these are just days where we have to
respect the sanctity of life. I seem to
be developing new esoteric
obsessions: my sense of time bends around
a Cartesian Geometry. (It
couldn’t be helped, but he begins writing
down words found in the poetry of
C.P Cavafy: burned out; red lips;
sensuous limbs; deviant; pleasure;
eroticism; two yellow
vases. He, also, begins to listen
to the radio once more for the first
time in thirty years. It was the only
kind of media which offered some kind
of balance and levity.) Writing is
life, with a series of footnotes, I thought
I had gotten over my sense of
allegory years, decades ago: these
days have a sense that you just want to make
everything beautiful; in the end this
could leave everyone speechless. Music is
a balm for the soul; a record collection
can save you from yourself and will always
make you free. One of my bookmarks just got
knackered by a hard-back John Tommy Copper
Clarke – just like that. I sit here evenings
reading Rossetti’s formalism, wondering
what restricted him and held him back: why
was he so mannered and could not realise
his full desire? (More words from Cavafy:
good likeness; mattress; reverie; desires
and sensations; deep-hued chestnut eyes;
ideal lips; sensual pleasures; remain forever;
historians and poets; stupidities;
fresh aches; fragrance that lingers; memory
of his beauty; coffee and cognac;
surrenders; unbuttoned coat; his friend placed
flowers for him.) (You could say that even
within these months, slightly sour months, of
isolation he came to feel his whole
self once more.) The city, although windy,
was quiet: you could hear the city singing.

 

 

Nick Ingram
Montage: Claire Palmer

 

 

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Self-Isolating, She Moisturised the Handrail along the Stairwell

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

 

I

Following advice, she washed her hands to the dryness of ironic perfection. All those different types of creams I got for her. When the skin’s normal ecological environment is compromised. Going up or going down the stairs, holding on tight, the effect was bound to wear off. Tissue consumption and extinction. Emollient cause. Imagine it a long curving bannister and you gliding along the residue of fragrant oils. There is little scientific evidence that a handrail will survive beyond its demise. Snaking stability and support. I discovered its coating by my very own hands and extrapolated. The conventional height, a la creamed or no, is between 0.9 and 1 metre. There’s a clearance value?

II

Beyond all demise
those who wear

a metre of the
conventional, survive.

I washed off
scientific residue

and discovered
different values.

Ironic creams
are a dryness of types

and the following of
a tissue emollient.

III

Your hands own their curving along
the ecological decline, a gliding skin
coating its extinction with evidence
of ironic consumption. Washed and
fragrant, there is a residue of support,
but the stability has been compromised.
It is all oil, snaking along the curve as
an emollient, yet we can now only
imagine its perfection. The wear and
wear is scientific though in the hands of
extrapolation a la hands washed of cause
and effect. Residue consumption is the
tissue of what will survive, this holding
off a demise in what is going and going.

 

 

 

Mike Ferguson

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Homología

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

 

Father, who art in Heaven,
I bought a derelict church
and converted the building in to
a battery farm. Every eight weeks,

a hatchery truck delivers me
blackbirds to feed – grow – slaughter.
I’m led into temptation, spend nights
smothered in feather-filled dreams.

I trespass, forget the heating in the barn
and beaks clutter the ventilation valves.
Deliver me now from Evil. Father, I spot
a black mark and cut my earlobe off

now my child’s cry sounds mono
in a faraway room. Someone has built
a wall of flesh between us. You can hear
much clearer once the pain dies down.

Nurses know which lie sounds better
at regular check-ups: Eat your fruit,
but I find baby teeth buried
in each apple. One bite, and seeds fall

on my breast, swell like a season.
My skin breaks out in black patches,
shoots sprout from my arms, seep out
the milk holding my bones together

with my flesh. Buds and twigs push
my ribs further apart. A child-tree grows
in my chest, claims its sliver of meat,
humming litanies to an adult-fruit.

Father they signed me up for research
and as soon as the paperwork passed
the Ethics Committee, they asked for
samples of tissue from my left eye.

Sacrifice my vision in the name of science,
check my womb for blackness but say black
only if you really mean it. Father, we all eat
pasta with mud and no-one complains that

the earth lacks seasoning. Yes, please, I need
another portion of this, sleep-walk
into the garden, repeat instructions
from qualified staff: Take a deep breath!
        Take a deep breath!
   Amen.

 

Maria Stadnicka

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Fragments Facelessly Falling

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

All is quiet, night black and calm – a loving peace.
Spring will soon be here – overgrown country lanes,
smell of new mown hay and always the call of the sea around the
island, the island…

I read my diaries and think about you – your aura in a past
setting like the brilliance of an isolated diamond on a
broken ring. Soon perhaps I will be strong again.

Memory is strange. In the nuance of each new thought,
everything we shared is reassessed, re-evaluated and each
second one less in an individual lifespan. England, London,
my room, you. How responsible were we for our conflicts and actions?

Isolated now I try to understand. Was it the environment
which should be blamed while we try to break the strings of our
puppeteer and loose each other because of the time-space dimension
which brought us temporarily together?

 

 

 

 

Léonie Scott-Matthews

Pentameters Theatre

 

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The Leaf Doctor’s Zombies

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

Strychnos, species                

 

My Aunt Evelyn’s Trip to Haiti ini1959

Ed Johnston, September 2020

 

…if a memory is great enough, other memories will cluster about it, and those in turn will bring their suites of memories to gather about this focal point, because perhaps, they are all scattered parts of the one thing… Zora Neal Hurston

 

Staff Reporter Evelyn DeTardo was twenty-three when the The Miami Herald sent her on an extended trip to Haiti to investigate reports that a witch doctor (“bocor”) was making zombies to labor on his tobacco farm. She hitched a ride on a friend’s sailboat and headed southeast to Port-au-Prince (in creole “Pόtoprens”) where she was met by Bernard Diederich, editor of the The Haiti Sun newspaper, and pastor Wallace Trunbull.  Together they made the two-day journey north in jeeps and over donkey trails, to Bombardopolis in the hilly country of the Mole-Saint Nicolas arrondissement where they found Father Laroche, curé of the Catholic mission there since 1948.

Father Laroche’s story

Father Laroche had been summoned to the police station to speak with the alleged zombie who’d been apprehended near the local cemetery. He claimed he’d been ordered to dig up recently buried Joseph Portalis, who had been under the care of a leaf doctor named Enacier. (This was long before Leaf Doctor was a free iPhone app for assessing plant diseases.)  Leaf doctors then treated patients withrherbs. herbs.    

Father Laroche recognized the alleged zombie as Elius from the nearby town of Jean Rabel, and indeed Elius recognized Laroche saying “I remember you from three years ago, the day I was buried.”  This got Laroche’s attention. He continued to question Elius, who paced the room “as if floating,” and never sat down but perched on a bench like a bird. Elius was emaciated with halting speech. His story was that Enacier kept five other zombies, two being women, to labor at night on his 20-acre farm. In the day they were kept in a series of caverns and fed mostly with sourioranges.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Haiti Map with line showing journey they took

 

Laroche clearly believed zombies were real. The basis he explained is a curare of the genus Strychnos, species used by some indigenous tribes in South America and Africa. “The results of taking this drug is (sic) as close as man has ever come to the living dead…it destroys the brain tissue to such an extent …the victim is incapable of returning to a normal life.”  The fact that young Joseph Portalis was under the care of Enacier is suspect.

Laroche explained the process is twofold. A mix of herbs and other psychoactive substances from puffer fish, sometimes cane toads is given to the victim. This “puts them in coma so deep that heartbeat, pulse and breathing are imperceptible.”  The victims, believed dead by family, are buried only to be dug up and “resurrected” with a second concoction and enslaved.                                       

The day of the interview, Enacier’s son was seen near the grave of Joseph Portalis. That same day, Postalis’ widow died suddenly.    

Shortly after the mysterious death of Joseph Portalis’s wife, Enacier himself showed up at the Bombardolpolis police station, allegedly bribed a corporal with 400 gourdes (Haitian dollars), and had Elius escorted to his hometown of Jean Rabel. Two days later, he was found truly dead on a nearby trail. That corporal was reassigned elsewhere.   

Travel to a Bocor’s Farm                                           

 DeTardo, Diederich and Trunball decided to travel into the rural outskirts of Bombardolpolis to find Enacier. It was a three-hour ride by donkey. His farm was in a jungle valley bordered by high cliffs. My aunt would write, “We decided that looking for a zombie here would be like trying to find a needle in aihaystack.”                                     

Enacier’siStory                                                                                                                  

The visitors found Enacier in his garden by the river Henne that flows through his farm. Diederich would later write, “Pleading his case with senatorial repertory and demonstrative hands,” Enacier with “blazing hypnotic eyes” made a “Mark Anthony appeal to his visitors.”  He claimed he was a prisoner on his own farm, and the so-called zombie was a crazy nephew. He called the towns people of Bombardopolis “witless” and claimed he was the victim of their “witch hunt.”  His denial of being a bocor was maybe protesting too much. The story my aunt wrote and the story Mr. Diederich wrote left readers to ponder. Enacier did, however, grow lots of sour orange.   

                                                        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evelyn DeTardo on the three-hour donkey ride to interview Enacier.                                                     

 

A LittleiHistory

In 1985 Harvard educated Anthropologist Wade Davis (now Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society) wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow to reviews like, “Exotic and far-reaching. . . a corker of a read, just the way Indiana Jones would tell it.” (The Wall Street Journal ) and “Zombies do come back from the dead, and Wade Davis knows how.” (Washington Post Book World).  In far more scientific words, detailed research and experience, he had written what Father Laroche had told my aunt some twenty-six years prior regarding how a zombie comes to be.  When Dr. Davis’ work was questioned by other scientists, he did more extensive work demonstrating, again, that zombies are real, albeitirare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bernard Diederich

 

Just over twenty-two years prior to my aunt Evelyn’s Haiti trip, celebrated author Zora Neale Hurston was there to write about voodoo and zombies. Her experiences, adventures and stories are all contained in Tell My Horse [1]. Huston not only wrote that zombies are real, she detailed meeting a few and photographed them.  There are not, she wrote, legions of zombies working as slaves but bocors will make zombies for labor, profit and sometimes revenge. There are children made into zombies to work as thieves for the bocor. When explaining what drug mixture can make and maintain the “life” of a zombie, Huston wrote something similar to what Laroche had said but added “some secret probably brought from Africa and handed down from generation to generation. These secret societies are secret. They will die before they tell.”  She felt that western science would never fully understand.                                                                                                                                 

My aunt would later work for Time magazine and continue her trips to Haiti, writing about the “Voodoo Dictator” Papa Doc Duvalier. Bernard Diederich would continue at The Haiti Sun until being expelled from Haiti in 1963 after angering Papa Doc. Diederich and my aunt made at least one other expedition together to interview the voodoo houngan (male priest) of Archaie, Haiti.

[1] “Tell my horse” refers to a purely Haitian god of the common people named Guedé (geeday), an irreverent and sarcastic god who insults the upper classes, politicians and the arrogant.


Enacier and Laroche- Above is an excerpt of The Haiti Sun story on March 15, 1959, by Bernard Diederich. My aunt’s story ran a full page in The Miami Herald on April 12, 1959.

 

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ANEW, NOW

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by David Erdos



                                       On Kirsty Allison’s NOW IS NOW (Cold Lips Press, 2020)

 

 

The Queen of any possible Zeitgeist arrives and without a moment to spare
Her ‘Now’ claims us. In Kirsty Allison’s new book of poems we see each minute
Framed by moist stars. Some are encrusted by love as a leg admits sex by a gearstick;
While some shine through earthed cosmos, as ‘Dracula addicts’ along with Midsommer
‘Druids, chancers and ravers..etch marigold shards to our graves..  for thrill’s scar.

The Poems astound, as does the breadth and breath of the writer,
Her music reportage and short stories have already earned wide acclaim.
She even talks and moves as she writes, with a steady slide and star swagger,
As she creates a fresh language that makes no perception or thought
Sound the same. ‘ Family is a fallen manor,’ she states,
A loan shark..
A builder,
A potion pusher..
A Family // Fallacy,
Even her lists convey truth in what they bring to the table,
Revealing the poet/poetess who is able to sentence and spear core belief.

From Ambit’s Dr Martin Bax to Dr John Cooper Clarke, Kirsty connects them;
Her own double female joins the literate world to the pulse
Of dance and rave culture which lives as a separate force in this poems,
Even at times of reflection –  from Crime Syndicate Nail Bar’s
‘Vegan Alternative Karma’, to Le Drug Affair’s  ‘You slapped me with daylight..’
Each word is fire scorching for truth through the false.

145 pages contain this burn, this babe Bible,
As word driven teenstar becomes womanly motorway,
Driving us on with the charge of her ecstatic verses
That bite still with wisdom, as ‘At the Fete of Perversity,
Kardashians cut the ribbons..
Manipulating biddable malignancy..’  with
‘holographs of Nixon n Kissinger
On drums
At the dawn of an uncivil war.’  

                                                               Show the way

To not only rage but reveal how the bit we choke on
Can sweeten, if we can find the pride that feeds poems
Of this calibre and this stamp. Missives aimed at the heart
And which search and singe as they sparkle,
As  well as sing through all seasons;
In the darkest day, words as lamp.

Allison flicks this on with each page,
As the truth of youth is wrenched open:

I keep my hood up to protect my identity/
My problem is I think I am a celebrity..
Baby I’m the same as Courtney Love & Lily Allen
With my Louis Vitton bag and red soled Louboutin..’

Singsongs that spear the shallow end of fame’s ocean
With expert precision and her queenly pen’s perfect motion.

From an ‘Avatar dollface dream to soldiers of the sun hailing..chanson’
Each tear torn, each poem and the stories here re-invent
The language of the street that Allison translates for us,
From the New Yawk Beatnik Bars of the 50s, via 30s Berlin,
Today’s Balham, and a bedlam of the mind Ginsberg lent.
You can also hear Ferlinghetti unfurl somewhere behind
Kirsty’s verses. Corso, Kerouac, Burroughs, Cooper Clarke,
Of course, and the sound this poet has clearly heard all her life:
The echo of the edge we all walk on, as in

Ego Erotika Dominika’s:

‘My vape makes the chem cloud trails snake.
I am faux de la fake
the false lips of fat salopes
the kids the kids
who never stop,
I am their piss on airplane seats..’

Word beats pound.

In a later song of herself she calls herself ‘more backstreet
Than high street.. a smartarse with a tight ass..
A blaggeur ‘who hates blaggers,’ and a bored miss
Who got married, only to escape and return to a ms.
As well as someone to teach each young, spun pretender
What it really means to be a ‘Desk writer in leather’
There to decipher the why and because in each buzz.

The Now is Now certainly, however we understand it,
Whether in times of constant change or in moments
That Kirsty preserves in sharp lines. These are heard,
Like the bird in the proverbial song of all poems,
As bright as chicks, or Dames daring decorum’s dance

To refine and to also stand proud. But they flash through
The short stories here too, struck a junkie jazzed and jumped
In an alley, as in Ghosts of Saint Leonards fantastic opening line:
‘ I don’t know when I started seeing ghosts but the new ones all have cancer.’
Here, then, are word visions shaped for the ear and eye that blaze loud.

Even the titles cajole; Blood Star, Euro Sarcophagus, Tide Bodies,
While Message to My Teenage Self tears you with a foresight that fouls
Life’s sad scheme:

‘You’re too fucked to read
You can’t see
I hate that about you
Makes your youth a stained dream,’

Sneers and snarls that reveal in a splatter of once, life’s true purchase,
As with youth’s overspend Now’s new woman shows how everything else
Feels obscene. There is something here for us all; poems as chords
Played through chaos. Words as notes, rising across repentant air
And sin’s smears. From The Riddle of Should, and Love is Just a Reflection,
Kirsty’s codes for being define a fresh English that certainly Irvine Welsh
In his cover quote now holds dear. But there is writing here all should prize
From the Genie-us inside the Negroni to the ‘craft mead arches’
Of Holly Grove; spells on the page that contain the age
In which each of us are now living and the hour too, or split minute
That these infinite poem streams cast and flow.

This is an invaluable book, that ends with a new myth
For the modern. As Allison honours Anubis, she creates
Golden Jackals for the glazed parade we’re all in.
And so, read; she reveals. Arise and renew past successes.
Here shine poems as progress. You should as these words
Heal our sins. The old now has failed as the Quantum catch
Moves unmastered. And so this new mistress
Of the movement between worlds makes a vow
In both the moments she shares, and those she’s yet
To write for us, of how to improve, record, prosper
And how to define the next now.

This books is a babe. This book is a burn.
Glitter blisters. Sing out, sweet sister.
The glare of day has a girlfriend.
Each gold and silvered line sparks each cloud.

 

 

David Erdos October 3rd 2020

https://kirstyallison.com/

https://kirstyallison.substack.com/

 

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Michael Horovitz Needs You. Updated

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor



AN APPEAL FOR SPACE & FUNDING ON BEHALF OF MICHAEL HOROVITZ





Under threat of being pulped by a leading UK book distributor, a mass of unsold copies of A NEW WASTE LAND, Michael Horovitz’s magnum opus, are in desperate need of raising & securing funds for a safely conditioned London-based storage space for these books & their companions, published in more generous times. At the present time 500 or so square feet are required, plus practical working space around that. Horovitz, dubbed by Martin Amis “a transmedial crusader”, is one of this and the last century’s leading poets, the link between the American Beats of the 50s, the 60s counterculture, and the constantly developing British traditions and practices that have developed since, and which the IT community treasures and extends. His New Departures Publications & Poetry Olympics Festivals have been among the quintessential publishers and promoters of new poetry & heterodox experiment in this country, so the preservation of this cultural movement is vital. IT asks its readership for assistance in both enquiring about space and/or facilities, along with the possible securing of funds or sponsorship. A working studio space in North, West or Central London would be the ideal outcome to maintain the continuity of this crucial work and body of voices. If you or any associates know of potentially suitable solutions, please contact Michael Horovitz at: [email protected] OR 020 7229 7850.


Michael Horovitz.  Photo by John Hoppy Hopkins

 

Portrait of Michael Horovitz by David Hockney, 1980


‘The Saxman Cometh’, painting by Michael Horovitz

 
 
 
 

Search – List of Books by Michael Horovitz

Michael Horovitz (born 1935) is an English poet, artist and translator, educated at Brasenose College, Oxford.

Though initially associated with the British Poetry Revival, Horovitz became widely known on his appearance at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall on June 11 1965, alongside Allen Ginsberg and Alexander Trocchi. In 1959 he founded the New Departures anthologies whilst still an undergrad, publishing Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Stevie Smith, Kathleen Raine, Langston Hughes, John Cage, et al. In 1969 he edited Children of Albion Poetry of the Underground in Britain for Penguin Books. And some of his most popular poems – ‘For Modern Man’, ‘A Postcard From Ireland’, ’Sea’s Cape’ – brought him to more public prominence, as did his pioneering of Jazz Poetry SuperJams, alongside many of the then adventuresome early British Beboppers including Ronnie Scott, Annie Whitehead and Stan Tracey, & also producing the first European appearance by Ornette Coleman’s band in Fairfield Hall, Croydon.

In 1971 he published the flamboyant The Wolverhampton Wanderer (An Epic of Britannia, In Twelve Books’), dedicated ‘for Poetry United’!, with an original dustjacket by Peter Blake etc as beforeAn Epic of Britannia. In Twelve Books. With a Resurrection & a Life for Poetry United, with an original dustjacket by Peter Blake. The book is a quintessentially English collection of British artists of the period with illustrations and photographs by Michael Tyzack, Peter Blake, Adrian Henri,  Patrick Hughes, Gabi Nasemann, Michael Horovitz, Paul Kaplan, John Furnival, Bob Godfrey, Pete Morgan, Jeff Nuttall & David Hockney. . It is a visual and literary elegy to the culture surrounding association football up to the 1960s, celebrating not only Wolves and its supporters, but also Arsenal, Spurs, and legendary teams from the North.

Growing Up: Selected Poems and Pictures, 1951-’79 was published by Allison & Busby in 1979. He has run the Poetry Olympics at numerous venues including the Albert Hall and Westminster Abbey since 1980 and elsewhere the world over, and recently published A New Waste Land.

Horovitz is, alongside with that of Beat exemplar par excellence Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Tom Pickard and Joyce Johnson, one of the last living links to the Beat poets and their milieu.

He was married to the English poet Frances Horovitz (1938-83); their son Adam (b. 1971) is also a poet.

Horovitz recently curated an event at the Portobello Film Festival 2009 entitled ‘The Beat Goes On’, the first of a two-part event. The second was curated by Lee Harris & River Styx .

In August 2010 Horovitz contributed to an eBook collection of political poems entitled Emergency Verse – Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State edited by Alan Morrison.

Horovitz stood for election for the Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2010, but came second to Geoffrey Hill.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article “Michael Horovitz”, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0
 

 
 
 
A New Waste Land Timeship Earth at Nillennium
2007 – A New Waste Land Timeship Earth at Nillennium (Hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9780902689268
ISBN-10: 0902689266

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New Waste Land
2007 – New Waste Land (Hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781906061098
ISBN-10: 1906061092

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Wordsounds and Sightlines New and Selected Poems
1994 – Wordsounds and Sightlines New and Selected Poems (Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9780902689206
ISBN-10: 0902689207
Genre: Literature & Fiction

  •  

 

 
 
 
Midsummer Morning Jog Log
1986 – Midsummer Morning Jog Log (Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9780950460680
ISBN-10: 0950460680

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Wolverhampton Wanderer
1971 – Wolverhampton Wanderer (Hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9780901539151
ISBN-10: 0901539155

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Love Poems
1971 – Love Poems (Hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9780902689039
ISBN-10: 0902689037

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Love Poems
1971 – Love Poems (Hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9780902689046
ISBN-10: 0902689045

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Children of Albion poetry of the 'Underground' in Britain
Children of Albion Poetry of the ‘underground’ in Britain [The Penguin poets, D116] (Other)
ISBN-13: 9780140421163
ISBN-10: 0140421165
Genre: Literature & Fiction

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Growing Up Selected Poems and Pictures 1951-79
Growing Up Selected Poems and Pictures 1951-79 (Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9780850312331
ISBN-10: 0850312337

  •  

 

 
 
 
A New Waste Land Timeship Earth at Nillennium
A New Waste Land Timeship Earth at Nillennium (Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9780902689183
ISBN-10: 0902689185
Genre: Literature & Fiction

  •  

  

 
 
 
Midsummer Morning Jog Log
Midsummer Morning Jog Log (Hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9780950460673
ISBN-10: 0950460672

  •  

 

 
 
 
WORDSOUNDS AND SIGHTLINES NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
Wordsounds and Sightlines New and Selected Poems (Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781856194648
ISBN-10: 1856194647
Genre: Literature & Fiction

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Horovitz

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Poetry

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

 

Hand Print
By DENNIS GOULD

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Street writer part ten – Christmas Epiphanies

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

 

What is an epiphany?

Who the fuck knows!

It’s like asking a writer… ‘where do you come up with this stuff?’

It’s like asking… ‘what is life?’

The best thing I ever read about life was this: ‘the only thing I know is that I know nothing.’

If my memory serves me right… I believe that was Socrates.

Anyway… whatever an epiphany is I always have one around Christmas ever I since I took the writing on, on a more full time basis.

I was 24 when I had my first Christmas epiphany.

I was in a serious relationship at the time and I decided I would take the writing on full time and go out mainly as a poet and a filmmaker.

My second Christmas epiphany came at 25 years old and I was very unhealthy at the time and I decided I would start the open mic circuit.

My third Christmas epiphany at the age of 26 I decided I would put on a poetry tour around Ireland and the UK.

My fourth Christmas epiphany I decided I would travel to New York and perform in the same poetry café Allen Ginsberg used to perform in.

Coming up to my fifth Christmas epiphany I decided to take a year out and test out material with magazines all around the world.

Coming up to my sixth Christmas epiphany at the age of thirty I decided I would make another poetry film and start to spread my writing out more diversely like… poetry, fiction, scripts and journalism.

And I did just that!

We are coming up close to Christmas again and I believe my new epiphany has appeared to me early this year (like an early gift of an unwrapped woman).

As writers all we want to see is the BIG DREAM!

Like seeing our names on books and records and films and shows so on and so forth.

But I believe the real dream is in the magazines.

So, I’ve decided I would spend the next ten years (if I live that long) in the magazines.

And if my work is worth its own salt someone will pick it up.

I’m leaving you with a poem called: ‘the greatest fight you’ll put up.’

Remember to start off small and work your way up to the top of your game, like putting that angel on the peak of your Christmas tree.

I got caught up in the BIG DREAM and I made many, many mistakes and fucked it up quite a bit but…

The moment I said: ‘I don’t give a shit anymore’ – all of a sudden more and more people were interested in my work and it grew stronger, better, bigger and badder.

Good luck until next time.

Love

PBJ

<3

 

The greatest fight you’ll put up

 

I ask myself

Walking out to the hall

Why do you do it

Even though

Your family life

Your friendships

Your love life

And

You

Is not the same

It’s the greatest fight you’ll put up

And

If it dies with you

You go a trier

But

That might not be enough

And

You say

I’m still alive

Right now

 

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A Tribute for the Great Gig in the Sky

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

 

The Moon Roq founder creates a fictional live concert in an imaginary stadium that features music from Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Osibisa and Hawkwind.

Interview: https://www.stampthewax.com/2020/10/07/praise-you-a-stadium-rock-tribute-mix-by-the-iron-glove/

 

 
The Iron Glove
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Covid Connections

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

 

Orryelle Defenestrate on sharing Covid opinions


Visual & sonic artist, sorceror, tattooist, tantric, tarotic. Director Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Co. (Orryelle’s self-description)

Alan Dearling writes: My old friend Orryelle, is based in Australia, but is a true world-traveller. He’s a stunning and sometimes frightening performer. But perhaps one of the World’s Wise Men! We first met when I was putting the ‘Alternative Australia’ book together. Then, a few years later I spent an evening with him in Glastonbury, before and after a Metamporphic Theatre event on and around the famous Glastonbury Tor. Here, Orryelle offers his thoughts on people sharing their Covid views via social media. It seems like an important message about ‘listening’, ‘diversity’ and ‘community’:

“When did intelligent people just start screening out or blocking people with different views, opinions or even just info than themselves? How is anyone supposed to grow and learn like that? Lots of people seem to be saying lately, ‘I can’t be bothered arguing with someone like that because they are set in their opinions and won’t listen’ and then also behaving in exactly the same manner, just blocking other views and info. Why the massive polarization of everything, and immediate assumptions that a particular view means a particular political stance, with no shades or nuances?

I feel this is especially dangerous with CV19 (regardless of your ‘stance’) as we’re all collectively working out gradually and progressively what to do about this problem, the information is constantly shifting as the virus changes and humanity finds out more and adapts to it, and nobody much (in power or not) seems to know for sure the best way to deal with it so we all need to stay a bit open-minded (though not so much our brains fall out) and not just block other views or info.

 It is also all very different in different places, both the level of pandemic (according to population density and other conditions), and the reactions by governments, media, populace etc… and especially the sickening way in which it has been politicised.  Set and calcified opinions are not helpful at this time, constant enquiry and consideration is vital…

Addition to post in response to some of the comments:  I’m not saying people should NEVER block or ignore others, just that other opinions if expressed coherently should be at least read and genuinely considered. Obviously we all have limited time and energy to engage in endless online debates, but we don’t have to be closed to other views or new information that challenges what we have already decided.  (I don’t tolerate ongoing racism, sexism or bigotry either).”

In on-line conversation with Alan, Orryelle made his own personal suggestion regarding Covid strategies, saying:

“Many are using Sweden as THE example of a country that hasn’t done lockdowns, but why is nobody looking at Iceland? They’ve done no lockdowns at all (instead focusing on contact tracing etc.), and have a total of ten CV19 deaths (they’ve  had plenty of cases (around 2.6k) as their borders are open, and yet one of the best  mortality-rates-per-case in the world).

 The facts that they have also done more research on the virus than any other country, and that they are a nation renowned for keeping corporate/media control at bay (they sacked all their rip-off banking tycoons a few years back), it makes the over-control of some other governments look quite suspicious to me (and no I am not a conspiracy nutjob, new-ager or right-winger, just looking at information and thinking critically)…”

Much more musing on ‘Covid and the Earth’s immune system’ from Orryelle in this link to his ‘defenestrations’. Orryelle told Alan, “I did this illustrated blog about Covid back in April. Some of my perceptions have shifted a bit, but the basic gist remains resonant.”: https://defenestrations150492840.wordpress.com/2020/04/28/covid19-as-the-earths-immune-system/

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HOLLER: AMY RAY

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

Website: www.andrewdarlington.blogspot.com)

 

interview by

ANDREW DARLINGTON

Amy Ray is one half of Indigo Girls.

She also has an impressive string of solo albums.

And she gives good interview…

Now the water is up to her waist, and rising. Amy Ray – the dark-haired half of Indigo Girls, stands in the centre of the creek as the floodtide swirls around her. On the back of the album the water’s up to her chin, and she’s swimming, ‘head just high enough to holler.’ Was that water cold? ‘It was a little cold. But we did the shots during summer, so it was just a little chilly. We started out trying to get pictures of me totally underwater, but I kept slipping, tripping and laughing, so we just took it the way it is.’

Amy Elizabeth Ray, was ‘born in the grist of a rebel yell, swaddled in the song of the Whip-poor-will’ – her spelling. Is that the kind of thing she used to do as a child, playing around Decatur, Georgia, in the local creek? ‘It’s the kind of thing I did, yes. And the kind of thing I do now. That little river runs below my property, from where it flows down from the foothills of the Appalachians. It varies from only six inches deep to around five feet. In summer we swim there and get kayaks too.’ Her voice is clear and bright. She laughs a lot in an easy relaxed way. She’s driving her car along the freeway, using her hands-free to tell me things across the Atlantic. A first for me. The first time I’ve conducted an in-car interview! But in other ways Amy Ray is not an easy artist to keep a focus on. While, in another sense, there’s nothing smoky, ethereal or other-worldly about her energies either.

For the Indigo Girls – Amy’s duo with Emily Saliers, the major-label breakthrough happened with their self-titled 1989 album on which they were joined by R.E.M and members of Irish band Hothouse Flowers. It’s an intense collection of acoustic ballads and Country-Rock flummery that claws at your carefully-contrived cynicism with its acrid wit and labours of lyricism. Their first UK interview had them sniping good-naturedly at each other. ‘Emily is earnest and soft-spoken with the wide eyes that come from smouldering conviction, rather than naivety. Amy is slightly more pugnacious and superficially tough. As Emily puts it, ‘Amy is Rock ‘n’ Roll’ (‘Melody Maker’, 10 June 1989). The two met at elementary school, but started taking the band seriously at Atlanta’s ‘Emory University’, where Amy was studying religion and English, and Emily majored in English. In the Neve Campbell slasher-flick ‘Scream’ there’s an Indigo Girls poster tacked to the bedroom wall.

But when I first saw the Indigo Girls I promptly thought of a female Everly Brothers. After all, Don & Phil spent so much time touring and recording together that they ultimately fell out and didn’t speak to each other for ten years. Are these solo spin-off projects a way of letting off that steam? So that they divide to conquer? ‘That’s a great question. You’re right. Maybe it is,’ as though she’s mulling it over. ‘With Emily we do spend a lot of time together, but we also spend a lot of time apart. My first few solo records were different from Indigo Girls records, more like Punk-Rock bands – ‘Stag’ (2001) with Joan Jett and Breeder Josephine Wiggs, and ‘Prom’ (2005) also with the Butchies. They were on my own Daemon Records label. We were playing in clubs on the Indie level, a DIY way to get my ya’s-ya’s out. The energy tends to get diffused in big venues. A small hall or bar is obviously our forté, where we can really relate to people, have a closer contact. And then we just kept doing it. We decided to tilt in a more Country direction. And with the band we got together for ‘Goodnight Tender’ (2014) we toured a lot. It’s now just a thing. There’s a whole other side to my creativity, with a different set of collaborators. I like the difference. It’s a whole different thing.’

Recorded on analogue-tape, ‘Holler’ (2018) is Amy’s sixth solo album, and there’s human experience etched into each song. A legacy, rooted in mythic rural southern-fried Americana, informed by its tradition of protest, toned with the redemptive power of language, music, and the natural world, compassion and fine-grained observation. A meld of place and history that ticks away beneath the contemporary surface of texts, taxis, on-the-road songs and Velvet Elvis. She writes about how Appalachian poet Byron Herbert Reece ‘gave words to the wordless’ (the jumpy-picking “Sparrow’s Boogie”). Vince Gill and ‘Firewatcher’s Daughter’ Brandi Carlile add harmonies on the gentle waltz-time “Last Taxi Fare”, while the Wood Brothers crop up most notably on “Tonight I’m Paying The Rent”. “Jesus Was A Walking Man” (‘some would build a wall and say send ‘em back from where they came, but you know who would’ve let ‘em in? Jesus would’ve let ‘em in’), even manages to capture the stirring gospel power of Georgia-born original SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) anti-segregation singer Rutha Mae Harris.

‘We draw on Biblical images. We know’ admits Amy. ‘But the spiritual thing is a universal thing. It’s not a definite denomination, or even a Christian thing – it’s, like, spirituality, a higher being… The principles of America, which were founded correctly, got lost straightaway. Now they talk about freedom of religion, yet you have a President who is definitely of the Christian doctrine and would push that to its limit.’ Then there’s “Fine With The Dark”, just meditative Amy and exquisite acoustic guitar. ‘Yes, some are just love songs’ she laughs. Comparisons have been made to Jim Ford’s 1969 album, ‘Harlan County’. I don’t really see that. ‘For me, that record was influential on me for the horn arrangements. And the strings. That was the biggest thing. My ‘Goodnight Tender’ album didn’t have any strings. Sonically, that was a real inspiration for me. It spurred us along. Of course, we have our own spin on it. Just by our way of miking of the drums.’

With the Indigo Girls they operate as two equal co-existing parts. They’re blowing ideas into each other’s minds, mapping songs and arrangements between them, even though they’re mostly writing separately. They’re instinctively so close it’s easy to think of them as chalk-and-cheese sisters. Now, from the Power of Two, she’s starting clean-slated. Is it different with her own band, is Amy her own boss now, or is it just a bigger democracy? ‘I’m the boss, to a certain degree. I pay everybody. The buck stops with me. But it’s a collaboration too. And in the studio, the producer is boss. I love to have someone directing me in the studio. I count on him to edit me, if I need to play something over, or if I need to rewrite something. I am a diehard collaborator, I enjoy being part of a team, I pick them because I like what they do. As with guitarist Jeff Fielder, I know what he does is gonna be great. There’s no way I’m gonna tell him what to play. I love what they do. I love working that way.’

No-one can play like Amy either. I love Amy’s “Duane Allman” song on ‘Goodnight Tender’. ‘I grew up being a big Allman’s fan. My older sister had their records. I wasn’t even aware that he was no longer with us. So I was listening to the music of ‘Woodstock’, you know. These rock ‘n’ roll people were iconic to me. Janis had already passed. And when was it Elvis died… 1977? I was talking to a friend who has addiction problems, and it’s like that sense of something missing, something gone that’s irreplaceable.’

Do you think about god and sex? ‘There’s a ton of things I think about!’ She talks about the Indigo Girls maybe coming across to the UK to make a record (which turns out to be the duo’s fifteenth studio album ‘Look Long’, 2020). She talks about the Indigo Girls promo-touring their “Galileo” hit single from ‘Rites Of Passage’ (1992) along with Siouxsie Sioux – ‘one of the most amazing people I ever met.’ Amy was looking out from backstage and seeing Goths in the audience. Budgie played drums. ‘Siouxsie came out and sang on a couple of our songs. It was just fun!’ On “Galileo” she asks ‘how long till my soul gets it right?’ So how does it work? Do some of her best songs come in the shower? ‘Some of them do. Or some of them come in the car. Or on a dog-walk.’

Amy writes ‘I ain’t afraid of being lost, but I am afraid of doing no good’ (in “Oh City Man” – ‘come to the wilderness, where you can be free again’). Amy and the Indigo Girls have always been activists in social and political issues, from environmental campaigns to LGBT Rights. Has that ever resulted in negative reactions? The way the Dixie-Chicks – or, as we must now call them, the ‘Chicks’, were pilloried when they criticised George W Bush’s Iraq intervention. ‘Yeah. The Dixie Chicks… that was a long time ago. They were in a different situation to us. But we get that. We get some negative feedback. It is what it is. It alienates some parts of the audience. But I’m never going to get that hard-core country audience anyway. And a lot of country musicians have come-out as progressive. People like Steve Earle are a little more progressive. Politics is so polarised. It’s where we’re at in the states. With Race, migration, the refugee crisis. I live in a town that’s very conservative. I’ve lived there twenty-five years. I do benefits for things we have in common, Animal Welfare, Battered Women’s Refuge. And the barriers start to come down. They listen to the music. Some of them like it, and some don’t. One guy came across and told me he was a staunch Republican, but he liked what we played. So for me, let music transcend that. It’s easier for us. We’re white and middle-class. If we were non-white it would be harder.’

Back to ‘Holler’. “Didn’t Know A Damn Thing” – dedicated to African-American Lit-activist Toni Cade Bambara, is a tour-de-force double-vision of young Amy on the schoolbus, unaware of the atrocities as ‘bodies were hanging, bodies were burning’ across the South. ‘It’s just the truth. It’s just my truth. I was born in 1964. As I was growing up there was still a great deal of unrest. With segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, the American Indian movement. It was just horrible. But we were sheltered in middle-class suburbia at the time. There was a lot going on. ‘I sang my heart out for the land of the free,’ we learned our history ‘but it didn’t say nothing about what was right in front of me.’ I just think about it now, and WOW! At the time, I didn’t even see the tip of the iceberg. Even by the time I got to go to college. Of course, the kids are much smarter these days. More informed. If they want to find out something beyond what they’re told, they can seek it on the internet…’

Amy Ray corners. Accelerates. Heads on down the freeway.

BY ANDREW DARLINGTON

Expanded and revised from an interview

originally published in ‘R’N’R: ROCK ‘N’ REEL’

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My cousin Vincent

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor


Vincent…

 

I praised his gawky sketches,
Nodded once in a while
At his babbling of light,
Colour, pain and guilt,
His endless talk of beauty.

Absorbed it with good manners.

But then he claimed he was in love with me
(And my husband not twelve months dead)
So I was forced to flee.

He followed to my Father’s house
And I was afterwards told
He scorched his hand in a candle flame

To demonstrate fidelity.

 

 

 

Kevin Patrick McCann
Illustration Nick Victor

A new book of poems

Buy at:
https://amazon.co.uk/Still-Pondering-Kevin-Patrick-McCann/dp/1788768671/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=Kevin+Patrick+McCann&qid=1581612715&s=books&sr=1-4

 
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John Lennon at 80: One Man Against the Deep State ‘Monster’

Posted on 10 October, 2020 by Editor

 

“You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.”—John Lennon (1969)

John Lennon, born 80 years ago on October 9, 1940, was a musical genius and pop cultural icon.

He was also a vocal peace protester and anti-war activist, and a high-profile example of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.

Long before Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was Lennon who was being singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files illegally collected on his activities and associations.

For a while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.

Years after Lennon’s assassination it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of files on him, including song lyrics. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, directed the agency to spy on the musician. There were also various written orders calling on government agents to frame Lennon for a drug bust. “The FBI’s files on Lennon … read like the writings of a paranoid goody-two-shoes,” observed reporter Jonathan Curiel.

As the New York Times notes, “Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’ … is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”

Indeed, all of the many complaints we have about government today—surveillance, militarism, corruption, harassment, SWAT team raids, political persecution, spying, overcriminalization, etc.—were present in Lennon’s day and formed the basis of his call for social justice, peace and a populist revolution.

For all of these reasons, the U.S. government was obsessed with Lennon, who had learned early on that rock music could serve a political end by proclaiming a radical message. More importantly, Lennon saw that his music could mobilize the public and help to bring about change. Lennon believed in the power of the people. Unfortunately, as Lennon recognized: “The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people. It controls them.”

However, as Martin Lewis writing for Time notes: “John Lennon was not God. But he earned the love and admiration of his generation by creating a huge body of work that inspired and led. The appreciation for him deepened because he then instinctively decided to use his celebrity as a bully pulpit for causes greater than his own enrichment or self-aggrandizement.”

For instance, in December 1971 at a concert in Ann Arbor, Mich., Lennon took to the stage and in his usual confrontational style belted out “John Sinclair,” a song he had written about a man sentenced to 10 years in prison for possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Within days of Lennon’s call for action, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered Sinclair released.

What Lennon did not know at the time was that government officials had been keeping strict tabs on the ex-Beatle they referred to as “Mr. Lennon.” Incredibly, FBI agents were in the audience at the Ann Arbor concert, “taking notes on everything from the attendance (15,000) to the artistic merits of his new song.”

The U.S. government, steeped in paranoia, was spying on Lennon.

By March 1971, when his “Power to the People” single was released, it was clear where Lennon stood. Having moved to New York City that same year, Lennon was ready to participate in political activism against the U. S. government, the “monster” that was financing the war in Vietnam.

The release of Lennon’s Sometime in New York City album, which contained a radical anti-government message in virtually every song and depicted President Richard Nixon and Chinese Chairman Mao Tse-tung dancing together nude on the cover, only fanned the flames of the conflict to come.

The official U.S. war against Lennon began in earnest in 1972 after rumors surfaced that Lennon planned to embark on a U.S. concert tour that would combine rock music with antiwar organizing and voter registration. Nixon, fearing Lennon’s influence on about 11 million new voters (1972 was the first year that 18-year-olds could vote), had the ex-Beatle served with deportation orders “in an effort to silence him as a voice of the peace movement.”

Then again, the FBI has had a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures. Most notably among the latter are such celebrated names as folk singer Pete Seeger, painter Pablo Picasso, comic actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, comedian Lenny Bruce and poet Allen Ginsberg.

Among those most closely watched by the FBI was Martin Luther King Jr., a man labeled by the FBI as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” With wiretaps and electronic bugs planted in his home and office, King was kept under constant surveillance by the FBI with the aim of “neutralizing” him. He even received letters written by FBI agents suggesting that he either commit suicide or the details of his private life would be revealed to the public. The FBI kept up its pursuit of King until he was felled by a hollow-point bullet to the head in 1968.

While Lennon was not—as far as we know—being blackmailed into suicide, he was the subject of a four-year campaign of surveillance and harassment by the U.S. government (spearheaded by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover), an attempt by President Richard Nixon to have him “neutralized” and deported. As Adam Cohen of the New York Times points out, “The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics.”

As Lennon’s FBI file shows, memos and reports about the FBI’s surveillance of the anti-war activist had been flying back and forth between Hoover, the Nixon White House, various senators, the FBI and the U.S. Immigration Office.

Nixon’s pursuit of Lennon was relentless and in large part based on the misperception that Lennon and his comrades were planning to disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention. The government’s paranoia, however, was misplaced.

Left-wing activists who were on government watch lists and who shared an interest in bringing down the Nixon Administration had been congregating at Lennon’s New York apartment. But when they revealed that they were planning to cause a riot, Lennon balked. As he recounted in a 1980 interview, “We said, We ain’t buying this. We’re not going to draw children into a situation to create violence so you can overthrow what? And replace it with what? . . . It was all based on this illusion, that you can create violence and overthrow what is, and get communism or get some right-wing lunatic or a left-wing lunatic. They’re all lunatics.”

Despite the fact that Lennon was not part of the “lunatic” plot, the government persisted in its efforts to have him deported. Equally determined to resist, Lennon dug in and fought back. Every time he was ordered out of the country, his lawyers delayed the process by filing an appeal. Finally, in 1976, Lennon won the battle to stay in the country when he was granted a green card. As he said afterwards, “I have a love for this country…. This is where the action is. I think we’ll just go home, open a tea bag, and look at each other.” 

Lennon’s time of repose didn’t last long, however. By 1980, he had re-emerged with a new album and plans to become politically active again.

The old radical was back and ready to cause trouble. In his final interview on Dec. 8, 1980, Lennon mused, “The whole map’s changed and we’re going into an unknown future, but we’re still all here, and while there’s life there’s hope.”

The Deep State has a way of dealing with troublemakers, unfortunately. On Dec. 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman was waiting in the shadows when Lennon returned to his New York apartment building. As Lennon stepped outside the car to greet the fans congregating outside, Chapman, in an eerie echo of the FBI’s moniker for Lennon, called out, “Mr. Lennon!”

Lennon turned and was met with a barrage of gunfire as Chapman—dropping into a two-handed combat stance—emptied his .38-caliber pistol and pumped four hollow-point bullets into his back and left arm. Lennon stumbled, staggered forward and, with blood pouring from his mouth and chest, collapsed to the ground.

John Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. He had finally been “neutralized.”

Yet where those who neutralized the likes of John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and others go wrong is in believing that you can murder a movement with a bullet and a madman.

Thankfully, Lennon’s legacy lives on in his words, his music and his efforts to speak truth to power. As Yoko Ono shared in a 2014 letter to the parole board tasked with determining whether Chapman should be released: “A man of humble origin, [John Lennon] brought light and hope to the whole world with his words and music. He tried to be a good power for the world, and he was. He gave encouragement, inspiration and dreams to people regardless of their race, creed and gender.”

Sadly, not much has changed for the better in the world since Lennon walked among us.

Peace remains out of reach. Activism and whistleblowers continue to be prosecuted for challenging the government’s authority. Militarism is on the rise, with local police dressed like the military, all the while the governmental war machine continues to wreak havoc on innocent lives across the globe.

For those of us who joined with John Lennon to imagine a world of peace, it’s getting harder to reconcile that dream with the reality of the American police state.

Meanwhile, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, those who dare to speak up are labeled dissidents, troublemakers, terrorists, lunatics, or mentally ill and tagged for surveillance, censorship, involuntary detention or, worse, even shot and killed in their own homes by militarized police.

As Lennon shared in a 1968 interview:

“I think all our society is run by insane people for insane objectives… I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal means. If anybody can put on paper what our government and the American government and the Russian… Chinese… what they are actually trying to do, and what they think they’re doing, I’d be very pleased to know what they think they’re doing. I think they’re all insane. But I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”

So what’s the answer?

Lennon had a multitude of suggestions.

“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.”

“War is over if you want it.”

“Produce your own dream…. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders…. You have to do it yourself. That’s what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be. There’s nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up. I can’t cure you. You can cure you.”

“Peace is not something you wish for; It’s something you make, Something you do, Something you are, And something you give away.”

“If you want peace, you won’t get it with violence.”

And my favorite advice of all: “Say you want a revolution / We better get on right away / Well you get on your feet / And out on the street / Singing power to the people.”

 

John W Whitehead

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LIZZY DALZELL: aka DIZZY*LIZZY*DIESEL

Posted on 6 October, 2020 by Editor

 

 

Alan Dearling shares some of the words and images from his friend, Lizzy, who has been having a real downer, BUT she is still full of ranting life. Angry, resentful…but I feel that she speaks for many in UK. The Forgotten Many, who feel lonely and helpless. But her words and those of many like her, are a sign of the times. She needs our support. She possesses a real VOICE, simultaneously vulnerable and powerful.

Lizzy and her generation, and their children are our future…Words and Images… Food for Thought and Thoughtful-ness.

I invite you to get know the Real Lizzy.

 

******************************

Lizzy tells us that she is:

“…trapped in the prison of poverty, and it’s gotten me feeling worthless feeling cursed wondering if things could ever get worse, desperately grab my purse but i ain’t even got a penny, the leccys about to run out and the cupboards are fucking empty, so let’s see, how to pull through feel new grasp a new angle on life… find a way out of the stress and the strife, just whatever you do don’t go reaching for the knife ?         wrote that a while ago got many more lol … FUCKTHESYSTEM .”

“…they say the only way is up, when you reach rock bottom, but i feel like there’s no coming back for me feel like my heart is rotten… wrap me up in cotton wool cos babe i feel so broken… and the days go by hoping the phone will ring but i feel like I’ve been forgotten… all the mates i used to kick around with, baby they’re all long gone…and i sit here wondering to myself how did it all go so wrong… try to write rhymes that are positive and nice but inside my mind’s so dark, reminiscing ‘bout when i used to be a teen, carefree drinking in the park, bunking school down the power station, getting blazed up before class, blim holes covered on my shirt and tie, short skirt ripping holes on the thighs of my tights, rejecting authority, screaming at the teachers tryna control me, but look where it’s gotten me, 30 years old no qualifications or job prosperity! #stay.in.school.kids”



Lizzy says that she is:

“…sick and tired of feeling sick and tired now you can’t even sleep from the overthinking you’re so wired, memories of things you seen things you could have been just won’t let me be… life’s falling apart at the seams! so you sit looking in the mirror feeling like a sinner, no longer a winner same sad eyes just now sunken and thinner, try to force down some dinner, but nothing tastes the same, with every bite, you’re thinking of all the pain, watching your hopes and dreams spiralling down the drain you just don’t feel the same and you’re the only one to blame, it’s you who lost your way, you who fucked your brain, you who went insane, and now it’s you who has to pay! depression and anxiety bubbling up inside of me feeling like a limbless zombie stuck in quicksand, can’t bring myself to stand, and i just don’t understand, this isn’t what i had planned…”



Lizzy writes lyrics, and is sometimes dancer and a singer with the band, ‘Reality Attack’. She plans on getting a solo act together bringing to us some consciousness-raising and controversial songs and raps! Here’s another of her rap-rhymes:

“… dreaming of a life where i can be free, travelling all over the lands and the seas yes i wanna be free! wanna explore the wonders of the world, collections of treasures and diamonds and pearls, and just do what i wanna! all of the places i wanna go, all of the faces i wanna know, all of the food that i wanna try and just forget about the times that i wish i could die, wanna fill my life with positive thoughts, no more sorrow and wallowing in the dark, no more depression and anxiety just happy and free is where i wanna be! you know they say that time is meant to be a healer, but i know that after time things don’t get any easier, you know they say that time is meant to heal, but i know that after time the pain it still feels real, tryna keep your head above the water, tryna keep your feet on solid ground, all the chaos and madness surrounds us, a little piece of mind you haven’t found, but i know that we will be alright, yes i know that we will be just fine!”

Lizzy can get angry, frustrated, alienated and in danger:

 “ // stuck on the same page, heart full of rage, my brain so deranged// just wish i could change// never ending spiral, wanting to be mindful// chewed up spat out feeling like a fool!// like a broken tool dump my body in the pool// take me away, i’m feeling far from cool// too much overthinking, too much heavy drinking// uncontrollable emotional, every day i’m sinking// harder darker faster tomato my brains turned to mush feel like a disaster// tryna master this game of life// but the pain cuts deep like the blade of a knife// wanna spread my wings and fly//don’t wanna break down and cry//so i look up to the sky and i promise i’ll try// to get a little better// still tryna forget ya// you fucked me up so hard now i’m far from the centre!// living on the edge crawling out of a hedge// tip-toeing closer to the window ledge, of a skyscraper// as my thoughts they taper disconjointed bundled up in a ball full of wool// tryna stay positve, but negative energy always pulls// i’m not allowed to be happy, my days are always crappy// and by the end of the night… my demons they snap me// happy slap me coming down like a ton of bricks// dwelling on, the fucking pricks, who fucked me over// now i’m growing colder gonna run myself a bath and jump in with a toaster! //this ain’t supposed to be the way my life turned out// I’m tired of this rollercoaster// i wanna jump out! wanna scream and shout// screw up my face and pout mundane life got me feeling so down! //”

************************************************************************************

Alan writes: To understand the ‘Real Lizzy’, this note from her about her daughter, Poppy, allows us a peek into her private world. A world where love and devotion, pride, fear, self-loathing, pain, hope and bravery intertwine:

“Before i had her i was on the road to destruction…no self-worth, anorexic tendencies and smashing every substance going then once i was preggers it was like a light switching on and then looked after meself proply n ting i feel so blessed everyday having my wonderful girl she’s my proper best m8   ”

*********************************************************************************************

Alienated, lonely and sometimes beyond hope, in a slough of despair, Lizzy tells us, she:

“.…woke up this morning stubbed my toe, then banged my head trying to look out the window! then i nearly fell down the stairs, being clumsy is so unfair! gonna have a cup of tea, but accidently pour the water in the sugar jar! better have some breakfast, but i burnt my toast and i run out of butter! clumsy! why i gotta be so clumsy!? clumsy! why i gotta be so clumsy! now being clumsy it fucking sucks, you’ll even try and tie your lace but get your finger stuck! wizzing around on auto pilot, put something down and you just can’t find it! i lose my lighter a hundred times a day ! I’m in a constant search, it’s the price i pay! clumsy! why i gotta be so clumsy!? clumsy! why i gotta be so clumsy!

//////// take me away now, i just can’t take it no more, feel like I’m gonna break now, memory-wounds so sore, going out of my mind now, unbearable anxiety so i’ll see what i can find now, as i search deep inside of me, longing…. for everything to be ok… hoping… that all the shit will go away… waiting…. for everything to fall into place…. crying…. cos everything just stays the same!  ////// when you’re lying in your bed at night, you can’t get to sleep, your pillow is soaking up the tears that you weep, when all the things you said and done are plaguing your mind, all those bad memories that you want to leave behind, when you feel like all the doors are closing in your face, the buffet of life has left a bitter taste, when you feel the walls are closing in and can no longer breath, bearing the wound of wearing your heart on your sleeve!

/////// sitting here in a void, who are you, who am i? can’t remember how i got here, don’t know why i can’t see clear! hide me hide me i don’t belong, I’m a freak I’m a weirdo I’m so fucking wrong! i’m a mystical force and i feel no remorse, just expand to dimensions of a different sort, intergalactic spastic, my thoughts are twisted and backwards, turn something minor into something drastic, think something’s shit when it’s fucking fantastic! spiralling down, memory lane, trying to learn from the biggest mistakes, one step forward two steps back, retracing your steps, covering the cracks…. It’s the devil inside, there’s nowhere to hide, he’ll take you for a ride, make you green-eyed and snatch your pride, don’t let him rule your mind, it’s time to choose your side, warp the twisted destruction, reconfigure the function, when you reach the junction, don’t know which way to turn, run away from the fire! ….don’t let your soul burn! thoughts of ifs and buts and what they penetrate your brain, leave you feeling oh so tense you hear the distant rain, tapping on your tin roof, tapping on your window, howling wind like a symphony but why do you feel so hollow.”

**********************************************************************************************

Alan says: “As I have got to know Lizzy better, I’ve asked her more questions about her life, and how she has arrived at her current situation with all its challenges. Her life is frequently an over-powering, emotional and heart-rending, roller-coaster ride….  Here are some fragments of what Lizzy told me:”

“My parents raised me as a hare krishna and I was given the name Lalita by a guru…. i got heavily into LSD at 15 and after 6 months got sectioned…. thinking my life was like the Truman show with hidden cameras everywhere (watching my every move), but luckily I slowly came back to reality!…. funny thing is: my initials are LSD lizzy sarah dalzell”

*********************************************************************************************

Lizzy told Alan: “I wrote this next one after the Westminster attack and bearing in mind the twin towers!”

“a nation under attack, or a nation getting attacked by its own government? a secret slaughter of people, innocent, and insignificant, they’re tryna keep us all on edge, tryna keep us all in a state of fear, they want us all to nod along and agree, till what they want is near! terror-threat level severe? Don’t make me laugh, your plan’s a fucking farce you can’t whitewash me i refuse to adhere, don’t believe the hype don’t buy into the fear! deployment of piggies packing heat on the street and with a nation on its knees it screams yes please! too many convenient coincidences leave you unable not to question, you wouldn’t believe what can be done with the power of suggestion, they’re tryna strip us bare, strip us bear of aLL our freedom, all the while the sheeple nod along and agree with them!

take a look inside your mind, come and see what you will find, take a look inside your mind, come and see what you will find… battling demons don’t feel like a free man trapped in the system, wanna run away to fairy land, cos they tryna push us down, now we gotta stand our ground ppl unite in every city every town no we won’t bow down to your crown, time for the elite to fucking drown, gonna flip their table upside down, they pump the lies they pump the fear, eyes of the wise are filled with tears they been tryna crush us down for years don’t let the bullshit fill your ears, fucked up fucked up society is fucked up, but their time is nearly up, they runnin out of luck, more and more ppl don’t give a fuck! take a look inside your mind, don’t bow down to the lies, yes the tears fill our eyes, they tryna segregate us break social ties ! ppl walkin round the street with their heads lookin down at their feet, no eye contact or smiles anymore, muzzles on tight looking down at the floor! take a look inside ur mind, don’t let them brainwash you with lies, it’s time for ppl to rise stand tall stand proud stand together and shine!”

*********************************************************************************************

“MaSsiVe ThanK YoU to everyone for giving me so much love and support in my dark times what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and when life gives you lemons make lemonade, so I’m sat here feeling hench as fuck, drinking some banging lemonade ” 

“thanks for the positiviteeez!!!  BIG LOVES XXXXX 

Lizzy 

  

Here’s one of Lizzy’s doodlidges:

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Boris – Latest Advice

Posted on 4 October, 2020 by Editor

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The Seven Rules of Boris

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor
 
 
sung of course to the Xmas carol tune of “The Seven Joys of Mary” !! :-
 
 
 
The first good rule that Boris had it was the rule of one
That we should all just sit at home until the bug was gone
Until the bug was gone, good man, though bumbling he may be…
Oh… we’ll track and trace and mask our face until he sets us free!
 
The second rule that Boris had it was the rule of two
The metres’ distance there must be between your friends and you
Between your friends and you, good man – but choirs you may not be…
Oh… we’ll track and trace and mask our face while singing out of key!
 
The third good rule that Boris had it was the rule of three
Appearing with two scientists upon the BBC
Upon the BBC, good man, and there for all to see…
Oh… we’ll track and trace and mask our face and watch them on TV
 
The fourth good rule that Boris had it was the rule of four
The months of furlough you may have – and still be shown the door
And still be shown the door, good man – bad news for employees!
So… we’ll track and trace and mask our face and take redundancy
 
The fifth good rule that Boris had it was the rule of five
The temporary hospitals to keep the sick alive
To keep the sick alive good man, though empty they may be…
Oh… we’ll track and trace and mask our face with Turkish PPE!
 
The sixth good rule that Boris had it was the rule of six
The number of our special friends that we may meet for drinks
That we may meet for drinks, good man, and sober – never fear!
Oh… we’ll track and trace and mask our face – except when drinking beer.
 
The seventh rule that Boris had he hasn’t told us yet
We hope it’s better than the rest – but I’ll not place a bet
Much better than the rest, good man, though how I cannot see
So…. we’ll track and trace and mask our face – for all eternity!
 
 
 
.
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Some Magical Tuesday

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor




Sydenham sidewalk
cig-but dipper

shite-hawk
slacker

Six buts-one scream-
one covid roll-up-no brew

the mugger’s blade turned
into a feather

goose, not swan
if you’re asking

 

 

David Crystal

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Love Was

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor

Love was
you trying to understand my love of black.
Crashing consciousness at unexpected moments.
Leading me down corridors of altered perception.

Love was
bringing strawberries, avocado and spider chrysanthemums
making me feel like a goddess.
Daring to hold my fear in upturned hands.

Love was
letting me cry into your wisdom
teaching trust of body and eyes
in the one long night.

Love was
finally sending me away from your warmth
into my own cloudy sunshine
to find the real love without you.

Love was…

 

 

 

.

Léonie Scott-Matthews
Pentameters Theatre

 

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THE SECOND WAVE

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by David Erdos
 
 
As the months progressed (or could have) fear
Became the first product. People withdrew into houses,
As self furnished tombs, suburb graves.
 
In a pair of sunglasses and mask, terrorists
Bombarded all Bus stops, or created fresh trends
For face armour, using a step towards closeness
 
As a weapon that left no-one spared, cured,
Or saved. I was alone in the world and so watched
It all from a distance. My parents were dead.
 
I’d no children and so my perception as such,
Shattered glass, or rather, the thick shield, or dome
Imposed by those who sought to abbreviate freedom;
 
Reducing the surrendered state to sit inside
The thin wishes that the most uncertain of pupils
Might ask. The Government duly coloured the air
 
In an infra-red search to see Covid. Cancer, affronted,
Soon took itself under ground, in order to both weaken
The soil and see the beleaguered trees cry for chemo,
 
For which a Nuclear light stoked wind motion,
Shaped to warp and distort Ultra-sound.
Parks become zoos, imprisoning those last inside them.
 
Sentenced to remain there, they ate the animals first,
Then the weeds, before turning in time on themselves:
Cannibal Camps within cities; zones and enclosures
 
That produced the truly bittersweet fruit of disease;
Chiefly, the disturbance and loss of all proper sense
Of perspective. Once doubt is sown, the land’s garment
 
Has every slender thread wrenched apart. These then,
Are perhaps just some of the nightmares to come,
Once the human hold has been loosened.
 
As we look at the world and imagine the worst things
To rise from death’s art. But we do so, too, to prepare
For the unknown thing we sense coming. For even Capitalism
 
Ends when Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and others such as
Elon Musk harvest wealth, whether with bad intention,
Or not, that remove soon displaces, and the rest us
 
Become the dots moving that Welles’ Harry Lime
Once looked down on before the Viennese sewers
Closed on him whilst robbing him of health. In such
 
Dark dreams, waters rise, giving way to new Noahs.
But this time, the Arks they make may seem empty
As we endanger the beasts and breeds who have roamed.
 
Our dreams may even blister, or burn, or refuse the soothe
And seal of strong water, as mankind’s final fate falls
Rewritten as an act of creation, or of marking at least
 
Our last home. That second wave is the world
That we have made or have coming. It will be an echo
Perhaps of the cosmos which folds and unfolds, instantly,
 
Revealing how our ultimate chance lays with stars
Yet to disclose their grand favour. What tides we attempt
To tame now are nothing compared to the tests to come
 
None can see. Humanity waits on the shore while water
And war decide for us. In the flash and foam hope’s
Refashioned by life itself’s fluid shape. Will we swim,
 
Or sink? And how does one stay afloat without money?
I would wish that each successive wave washes deeply
And that the good hope we all search for can be found
 
On sands still untested, bred from a series of coasts,
Forests, Capes. I dream of a Dolphin’s sharp stare
And an Elephant’s disappointment. Perhaps we should
 
Not read books only water, the planet’s true paper
On which Creation’s force begins writing, as it turns
Its attention to the amoebic thrust and wise ape.
 
Perhaps only then will we see through this invisible
Curtain. As it lifts those far chambers and the kingdoms
To last seek new shape.
 
 
 
                                              David Erdos October 2nd  2020       
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When Machines Die

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor

These posters are not just about selling movies
but we’re talking entry level collecting here and
this foliage has a very glossy effect. “You’re just
the one we want,” she said. Are you seriously

telling me that we’ve been following the wrong
man all day? Why are the planets here at all?
Most often we build from the inside out but
there’s something of the cobra in you and his

brain appears to be functioning as normal. “One
day the tide will turn,” she said. This is as much to
do with community as with collecting and your
slightest response will be recorded. Most puzzling

of all are the larger planets. “We need to get what
we need to get,” she said, “but you mustn’t be too
surprised when you see what he looks like.” This has
either been pulled out of a river or dug out of the

ground but we’re all looking for the real deal and
either way this has to happen fast. What’s behind
the red door? These diagnostic machines use trial
and error to pinpoint the problem but we need to

stay on top of the technology requirements. “When
machines die people will carry on drawing,” he said. 

 

 

Steve Spence

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A MUSING

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor

 

To all we’ve done
And are yet to do;
For changing grey
To skies of blue,
From curtained lull,
To rooms in bloom;
The love flushing my cheeks
And breathing life anew:

Thank you.

The stretch in the morning no longer need stitches
And instead, lingers into the night
Dancing with strangers
Staying to glint in glances
And gleam. The happiest light.

I write to you
In the way I’ve become accustomed to
Through years of practice:
Cowardice, irrationality…
Perhaps practicality?
People are busy and I am not.

Words run away from me
Whilst romanticism ravishes the reader
Should a “writer” flick wrist,
(These maestros can’t help but make marvel).

Me?
Lingering too long upon cliche has become my forte.

Instead,
I’ll scribble loudly.
I’ll sketch a scream and wail to the waters
Whilst I silently sit, sipping, sofa bound…

To all we’ve done,
What we’ve left to do-
I owe all to you,
My all-too-knowing muse.

 

 

Megan Hopkin
Illustration: Claire Palmer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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YOU HAVE VISIONS

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor
 
 
If you have visions they will take them away,
they have pills for that.
If you hear voices they can erase them.
If you think out of the box they will kill you
with ridicule.
Already they are censoring ideas.
Soon they will invade your dreams and steal them,
then they will erase imagination.
When imagination is erased
the universe will come to an end.
The universe cannot exist without imagination.
Your imagination, mine and everyone else’s.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Peter Woodcock
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RED SUN RISING

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor

Sun shouldn’t be this red this high.
It’s a wrong beauty.  Smoke-plumes
across the continent from burning Oregon,
burning California tint our sunrise
a sunset.  Our river banded
summer-algae green sparkles copper.
All day a pinkish eye will sear
a furrow in the dirty blue.

Out west, the sky bends and
buckles, a sheeted flame from
the lit match of earth, orange
as the grotesquely made-up face
of the arsonist to whom the forests
are entrusted, American sundown.

 

 

—Thomas R. Smith

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There’s a Man in a Van And He’s Looking for You

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor

 

The policemen arrive
In their two white vans
Home Office, Immigration,
Thinking of you and your home

There’s a man in a van 
And he’s looking for you
One comes to my door, 
Says ‘how do you do’

‘This man here we’ve hooded,’
Eyes, face to the ground,
‘Does he live in your house?
Have you seen him around?’

Well, Yes, I reply
Aliens, just minutes ago
‘Where are they now?
Where did they go?’

Look up, Look up
See that trail in the sky
See the scorched earth
In the meadow, I cry

Friends landed their saucer
Thought a welcome be coming
They saw you drive close
Fled, on the ground, running

‘He’s got no ID
And he’s not from here.
His face is misshapen
And his voice unclear.’

Well, take him away then
If that’s what you must
‘Tho there’s space here for him
And space here for us

There’s a man in a van 
And he’s looking for you
This land is your land. 
Blend in, whatever you do

‘We have our orders’, the policeman said
‘To take him away to the prison.
We’ll send him home a few years from now
To Mars on the one-way space mission.’

I’m glad all it takes to keep ourselves safe
Is the man in the van with his bright epaulets
So who belongs here and who does not
Can we send them away, ‘No regrets?’

 

© Christopher 2015/2017  
[email protected]                   

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High Treason in UK Suffocates Democratic Governance

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Julian Rose

 The Treacherous Trail to Totalitarian Dictatorship

 

My home country, the United Kingdom, once known for its promotion of libertarian causes, has been taken over and its citizens utterly betrayed. The last vestiges of parliamentary democracy have been buried, so that the Prime Minister, members of the Cabinet Office and senior civil servants can operate via ‘rule by decree’, effectively taking over the levers of governance with little or no recourse to parliamentary debate or public consultation. These are dangerous times.

This ‘putsch’ has not taken place overnight, but has been steadily poisoning the arteries of government for decades. It took the chimera of Covid-19 to act as the tailor-made alibi to enforce the final act of treason. A move taken in the name of ‘protecting the health and welfare of British citizens’ “against the biggest threat this country has faced in peace time history.” (Matt Hancock, Minister of Health).

In reality, ‘the biggest threat in peace time history’ is coming from the government itself. The threat of a despotic, totalitarian take-over by fake leaders’ who have mastered the art of the lie.

The British media is fully complicit, ever ready to ram the fear doctrine down peoples’ throats and abandon any attempt at investigative journalism.

It has been recognised by those with a keen eye, that the UK has long since housed a devious seam of schematic criminality within its higher echelons of state, furtively open to selling the country to the highest bidder, or for favours of rank.

The corporation of the city of London leads the world in surreptitious arrangements of almost any tax evasion and money laundering exploit it is asked to undertake, provided the reward is not less than six figures.

For decades plans have been honed to install a cabal within the halls of Westminster that would appear to be operating according to constitutional practice, but would actually wrest the reins of power away from the practice of public consultation and parliamentary debate.

With the advent of Tony Blair as Prime Minister in 1997, this process was greatly speeded up. It exploited already existing strong links to international criminal syndicates and collusion centred around the Bush family and the 9/11 trigger point for invasion of the Middle East. Gordon Brown kept this line going throughout the financial crash, and with the arrival of David Cameron as Prime Minister, the seal was set for the publically announced introduction of “chaos” as a leading policy position of the ruling Conservative party.

The ‘chaos’ from which a new ‘order’ can be imposed, neatly dressed-up as a saviour from the organised anarchy.

Ominously, and in spite of the bizarreness of this announcement, it failed to engender any significant kick-back from the electorate. An electorate already seduced by the long standing deluge of half-truths and outright lies fed to it by a highly sophisticated and doctrinaire PR system, closely aligned with the secret service and leading media moguls.

So when Cameron announced that his government was going to introduce “chaos” into the management systems of the country, most simply ignored the pronouncement or wrote it off as typical ‘politician’s craziness’. But it was nothing of the kind – it meant exactly what it said.

Theresa May, next in line to take over from Cameron – who was ditched after having called the referendum on Brexit whose result went against many insider expectations – took the reins, having served in the Home Office and up-built close affiliations with MI5.

May’s appointment co-incided with Mark Carney taking over as director of the Bank of England, a post carrying very significant powers to shape what is now called ‘The Great Reset’.

By then ‘Global Warming’ had become entrenched in gullible minds as “The biggest ever threat to the future of the planet” and Carney clearly demonstrated which way the cards were falling by brutally announcing that any business not conforming to the strictures of a united push for ‘Zero Carbon’ “would be bankrupted”.

The Green New Deal/Fourth Industrial Revolution was looming large and Extinction Rebellion was assigned the role of conditioning young peoples’ minds to become accustomed to living under a permanent pall of fear concerning Global Warming. Fake green arguments emanating from the United Nations and Al Gore were now proclaimed by Greta Thunberg and most Green NGO’s; all repeating – ad nauseam – the same siren-like mantra concerning the ‘cataclysmic effects’ of CO2 emissions.

Let us briefly remind ourselves: carbon is what enables plant life to grow and humans and animals to breathe the oxygen they emit. ‘Zero Carbon’ means zero life. Scientific data reveals that the volume of anthropogenic CO2  in the upper atmosphere measures just 0.0379% of total atmospheric components. Weirdly, this percentage figure is almost identical to the percentage of the world’s population deemed to have died from CV-19. The masters of deception have managed to alter the direction of the entire planet based on evidence that reveals the presence of a distinctly minor atmospheric and human ailment – and sold it as a major disaster for mankind and the biosphere. A piece of egregious spin never likely be surpassed.

In spite of the exceptionally high profile awarded to the CO2 hoax in the UK, its progress was thwarted by an equally high level of contradictions inherent in its phony science and the fact that climate scientists at the University of East Anglia were caught fixing the emission figures.

Theresa May was ordered – by her hidden masters – to put her attention to getting the Brexit affair sorted, and public opinion was suitably divided on what this should mean in practice. This division   – pro and anti-Brexit camps – eroded the cohesion of family life across the country by setting one segment of society against another, thus engendering a distraction from the rapid erosion of civil liberties and responsible statesmanship going on behind the headlines.

As the ever watchful UK Column News noted, this was “a Brexit without the exit”, and while May scuttled to and fro to Brussels supposedly negotiating the exit, the cabal was actually engaged in the selling-off of the British military to the ‘EU Defence Army’ – answering the predominantly French and German call to build ‘military union’ and a rapid deployment force to provide for international hegemonic ambitions under the label of ‘peace missions’.

This covert betrayal of the people of Great Britain has therefore been extended into a betrayal of nationhood itself, something that used to be called ‘high treason’. A country unable to defend its shores cannot be described as an independent nation state, and Britain is rapidly approaching this state of demise.

The sense of abdication of statehood was heightened when, on December 19th 2019, the Queen opened the new parliament not wearing her crown or any ceremonial clothes. One could almost smell the betrayal in the air. Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 Coronation Oath, in which she swears allegiance to the nation via a formal commitment to uphold various moral protocols, appeared to have been severed – at least symbolically. Was this a barely disguised admission that the United Kingdom was no longer a nation state under the leadership of those committed to some form of democratic rule of law, or ‘constitutional monarchy’ as it is known in more formal terms?

May was soon displaced. The hidden cabal needed a Prime Minister of a different calibre to “get Brexit done” and take the country into uncharted territory where a totalitarian technocracy could ‘occupy the throne’ leaving a parliamentary democracy and royal tradition to be sidelined into the annals of history.

Already the traditional non-partisan values of the civil service were being eroded as a more corporate influence started exerting itself. What’s more, the head of the civil service, Sir Mark Sedwill, was also put in charge of national security and a number of other key posts, giving him large powers of leverage within the state control agenda of the day.

By the time Boris Johnson was selected as Prime Minister, the new power base was already in place and an EU style bureaucrat was shaping the political course of the country, closely linked to a powerful Brussels-based lobby of EU technocrats.

Ordinary members of parliament have found themselves taking an increasingly back seat with all key decision making taking place outside the halls of Westminster, in special meetings involving private ‘advisors’, social engineering agencies, behavioural psychologist insight teams and a few senior cabinet ministers. An almost complete shield has been formed between the general public and those running the country.

Any attempt by members of the electorate to get an answer to questions concerning political decisions – is now met with complete silence. I have personally sent formal letters to local authority leaders and parliamentarians on urgent concerns – and have been greeted with a stony silence. Not even a note to confirm receipt of the letter.

Johnson, with his fake Churchillian style of delivery, sports an exaggerated rhetoric that makes “beating covid” sound like an urgent call to arms in defence of the realm. Ironic, when the actual defence of the realm is being dismantled in front of his eyes and with his tacit agreement.

I never expected to witness my country of birth being taken over by a government of occupation. Powerful interests in the banking and corporate sector, tied-in with US and other international power brokers, have colluded with political leaders to usurp power while other supposedly ‘responsible parties’ have resorted to an eerie and arrogant silence. A refusal to engage with humanity.

Covid-19’s arrival on the scene was not by chance, and the criminal imposition of a plethora of draconian rules and regulations concerning its supposed containment – accompanied by intense media fearmongering – has simply capped the inescapable truth that a treasonous regime change is at hand. A change that is laying the ground for the establishment of a New World Order under the title World Economic Forum’s planned ‘Great Reset’.

A plan whose co-ordinated clamp downs on human civil liberties are happening simultaneously in almost every country of the world, accompanied by the lauding of ‘rule by robot’ with its deeply sinister techno-fascist undertones.

Contrary to what one might believe, this does not mean that all is lost for the British Isles; resistance is real and is growing. Rising up through the enforced chaos are the seeds of a fresh vision of what constitutes genuine governance; and it starts with ‘self governance’. The ability to overcome fear and nurture belief in one’s self as an agent of higher spiritual calling.

England will not die, the deeper, older spirit of the country will hold firm – and will rise again – ridding these islands of the sickly fake governance that has stultified their true expression for far too long. A phoenix will rise from the ashes and overcome the present gross imposition of tyranny.

It will not be a purely national phoenix, but a joined-up pan-planetary unfolding of the wings of truth, justice and emancipation, in which all who hold reverence for life uppermost in their hearts and minds, will be in the vanguard.

No, it will not be a New World Order – it will be a True World Order.

 

Julian Rose

 

Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and teacher. His latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly prescient reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info

 

 

 

 

 

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Darkness and Light

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor

 

Alan Dearling shares his reactions to two albums from Caz Templetree and one from Laura Marling

****************************************************************

Laura Marling

New album: Song to our Daughter

Plenty of videos to sample here from Laura’s new album and more: https://www.lauramarling.com/ 

Simple and sad. Whimsical and kind of old-fashioned. Laura Marling, seven albums into her career, is still described as a British folk singer-songwriter. It’s where she started out and what it says on the tin still fits, but it’s full of slices of Americana too. Not for the first time, Laura is heard evoking the spirit of early Joni Mitchell.

“You took out that money your mumma saved

She told me she kept it for running away.” From ‘Fortune’

And here’s the short video film for the title track, song-poem: ‘Song for our Daughter’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU0t2Y6ACz8

 

Complete with its recurring thematic of “I think we did our best”. It’s happy-sad, sentimental, tinged with oodles of pedal-steel guitar, in all, reminiscent of the little girl lost image that Laura portrays on the cover of the new album.

It gets a bit gooey at times, but she’s proved that her talent is here for the long haul. Laura is most definitely one of the go-to musicians of her generation. Folk-American Royalty. Indeed, I last saw her live supporting Neil Young and Promise of Real a couple of years ago at Glasgow’s SEC Hydro, but my first sighting of her was in a smallish tent at the back of Neil’s gig some years back in London’s Hyde Park. There, she was hanging out with Mumford and Sons. My guess is that Jonah and the Whale were hanging-out too. Definitely one of the prominent members of the Class of 2007/8.

Following a lengthy sojourn in California’s LA, intriguingly, Wikipedia tells us: “As of 2020, Marling is enrolled in a master’s degree program in psychoanalysis. She lives in northeast London with her boyfriend and older sister.”

Here’s another tempting track from the album, ‘Alexandra’, a musing on Leonard Cohen’s Alexandra – “I need to know, where did Alexandra go?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyOjEQdeiQk

 

Templetree Caz

https://www.n1m.com/templetree

https://www.facebook.com/greatoakrecords

*********************************************************************************

Great Oak Records tells us that it is:

“The label of Templetree & friends. Established by Sophia Mitchell in 2007. Sophia does not respond to people trying to call her caroline mulcahy. Caz or Sophia, is what I’m called.”

Templetree Stoner Folk: The Inside Circle

Let me take you down to a deep, dark space of…intensity…the ‘Inside Circle’ of stoner folk.

Mournful, scornful, melancholia. I’ve now heard the scream of the butterfly. She’s called Caz…

“Aching, shaking, faking…” angst-ridden on the darker side of Nick Drake, circa ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Pink Moon’ and Nico’s ‘Marble Index’. Approximately infinite miserablis. Mournful but also unique and individual. Undertones of reggae.

“Let’s hit the peaks and watch the sun go down

And discover the new world.”

“It’s all downhill from here”

 

A gnarled, sneering, snarling frenzy. A siren. A witch in heat. Humming up a spell or three. Jazzy at times. Moody and richly spiced as Gumbo Gris-Gris.

“Oh Roots,

Keep I Strong.” (from the Templetree track)

 

Templetree and Friends: The Love of Wales

Eclectic. Trippy, melodic, drum ‘n’ bass, languorous lounge – trip-hop and jazzy back beats. Warbling and whispering. Ancient voices and tribal murmerings. Hypnotic. Experimental. Shades of Amy Winehouse, or, maybe early Joni Mitchell scat-singing in late-nite bar rooms. Picture a scene from the 1950s in monochrome, ‘Play it again, Sam’, Bogart and Bergman, smoke-filled and sensuous. A tapestry of soundscapes, often ethereal… Indian ragas floating on a cloud of whimsy. Caz Templetree on a spacey exploration along with her varied psychonautical, musical friends.

Wales has rarely sounded so ‘out there’, sounding like a musical search for a unicorn lost in oft-changing inter-galactic tundra.

Templetree is joined on this album by Golden Ears; Rob Jones & Dave Kirk; Dean J; Bill Sutton; sounds from Maxtrax; and Control Freqs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Vitality 2

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Jan Woolf

 

In my preparation for the inevitable lockdown 2 – I’m doing an inventory of the sources of vitality.  In typing that, I realised that that sentence has no vitality whatsoever: in fact it’s got the weight of a BBC management manual  (Thanks W1A – when’s the next series?)   Vitality in language is a key component in the dissemination of ideas.  There I go again. Shut up!   Language fresh from the mind not the intellect, is best spooled onto the page via the hand and pen. The novelist AS Byatt always writes in hand, as it viscerally links with the subconscious.  Typing adds another process that can be obstructive if you don’t play the keyboard like a concert pianist.  I’m typing this  – and no I don’t play the piano.  My grandmother did though – she was a pianist for silent films at the Plymouth Odeon back in the day. She called herself a silent pianist as she thumped out and improvised tunes to love scenes, cowboy chases, cold villainous stares, or the sweet smiles of Shirley Temple: all while the ash from her un-tipped woodbine fell on the keyboard. But Nan, I asked, how could you make it all up with out reading music?  You just have to keep looking at the screen and your fingers know where to go, she said.  So looking went to her fingers, like Antonia Byatt’s mind went to hers.

To have our senses alive without obstruction is a strange luxury in this age of social media.  (Do watch the new Netflix movie The Social Dilemma.) It promises vitality but doesn’t really deliver. And that is why, as a no-religious person I have a statuette of the Indian godlet Ganesh – the remover of obstacles – on my desk. It was given to me in Rishakesh, India and there’s nothing precious (although he is) about him at all. He’s in yellow, red and white plastic with red varnish on fingers and toes with a golden chain and blue turquoise dot on his belly. He’s immaculately kitsch. 

I digress (thanks Ganesh). Walking is a source of vitality – one sees better.  I like the country walks for sure, with the greens, birds and skies, but it’s in the city, and its waterways we may have to explore this winter. Last weekend I joined Metropolitan Walkers and since the Regents Canal terrain was flat and firm, and I  could look up and about without falling over.  I found unintentional art.  First a descending series of steel wheels in a bridge, then a pile of junk with a yellow version of Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man climbing over the detritus of the world. The formalism of the first and chaotic anarchy of the second were delightful and invigorating; no obstacles from eye to brain.  

 

Jan Woolf

 

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A pensée and Poem on the Subject of King Boripus Rex

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor

shadenfreude


One particular aspect of the Johnson shadenfreude is that as a lover of ancient Greek culture Johnson will be aware that Corona is HIS fault, a plague unleashed by the gods for his execrable behaviour in helping Brexit over the line for his own advancement despite not believing in it, for sacking all his experienced elders in a blind drive to win the election, for lying to the electorate to gain power aswell as destroying London by selling it to global capital. He is like Oedipus the King. His job is to lift the plague from Thebes by finding the root cause of the Gods’ displeasure and finding out that it is HE who has displeased the gods and must ultimately pay the price of his caprice.

 

 

BORIPUS REX


The King investigates
The plague on Blighty
Only to find it is he
Who has angered the gods
By killing his Father Churchill
And his dream
Of a United States Of Europe
And by fucking The Mother
Of Parliaments
With his wrecking-ball Svengali
Calling the shots like a psychopath
As care homes become charnel houses
Hospitals death pits
Schools dissemination centres
Airports virus refill stations
And the elite now living adverts
For contempt of the law
Sophocles become Benny Hill
And the King his own Fool
(With his lines fed through an ear-piece)
In a world-class cock-up to die for

 

 

 

Roddy McDevitt
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The Potato Eaters

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor

 

                        Theo says their hands
                        Are crude, disproportionate,
                        The light failing.

                        But I say that as they pick potatoes
                        From that bowl, their simple supper           

                        Is the consecration of seed and clay.

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin Patrick McCann
Illustration Nick Victor

A new book of poems

Buy at:
https://amazon.co.uk/Still-Pondering-Kevin-Patrick-McCann/dp/1788768671/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=Kevin+Patrick+McCann&qid=1581612715&s=books&sr=1-4

 

 

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Walnut

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor


Hand Print
By DENNIS GOULD

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Community in the Age of Covid-19

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor

a virus,
Satan, personified,
spreads fear and mistrust,
no love, or contact,
cases increase,
fingers pointed,
assessing the blame,
wear your mask !
keep your space !
the individual to suffer,
for the good of the nation,
the community,
yet no answers,
for how long?
businesses closed,
how to pay bills?
how to survive?
who knows!
just do not infect your superiors,
you working poor,
on the front lines,
sacrifice for the community !!
and Satan smiles . . .

 

 

 

 

 Doug Polk

 

 

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DREAM OF STONE

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Editor

Deathmasques IV

I am beautiful, O mortals!

As a dream of stone.

– Baudelaire

 

               Yes, she was coming to life!
              I stood back, my face twitching with excitement.
              Those granite limbs – blood flowed beneath their impregnable gloss, through her iron arteries.
              Behind her was my workbench. A skull. My books. My instruments. On the wall was a chart – the internal labyrinth of the body in grey and pink.
            Her cheeks were so pale, almost transparent. Her bones were visible through her translucent flesh.
            She stood before me on the plinth. And I knelt down before her on the bare boards of the studio where, for exactly twelve months, I had laboured in solitude and rigorous asceticism: the studio-prison which I hated and loved.
          She was coming to life!
          Incredible!
          Scattered about on the floor were my drawings, the sketches that preceded the Magnum Opus. There were my notebooks – a commentary on my anguish – sallow pages, devoid of sentiment. In the corner, leaning against the wall, were several metal limbs, two hands made of marble, a thigh carved from jade and part of the female skeleton cunningly articulated.
         Before me a veined, marble hand was raised with a mechanical jerk. The mirrors, inlaid only the previous morning dazzled me as light bounced from their polished surfaces.
          I gasped.
        I hid my face.
         But I had to look, I had to see.
         Fantastic!
          Her body moved. The filigree globe of the stomach revolved within the flawless structure of her granite pelvis. You know, I had to admire the craftsmanship – the craftsmanship that had created this vitrified vision now waking before my very eyes.
        Eight foot tall, she towered over me. Her thighs were impregnated with the fires of domination. Her massive breasts contained curdled ecstasy.
        For six weeks I had laboured, inscribing passages from The Astral Beastiary on each eyelid. Her limbs were ingeniously interlaced with the finest platinum wire. Her eyes were dead white. Scarabs clung to her ears.
         And now she was coming to life!
         She was alive.
         Her huge wings cast a shadow across my face as I hurriedly traced a giant crescent on the floor before advancing with instruments for The Delivery. I was about to unleash my work upon the world.
        I had lined the ceiling with black velvet. I had placed a bed in the exact centre, decked out in purple and blue. Outside, beyond the orange blinds the city lay in darkness, restless, reeking.
       There was a scream. I had never heard such a scream. She lurched forward, thrusting me aside with an aristocratic gesture, treading heavily on the boards of my humble studio where I had shunned daylight and friends for too long.
      Now she stared at me without feeling. She looked about her. She glared into the mirrors and fell to her knees with a crash. She ran her hands across the surface of the floor, as if unable to accept the materiality of existence.
       A moaning wail assaulted my ears, teetering across the threshold of sound. Sniveling and panting she lurched to the window. Anxious, aghast, I leapt to my feet in time to see her dive headlong to the pavement, a mile below.
       There was a crash of seismic proportions. A wisp of purple smoke drifted up outside the shattered panes.
       I looked down.
       A crowd had begun to gather, gesticulating and complaining. They stared uncomprehending at the pile of mute jetsam marking the spot where she had fallen.
      Some of them looked up with expectation – waiting, no doubt, for the repetition of her descent which I am now bound to make.

 

 

 

 

A.C. Evans

Drawing: The Debris of a Poet by A.C. Evans

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Still Life with Diary

Posted on 3 October, 2020 by Rupert Loydell

 

 

Field Recording and Fox Spirits, David Toop (Room40)

Apparition Painting, David Toop (Room40)

David Toop is an astute and open-minded writer, who for many years now has been thinking about the nature of sound and music and gathering those thoughts together in volumes such as Ocean of Sound and Haunted Weather. More recently Sinister Residence turned the discussion around to discuss ‘the mediumship of the listener’, making the listener as active as the musician, and Flutter Echo was actually a digressionary autobiography peppered with philosophy, theory and anecdote as much as personal revelation.

He has also made music throughout his career, music that is often hard to describe or label. Ambient, improvisation, exploratory sound works, cultural anthropology, isolationist? No, none of those really fit. And they have to sit alongside a slew of ‘curated albums’ he assembled at the end of the 20th century (often to sit alongside his books). However hard to describe, they amount to a fascinating and complex output, now joined by two new CD releases from the Room40 label. And Toop doesn’t care anyway: on the press release for one of these he says ‘Don’t ask me about genre or consistency. Who cares?’ Ok then, let’s listen to the music.

Apparition Painting is perhaps the more expected of the releases. Quiet soundscapes, ambient  songs, lots of guest collaborators, combine to make an intriguing yet disparate album. Toop explains that the title is a term used to describe ‘a certain type of ancient Chinese painting [where] the ink used to depict the subject was exceptionally pale, the background lacking any detail’. One might think of similar conceptual frameworks such as Jon Hassell’s ‘bluescreen music’ or even Eno’s descriptions of ambient music, but there is more detail and things to notice in Toop’s music than this might suggest.

There is, however, a sense of dislocation and lack of context. How does the synthesized guitar (?) workout of ‘All I desire’ fit with the more abstract percussion and guest vocals of ‘When I first came here (I thought I’d never get used to the trains, now when it’s quiet I get nervous)’? And what do the appropriated titles have to do with the music? Do they suggest or imply a context or narrative or are they simply a provocation?

They are not ‘pale’ either, this music is very much there, as much as sound can be as it reverberates through the air into the ear (in my case via hearing aids). Toop also talks about ‘self-disassembling images that somehow compromise their own visibility’ but I think he does himself a disservice. These are (thankfully) not three minute pop songs, and they do require listening to, but actually we live in a world where audiences are more and more fragmented and (in my opinion) more open to and able to listen to, far more types of music than previously, as the concept of music charts or even popular music, becomes less and less important or imaginable.

So for me, this is very real, careful music. I like the fact the sense of curatorship and assemblage here, the traces of careful listening and careful selection as this music is assembled and composed. Eno suggested a long time ago that the studio was as much as instrument now as any guitar or keyboard, and I think it’s evident here. Not because of any studio trickery, but simply because so much of this music seems to do with juxtaposition and combination of music made in the past, music made through improvisation and experiment, as much as music specifically made for the track bing recorded.

This approach is even more evident on Field Recording and Fox Spirits, ‘a collection of personal recordings’. I actually like this album more than the other, it is stripped back, less layered or composed, and insists upon being paid attention to: it really does disappear if you don’t. It is a form of time travel, sound that counters transience and the moment yet also embraces it, and also an aural biography of David Toop.

A wasp from 1971 hovers in the sound field, followed by a short recording of drum and flute from two years later; there are fragments of improvised concerts, brief excerpts of conversations with known and unknown artists & musicians, frogs calling, a cityscape from Beijing, blind musicians busking in Thailand… All offered to us to listen to. Why would we listen to a wasp? Is there really any trace of Somerset or the summer of 1971 there? I don’t know, but there might be. I don’t normally listen to wasps, and to do so is fascinating. What is it’s relationship to the flute and drums up next? Nothing except they are neighbouring sounds on this album, or am I missing something? Is Syd Senior, who Toop converses with on track 3, commenting on the music directly, and if not why is what he his saying placed there? A similar question can be asked of Ornette Coleman’s pronouncements on track 14. It is a conundrum, perhaps best experienced as a sequence of moments.

Or perhaps Toop is playing with us? The fox in the CD title appears not to have actually existed, although Toop says he saw it. So this is also a ghost story in 18 chapters, a past we never knew come to haunt us: bells in the distance, sounds of nature, and David Toop’s daughter singing a child’s song. Its is, of course, also the now we are experiencing as we listen, just like any album. Toop explains that in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a 17th/18th century book, ‘fox spirits inhabit the physical spaces of living humans in a variety of guises. Some are malicious, some benign.’

The musical spirits David Toop has assembled here seem mostly benign, though they may surprise, annoy or cause us to reconsider what we think about music and sound, what we listen to or ignore in our lives. Both these CDs have come to haunt me, demanding a re-listen and provoking much self-reflection and interior discussion. They are fascinating, elusive and original creations, innovative as much for their positioning within and understanding of contemporary music and sound as the tracks themselves.

 

 

Rupert Loydell

 

David Toop, ‘Suddenly the World Had Dropped Away’

 

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Employees at France’s Biggest Phone Company Undermine Country’s 5G Push

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

 
September 22 2020
 
 

By Dafna Tachover, Director, CHD’s 5G and Wireless Harms Project

Employees at Orange, France’s biggest phone company and the tenth largest mobile network operator in the world, are calling for management to stop the rollout of 5G just days before the industry plans to commit billions to their deployment in the country. About 1,000 Orange employees, calling themselves “Je Suis Si Vert” (I’m So Green), circulated two memos. The most recent memo — Without 5G: Orange in The Future World — from May 2020, argues that 5G will be bad for the environment and unprofitable.

The massive antenna infrastructure required for 5G, the billion more wireless devices that will be interconnected and MIMO technology are predicted to exponentially increase wireless energy consumption, significantly contributing to the carbon footprint of wireless technology. Stopping 5G has also become a top agenda item for the French Green Party Europe Écologie Les Verts (EELV). During the local June elections, the party became stronger, with candidates winning in major cities including Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Bordeaux and Strasbourg.

Recently, one of the Green Party members, the Mayor of France’s “Silicon Valley,” where companies like Apple and Huawei have development centers, got major headlines with his calls to halt 5G because of environmental impacts, including e-waste. E-waste is the world’s fastest-growing domestic waste producer.

The resistance to 5G is growing across Europe. According to Bloomberg, the French dissent is “the most consequential of several grass-roots campaigns against the technology in Europe.”

In Europe, like in the U.S., telecom companies have been capitalizing on the economic devastation created by policy choices in regard to COVID-19 to present 5G as the economic savoir and those who object to 5G as a threat to the economic recovery. A recent Council of the European Union report expressed the importance to “fight” the claims of 5G health effects while the courts of these countries have consistently ruled for plaintiffs who have become sick from wireless, both for those who have developed microwave sickness and cancer. Hundreds of scientists filed an appeal to the EU calling for a moratorium on 5G quoting potential devastating effects to people and the environment.

What’s next? The French government, according to Bloomberg, has resisted calls to delay the auction of 5G frequencies set for Sept. 29 that will begin the national rollout. However, the four big phone carriers in France say they’ll bid at the auction. This process will commit them to installing 5G equipment at 10,500 sites by 2025.

Employees at France’s Biggest Phone Company Undermine Country’s 5G Push

 

Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. CHD is planning many strategies, including legal, in an effort to defend the health of our children and obtain justice for those already injured. Your support is essential to CHD’s successful mission.

https://youtu.be/4vkWebSiB1g

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Barfly Girl

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

Why can’t we talk about
what I want to talk about,
while we stand for hours at the bar?
Could we at least sit down?

But no!
You like your time-honoured position
to be precise, the left-hand side,
two stools in.

You have been leaning there for years now,
every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday
from 9pm until closing time,
and are always the last to leave.

To stay or to go,
is all I think about.
As you order yet another pint,
and I drink red or white wine.

Meanwhile,
I dream of running with you,
hand in hand, along endless beaches,
on an island, at the edge of the world.

 

Léonie Scott-Matthews
Pentameters Theatre

 

 

 

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State of the Enemy.

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

 

It is quite disturbing to see the trend in the USA for what the media and politicians and the law term “extremists” or even “terrorists,” black communities already armed mobilising against those who refuse to listen to their concerns and treat them as equals.

But this is not a new process. It is a historic progression. We have seen more of it in more countries this century than any other. But who really are the aggressors?

On one hand we have indigenous populations the world over who lose out to aggressive and violent industrial development and a history of forced appropriation of their territories and assets, including slave labour. On the other, predominantly white privileged colonialists who flout respect for life and law to gain that control then sustain it.

So are current political powers, especially those we call ‘democratic,’ representatives of the people or enemies of the people?

The abuses and misdirection of tax-payers money, decimation of infrastructure and depletion in labour and working rights, as well as the insane political policies, outrageous and immoral rhetoric of fear and division and the gross lack of accountability for the loss of millions of lives in an almost psychopathic disregard, is surely premeditated. It is simply the age-old strategy of divide and conquer.

But to get away with the infringements upon one’s OWN civil population, (when you rely upon a minority of approval to retain power), you must set them against each other and confuse them so they feel conflicted and dis-empowered – simply because you can legally get away with it. But you cannot do so by outright opposition as in other regimes. In democracies you pitch it in snappy three-tier slogans made to sound upright, or under the framework of making “AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” or “BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN” in purely colonialist sentimentality and spin, re-employing all the abuses and base prejudices that formed empire and have been staunchly fought against since: racism; class distinction; sexism; hostile take over; insurgency into foreign territories and affairs, politically and through covert carnal warfare, through trade embargoes and arms deals – whilst disintegrating the very principles of human rights and care and sharing that actually made western democracies great after rejecting those conquests and making movements towards reparations and welcoming cultural diversity, establishing laws of equality etc. This was an on-going journey, for sure, until ultra-conservatives took power over the transatlantic union and dominates the political landscape, under the umbrella term and trend of ‘protectionism.’

Whenever any premier perceives their looming demise, they reach for the big guns, to rally the patriots. Thatcher, Blaire, GW Bush, but now for Donald Johnson and Boris Trump it is about minimising opposition to ignorant and prejudicial domestic policies. Simple projection, as many spineless people practice. Make the general public the cause, the bigots, the ignorant. They load the bullets for others to shoot. Trump had no gripe with the security of the electoral process last time around.

More insidiously, it is because competitiveness in a global economy – not in trade but accumulation of wealth, which affords power – no longer relies upon indigenous community. Something the sitting pretty are all too aware of and makes them actually ENEMIES of the people under a facade of patriotism and conformity to protectionist rhetoric.

This is the natural progression of neoliberalism. Indigenous populations (not races) are no longer required to generate and sustain the wealth of their nations. This is the biggest lie used as a political tool of misdirection upon the tax-paying public. Financialization long since made labour and the means of production minimal in importance to trade, which is now simply a manipulation tool to control access to consumerism and to control and marginalise populations.

State has become the elites’ arbiter of systematic civil disintegration.

Hence the flouting of international laws and human rights infringements; rise in poverty and all the un-policed and sometimes sanctioned abuses connected with it; undermining of civil access to legal representation; co-option and undermining of charities, NGOs and welfare rights organisations; exploitation and profiteering during crises – and why during nearly a year of the Covid-19 pandemic NO INTERNATIONAL ACCORD OF ACTION; SLOW AND LIMITED ACCESS TO INADEQUATE TESTING, TRACKING AND TRACING; NO MASS PRODUCTION OF PPE; MANIPULATION OF INFORMATION AND SUPPRESSION OF TRANSPARENT AND ACCURATE RECORDING OF CASES AND FATALITIES.

If, as some claim, “SOCIETY IS BROKEN” it is not society (who carry on regardless, plugging the gaping holes and usually at cost to themselves) that have broken it. It is time to call to account the perpetrators. But how?

By taking control of a new civil economy that functions without dependency upon money, reducing money’s controlling power and relevance.

Contrary to immediate capitalist assumptions, this will not constitute ANY civil disobedience or the slightest conflict with capitalism. It will actually save it and eliminate any need for political, commercial or international competition, simply as a bi-product. It will relieve any government from dependency upon elite capitalists and their economic agendas, rendering them champions of society.

Its main productivity will be the economic empowerment of every individual of any circumstance living now and into the future. It empowers them to come together to rebuild what they have been tactically deprived of. To form civil bodies of cooperation that bi-pass the political and financial manipulations, dissolving its influence over their activities. There are successful examples in our recent history and pathways that we are already familiar with. So this is merely appropriation of existing agencies and methods to benefit from what neoliberals have already misappropriated to maximise exorbitant profits.

But this can never come about using money or moral agendas. It can only replace money by unilateral civic cooperation, which then forges global accord by the very nature of what the non-monetary economy enables. What the vast majority of people want in common and all too often share, regardless of race, political and cultural persuasion and often in the face of economic hardship. Once one country takes it up, no matter how small, it will snowball across the globe. Imagine Lebanon, Belarus, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Haiti, Bangladesh, Syria, Myanmar, Darfur or the Philippines forming their own civil State and reconstructing infrastructure without needing money or generating conflict with existing monetised ‘authorities.’ The parallel non-monetary economy never threatens monetary capitalism. When it offers people in conflict for their beliefs better options for self-fulfilment and enrichment, it dissolves some of the very issues that brought about that conflict or at least gives them opportunities that needn’t threaten their lives or those of others. It can do this with domestic and international conflicts. When people see it work before their very eyes, even monetary capitalists will not be able to resist what the 99% offer them.

How do we get this and how does it work? This is explored robustly in ‘A Chance For Everyone: The Parallel Non-Monetary Economy.’ Kendal Eaton

 

(download versions available for FREE or pay what you wish)

 

achanceforeveryone.com

 

Kendal Eaton
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Study Text

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

 

A cowboy gets off a bus in the middle of a small town. He’s wearing spurs and leather chaps, his hat tipped forward to shield his gaze from the brightness of the midday sun. There’s a middle-aged woman in the front garden of a house nearby, a girl of around twelve trussed-up, lying on the ground at her feet. The child squirms violently, struggling to loosen the cords. She’s trying to say something, but she’s been gagged. ‘This is my daughter,’ the woman says to the cowboy. ‘You can take her with you if you want.’ The cowboy looks at the woman for a while, then at the girl. ‘Is there someplace like a saloon around here?’ he says.

Study questions:

1. What has happened to the cowboy’s horse?
2. Is the cowboy thirsty?
3. What kind of mother offers to give her twelve-year-old daughter to a total stranger?
4. Is the woman acting on a wing and a prayer?

 

 

 

Simon Collings
Art from the Estate of Mike Lesser

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Vintage Ventriloquists And Their Dummy Pals

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor
 
 

vintage snapshots, publicity photos and actual ventriloquist dummies from the collection of Jim Linderman

vintage Ventriloquist dummies

 

Let’s kick off this look at vintage snapshots, publicity photos and actual ventriloquist dummies from the collection of Jim Linderman with the words on the reverse of the press photograph you see above from 1937:

“She didn’t mind traveling about the country gypsy-like when Ellis K. Short, her husband, quit his bank job, Mrs. Annabelle Short testified in court yesterday. But when he ordered her to work as a strip-tease dancer she quit him, according to her testimony. Photo shows Mrs. Annabelle Short, who is a ventriloquist, with her dummy, after judge Charles has granted her a divorce.”

As Jim quips: There is no quote reported from the dummy (or “vent figure” as they are properly called)

But hold on… Is this she? And is that Ellis?

 

vintage Ventriloquist dummies

 

 

Let’s keep this fit for family entertainment with four polaroids of lovable dummies from Jim’s collection. Fans of Jack Black, Frank Sinatra, Pee Wee Herman and British royalty may care to enter bids for the following lots:

 

 

We’ll return to more Polaroids soon, but before that, this:

 

vintage Ventriloquist dummies

 

 

After that Vintage Ventriloquist Vent Dummy (and one in the box), a couple of press photographs from more female ventriloquists and their wooden families:

 

vintage Ventriloquist dummies

vintage Ventriloquist dummies

 

vintage Ventriloquist dummies

 

Now for some more Polaroids, at least one of which is hell bent on world domination and a fascist super-state:

 

vintage Ventriloquist dummies

 

 

 

 

A word from Jim on the image above:

A young boy or girl practices not moving his or her lips. Charlie McCarthy was once the world’s most famous blockhead, sidekick and as unlikely as it seems (since the whole point is to SEE the ventriloquist) radio personality. He was owned by Candice Bergen’s father.

 

vintage Ventriloquist dummies

‘Classy; stuff c. 1900

 

 

vintage Ventriloquist dummies

 

Finally, a few words from our sponsor:

 

vintage Ventriloquist dummies

 

Ventriloquist Figures from Collection Jim Linderman.

See more in Jim’s book : I’M WITH DUMMY: Vent Figures and Blockheads  Vintage Photographs from the Jim Linderman Collection.

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Vitality

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Jan Woolf


Jennifer Steinkamp’s Blind Eye 1

Please click on image above or link below for video
3e41d240-ec8b-40f6-ac75-430d4293f73f  

 

Vital…being a manifestation of organic life: supporting, or necessary to, life giving, invigorating: characteristic of life, or of living things: animate, living: full of life: lively, energetic: capable of living.   (Chambers English Dictionary)

In preparation for Lockdown 2, I’ve thought about what got me through Lockdown 1:  a pension, good health, comfy home, an allotment, the voices of friends on the phone and the bonus of their faces on Zoom. The knowledge too, that other things were growing during this period, like Riversmeet Productions * winter cabbages, and my play about the Middle East, Blood, Gold and Oil. 

In short, vitality; for there’s no growth without it.  When people start to get depressed, it’s vitality they’re short of. Other people and creativity provide it. But don’t creatives need to be alone?   In the act maybe, when the current of energy is between the self and what’s being done. The work will then need to connect with others in a circuit. If it doesn’t, it shorts.

I think of Freud writing about ‘the lonely psyche’ – how we look out for others to relate to, and when our batteries are re-charged we can keep going on our own for a while.  For me trees and visual art (art that I choose, and trees that nature chooses) are sources of vitality.  I went to the Haywood Gallery show Among the Trees. It was lovely, as Heathcote Williams’ poem Tree Power declares –

As we came from trees it’s no wonder
We turn to them to recharge.
They’ve silently witnessed our history
And they’re ourselves writ large.

I enjoyed this mixed media exhibition as I might a family photo album – a curated forest, the ‘wood wide web’. Yet the vitality of art and the vitality of trees do not make vitality to the power of two.  These were representations, tributes, not love.  No pheromones.  You couldn’t smell it.  Heathcote Williams again.

In the Musky bouquet of an ancient wood
The very nature of thought is changed.

Then I got to the last room. This forest sized wall installation made something new.  Jennifer Steinkamp’s Blind Eye 1 was a thing in itself.  Defined as computer sculpture, the artist fed images of a year’s growth of silver birch trees through a programme that condensed it to three minutes.  It revitalised me and I left with a spring in my step – animate, living: full of life: lively, energetic…’

 

Jan Woolf

*  https://riversmeetproductions.co.uk/

 

 

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One Rule for Them

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

The Prime Minister’s wife holidaying with friends at a 5 Star hotel at Lake Como, Italy

https://newsopener.com/uk/carrie-symonds-enjoys-five-star-italian-holiday-as-rishi-sunak-unveils-urgent-measures-to-save-jobs/?amp

 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…..

Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned there are “difficult months to come” in the fight against Coronavirus and urged the nation to “get through this winter together”.

But he warned that the Government would impose more lockdown restrictions if people fail to follow the rules.

And he said the situation “will be far better by the spring”.

In a televised address to the nation, Mr Johnson said: “If we were forced into a new national lockdown, that would threaten not just jobs and livelihoods but the loving human contact on which we all depend.

“It would mean renewed loneliness and confinement for the elderly and vulnerable, and ultimately it would threaten once again the education of our children. We must do all we can to avoid going down that road again.

“But if people don’t follow the rules we have set out, then we must reserve the right to go further.”

 

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/boris-johnson-tv-speech-urges-18980089

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Four

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

Seve learnt his game
playing links golf
with one club-a 3 iron

One poem
One horse
One true love

One Fray Bentos pie
banging away
in a half-full saucepan

One bloke
drinking
Budvar
on a wall
 
Staring at his feet
like they belonged to
someone else

 

David Crystal
Illustration: Claire Palmer

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Death Dance

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Heidi Stephenson

We separate
ourselves two
metres apart,
into a honeycomb
of coffin-sized
spaces,
ready for
the falling.

Unmasked
assassins
roam the streets,
supermarkets,
parks, pubs;
looking
to give
the kiss
of Death,
to the unwary.

A man
on a train
dangles
his requirement
from his ear:
an ominous
black ear-ring.
Cavalier,
defiant,
shooting
daggers at the
wide-eyed –
the train pirate.

We are all
openly
bandits now.
Exposed
as Earth’s
villains:
rapacious,
voracious,
ungracious,
unjust,
…unkind.

Make no mistake;
this is a cull.

 

Heidi Stephenson

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A Studied Informality

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

A studied informality is a desirable feature but it may
depend on the circumstances. Sometimes it’s wise to
remain in the shadows. Our plans are contained in a
consultation document but you may be entitled to

compensation for being misled. “It’s not just tropical
paradises with fabulous weather that are tempting the
wealthy,” she said. Is this the end for lipstick? Yet the
term ‘tree hugger’ is often used flippantly and here are

the trophies and here is the clothing. “It takes more
muscles to frown than it does to smile,” she said.
Current restrictions are breeding technical innovation
through virtual performances and an entitlement to

flexible working will be introduced. Have you ever eaten
jellyfish? “To hell with the backlash, this is shameless,”
he said. Masks are a huge issue when it comes to painted
lips but today we are all being pseudo journalists.

 

Steve Spence

 

 

.

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Extinction Emergency: Naomie Harris, Brian Eno & Extinction Rebellion

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

Voiced by Naomie Harris and scored by Brian Eno for Extinction Rebellion, the animated explainer video ’Extinction Emergency, and Why We Must Act Now’ summarises the planet’s biodiversity loss, runaway consumerism and the ecological crisis that now faces us, and how the consequences will affect millions of lives around the world.

Full credits list:
Voice-over: Naomie Harris
Music: Brian Eno
End theme music: Simon Bass
Direction, Design and Animation: Miritte Ben Yitzchak
Script: Mark Ellis
Science and Script: Matthew Shribman
Sound Design and Mix: Jack Hallett at Factory
Producer: Serena Schellenberg
Public Relations: Beverley Luckings and Nic Eliades at theclima.es
Marketing and Distribution: Jonathan Mintram

Extinction Rebellion is a decentralised, international and politically non-partisan movement using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency.

Extinction Rebellion’s next UK rebellion begins on 1 September 2020 – when the UK Parliament is due to sit again.

Help XR mobilise and donate here: https://rebellion.earth/donate/

Extinction Rebellion: https://rebellion.earth/
International: https://rebellion.global/

1. #TellTheTruth
2. #ActNow
3. #DecideTogether

World Map of Extinction Rebellion Groups: https://rebellion.global/branches/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ExtinctionR
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ExtinctionRe…
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/extinctionr…

#WeWantToLive #LoveRageRebel #NoGoingBack #RebelForLife

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Significance in the Jungle

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Lawrence Freiesleben

 

At the end of almost anything we’ve watched on television as a family over the years, I can rarely resist comment. As the river of credits flows in and out of sight, I begin to dissect . . .  a habit which commonly causes my children to leave the room.

In the past, with less choice and more of a common culture, it might well be that a higher proportion of mainstream films or highly visible programs, were worthy of such dissection. Nowadays, whatever equivalents exist, will largely be camouflaged in the undergrowth or lost down obscure alleyways. Then or now, who can blame my children for resenting my argumentative interruptions, my enthusiasm or dissent? Rather than answer: “So, what did you think?” no doubt they wanted to reflect, or merely enjoy the haze of entertainment. Instead, to fill the deafening silence, came my avalanche of impressions – for however much I’ve hated or admired a film or program, it’s rarely stopped me praising some inadvertent virtue or railing against buried platitudes or assumptions. A respectful hush rarely carried us all to our sleep.

About a year ago we watched an episode of the 1963-64 TV series, The Human Jungle, with Herbert Lom as psychiatrist Dr Roger Corder. This particular episode made much of man’s ultimate insignificance – as if insignificance was something every intelligent person should take for granted. As the familiar ending theme faded, in a genuinely puzzled way, against the memory of Dr Corder’s grave yet assured self-importance, my irritation burst out: “I’ve always had to struggle really hard to feel insignificant.” My wife and daughter both burst into laughter at this – laughing with an extreme, we are not at all surprised! amusement. Though there was affection or even tolerant respect in their hilarity, it also felt like I’d just shot away every ounce of credibility I might precariously have possessed. “But I don’t mean it in a big-headed way,” I protested. “Of course not!” their amusement continued somewhat ironically. “I meant it in the sense of having been aware at moments that everything is interconnected.”

While it was true that this was my confident, underlying reason for objection, I was and remain angry about the defeatist or hypocritical attitude this particular Human Jungle episode partially embodied – one we are all expected to accept and come to terms with, despite that both ideal parental love and now the instilment of schooling tries to reinforce the opposite: that we are all special, all worthy of self-fulfilment and ‘agency’ – as that sickeningly fashionable term currently has it. Rather than a challenging paradox, this trend of individual specialness, spreading through western society, with its propensity to encourage consumerism, has produced an undermining dichotomy. How do we resolve being special with being insignificant? No wonder people feel so disoriented.

Apart from when I’m deep in the doldrums myself, I’ve always distrusted this retreat into the tree-shadowed jungle of insignificance. Rather than being humble, accepting insignificance evades some essential responsibility. Its defeatism resigns into the dead strata of human history. While it looks ‘good’ or ‘realistic’ on the surface – appearing to capsize any sense of hubris or hubristic pride – it is in fact, no more than an indolent acceptance of a destructive convention. For this shrinking-violet bashfulness, this relativistic lack of self-esteem, is probably more responsible for goading the maladjusted or stimulating the bully, the stock exchange pirate, the tyrant leader, the serial killer, the hare-brained politician and so on, than any open acknowledgement of its reverse. All these try to prove their significance as if significance were about being individual, powerful, or rich. But significance does not come from celebrity or success, or even from belonging to a family, a group, a religion or a country. It’s much more inherent:  The escape is there for all / But few are free enough to notice[i].

Made complacent by the artificial euphoria of drugs or crowds or the surge of overtaking (!), have we become temperamentally immune to the more natural escalations which can so effortlessly surpass both our daily and our investigated realities? If so, how much is the widespread sense of insignificance to blame – endorsed as it is by both our sciences and by many religions. Society leans so heavily on our continued faith in applied science, that warning proverbs should be flashing constantly. As the planet rejects our blight of progress, the essential hollowness at the core of such an idea stands revealed. Its originators may have meant well but were easily subjugated. With luck, perhaps, eventually, science might escape its materialistic viewpoint and expand elsewhere? At present, its pragmatic form leaves us in the crossfire of its treacherous shortcomings, feeling worthless and insignificant.

In his book, dubiously titled, ‘Beyond the Occult’, in an attempt maybe to sound more rationalistic and using a term derived from the psychologist Abraham Maslow[ii], Colin Wilson[iii] reduces what others might, albeit reluctantly, refer to as visionary or mystical experience, to ‘peak experiences’. Maybe this is because Wilson (unlike Maslow) wanted to posit the idea that such experiences of overwhelming happiness could be induced at will?

Wilson also argued against “the fallacy of insignificance”. But as far as I can (quickly) gather, what he deplored most was the loss of the heroic – a hazardously fascist concept if taken too far. Perhaps an understandable caution in the face of all the disasters of human history explains why especially the fair-minded among us are so ready to embrace the concept of insignificance?

On the surface, the idea of believing in significance can sound dangerous – but the significance I’m talking about (should it exist – I’m not doubting that I might be deluded, I don’t have absolute faith), isn’t limited to an elite, it’s something intrinsic to all. The great freedom[iv] is there for anyone able to recognise tools and gadgets for what they are, rather than becoming a slave to them.

I’ve long been convinced that it’s through a full and intense awareness of our personal events and significant places within time, that one is most likely to discover the great freedom of timelessness. Only my surface accepts the here and now.

I don’t know if there is a best landscape in which to encounter this expansion. A resting interval on a journey may be best of all – especially after physical effort. Yet perhaps the claustrophobia and tedium of being in a sealed box can provide the equivalent of effort? Getting off a crowded train to fresh air on an echoing platform – or escaping the motorway at last. Each to their own.

The most naturally visionary landscapes are obvious – mountains, moors, cliffs. But almost anywhere that provides an interval of ‘peace’ can suffice. For me, it even happened once on London Bridge at rush hour – the bridge transported into a cloudscape legend of redness by a serenely apocalyptic sunset.

 

© Lawrence Freiesleben,

Cumbria, September 4th 2019

 

[email protected]

 

NOTES

 [i] From: Cat’s Eye’s Removed,  http://internationaltimes.it/cats-eyes-removed/

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow

[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wilson

 [iv] My (Small Press) Writing Day: http://mysmallpresswritingday.blogspot.com/2018/09/lawrence-freiesleben-my-small-press.html

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Street writer part nine – A Year Out

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

 

So, we got the thumbs up from Claire to write some more articles for this column.

Yippee!

I left you off at the age of 29 with 5 years of poetical experience behind me and that things were about to change drastically…

I usually slow down at Christmas time and try and recharge and enjoy some time with my family and friends and if I’m looking to have a woman about ha ha.

I decided that Christmas I’d take a year out and figure some stuff out.

Basically, I wanted to know, I mean, I really, really wanted to know if I was going to stick to this path of writing and poetry.

When the New Year hit… I knew I didn’t want to give up completely, but I definitely was going to take a break.

So, what I came up with was this: I would mainly drink, smoke, eat and watch the TV for an entire year but… I had over 900 poems in my memory pen written in the space of four or five years.

I was going to go through that collection of work and send them out to every literary magazine I could get my hands on and try my luck for publication.

I got the list of magazines from a recent rejection from the Poetry Ireland Review, thanks to the editor of the magazine.

I got my aunt to print it out for me and I made a start sitting at my kitchen table with the papers spread out all over it.

I decided to work with all the magazines based in the UK, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Basically, all the English speaking countries…

I had some acceptances based in Belfast thanks to Four x Four and Panning for Poems.

I had some interest in New York and Australia but they didn’t offer any publication at the time but they definitely wanted to see some more work.

Funny enough, the one in Australia were definitely interested, but because they were a university press they couldn’t publish any of my work – what a shame.

I also had some feedback on some of the work… which as you know is a very difficult thing to get these days so I was very grateful for it.

And as you can tell: there was a HELL of a lot of rejections, but do not EVER let that put you off as you go along on your creative path, because it is all a part of it…

Learn to FUCKING LOVE that part!!!!

As I ate, drank, smoked and watched TV… getting fatter, hairier and well rested, I started to get a little edgier near the end of the year.

So, I decided I would write and make a new film from a poem I wrote a couple of years ago that was published in my last book and the poem was called: The Dark Wank!

I contacted a young filmmaker who also wanted to work with me sometime.

I pitched the idea and the script to him and he went for it.

I wanted to make a film that was more about the words rather than the moving image or images.

My idea behind was a little surreal but very simple.

Inspired by a Warhol feature.

It was me in the dark with very little light and I was just smoking on a cigarette…

We made the film that December and we pushed it out there around that time.

During my time off I decided to take up painting as well.

I only wanted to paint silly cartoons based off the poems or my life experiences.

Nothing more…

I think by the end of the year I ended up with 20 paintings ha ha.

Coming up to the end of my year out, I really, really wanted to broaden my horizons in the writing game.

And… that is exactly what I did!

I will go into this in more depth in the next article.

And the articles are going to change a little.

They are all going to have titles and I am going to start talking about subject matter instead of it just being like a diary.

I just wanted to write this last one about my year out and the next one will be the last instalment of a diary-like article for this column.

It will take you up to my present day as a 31 year old writer and storyteller.

Until then, have fun writing and sending your work out there and getting rejected and maybe with some luck: accepted!

Either way, LOVE IT…

I’m going to leave you with The Dark Wank poem at the end of this.

It is one of my favourites because…

When I took this poem out for its first spin in the live circuit it was received with laughter and quite a bit of WOW facial expressions.

It sounds dirty but it really isn’t… it is more prophetic than anything.

But only you can judge that, nobody else.

Either way, an artist is just out to create art no matter the cost and despite the odds.

So, fuck it.

Love

PBJ

<3

 

The Dark Wank

 

I hate my heartbeat

Yet I work from God

From a renaissance of dark wanks

 

I wait about in a day

Thinking the next life is just the same as here

With the same alcoholics and the same faces

That passed their turn

 

Yet I am reunited with them and their blue bags

We never changed in body mind or shape

Still searching for the same answers

And our prophets are even lost

Will any of us really know

Can we truly not just be at peace

With Bacon’s truth of the pitch

 

Even I don’t cringe at my own obscurity anymore

But from my own obscure thinking

From a renaissance of dark wanks

I see this

 

The obscure is the death of little hearts

That never even had a chance

Or the change of a £100 in their torn pockets

It will take one solitary man

To stand up for Bill’s last speech

As he knew he was dying

And to make this happen for a truly happy world

Out of love and fascination

 

 As I’ve mentioned before

 As I look at myself in the living room mirror

 I realise I am only human

 And only an artist

 

I would love to be that solitary man

But I cry at my own selfish penny-dropping charity existence

I can only do what I can

From these dark wanks

In hopes it will inspire that man

 

It’s not about fame

The heart says to the artist

It is the difference you can make

From the words you put together

To cause a catalyst for the solid man

And say this

I LOVE YOU LIFE

I LOVE YOU PEOPLE

I LOVE THIS LIGHT

&

WE WILL ALWAYS LOVE FROM THIS FLICK

 

It’s not about my death or the alcoholics

Even they and I stood a chance

It’s all about the little hearts that died

While I surrendered

Just listen to each soul that walks passed

And you will know what to do

Straight from God to yourself

Life is all inspired

From a renaissance of dark wanks

So go out now

And make LOVE

 

As I’ve said before

What is reality

When you break it down through its component parts

It’s nothing

We are all lost in something we will never understand

 

But

As I see a hunting dog so close to a bird

And all they wanna do is kiss

I stand at the bottom of the stairs looking up

I walk slowly

Escalating to the room of dark wanks

I am debilitated

And centred for the earth to spin in PEACE

From my only heartbeat

 

 

 

 

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GO WITH THE FLOW

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Rupert Loydell

Columbus provided boys with bohemia,
changing grammar and the modern novel.
The failure of his academic career
didn’t result from alcohol abuse
or the poor quality of his teaching
but his inability to remember.
He was honest but also evasive,
did what the system required
yet seemed unable to see for real,
until 1965, when he wondered if
he could crawl as far as the phone.
He was an oh-so-beautiful mix-master
and is said to have done a lot for
wildwater tourism and his lost sons.
Narcissism, trauma, breakdown and death,
death, death, death, death, death.
Be as personal and wayward as you like
but this is a theme that we can’t ignore:
we all need to learn to crop our pictures
and become film-star handsome.
With the correct result you can do anything,
and I shall, if I can get a word in edgeways.

 

 

 

© Rupert M Loydell
Illustration: Claire Palmer

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The Price of Milk

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Heidi Stephenson

Dairy, dairy, quite contrary,
how can your brothers grow?
Now piercing yells in terror hells,
and bleeding babes all in a row!

Dairy, dairy, so contrary,
treating young friends, like a foe?
With killing fells, for dainty sells,
and crying calves laid low?

Dairy, dairy, beyond contrary,
how would we each like to go?
With eyes like wells, as murder quells,
in agony, blow on blow?

 

Heidi Stephenson

 

The Rape Rack – The Meat and Dairy Industry – An Animal Rights Article Series from all-creatures.org

 

 

 

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The Summer of Portland

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

 

the sickness grows,
arrogance and ignorance,
cancers,
creeping into brains,
civilization crumbles,
gradual, yet swift,
white liberals shout,
protest and march,
conservatives back the police,
while black children continue to be gunned down,
week after week,
as if invisible,
reality,
not as important as preceptions,
unending protests,
no justice, no peace,
but no one free or equal,
the only thing progressing,
the decay and destruction all around the urban streets.

_________________

 

 

Douglas Polk

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Travel from the Scottish Borders to Bulgaria in the Covid-19 era

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

 

My wife is Bulgarian and hasn’t seen her family there for a couple of years. Because of the pandemic we thought long and hard about whether to travel there or not this year. As flying began to restart it seemed to be a practical possibility so we went ahead and booked flights. Pricing was somewhat weird as it cost my wife about 175 GBP for a month with BA via London. However, I had to pay around 350 just for 10 days!

We drove into the multi-storey car park at Edinburgh Airport to find that it was fairly busy. In the airport itself most folk seemed to be respecting the rules as face masks were worn, however sometimes not properly, e.g. wearing them under the nose or chin, or not wearing them at all when making phone calls. At Heathrow I noticed at least one person not bothering to wear a mask at all (although of course, there could have been a legitimate reason for this).

The flight to London was absolutely rammed – every seat taken. I had naively thought that the airline might have created some social distancing on the aircraft, but no! Presumably the wearing of face masks is meant to be sufficient to keep everyone safe. Of course masks could not be worn when eating the proffered snack and bottle of water, so some risk must still exist.

The flight from London to Sofia was only half full so that was a bit of a relief. Cabin staff were pretty good on the whole at enforcing the wearing of masks. However, they did have a bit of a problem with a couple of young women who had managed to bring some alcohol on board and kept drinking it even after being told not to. So of course they weren’t wearing masks but were also breaking the alcohol rules as they must have been drinking supplies they had bought at Duty Free. And of course in these Covid-19 days the airline does not sell or supply alcohol on board. So I was somewhat jealous to say the least!!

Car rental at Sofia airport was uneventful, as was the 90-minute drive to Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city – and the European city of culture last year – so it has been smartened up quite a bit! We stayed overnight at my daughter-in-law’s, then headed to Kranevo on the Black Sea Coast. This drive took around 5 hours. Kranevo is a seaside town and fairly close to Varna, Bulgaria’s third city, and a University one at that. By the way, the speed limit on much of the motorway system in Bulgaria is 140 kph – around 87 mph.~

Many Bulgarians if they can afford it have a summer property. For example in Plovdiv, many will have a second home in the mountains where it is a whole lot cooler than in Plovdiv. In Kranevo we found a hotel for a couple of nights and visited my step daughter-in law for lunch on the second day at their summer villa. They have renovated and extended their property, creating a substantial ‘outdoor kitchen’, which is essentially where you spend most of your time in the summer. I remember one outdoor kitchen I visited in the mountains above Plovdiv – here the family had diverted water from a local stream down to the kitchen, where it flowed into a basin to chill wine and Rakia (Bulgarian brandy).

Most Bulgarians who have a plot of land anywhere will grow grapes to make Rakia. This is a national parstime that the EU tried to outlaw when Bulgaria acceded. However, there was a countrywide revolt at the idea and it was quickly dropped. So, it is perfectly legal to distil the stuff for domestic consumption. I have tried many samples and I have to say that often it is the home made versions that are far better than the commercial ones. Everyone has their own recipe, often enhanced with herbs for added flavour.

You can see some photos of my step daughter-in-law and husband’s vegetable garden and ‘vineyard’ here:
And the outside kitchen. You can just about see their well and the barbecue area!

In addition to fruit and vegetables they grow a range of grapes for wine and of course Rakia. Rakia is very interesting, not least as it is traditionally drunk ice cold with ‘Shopska’ salad. This is a salad of tomatoes, cucumber, spring onion and feta cheese, sometimes with some red onion and/or green pepper. It is often topped with a single olive on top of a ‘volcano’ of shredded feta cheese. The brandy pairs fantastically well with the salad, believe it or not!

Kranevo has a very long single main street. As a seaside town it has plenty of restaurants and tourist shops – many essentially just open fronted booths. We didn’t see any mask wearing on the streets or in the small shops, although some folk used them in the supermarket. Similarly, there didn’t seem to be much social distancing in evidence, although there were country wide rules about this apparently. Walking along the main street we saw one crowded restaurant with entertainment where the singer was leading a crowd of people doing the ‘Horo’ – a linked arm dance you do in a circle. They were doing it enthusiastically around a group of tables – absolutely no social distancing at all!

Kranevo’s best feature is its brilliant beach:

We then headed back south to the lovely coastal town of Sozopol. Recently they have renovated the old fortress wall and created a walkway along the clifftop. Impressive. This has nice beaches and a very traditional old town. This has ancient wooden houses and narrow cobbled streets – very atmospheric.

A new innovation this year was a pirate ship which made regular trips around the bay. Here are a couple of photos of it during the day:

And lit up at night……

We were told by some locals that they wouldn’t go on it if they were paid, as it was built from old scrap components!

Here’s a photo of Sozopol’s central beach. This is run by the municipality so the costs of hiring beach loungers and parasols is reasonable at 5 GBP a day for two:

There are always bars and restaurants on most of Bulgaria’s beaches so you don’t need to go far to get a drink and some respite from the sun. September is a good time to visit the Black Sea Coast resorts as it isn’t brutally hot and you often get a nice breeze from the sea.

After five relaxing days in Sozopol we headed back to the city of Plovdiv. We helped my daughter-in-law by driving her to a DIY superstore. You can see from the photos here that masks were not always worn properly, and I spotted a couple of folk not wearing them at all. Social distancing in this store seemed to be set at 1.5 metres.

Here’s a photo of a typical small restaurant/bar in a street market in Plovdiv.

That evening we went into a newly created trendy part of the city called the Kapana (the Trap).

You can see from the photos that the bars and restaurants were clearly trying to maximise revenues by packing tables close together – so again no social distancing and no mask wearing. This area has some impressive and colourful wall graffiti!

Plovdiv has some fascinating ancient Roman remains. Quite a lot was done in the run up to being last year’s European City of Culture to showcase these impressive ruins. Here’s an example.

Incidentally, Plovdiv also has a Roman amphitheatre that they still use for opera and pop concerts!

I should give some context here I suppose about travelling in Covid times. Although I had to quarantine for 14 days on my return from Bulgaria, there seems to be little sense in this as the cases per thousand in Bulgaria are half that of the UK. So it seems that our government is embarked on some kind of political campaign trying to suggest that other countries are worse than us in relation to their Covid-19 rates, hence the need to quarantine.

On arrival at Sofia airport for the return flight we came into the airport via the underground car park, where we had to go to drop off the hire car. My temperature was taken before I was allowed in but my wife (who was staying longer in Bulgaria) was refused entry to the airport – ridiculous, especially as once I went in I could see that there was easy entry and exit via the main entrance. It looks like we just were unlucky to meet an officious security guard.

You have to complete an online government quarantine form before travelling back to the UK, and divulge a whole lot of personal details together with where you are going to be for the 14-day quarantine period. The airline sent this link to me well in advance, and as a law abiding citizen I completed it. Only to find out when I tried to submit it that you can’t do that until 48 hours before your flight! Infuriatingly, although the system said it had saved my details I had to enter them twice more before being able to submit. And – when you get to immigration in the UK they then ask you to find the damn details again on your phone and show it to them.

A final ignominy of air travel in the Covid-19 era is the paucity of flights – I had a 5-hour layover in London waiting for a flight to Edinburgh!

Here are some photos of Peebles in the Scottish Borders from before my travels. I suppose they indicate how relatively law abiding we are here, with masks worn in all the shops and often in the street as well. Indeed, I have often spotted cars with only the driver who for some bizarre reason was wearing a mask!

On my return to Peebles I was fortunate. As I am able to work at home, quarantine was not as much of a disaster as it could be for others, particularly if it was imposed while you were actually abroad. However, it is a real pain as you are not meant to leave your place of residence at all and need to arrange to get groceries delivered etc.

Overall, I am glad I did make the effort to go abroad. It was great to get some decent weather and participate in the outdoor café and restaurant culture for a while. So I think that travel is still eminently possible these days if a bit more hassle than previously.

oooOOOOOooo

 

 

 

Howie Armstrong

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Covid Conversations Intro

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

 

 

As the UK lurches from Covid policy to policy, the introduction and changing of a plethora of testing/tracking and tracing systems, and ever-evolving local Covid lockdowns, and confusing (and probably confused) restrictions, it is increasingly fascinating to learn what is going on in different parts of the world and even in the four kingdoms of the fractured, not-very-United Kingdom.

I’m writing this while in Todmorden in the Yorkshire Pennines. The use of face coverings in this area is very, very mixed. Many students in particular, are simply not wearing anything on public transport and many older people are wearing ‘something’ – but in many cases they are not covering noses, and in some cases they are sitting around folk’s necks! Others are simply refusing to wear any sort of face coverings citing infringements of personal liberties and/or denying that the Covid pandemic exists.

Likewise, the organising of ‘social distancing’ in pubs and restaurants is incredibly variable, ranging from table service only to full-on bar service with many standing around at bars. Noise levels are indistinguishable from pre-pandemic days, i.e. LOUD! And, ‘track and trace’ records vary from the rigorous enforcement of the entering of personal details in a record book, through to groups of 15 to 20 football supporters (with only one name being taken), sitting virtually on top of each other, and screaming and dancing like modern-day cannibals around the ceremonial TV-set, handily substituting for a big cauldron blazing on a ceremonial fire! “It ain’t going to affect me”, they yell.

Covid-19 certainly hasn’t gone away. Indeed the number of cases is rising again. Some say it’s ‘exponential’. Clashes between Covid-deniers and other sections of society across the world in different countries are increasing too as people become angry about restrictions to civil liberties and threats to health. This is all fuelled by fear, conflicting information, and in some cases has become embroiled with issues around Climate Change, Black Lives Matter, Brexit, refugees and vaccinations.

Meanwhile, I have continued to invite friends, acquaintances and work colleagues to share their ‘personal’ Covid stories for publication.

In this issue, my old social-work colleague and good mate, Howie Armstrong, shares his recent experiences of travelling from Scotland to Bulgaria, via London.

 

 

Alan Dearling

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Time Capsule

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Rupert Loydell

Racing Cars. The Albums 1976-1978 (4CD, Cherry Red)

 

Before there was punk there was pub rock. Truth be told, the two blurred into one another in the Seventies; both were loud, awkward back-to-basics rock that rejected the excesses of progrock and the notion of musical skill having to come first. (I actually liked it more when postpunk arrived and allowed keyboards back onstage and rock started being deconstructed again, but that’s another story…)

Many pub rock bands such as Clover included American country in their musical mix; others like the unjustly neglected Moon got downright funky; and there was also a version of jazz-rock by the likes of Jim Mullen and his friends, that avoided the excesses of what we think of as jazz rock. These were in contrast to the clipped, rough’n’ready performances of  bands like Ducks Deluxe and Dr Feelgood, who if they had chosen to wear plastic sacks and pins in their noses could easily have become punks. They were also in contrast to Racing Cars, a hard working band from Wales, who drew on the swamp music of Little Feat and others in the American South for their inspiration, and featured some beautiful slide and lead guitar work within their repertoire.

They also had a secret weapon: Morty on lead vocals, a small, soulful whirlwind of a man, who could captivate audiences of any size with his angelic bluesy voice. (Morty also had a secret weapon: a brother who was the band’s roadie. On a good night the brother would join the band onstage, where he would juggle and balance things on his nose to help round off the evening in celebratory style.)

Racing Cars were mainstays of the London pub rock scene. I mostly saw them at The Nashville, in the Hammersmith and Kensington hinterlands, but possibly at The Greyhound too. And the first time I saw them was one of my first gigs: Brunel University Students’ Union, although my friend and I were still at school. It was a revelation, especially as we arrived so early we saw the soundcheck, and also because cans of Swan lager were 50p a tin and they didn’t blink about serving us. Happy days.

Racing Cars were a band who never managed to catch the energy and intrigue of their live performances on record. The first album, Downtown Tonight, feels a little slow to these ears, although it’s atmospheric and moody, but Weekend Rendezvous (their second) and the live BBC In Concert are much better, mixing stomp rockers with some slow numbers like ‘They Shoot Horses Don’t They?’, their one and only hit single.

The single actually didn’t help the band. It suggested they were big successful pop stars, but they weren’t. Soon after the song was played on Top of the Pops we attended a gig at Hammersmith Odeon where only a few hundred tickets had been sold. Morty invited everyone down to the front of the stalls and the band did their best to whip up a storm, as though they were in the pub down the road, but it didn’t really work. And when they supported Bad Company at Earl’s Court, that didn’t really work either – it was a sunny day and the sound drifted into the warm stagnant air to become background music. No-one was in the mood for rock and there was no atmosphere. (Mind you, they were better than Bad Company; I left that concert very early.)

So Racing Cars returned to where they seemed happiest or worked best, the pub rock scene. Bring on the Night, their final studio album (though BBC In Concert was released later) is good, but feels too polished and overproduced. The title track is maudlin and indulgent: I remember it best as a newly-written song sung solo at the end of a new year’s evening gig. The band had literally run out of songs to play, and Morty said he’d sing a new song that the band didn’t know yet, if we shut up and all went home. So he did and we did.

You can see why Racing Cars never made it mega big: the music is in many ways ordinary and of its time, however well played. The songs are full of American trucks and liquor stores that weren’t in abundance in West London, and at the risk of being too PC the music is full of sexist asides and unbridled lust that we’d now consider unwarranted and unrequired lechery and harassment. But apart from that, this box set is a great collection of party music and love songs, with a lot of superb guitar work and passionate vocals. The band apparently reformed on an occasional and amateur basis in the early 2000s, but since then a couple of the guys have died; this makes a suitable memorial and is a nice time capsule of what was actually happening in the mid 1970s music scene.

 

 

 

Rupert Loydell

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Vincent is an infinity

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

Of yellows: sunflowers,
Lamps above a green baize table,
Ripening wheat: he’s slumped
Outside the cafe, sleep always
One drink away.

 

 

 

Kevin Patrick McCann

A new book of poems

Buy at:
https://amazon.co.uk/Still-Pondering-Kevin-Patrick-McCann/dp/1788768671/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=Kevin+Patrick+McCann&qid=1581612715&s=books&sr=1-4

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Red Rebellion in sleepy Dorset hilltop town.

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

 

 

Back in the day when Extinction Rebellion actions were possible in London without the degree of oppression that the police have been compelled to enforce this September, I got to see at least one team of Red Rebels making their slow promenade in front of the law enforcement lines.  I was impressed.  Their absolute silence and slowness of movement contrasted intensely with the surrounding hubbub.  They conveyed something of the deep seriousness with which we regard impending climate breakdown in a way that complemented the conventional chanting, singing and shouting of the protestors, along with the banners, the slogans, the music and the impassioned speakers at their microphones.

 

It didn’t occur to me then that I might one day find myself rebelling in red.  Here’s how it happened.

 

Our local group of activists, like so many, has been hit hard by lockdown.  Unable to hold public meetings or, until recently, gatherings of any sort, we’ve tried to keep things ticking over with regular Zoom meetings.  Unsurprisingly, this has whittled us down to a core group and to actions involving few people, carefully socially distancing and reliant on social media for extended impact (see https://www.planetshaftesbury.org/xrshaftesbury for one of these).

 

By early July this year we were starting to think about how we could contribute to the forthcoming wave of XR activity. Sheltering as most of us are, our offering would have to be for the Bank Holiday weekend of local action, proposed as a prelude to the events in London, Manchester and Cardiff.  We planned and took part in fuel station and roadside banner actions, but aimed our most elaborate shot at banks on the Monday.  Unusually, Shaftesbury’s main thoroughfare still contains the majority of its high street banks.  And so it was that one of our number proposed that they should receive a visit from a small, as-yet non-existent group of Red Rebels.

 

Four volunteers were available and willing to take on this task, one of them me.  A few more took on the support roles: carrying banners, distributing leaflets and explaining our silent protest to passers-by.  Our proponent ordered the needed materials: twenty metres of crushed velvet stretch, five of chiffon and ten artificial roses.  The remaining items – gloves, leggings, face-paint – were up to each of us to find.  By then we were into August, time already getting short.  The suggestion was to fit in a workshop session for making the headdresses and two rehearsal sessions, at least one of which in full costume.  All this to be done outdoors, under the then-current rules, and maintaining that ever-required distancing.

 

Links were found and distributed to the Red Rebels website and to videos provided on how to make the costumes – the intricate headdresses in particular – then how to do the make-up and form the roughly standardised postures – both when moving and when static in the silent ‘tableaux’.  These videos were mainly presented, with insouciant charm, by RR founder (and creative director of the Invisible Circus performance group) Doug Francisco – to whom, our thanks.

 

In the meantime, I drafted a leaflet to be distributed on the day.  Though some information later came through from XR, my main source for assembling this was ‘Banking on Climate Change – Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2020’ produced by the Rainforest Action Network in association with a number of other environmental organisations.  The figures are shocking.  Since the 2016 Paris Climate Conference, which was supposed to herald a full on international attempt to deal with the threat we are all facing, the established international banks have continued to invest billions and billions into shoring up the fossil fuel industry.  Many of the worst offenders are US banks, but this side of the Atlantic, Barclays and HSBC rank highly.  RAN’s report (downloadable at https://www.ran.org/bankingonclimatechange2020/) is an eye-opener.  I edited down relevant information on UK banks to one side of A5, and added a few notes on who we were and why we were protesting on the other.

 

Our first setback.  The headdress workshop scheduled for the 19th had to be cancelled, it was raining all day.  At our weekly Zoom meetings, meanwhile, it was decided once again to make a video of the event, intercutting footage of the protest and its preparation with documentary material.  Our camera person wanted shots of the Reds against the sunset on Shaftesbury’s scenic Castle Green and this was to be part of our final rehearsal, in full costume, on the 30th.  But all we still had, with just ten days to go, was a package of the material and no one available with the expertise to cut it out into the relevant pieces, or indeed the space in which to do it.  Someone had earlier volunteered this service but had had to withdraw due to work pressure.  Would we be able to get the costumes made in time?  Would there be a rain-free day on which we could all meet and get the rehearsals started?

 

An attempt was made and fortunately favoured with better weather on the afternoon of Sunday 23rd.  Still no costumes, we just had to try and get into the spirit of it with our red gloves on and improvise what we would do in the garden where we met.  Once again, social distancing proved a limitation.  Take a look on the website at some of the Reds’ tableaux and you’ll see that they cluster together.  We’d have to try for a similar effect, yet remain each at least one metre apart.  We had a go, imagining we were moving from bank building to bank building as we crossed the lawn and posed by the flower beds – photographed by two of the helpers so we could consider what worked and what didn’t later.  Next, we walked to the point where we’d agreed to start, and did our slow walk up Shaftesbury’s cobbled Gold Hill (the one in the Hovis ad), timing it so we could schedule our arrival at the Town Hall on the Bank Holiday Monday as the nearby church bell chimed midday (another ‘that would make a cool shot’ type request from our camera person).  Finally we did the circuit of the five high street banks, trying out the tableaux in front of them.  More than one bewildered passer-by watched us for a while, scratched their heads and moved swiftly on.  That gave us some idea of what we were letting ourselves in for.

 

There was for me another anxiety.  Without thinking it through, I’d ordered a cheap pallet of kids’ Hallowe’en face-paint for £2.99 online.  It had arrived in the post and the day before the rehearsal I’d tried it out.  I’ve never attempted to do this kind of theatrical face-paint thing before and my inexperience combined with the apparent inadequacy of the stuff in the pallet resulted in the appearance of a ghastly apparition, the Joker on a bad day.  I quickly washed it off, realising I had just five working days left to get hold of some pricier but proper face-paint.  Ordered on the Monday, but would it turn up in time?

 

That day brought some good news though.  Someone had been found with both the equipment and the skill to do the cutting out.  All we needed was somewhere to do it.  We managed to locate some community resource space in the town and get access to it the next day.  Two of us helped out and by the end of the Tuesday morning we had the various pieces cut from the velvet: the skirts, togas, scarves, belts and headdress pieces.  Our benevolent seamstress took the chiffon with her to cut out the veils and streamers for us later.  Over the next two days I made my own headdress, while the others were made up by various volunteers elsewhere.

 

By the last of our Zoom meetings, immediately prior to the Bank Holiday weekend, the leaflets were printed and one of our number – fluent in front of a microphone – had done an interview to herald our actions on the local daily podcast.  We’d looked at the photos of our rehearsal and it was clear that we needed to simplify the tableaux, sort out the order in which we’d move from one spot to another and generally find a sense of consistency to what we were doing.  We studied photos of the Reds in action, and limited our choice to a small range of gestures.  Given more time, we could probably have broadened it, but that was time we didn’t have.

 

In the early evening, on Sunday 30th, following a more focused rehearsal in yet another garden, we finally got our costumes on.  The face-paint I’d ordered had turned up just in time and proved easy and effective to apply.  We helped one another with the fiddly bits of the Red rig and ended up in a slight race against time in order to catch the hoped for sunset, so the relevant film and stills could be shot.  Veils down, in single file, we exited the garden and began our slow walk across the street to Castle Green.

 

It was our first, limited taste of what was to come next day.  To be within the guise I had observed from without, the previous year in London, was like nothing I’d ever felt before.  To be observed by those whose eyes are naturally drawn by the striking, blood-red costume, and yet to be not quite oneself, beneath white face-paint, the velvet and the chiffon proved a strange experience – a kind of peaceful alienation.  I’ll delve a little further into those feelings below, suffice to say of this venture that the sunset was suitably spectacular and our camera man – filming us walking and posing – sounded quite ecstatic.  In amongst the exclamations of ‘cool’ and ‘great’ I heard him say at one point: ‘biblical!’  I guess it was.  Sort of.

 

The next day we met at 10.30, in the garden of another sympathetic household at the bottom of Gold Hill and transformed ourselves once again.  Here is some of what I wrote in my journal, later that day:

 

…Walking in slow procession up Gold Hill was first challenge.  Though the togas were relatively okay for flat walking, going uphill they tended to catch underfoot quite easily.  The slow steps required poise and balance, but on the rough cobbles it was quite easy to totter.  Under the veil, the sense of being at a remove from everything was strong.  We could hear snatches of conversation – our ‘minders’ talking to people who wanted to know what we were doing.  Someone asking one of them: “Where did they come from?”…

 

…Keeping steady, stopping and starting, required concentration – which made one’s perceptions of what was happening around us even more fragmentary.  At the top of the hill there was a gathering of people, many taking pictures…

 

…The sense of being stared at was strong and the stipulation not to respond to it was strange.  It was dream-like – walking in this all-red, androgynous and mysterious costume and being seen thus.  It wasn’t difficult to maintain the sense of solemnity, though by the time we were in front of the Town Hall, we were hearing snatches of conversations around us to which we might have responded or been distracted by…

 

…As we headed for HSBC, an elderly couple passed us by.  “Can’t you find anything useful to do?” said one.  “Go home,” said the other…

 

…Doing the tableaux was tricky.  As we were not close together it was hard at times to even see the other three, once we were in position.  Thus hard to know when they changed their pose or moved, without breaking one’s own posture.  But we managed somehow, even if not always according to plan…

 

…One felt other-worldly.  Outside the human activity there – people shopping, having outside coffees/drinks, sightseeing etc.  But there  were times when less dream-like sensations prevailed: twinges in my lower back as I changed position; tiredness towards the end (the whole thing took best part of two hours); itches on my nose and elsewhere; occasional boredom; occasional ‘what the fuck are we doing?’ kinds of feelings – but mostly it had its own weird momentum…

 

Since that day, quite a few people have kindly said to me that they thought it an effective form of protest.  Our role in Shaftesbury was somewhat different to that of the Reds who appear during major XR actions forming just a part of an ever-interweaving mass of events.  Here, we and our helpers with the banners and leaflets, were the event.  I think by our unusual appearance and silent walking we might have been saying: ‘climate breakdown affects everyone everywhere – even here on a quiet Bank Holiday Monday in a country town’.  I hope so.  Someone told me it was provocative of thought, more so than a noisy protest would have been.  That’s good, that’s what we’re trying to do here in Shaftesbury where there’s little point in the big city tactic of disruption.  Amongst those in the street who conversed with the leafletters, the majority looked on favourably – though of course one has to remember that ‘bankers’ have generally fallen out of favour over the last decade or so, so we may have been pandering to prejudice in some cases.  I’d like to think that at least some of the people who saw us that day and who read our leaflets might give some thought to contacting their bank and questioning its investment policies.  Perhaps even consider moving an account to an ethical bank like Triodus.  Chances are there won’t be many.  But some seeds were sewn and some of them may grow.

 

Amongst those voices we heard, fragmentarily, as we posed and walked, was that of our local podcaster, interviewing people on the street or those of our number who were not committed to silence.  By the evening he’d put together a quite supportive piece on his podcast, for which we are grateful.  Inevitably there was also stuff on the associated Facebook page, and even more inevitably there were comments.  Someone claimed they had seen us, at one point, call in at the local Costa and drink coffee from non-returnable cups.  This provoked a short thread concerning our hypocrisy, until it was pointed out that it did not actually happen.  A woman who thought our costumes scary reckoned we might have frightened small children.  In my, and some of the others’ experience that day, children tended to react with curiosity and wonder.  I replied, hoping to reassure her to this effect.  Another accused us of spreading ‘propaganda and lies’.  I replied with a link to the RAN 2020 report.  Compared to the hideousness of some online trolls, it was mild stuff really.  But still, one tends to think of those who read the negative posts, form conclusions and don’t return to read the balancing comments.

 

Since then, particularly in London, XR protestors have had to face some disappointingly Draconian repression.  Under difficult circumstances, I think they’ve done the best they can to draw attention both to the issue and the inactivity of those with the power to instigate the necessary changes.  Our own action seems mild by comparison – we didn’t even see any police that Monday, let alone face arrest.  But maybe there’s something of the ‘butterfly effect’ about what we did.  Or it could be seen as a small but integral part of something bigger.  Such thoughts at least give me comfort.

 

My costume now sits in a box in the attic.  One thing has occurred to me.  I can’t just let it stay there.  When called upon, this Red will have to rise again.  But hopefully, not up a cobbled hill.

 

The video mentioned in this piece is now complete and can be found at: https://www.planetshaftesbury.org/xrshaftesbury – if this video seems worthwhile to you, feel free to share it.

 

Richard Foreman

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THE ST DAVID’S SYMPHONY OF SOUNDS

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Rupert Loydell

 

Created by musician and composer PHILIP ROBINSON, The St David’s Symphony Of Sounds is a sonic tapestry of the rich and varied community of St Davids, Exeter. An audio selection of people, places, events, music, things and wildlife – old and new, long-standing and transient, conventional and wayward. The Symphony is made up of four 20 minute movements (like a double LP).

 

Crediton Radio have kindly hosted the Symphony on their website. You can listen to the four movements at https://www.creditonradio.org/post/120920

 

Or you can access them on Soundcloud where you can download them for free – click on the track, then on the More box below it:

 

Tracklist details:

The intros and outros throughout are spoken by Willow Wilkie Robinson (6) and Esah Bleham (5)

The 1st Movement: 22’ 57”

dawn chorus (recorded by Rollo 2016) / Laura Blatherwick playing piano / Hugh McCann talking about a mystery / Strange Bedfellows (Keith Hunter, Matthew Shepherd, John Sealey & PR, live musical soundtrack to England v Argentina football match, 2002) / Lutfa Hassan talking about coming to Exeter (interviewed by Mona Hassan & Nazima Khan, Telling our Stories, Finding our Roots, 2013) / metal bannister down steps to Exe Street / Jamie Sexby Approach (St David’s Ambience Society CD 1997) / River Exe sluice gate adjusters / Leonard Lawrence talking about coal and the railway (re- corded by Laura Denning) / Spectrum Choir Spectrum – Say My Name (Devon’s first and thus far only LGBT+ choir) / Karen Cunningham talking about a hug / Exeter College students theatre workshop (1999) / Children Of The Drone performance at St Michael’s and All Angels Church (with Henry Tomkins, Matthew Watkins, Matthew Shepherd, Simon Egan, Keith Hunter, James Turner & PR, 2003) / Jade Rowden talking about singing and living at the YMCA / Paul Simon Northern Line, concert in St Thomas, the night before his Jolly Porter Folk Club show, St David’s Hill, 1965

The 2nd Movement: 20’ 53”

Jamie In The Face Of performance (Phoenix Arts Centre 2011) / work- men working, Kelvin Lacy talking about plumbing and plastering / Pig Noise Boys The Quiet, I See (David Axford & PR, 2017) / unknown local woman talking about the dairy (recorded by Laura Denning) / Alex Hibberd talking about the Mulberry Tree Cafe / Fadi Al Naji performing at Refugee Music Night (with David Heathfield) / The Price family talk- ing about the dairy (recorded by Laura Denning) / various dogs / V&P Big Band Black Dog (Vaughan Gallavan & PR 2007) / Dorleta Diego talking about exercise / Gina Richards talking about the Veitch Lamp Post Trail / Royal Albert Memorial Museum clocks (1996) / Ginny Baker talking about working at Exeter Community Centre as the West of England School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (recorded by Laura Denning) / Bux freestyle rapping a song with PR (Shilhay Community 2011) / Vespers from St Michael’s and All Angels Church (recorded in ‘Lockdown’ by Ku Sun-Tzu)

The 3rd Movement: 22’ 20”

Bold Set Of Ruffians Wonderous Love (Nick Peed & PR) / Abdullah Kuzu talking about being a refugee (interviewed by Richard Brad- bury & Anita Nathwani, Telling our Stories, Finding our Roots, 2013) / Exeter College students en masse, Queen Street / children’s tap dancing class (2004) / Hannah Reynolds talking about the mul- berry tree / Luke Tindall Swallow (St David’s Ambience Society CD 1997) / Stéphanie d’Haussy talking about debate and tolerance / John Sealey talking about what now / children speaking Shakespeare: Kate, Georgia, Anna, piano by Mary Robinson (Macbeth film sound- track 1995) / Sean talking about being a Big Issue seller, Exeter Central / Mike McInerney Humbox interlude 1 / Lutfa Hassan talking about her sari (interviewed by Mona Hassan & Nazima Khan, Telling our Stories, Finding our Roots, 2013) / Seat Of The Pants Orchestra with Aaron Jeffery, Vaughan Gallavan, PR (live soundtrack to Cops, a Buster Keaton silent movie, 2010) / Tania In The Face Of performance (Phoenix Arts Centre 2011) 

The 4th Movement: 22’ 32”

River Exe at Miller’s Bridge / Pig Noise Boys The White, Dawn (David Axford & PR, 2017) / Leonard Lawrence talking about the war (recor- ded by Laura Denning) / Jo singing Silly Games (Shilhay Community 2011) / on The Iron Bridge humming to the Cathedral bells (2000) / Zorro talking about masking loss (interviewed by Sasi Phongploenpis & Gordon Chang, Telling our Stories, Finding our Roots, 2013) / Alison Whittall, Andi Tobe, Gill Unstead singing (in a Richard III performance, Emma Brown as Lord Grey being executed, 2001) / various door bells, very squeaky door (2008) / Celia Drummond speaking a train announce- ment / Hugh McCann talking about people rushing / Ray and Laura In The Face Of performance (Phoenix Arts Centre 2011) / Ryan Maddocks talking about being a chef at the YMCA / Vespers from St Michael’s and All Angels Church (recorded in ‘Lockdown’ by Ku Sun-Tzu, remixed by PR) / Mike McInerney Humbox interlude 2 / Raven Words reading I Write

 

 

 

Philip Robinson

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Steam’s Special Dedicated to Toots Hibbert

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor


This week Steam filled in for Zephyr George on the Sunday Sermon with an all reggae special, dedicated to the late, great Toots Hibbert, playing tracks by Sound Dimension, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Bob Marley, Prince Buster, Toots and the Maytals and many more!

Tracklist:
Toots and the Maytals – Bam Bam
Sound Dimension – Real Rock
Bunny Clarke – Be Thankful
Stranger and Patsy – When You Call My Name
Marcia Aitken – I’m Still in Love
The Minstrells – People Get Ready
Johnny Osbourne – Truths & Rights
Lone Ranger – Automatic
The Upsetter – Jungle Lion
Norma White – I Want Your Love
Toots and the Maytals – Sweet and Dandy
Cedric “Im” Brooks – Ethiopia
The Preacher – Black Moses
The Gaylettes – Son of a Preacherman
Lyn Taitt and the Jets – Batman
Peter Tosh and the Wailers – Stepping Razor
Bob Marley and the Wailers – I’m Hurting Inside
Lascelles Perkins – Creation
Prince Buster – Wash Wash
Norma Frazer – First Cut is the Deepest
Toots and the Maytals – Country Roads

 

Steam Stock

 

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IN THE PALACE OF THE SPHINX

Posted on 26 September, 2020 by Editor

 

(The Supplicant)

 

Deathmasques III

She entered through iron doors that fell back against the cold stone wall with a crash. She uttered an anguished cry:
           “Oh, help me sister: Is it the end? Have I lost everything?”
           “Be calm, my sister,” replied an imperious woman who neophytes called The Sphinx, “for, although you have disturbed me with your haste, I will listen to you.”
She leaned back and, fingertips tentatively touching, examined the face of the trembling neophyte, the Sister Phantastica – The Supplicant.
               The girl’s hair was almost raven black. A chain of jet hung about her neck.
           “Oh, my sister,” she cried, “I despair because I cannot love…”
               The woman known as The Sphinx placed a sheet of green blotting paper over a diagram drawn in red ink on blue-tinted tissue paper.
          “I shall assume,” she said, “that you have consulted The Warlocks in their foul hovels, The White Witch in her palace and she who has a purple face, Our Lady of the Place of Death.”
           “Yes, all these things I have done, as I was instructed when I joined this Order from which there is no retreat.”
           “So, my daughter, tell me what happened,” commanded the imperious one.
           “Oh, Great One, Oh Great Sphinx, I shall tell you my story,” sobbed The Supplicant.
              And so she began:
          “I visited the Warlocks in their hovels of bone. I studied with them until winter frost covered their hearts with frozen dew. They examined my soul and in return I gave them the silver coins bequeathed to me by my father. They melted the precious silver in a crucible, and, having examined the desires of my soul, they created for me a gleaming monster – a beautiful mon­ster for me to play with. He was tall and angular with deep sunken eyes – pale metallic eyes that hinted of many hermetic secrets but told me nothing.
          “I dwelt with this monster in my Ivory Tower for exactly a year. He showed me much that was of interest and much that was not. We watched the sun set over the rooftops. We observed the courtship of insects. We saw the mantis devour her mate.
          “We traveled in the nine dimensions that can only be reached by the crystalline pillars and the shadowy shores of The Sea of Life, a sea of floating water-lilies.
             We saw nothing.
             The hermetic monster said I was his mantis and begged to be devoured. I chained him to a golden bed and after exquisite tortures I removed his heart using the ‘Keys of Darkness’ and many incantations.”
           The imperious Sphinx shifted impatiently in her chair of carved onyx. She glared at her inkwell: in this glass womb nestled a gobbet of red.
        “Please continue.”
        “Following the instructions from The Goat-Superior, given to me when I joined this Order (from which there is no escape), I next visited the White Witch in her palace. The walls of the palace were carved from ice and in­laid with pearls. These pearls glittered in such a way as to interfere with the functioning of the mind. The floors were inlaid with white gold.
         The White Witch sat on an ermine-covered throne. She wore a robe of swans-down fastened with a chain of mirrors. Beneath this robe the body of the Witch was supremely beautiful, oh my sister, so beautiful! She showed me her milk-white breasts with their startling areolas and her thighs white as moon-dust.”
      “This story is far too long,” snapped the imperious one. “Be quick – we all know the legendary charms of the White Witch. We all know of her blonde-white hair…and her subtle, tempting ways with Supplicants such as you…”
         Sister Phantastica sank to the floor and clutched her breast
      “I must tell you of her gift,” she said huskily and with many hesitations. “I think it was a microscope.”           
      “A microscope. Now that may be unusual.”
      “In the microscope I saw the violet mirrors of her eyes reflecting infinities of light. I returned to my Tower and, for exactly a year and a day, I searched for answers with this magical instrument.”
       “What did you see? What did you find?”
       “I saw a vast, metal plain inside my mind, far within myself. There were tall pillars without summit or base and I saw a great pit from which emerged a giant hand. Almost overcome by vertigo at the sight of this spectacle of supernal terror, I heard a voice, in the distance, shouting: “this is all, this is all…”
       “Looking into myself with this instrument again I saw a vortex where a thousand virgins swirled in a maelstrom. I saw an angel ascending to­wards a noose. I saw The Abyss of the Birds. I saw The Unwanted Offerings… “
       “Enough!”      
       Oh Great Sphinx, oh my sister, have I sinned against the order?” beseeched the supplicant, still on her knees.
       “What next? What of the purple-faced Lady of the Place of Death? Speak, I command you!”
         The terrified Supplicant continued:
       “As instructed I visited this dread phantom. After a night of terror, tormented by her servants (they who are neither living nor dead) I was taken, in heavy, iron chains to a tower. This is where the purple-faced lady keeps a great instrument for scanning the limits of space, the zone of death-in-life, where the uni­verse falls away for ever into a pool of ebony mist. By this instrument Our Lady can see her works in their entirety.”
       “My child, I was not born yesterday! All of this is known. Did you witness the deaths of ten million suns?”
       “Yes!”
       “Were you shown that for every star that dies two are created?”
      “Yes!”
       “Were you dazzled by the chaotic nebulae and the transcendental glare of The Universal Centre?”
         Sister Phantastica moaned “Please, Great One, have pity…!”
       “Flames a billion miles high?”
       “Yes, I saw those flames…”
       “The Web of Time?”
       “But time has failed me – Oh Great Sphinx of Pain!”
       “The fractured, evil face of Kronos laying his eggs?”
       “It was terrible…”
       “The distant Citadel of Doubt?”
       “Yes! Oh, yes, I saw it all!”
        The Supplicant moaned. She fell to the floor on her face and wept.
      “Then you have both succeeded and failed in your quest. You have seen all, but you cannot love. This still     torments you, my child, oh my sister – let this torment cease.”
      “Please let my torment cease!”
        The Supplicant was flotsam adrift in chaos.
        She quivered violently as the end came but remained submissive and did not cry out.
       The Warlocks in their hovels of bone dispute how the bullets entered her body but they are pedantic and over-fond of such diversions.
      As the end came The White Witch squirmed on her ermine throne.
       As The Supplicant died Our Lady of the Place of Death gathered her soul and clasped it in a fearful embrace – one last embrace.
       The imperious Sphinx stared dispassionately at the blood as it welled from the three wounds disfiguring the breast of The Supplicant who had both succeeded and failed. She replaced the weapon in the drawer of her desk.
       And the iron gates were closed – forever.

 

 

 

A.  C  Evans

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Cultural Studies

Posted on 19 September, 2020 by Jan Woolf

 

Jan Woolf’s book of shorts Stormlight was launched just before lockdown at Housmans Books, with all subsequent readings cancelled.  Her publisher Riversmeet, is organising another (on  zoom, not in a room) this autumn. Watch this space.   Stormlight (signed) is on sale from  http://janwoolf.com and keep an eye on https://riversmeetproductions.co.uk for the other wonderful things they do.  Not least an up coming course on Ulysses. Meanwhile here is a taster from the collection. 

 

Cultural Studies by Jan Woolf

Elly stirs in her hangover. The china foal she gave her Aunt shimmers into focus on the bedside cabinet, beside the digital clock telling her it’s 7.32. She jack-knifes her knees to meet the ache in her heart. She’d longed to wake up with him this morning, yawning – their limbs entwined. She wants to cry, but he’s not worth it so she throws his pillow across the room instead. She recalls the conversation in the small hours.

‘It was all about the exploration of attachment honey, at least I fessed up,’ he’d said.

‘Another post grad’ student was she?’

‘He.’

‘You flake, Tyrone, you only come here with me because it’s trendy Whitstable.’

‘No, it’s because I want to be with you, Elly.’

‘Attachment, my arse.’

‘Please don’t be bitter.’

‘One for sorrow, two for joy?’

‘Eh?’

‘That’s what you say when you see a magpie on its own, Professor.’

‘A what?’

‘Magpie – black and white bird.’

‘I know, I’m not stupid.’

‘When you see one on its own it means sorrow.’

‘And two is for joy?’

‘Yes, but it’s meant to mean us, not….’

‘Referencing wildlife – of course – forgot – you’re a country girl.’

At least he hadn’t accused her of rural idiocy, like before.

‘You meant to call me a rural idiot didn’t you?’

‘Of course not, sweetie.’

‘Idiocy is Ancient Greek for obsessive pre-occupation with self, did you know that?’

‘Nope.’

There was a lot he didn’t know. The idiot.

‘I never want to see your postmodern arse again. Go fuck a brick.’ And he left Aunt’s B&B, and walked away into the night. There were no trains, so he probably spent the night in a beach hut.

She turns in the apricot nylon sheets, wondering if the sparks are her agony, or the reaction with the synthetic fabric of the nightie she’d found under the pillow (that had turned him on). Ends were wretched, especially after the first romantic months; the Brick Lane curries, dirty weekends, the art galleries.

Last week, in the National Gallery she’d shown him the tiny smears of red that Corot had put in each of his whispering green-grey landscapes, telling him that this was each work’s centre, ‘to draw in the eye, like an infant’s to a nipple.’

He’d liked that.

She thinks back to their beginning. He’d given her final dissertation on The Communard Courbet a 2-1, inviting her to lunch to discuss the gender implications of the Paris Commune. The rest had been history or ‘the end of history’, he’d quipped, stroking the back of her hand with his long white fingers.

Clever Tyrone. The only lecturer in the Cultural Studies department to wear Converse trainers with a suit. Wore his learning well too. His PhD, Aesthetics in Post Industrial Society had been translated into eight languages – even Albanian. Sexy Tyrone; handsome and tactile, with mooncalf eyes and dark all day stubble. Not just a pretty academic either, his novel Working Title had been well received and he was getting guest spots on Culture Vultures.

And he was divorced,

And he was good in bed.

‘Quite a catch,’ she tells the china foal.

She stares at the wallpapers of mottled mauve and regency stripes, and the picture of a Victorian girl child in a white dress standing on tiptoe, her mother’s receiving arms just visible inside the golden plastic frame, and she wants to weep. The picture isn’t hung, but screwed to the wall. Tyrone had called it an installation. ‘Oh Tyrone, you were so funny sometimes.’ She wants to grizzle into the polyester pillow, but she knows it wouldn’t soak up the tears – if she had any.

The last time they were here he’d made an action, as the Fluxists would have put it. ‘Let’s make some real shit,’ he’d sneered, eyeing up the china foal, tearing up pieces of his Lib Lit Supplement, spitting into them, pudging tiny pellets of newsprint in his fingers, then placing them in a row behind the foal’s straddled back legs. It was the first time she’d seen him actually make anything, other than his roll ups. Feeling mild guilt at the collusion, or collaboration, she’d re-arranged the tiny turds into the more authentic heap that would lie beneath a horse.

‘Don’t they shit while they’re walking along?’ he’d asked.

‘No, and I gave that china foal to Aunt for Christmas when I was six.’

‘Foal? I thought it was a pony.’

‘No. Ponies are small horses. They have foals too.’

‘Wouldn’t that make them poles?’

‘Shut up.’

‘Do you like all this kitsch, honey?’

‘It’s my aunt’s’.

‘That’s not an answer.’

Well, it was answer enough for her, and if he didn’t get it? OK. He got Derrida, Foucault and Lacan, so maybe they could explain.

Then he’d turned aunt’s reproduction of The Haywain upside down.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘To help her see afresh….’

‘You mean my aunt.’

‘Yes, the balance of the composition, and question the reality of her own existence.’

She’d laughed, imagining the man falling out of his cart and tumbling into the sky. ‘Constable would have found that funny, wouldn’t he Hon’?’

‘Who? Oh – cuntstable. First time some guy had ever painted clouds, big deal.’

She’d turned away from him then. Yes, the first time some guy had painted clouds.

‘What did you call him?’

‘Kunstable, sweetheart. German for art, with a stable attached.’

She sits up in bed and looks at the upside down Haywain, the man clinging on in his cart, timeless, safe as houses. Aunt can’t have noticed. She feels guilt at the collusion, implying that her aunt was a fool, and wants to cry again. But he isn’t worth it.

The Kunst.

She looks at the sunlight straining through curtains of brown and orange flowers. Tyrone had loved those curtains – the whole room in fact; ‘its context and signifiers.’ He’d once suggested flogging them at Spitalfields market, so that her Aunt could afford some nice white slatted shutters with blinds, more in keeping with the contemporary Whitstable feel. ‘This junk will be worth a fortune one day,’ he’d said, while pissing in the sink.

’You can’t do that, Tyrone.’

‘Why not? It’s sterile.’

‘The sink?’

‘Piss.’

And so was he.

There’s a tap at the door. It must be 8 o’clock. She looks at the clock. It is.

‘Come in, Aunty.’

A waft of eau de Freesia and fried food accompanies her Aunt, whose rump is the first thing in the room as she balances a tea tray. As she turns, it’s all held before her like a ship’s figurehead; teapot, milk-jug, sugar bowl, plate of biscuits, two cups and saucers. Under the hennaed hair, she sees an older version of her mother’s face and wants to cry. ‘Hello Aunt.’

‘Morning Lovey, where’s that Teroll then?’

‘Tyrone.’

‘Yes, him.’

Elly, spotting the extra cup starts to cry.

‘Oh dear,’ says Aunt, setting the tray down, sitting on the side of the bed, pulling her niece towards her. ‘I quite like the picture like that you know,’ she says, patting the huge infant crying on her shoulder.

‘What picture?’

‘The one by the man who painted Constable’s Haywain, you can see the cloud effects better, the bushy trees, and the shine on the water and the horse’s bottom.’

‘Tyrone did it.’

‘I know. That’s why I left it like that. Daft bugger.’

 

 

 

 

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Bold As Love – Celebrating Hendrix

Posted on 19 September, 2020 by Editor

Explore Virtual 3D exhibition

14 -30 September

MASTERPIECE ART

3 Norland Place

London, W11 4QG

https://masterpieceart.co.uk/exhibitions/13-bold-as-love-celebrating-hendrix/works/

https://masterpieceart.co.uk/

 

 

 

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