As the trust in establishment media
continues to plummet
As the governmental health agencies
disgrace themselves
with doublespeak, obfuscation, and blatant disinformation
If they had any honor
it might sting their pride
As the fog of war
begins to break
As the smoke of fear
clears away
We do well to remember
that cornered rats
are left with only one option
and their rotten teeth
carry more disease
than any plague we’ve faced
As the clenched fist
offers its final squeeze
As the naked system
is recognized with shame
Scott Thomas Outlar
Bio:
Scott Thomas Outlar lives and writes in the suburbs outside of Atlanta, Georgia. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He guest-edited the Hope Anthology of Poetry from CultureCult Press as well as the 2019, 2020, and 2021 Western Voices editions of Setu Mag. He has been a weekly contributor at Dissident Voice for the past seven years. Selections of his poetry have been translated into Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Dutch, French, Hindi, Italian, Kurdish, Malayalam, Persian, Serbian, and Spanish. His seventh book, Evermore, was written along with coauthor Mihaela Melnic and released in 2021. More about Outlar’s work can be found at 17Numa.com.
A looking glass bus
waits in the stand.
My hundred selves climb up.
Some’s arrived quite late,
but others can be patient.
A war wrecks some roads and lanes
near and far as they ride, after all,
and yet the driver tsk-tsks,
“No one ever understands time.”
I whisper in the left ear of the other I,
“I was lost in the ruins of the thoughts.”
“What was you thinking?” He asks.
Doesn’t matter. They all went the way with the time.
To be honest, I’ve heard a considerable number of albums with Bill Frisell on them. Author, Philip Watson says that there were 748 of them listed on Discog.com at the time of the publication of this biography. I own a few of them, particularly the ECM ones, especially the relatively early albums such as the couple with Jan Garbarek. Bill has also worked with Fred Frith, who I interviewed a few years back. So, some slight connections, but I have to say that I find his ‘style(s)’ often a bit ‘soft’ for my personal liking. Not quite MOR music, too accomplished for that, but he’s a jazz guitarist who often has mixed in interpretations of ‘standards’ with his own compositions. He also sometimes operates at the ‘soft’, gentle end of the musical palette.
This book bursts much of my personal Frisell ‘bubble’ of ignorance. It’s a massive compendium of Bill’s collaborations with hundreds of world-class musicians and indeed artists. It is a genuine opus encapsulating Frisell’s ideas, collaborations, compositions and his mindset. What author Philip Watson calls, The Frisell Dream. I wasn’t sure about the book when I started my read, but it offers an intricate portal into the great American songbook: folk, jazz, popular, classical – indeed, ‘music’! Hundreds of snapshots of information, recordings, gigs, musical explorations, sign-posts and opportunities for searching out the music of Bill, from the 1980s to the present day. At its considerable heart is the odd juxtaposition of Structure and Discipline and Freedom and Improvisation. The book links this enigma to the imaginary island of Frislandia. A floating mirage.
In putting together this shortish review of the new biography about Bill Frisell, I’ve added in some video links to enable you to listen in to the man and his music for yourself. For many of his early years he appears to have modelled himself on guitarist Jim Hall. A fine role model, but in jazz terms, perhaps regarded as ‘safe’ and fairly traditional.
Frisell is probably best known for his layers of harmonics, his use of foot pedals and loops. He’s a very nuanced player and in Philip Watson’s new biography this makes Frisell come over as being a conundrum, full of musical contradictions. This, rather like the book about him, Bill Frisell features as a human musical chameleon, and something of a frustrating melting pot of all-styles and all genres. This is underlined by the many years it took Bill to become the ‘main man’ in jazz groups. The book takes an episodic approach to Bill’s life. In the initial stages of his musical journey he was very much a ‘go-to’ sidesman, a master of all styles – one of those fabled musician’s musician.
The contention of the author is that Frisell is “The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music”. Not so sure on that one. The book certainly offers many testaments to the musician’s ability to completely transcend ‘jazz’ and engage in myriad worlds that mix sounds and visions. There are many hundreds of voices in the book describing Bill as a genius, a Svengali-like musician, but also a bit of geek, a loner, an oddball outsider with the characteristic of slow speech and a fast and agile musical brain. His album helmed by producer, Hal Willner, ‘Unspeakable’ in 2004 won Bill and Hal a Grammy award. But, it’s the unusual excursions into fusions of jazz and rock, American standards, the worlds of John Lennon and Hunter S Thompson, world music and composing, and playing music for films (including soundtracks for Buster Keaton films), videos and animations that create some of the most vivid sections of Philip Watson’s often fascinating book. Such as when we hear that, “Frisell sparks the colours of a symphonic storm” in ‘Strange Meeting’ with his Power Tools trio. It was dubbed as a Super Group at the time: Ronald Shannon Jackson – Bill Frisell – Melvin Gibbs: ‘When We Go’: Power Tools, Live from ‘The Strange Meeting’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3nzloBmuPE
Paul Motion, John Zorn, along with Jim Hall are frequently referenced. Not always as co-performers, but often as mentors and exemplars. Likewise, ‘Far Side’ artist Gary Larson, who became a friend of Bill’s and created the woozy, wonky musical tapestry of 1996’s ‘Tales from the Far Side’ from the Bill Frisell Quartet which was used to accompany the TV series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQH5W-hyD5Q
Hypnotic and lovely.
As an example of musical sign-posting, I read in Watson’s Frisell biography about his sonic studio experiments on two albums, ‘Floratone’ (2005) and ‘Floratone II’ (2012), which Watson describes as: “…a swampy, spacey trip to soundworld where jazz, blues, dub, country, rock, funk, trip-hop and psychedelia seem to simply coexist.” These were part of a collaborative project conceived with drummer Matt Chamberlain. It reminds me of the boundary-bending sonic experiments of Miles Davis. It just naturally ‘grooves’. Music created well ‘outside’ the Box.
As an example of Frisell’s boundary-rule-breaking, from 2003 to 2005 he acted as musical director for ‘Century of Song’, a series of concerts at the German Ruhrtriennale arts festival (produced by Lee Townsend). Frisell invited artists including Rickie Lee Jones, Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega, Arto Lindsay, Loudon Wainwright III, Vic Chesnutt, Van Dyke Parks, Buddy Miller, Ron Sexsmith and Chip Taylor who performed their favourite songs in new arrangements and styles.
Philip Watson deserves to be congratulated for rigorous research and mind-bending, sometimes numbing, attention to details. He is very much a Frisell ‘believer’, sucked inexorably into ‘fandom’ and this is a drawback in terms of making a critical assessment of the diverse range of Frisell material. Watson uses others to gently and sometimes not-so-gently criticise, for instance in connection with the John Lennon album, ‘All we are saying’ and ‘Guitar in the Space Age!’ Watson comments: “There were further charges that Frisell was again simply into vanity project(s) and cosy nostalgia.”
Someone said:
Resistance to tyranny
is obedience to God.
Someone said:
Have faith in the Lord
but get out of the way
of rolling rocks.
Someone said:
These people must be stoned
out of their gourds
if they think that we
are going to sell our souls
to the system of the beast.
Someone said:
Welcome, my son,
welcome to the machine.
Someone said:
Big wheels
keep on turning.
Someone said:
It is not a tool
that is good or evil,
but in how it is used.
Someone said:
I bet one of these wrenches
would work wonders
when shoved sideways in that gear.
Scott Thomas Outlar
Picture Nick Victor
Bio:
Scott Thomas Outlar lives and writes in the suburbs outside of Atlanta, Georgia. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He guest-edited the Hope Anthology of Poetry from CultureCult Press as well as the 2019, 2020, and 2021 Western Voices editions of Setu Mag. He has been a weekly contributor at Dissident Voice for the past seven years. Selections of his poetry have been translated into Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Dutch, French, Hindi, Italian, Kurdish, Malayalam, Persian, Serbian, and Spanish. His seventh book, Evermore, was written along with coauthor Mihaela Melnic and released in 2021. More about Outlar’s work can be found at 17Numa.com.
With the spike in veganism, the local butcher rebranded his business as a pet shop, selling pigs, sheep, and chickens to the lonely unemployed who missed the rush for dogs. He’d no previous experience, but an animal’s an animal, and at the end of the day it’s as easy to sweep up shit as blood with the sawdust. He didn’t know where to source cages, so he carried on dangling his stock by the ankles in his fly-specked window. Of course, it attracted do-gooders from all over town, but the pigs assured them they were fine, that the tethers were soft and comforting, and that a rush of blood to the head was actually quite a buzz. The sheep agreed and said it could be worse, nodding to the gleaming cleaver in the block behind the counter. The chickens and the butcher smiled, and the do-gooders saw the joke and laughed as they left, more than one of them with a new best friend for life trotting at their heels. In the quiet that followed, the butcher said he never knew that animals could talk. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see, said a pig. You and your Kierkegaard! said a sheep. The butcher looked at the chickens and the chickens looked right back.
From Edges of Memory: America 1968 – Gavin Selerie
On the last day of August we went to a concert at the Palace of Fine Arts, part of a festival in aid of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. The venue was a stunning neoclassical structure, recently rebuilt, with a colonnade, rotunda dome and lagoon. The exhibition hall, a curved structure like a railway station or hangar, was barely finished but served the present purpose. A spectacular light show, involving three simultaneous sets of liquid art, was projected along one wall, the most distinctive devised by the Holy See. It was odd to experience this in the afternoon, though we were easily transported to a world of shadows and shifting shapes. There were several stages and the audience moved to focus on each act in turn. (This was an era when concert attendees remained fully engaged with the show, before it became usual for restless folk to wander in and out.) Quicksilver Messenger Service was the headline band, encapsulating the high octane energy and improvisational expansiveness of the San Francisco music scene. John Cipollina had an amp rig with flashing lights and antenna horns that seemed like a creature from outer space. Sizzling, searing solos punctuated lengthy songs, often threaded in a medley. A stretched-out ‘Who Do You Love’ was a highlight, its blues pulse given a gliding, lyrical quality.
There was also an unscheduled appearance by Michael Bloomfield, the guitarist from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band who contributed so much to Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and live appearance at Newport, 1965, which I’d recently seen in the film Festival. Bloomfield had assembled a ‘jam’ group that included Nick Gravenites and Mark Naftalin, and Steve Miller joined in on guitar at one point. Despite the mix, this was a purer form of blues, less spacey than QMS. If Bloomfield had come some way from his Chicago roots, the tonal grip remained, jazzy licks veering out within something contained. The interplay with his old partner Naftalin on keyboards was stunning but never flashy. Bloomfield insisted that he had a ‘sweeter’ sound than some of his guitar contemporaries, who played in a harder, funkier mode. Seeing this in the flesh was a revelation.
Another act was the only female group from the Bay Area, the Ace of Cups. They were effective entertainers, dressed theatrically and making use of the echoey acoustic in the hall. Their gentle folk-rock harmonies provided a contrast to the heavy male rock, though they interacted well with Bloomfield when they were called back to sing with his group. Faren Miller recalls the scene vividly in her diary:
Giggling, they formed a semicircle around a microphone and practiced a few ‘Baby!’s, under Mike’s direction. ‘We’re the Bloomettes!’ Denise laughed. (She was now wearing the gold-rimmed spectacles she’d donned offstage.) The Cups provided soulful background while Mike sang a blues.
They closed their own set with an acapella ‘No More War’, particularly relevant in the aftermath of recent events in Chicago. Someone whispered that the lines about Mayor Daley were improvised. Given the strong police presence in the vicinity of the Palace, this was subtly provocative. A few weeks later I acquired the latest Jefferson Airplane album, Volunteers, to which the Cups contribute backing vocals. That record still stands as a defiant programme for the transformation of society, not least in its ecological message.
As is often the case, the most memorable performers were those least celebrated, in this case the duo Lamb (called ‘the Lamb’ on the bill). Their mix of folk and jazzy blues reminded me a little of The Incredible String Band, whom I’d seen at the Albert Hall in 1966, although Barbara Mauritz’s forceful solo voice gave the music a different thrust. Earthy but also soaring into space, it merited comparison with Karen Dalton or Grace Slick. This intersected with Bob Swanson’s ornate quasi-classical guitar work. The duo sat at an angle facing each other, with complementary outfits: his floral trousers almost matching her skirt or dress. Christine and I were sitting on the floor, behind or between some oddly deployed chairs at the front, so we were closely engaged with the performance. Dreamy, ethereal lyrics floated between spangles of the light show and across the weave of guitar notes. It was a unique synthesis: at times Eastern-meditative, then pumping with gospel energy and finally folk-surreal. A mystical pull was evident in the faces of the audience.
The magic of the event was accentuated by the interplay between sound and light in a high, arc-sided room. Blobs of floating colour and literal forms such as a human silhouette seemed to spring from or anticipate the music: swirling clouds, eye and limb shapes across Persian cloth, glowing coils round a couple kissing. Fire, air, earth and water were interchangeable in the patterns projected, and ceiling, walls and floor lost fixity of position. I had had a taste of this in England and would experience it again, particularly at Pink Floyd concerts, but the August ‘68 benefit stands out as socially receptive and artistically satisfying. Perhaps it was my initiation in a line of festivals that led to Glastonbury in the summer of 1971.
Lamb went on to make three albums and they should be better known, but their eclectic procedures worked against them. Bob Swanson has since reflected, ‘We were odd [even] for the oddballs’ (quoted by Richie Unterberger in Unknown Legends of Rock’n’Roll). When I got back to England I misremembered the name and started looking for information about ‘The Lamp’. It took a long time to identify the group I had seen and to discover that Barbara Mauritz was from Beaumont, Texas, a town I had passed through. As for the occasion, the organizers had envisaged a sequel to the 1967 Monterey Festival, but in reality it was a series of extended concerts held indoors. Still, the Palace site—‘a broken toy reassembled’, as someone put it—gave the events a certain aura. Towering columns, reddish in the sun, and a grey, age-rubbed dome, with a great reflecting pond and trees beyond. Some parts were cordoned off but Christine and I were able to dip our feet in the lagoon and munch our provisions. The hall was uncrowded, which helped to sustain a relaxed mood, and the adjacent coastal strip, with Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz visible in the distance, provided a nice ‘last act’ as we walked in the evening. Challenged once by police, we maintained our equilibrium. Predictably, the festival had met with opposition on grounds of safety and propriety—‘hippies would piss in doorways’—but the Medical Clinic’s director won support, revealing that the facility had treated 30,000 patients during the past year. A footnote: the palace, with its domed rotunda, is a backdrop in two scenes from Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
——
Extracted from a book-length memoir recounting Gavin Selerie’s experiences in North America during an eight month period before he went to university.
After a brief hiatus, Steam’s Groove is back with an hour of funk and soul, whether classic cuts or crate dug obscurities from the late 60s through to the early 80s, each episode you get one hour of killer grooves to get down to!
Tracklist:
Gene Harris – Theme for Relena
Lowell Fulson – Tramp
Explosions – Hip Drop (part 1)
Explosions – Hip Drop (part 2)
Baby Huey – Mighty Mighty
Gene Chandler – In My Body’s House
Rotary Connection – Respect
Timmy Thomas – Why Can’t We Live Together
Lyn Collins (the Female Preacher) – Take Me Just as I Am
Trinidad Oil Company – Feelin’ Allright
The Bar Kays – In the Whole
Tom Tom Club – Genius of Love
Patti Jo – Make Me Believe in You
Bernard Purdie – Soul Drums
Curtis Mayfield – We Got to Have Peace
He had cards laid out,
a twisted thread of umbilical solder
hanging from his navel.
Heavy metal shelves on each wall,
red warnings on sealed packets.
Protective clothing required.
Do not attempt to adjust this mechanism
Snakes had been let loose across his life
and cleared the surrounding area.
What was far had never been so close.
What was close proved unsafe for trespass.
It was done.
Things fell apart when he touched them.
People seemed to melt away like soap.
Logbook entry:
Tomorrow we sail on The Bitter Sweet.
On this day, Shelley orders his boat.
A fire is laid, letters sent.
Let us pray events find their level,
honed to the point of a needle
sunk in the spiral of a sentimental song
that packs big things into smaller ones,
releasing them through the musculature.
No one was blocking moves for a sequel.
Everyone knew that doors would soon
be opened by force, clearing every room
all the way down to Jericho.
Blow trumpets blow.
The hunt is riding by,
the long road back a tangle of wire
on racks of signalling equipment
from the last war.
Rolling news and screen crawlers
lay eggs in minds strung out like lightbulbs,
each one hatching creatures bright and cryptozoic.
You think you know what they’re like.
Do you roll over in your sleep?
How much of this have you not seen before?
Ugly Beauty. Jazz in the 21st Century, Phil Freeman (£16.99, 250pp, Zero Books)
I was looking forward to reading this, but it turns out to be a bunch of record reviews (of individual or clusters of albums) vaguely grouped together in sections, with each section having a brief introduction. In fact the best part of the book is the main Introduction, which contextualises the book (written during pandemic) and considering the clusters of music Freeman sees as worthy of attention, of providing a way forward for whatever jazz is or can become.
He is also keen to note that ‘[t]he class structure that walled jazz off as music for elites, immune to the vagaries of the market thanks to academic support, has largely collapsed’, going on to note how streaming and social media has changed the market, just as the world is still full of ‘racism, sexism and general abuse’. This, Freeman argues, ‘only makes these artists’ work more important.’
I confess I do have some reservations about this line of argument. I’m no jazz purist, am all for hybridity and new music, but jazz hasn’t been hidden in an academic high tower for a long, long time. The likes of Miles Davis and his electric music, the whole jazz rock movement, New York’s (and elsewhere’s) downtown experiment, and the likes of Courtney Pine embracing hiphop and soul, have all previously helped place jazz within the melting pot of popular music, in both recorded and live forms. It’s clear that music, like many other art forms, has fragmented and been re-assembled, and that the net has facilitated the availability of any kind of music a listener could want.
Little of the music discussed in this book seems particularly new or innovative, and – at the risk of seeming like an old fart – I hesitate to see why some of it is considered jazz and not r’n’b (mark 2, not the rhythm and blues of yore) or soul, or how the ‘new’ spiritual jazz Freeman highlights is different from the spiritual jazz of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and many others. Does putting beats behind a saxophone make it jazz? Or does layering a saxophone over beats make it hiphop?
Perhaps the problem is that Freeman still wants to call it jazz? But then that seems self-defeating, in the same way that the grouchy poet and music writer Philip Larkin didn’t want bebop associated with what he regarded as jazz. Or perhaps it’s that much of this music I simply find over-hyped and boring? I love Yazz Ahmed’s and Nubya Garcia’s albums, but Kasami Washington’s work is tedious in the extreme.
Freeman himself says that ‘[t]he term “spiritual jazz” is so broad that’s its effectively meaningless’, and I wonder if that should be extrapolated to include jazz itself, if not all music genres? What do we call music that draws on noise, collage, musique concrete, improvisation, contemporary classical, folk, jazz, rock, rap, r’n’b, pop and soul? Certainly not jazz, although Freeman notes that there’s ‘always been a sizable, if critically overlooked, audience for music that blurs the line between jazz, soul, funk and R&B’, citing labels such as Blue Note and CTI and specifically mentioning what became known as ‘Soul jazz’ or ‘smooth jazz’, noting that plenty of people would not accept these as jazz.
The get out clause of course is this statement in Freeman’s introduction:
‘In the pages that follow, which I encourage you to think of less as an encyclopedia and more as a collection of postcards, I will offer my interpretations of the music based on personal experience’.
In the end Freeman has chosen to visit and send missives from places that I have no inclination to visit, or having been once do not wish to go again. I don’t think the music discussed here is urgent or vital, nor that it provides a blueprint for a radical 21st century music. This book is, however, a snapshot of one person’s take on some types of contemporary sounds.
Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE The column which thinks that a rug’s as good as a wig to a bald horse
READER: That statement above there is not only baldist, but horse-ist. MYSELF: Yes, I’m trying to attract more angry letters from people with nothing better to do. I might also mention the fact that the International Pole-Sports Federation (IPSF) has been furiously lobbying the Olympics Committee to have pole dancing recognised as an Olympic sport in 2024. READER: Haha, LOL, smiley face, emoji of frozen chicken. MYSELF: No, I’m serious, I mean what’s next? Lap dancing? Table dancing? Inappropriate touching? READER: Come off it, I know when you’re having me on. For a start, the French would never endorse anything pervy. MYSELF: I have it on good authority that the Russians are already threatening to pull out of the Paris games on the grounds that they are OK with dancing, but they don’t like the Poles. READER: Nonsense. It’ll never happen. What category would you put that in anyway? MYSELF:Track & Feel I suppose.
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DICTIONARY CORNER Handsy (n) one of the original seven dwarves, who along with Gropy and Kneesy was dismissed by Disney in 1939 following complaints from Snow White, who claimed she was fondled whilst under the influence of a rohypnol-laced apple provided by an unidentified Hollywood producer known only as The Wicked Queen.
BANANAS Hastings boffin professor Gordon Thinktank’s latest idea is for a wide-brimmed shower hat for compulsive heavy smokers. Made from Himalayan neoprene and recycled pomegranate skins, it will prevent cigarette extinction whilst providing the smoker with a simulated semi-tropical environment. The hat will go on sale at £99.99. “I am hoping to catch the Christmas rush,” said the inventor, “and the hat should be in the shops before the end of November. There will be two models, the classic Fedora for men, and for the ladies, a pineapple and banana based Carmen Miranda-style hat with a built-in MP3 player preloaded with the the theme songs from Down Argentine Way and Copacabana”. If you don’t have a shower the whole thing comes on an app for the iphone, ipad and and X-Box.
THE BIG FIGHT Everyone is talking about the upcoming fist-fest at The Royal Albert Hall between incumbent heavyweight champion Vladimir “Ras” Putini and challenger Liz “Hernia” Truss, which has sent followers of the glove game into a spin. Truss’s manager Bert Womble told us: “Tickets for this bout are hotter than Chris Rock’s cheek. The fact that the champ is actually fighting a woman has provoked a lot of controversy, but make no mistake, The Hernia is not to be trifled with. Her right hook is like a wrecking ball caked in quick drying cement. She’s faster than an MP interviewing an intern. Her footwork has been described as Fred Astaire meets Gene Kelly in a remake of Dirty Dancing on leg-steroids. She’s as nice as pie in the kitchen but once she’s wedged her gumshield in, she’s an animal.” Putini’s manager Georgiou Falafel retorted; “She has no chance. She should stick to embroidery and crochet. My boy is a monster. His hair alone weighs 2 kilos. His wit is so powerful he can light cigars with it. Sarcasm is his secret weapon. I’ve advised him that if he just keeps pummeling her self-confidence she will be reduced to a quivering wreck in the first round. My boy has been sparring with a Bornean Proboscis Monkey to improve his nose punching accuracy. He’s also been pursuing a Zimmerman’s Gazelle every morning, dressed as a lion. He’ll stop at nothing. As far as the champ is concerned, once the gloves are on, the gloves are off.”
TIT FOR TAT Now that chicken nipples are on the menu at some branches of KFC in Hong Kong, it can’t be long before some of the hipper restaurants jump on the bandwagon. Upper Dicker’s rare breed specialist eatery Guilty, whose menu already includes baby octopus tentacles in whale semen, dolphin beak tartare and orangutan tagine surprise, is, I gather, already sourcing some questionable items. Guilty’s Manager Roland Guff was spotted at Glutton-E the annual foodie convention at Birmingham’s Exhibition Centre, negotiating wholesale prices on Giant Panda navels, Tiger hemorrhoids and gluten-free wax from the ears of the Javan thick-thumbed bat.
Sausage Life!
Colin Gibson • Emmet Ives • Anita Makris
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a generation rages: don’t vote don’t pay taxes defy the police burn your money puncture tires upheaval destroy the whole culture let go of the past shit on everything rather than the sterile power clean machine eat less wear less work less do nothing that does not contribute directly to great transformation poetry break every law to pieces break up the sidewalks walk on the earth find another life take your children out of school make flags into flour sacks destroy all government the wasting of time stop the time-clocks strike strike strike holy terror into our hearts reverse peristalsis drive out the money changers stampede the banks ban them the bombs and the whole thing of it dismantle stare dissolve grow fins fly focus feed exude light from the eyes beauty from the ears night exultation is one of the roads to salvation pound cack scream oggle wallow fuck creep crawl retch suck open the roof to the rain open the lungs the blood the cells to the plants high five fingered cannabis bright coca the languid poppy the secrets of the cactus the magic formulae of the earth are our chemical warfare against the killers recreate everything dislocate the brain which kills right and left revokes the pitiless modern mind lengthen this list with all variety of action until every sentient being eats right and left breaks the love barrier and sheds his anger his sexual revenge revenge on everything
What is a drowning person losing? There is all conflict in the world. Sometimes, the critic is there to Lead you astray before you live Are you aware? I would keep the sensibility alive instead and be silent And still be called mighty Annapurna* for lifetime. Those who wish to mount me, can place their soft steps On my hard mountain ground. Your eyes should be like lake Rara*, If you were to study The capped mountain of my soul. For, the soul needs to be reflected If it is not seen as a thing and is formless. Adherence to others Comes as a forceful negation today. Life is all unique to everyone. It is always a perception to understanding That makes meaning for life. Living is all that it takes to die. Before thinking to lose why don’t we foster instead Like a sacred thread hung as a meaning.
*Annapurna is the tenth highest mountain of the world situated in the Annapurna mountain range of Gandaki province, north-central Nepal. *Rara is the biggest fresh water lake in the Nepalese Himalayas located in Mugu district of Karnali Province, Nepal.
.
Sushant Thapa
Bio: Sushant Thapa is a Nepalese poet who holds a Master’s degree in English literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has published three books of poetry, namely: The Poetic Burden and Other Poems (Authorspress, New Delhi, 2020), Abstraction and Other Poems (Impspired, UK, 2021) and Minutes of Merit (Haoajan, Kolkata, 2021). His poems have been published in Sindh Courier, The Kathmandu Post, Trouvaille Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Journal of Expressive Writing, Dissident Voice, Harbinger Asylum, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Litehouse, My Republica, New York Parrot, International Times, Literary Yard, The Beatnik Cowboy, Dumpster Fire Press, and Impsipred among many. He lives in Biratnagar, Nepal.
My velvet voice will find a lasting memory into your soul.
Monalisa Parida
Bio data:- Monalisa Parida, from India, Odisha, is a post graduate in English literature and a prolific poetess. She’s very active in social media platforms and her poems have also been published in various e-journals and translated into different languages.
She has got 70 international award for writing poetry. Her poems have been publishing international e-journals “New York parrot”, “The Writers Club” (USA), “Suriyadoya literary foundation”, “kabita Minar”, “Indian Periodical” (India) and “Offline Thinker “, “The Gorkha Times “ ( Nepal), “The Light House”(Portugal), “Bharatvision”(Romania), “International cultural forum for humanity and creativity”(Aleppo, Syria), “Atunispoetry.com”(Singapore) etc. And also published in various newspapers like “The Punjabi Writer Weekly(USA)”, “News Kashmir (J&K, India)”, Republic of Sungurlu (Turkey)” etc.
One of her poem published an American anthology named “The Literary Parrot Series-1 and series-2 respectively (New York, USA)”. Her poems have been translated in various languages like Hindi, Bengali, Turkish, Persian, Romanian etc. And she is the author of the book “Search For Serenity”.
Time makes man a play-thing
But man alone may play with time –
Here comes Shelly Manne
Have you met this man?
His inner clock can calibrate
A micro hair-breadth fraction
Of silence amid action
In tempi so discreet
He charms a brazen Herd or horde
To linger on a ballad chord
Eliciting lyrical solos
It is cool to be so warm
None suspect that you are cool
Time is a returning spool
As Albert Einstein speculates –
A spiral where all tenses meet
So walking in this Roman street
Expresses yesteryear’s espresso…
I was sipping on the cheap –
Leaning at the zinc bar with Marco
Aurelius in that café
Just behind the Trevi
Frequented by Fellini
Who clocks the passing scene
Seeking a timely stranger
To pass for Julius Caesar
In his flick at Cinecitta
Of which Roma is the star
Unfolding from her languor
Stories layered like lasagne
Poems underfoot and then some
Fables underhand and
All except yours truly
Underground
OSTIA
Kid you look dead good
But no-one kid
Looks too good dead
Think you have the smarts?
Silence is far smarter
Imagine that you’re minted?
Silence is the stronger breath-enhancer
Silence is the smarter part of valour
That is why I seem so drop-dead gorgeous
Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE The column which, without proper maintenance, would collapse under the weight of its own self-importance.
MYSELF: I would like to announce that from today, all reader’s letters will be replaced with our new phone-in program. READER: What? No more letters? MYSELF: Correct. From now on, all correspondence will take place via the telephone, a medium which is both immediate and personal. PHONE: Theme from Flash Gordon by Queen. MYSELF: (after two verses and a chorus), Hello? READER: Hello, it’s me. MYSELF: Well? READER: Er….. MYSELF: Yes? Have you anything to say? READER: That’s your job, surely? Why don’t you make me say something interesting for a change? MYSELF: That would alter our relative dynamic for the worse I feel.
OH YES HE DID – PANTO REVIEW Nevermindland, Cockmarlin Arena until March 31st
This exciting production stars Bert Lord of Traffic Cops In Drag as Piers Pan, the boy who wouldn’t grow up and Adam Seagull the voice of Lala in Tellietubbies as Captain Hokum, the one-eyed pirate who claims he had his hand bitten off by a crocodile but everyone knows it is up his sleeve. Although X-Factor winner Kandy B is mesmerising as Windy, the irresponsible child-minder who kidnaps her young charges and whisks them off to Nevermindland, the indisputable show-stealer is mischievous fairy Tinkerballs, played by Gladiator star Rambo Udder, who flits around the stage like an excited moth, colliding with spotlights and scenery alike in her unquenchable quest for validation.
POLITICS During a recent PMQs, Iain Duncan Sailor, the minister for cruel sports rejected suggestions that Russian sanctions might result in blocked channel ports and a 50-mile tailback of lorries filled with dying sheep. “Hasn’t anyone heard of the Dunkirk spirit?” he shouted at braying opposition backbenchers, “I call upon anyone with a seaworthy vessel, even if it is just an inflatable canoe or a kitchen sink with the plughole blocked up, to do your bit for Queen and country. Let our plucky little offshore tax haven show these eurocratic oligarchs that Britannia still rules the waves with an iron fist. Last one across the channel is a rotten egg!”
Mr Rees-Mogg, the Minister for Naked Ambition, interjected, saying that what Team UK required was a conglomerate of greedy businessmen prepared to accept millions of pounds of dirty money and make massive promises without having the slightest intention of fulfilling them. “Look at Hannibal,” He demanded, “they laughed when he suggested crossing the Alps with privately funded elephants but who’s laughing now”? As he paused to milk the puzzled silence, the Prime Minister pounced. Standing up and strapping on a huge red nose, Mr Johnson provoked 3-minutes of uproarious faked laughter from the Tory benches by claiming to have once pulled a Christmas cracker containing the riddle: “What do you get when you cross the alps with some elephants?” However, when pressed by the opposition leader Sir Kier Starmer QC for the answer he replied disappointingly: “I am unable to comment until the results of the Sue Grey enquiry have been successfully buried in the rubble of Kyiv”.
WENDY WRITES
Clear, unqualified advice for the constantly confused.
Dear Wendy,
I put on an awful lot of weight during the Brexit negotiations, and I am increasingly concerned that our sanctioning of Russia is going to leave me beached, like an abandoned one-man nuclear submarine. Do you have any dietary advice? Tallulah Bunkbed, Lilliput.
Dear Tallulah, first the good news. Now that we have severed our Russian ties, virtually all fattening food will be unavailable unless you are a hedge fund manager. Dieting in future will simply be a matter of course, about which you have little choice. Try this daily menu for a slimmed-down 2022, which I guarantee will turn you into a svelte, sylph-like silhouette, able to slip silently into any room, even when the door is barely ajar.
Breakfast: 200gs Marmite (no toast). Lunch: Small Potatoes drizzled with nothing at all. Tea: Hard British cheese. Dinner: Austere fry of run-over squirrel with roasted acorns and low-fat lard.
If you are at all squeamish, ready run-over squirrel can be ordered from Squirreldead.com (minimum order 10 squirrels).
Dear Wendy, Following your new policy of replacing letters with phone calls, would it be possible to have an actor read this one out, pretending to be me? Marcia Twelp, Periwinkle
Dear Marcia, Due to reader’s overwhelming objections, spearheaded by an online petition, the editor has agreed to reverse his original decision. Any future phone calls will be transcribed by a legal stenographer and will be available in a full colour illustrated pamphlet. Wendy
WHINE LISTS All this month, Upper Dicker’s Pink Triangle Gallery hosts Upper Dicker installation artist Bandy Sponk and his exhibition of handwritten band set lists which he has collected from all over the world. Hastings’ hottest Band Meat Raffle feature, alongside international superstar acts like Fur Cough, Tinfoil Hat Band, The Cock Genies, Lemming Rebellion and Platonic Bomb.
MEAT RAFFLE- PIDDLEHOE KIPPERDROME 2003
Set 1
BINKY BONKY BOO
DONALD WHERE’S YER TROOSERS?
OH FOR THE WINGS OF A HERON
SMEGMA TRUSS
PUSSYFOOTIN’
WHY OH WHY (DO MY TROUSERS FALL)
MY SWEET LORD
NO, NO NANOOK
PLUMSTONES IN MY CROSSROADS
AWA’ AN BOIL YER HEED
WHEN MOLLY O’HARA RIDES HER BIKE, (YOU’RE SURE OF A BIG SURPRISE)
Set 2
HOW HIGH THE TULIPS-OH
SAWDUST
THEME FROM WINDOLENE
APACHE
LUMPY-PUMPY
PLIPSY-PLOPSY
FOUR WHEELS ON MY WAGON
BIG BABOON
WALK LIKE A WHELK (NOT THE ELVIS VERSION)
QUIT SUCKING AND BLOW
LIPSTICK CARAVAN
ENCORE:
(MEDLEY) BABY I’M A HORSE/LITTLE MOUSE WITH CLOGS ON/ DANCE OR I’LL VOMIT/WALK LIKE A WHELK (ELVIS VERSION)
.
Sausage Life!
Colin Gibson • Emmet Ives • Anita Makris
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The battered vintage Corona clattered in its case,
inpounded dark and red ribbon
taut as a bandana round a migraine.
Plunket’s manicured fingers translating her unwritten diaries.
Fifteen of them, ripe for manufacture.
[Sunday. The ferreteria was shut and there was no ant powder.]
The six o’clock clunk of pilgrim gin
rattling the light in late August sun
as it drenched the deformities
of centuries old olive trees
in reaffirming aridity.
[The valley in Venezuela had been covered in pleasant shady trees
interlaced in artificial avenues
full of green screaming parrots and pure simple doves]
He stared at the lonely slice of green lemon
in his near-empty glass.
‘Juanito!’
The yacht he never bought
when his ship failed to come in
was, too, named Catalina.
He’d left her in her numbered berth,
ballast of portent discarded,
moored in memory.
He swirled the last of his gin.
‘Juanito!’
Chin-chink!
Like an anchor chain.
[Mountain rivulets ran in ribbons through the lanes
bordered by hundreds of butterflies
the air was full of incense anxiety and hope]
Damn. It was Sunday and he was out of cigarettes.
An excuse for dinner at Cas Catalina, they had a machine.
His lips watered at the thought of a solomillo,
his eyes at the sound of her name.
Later the ceremony of kissing her yellow ribbon
in its Romeo y Julietas box.
Recall was a chessboard of Bolivar squares.
Originally created by Veda Stram in 1992, this revised and expanded 2022 version is the result of a wonderfully fruitful collaboration with David Hoey/80spopanimals.com.
This guide is for you if…
You are an animal lover and therefore want to eat in a way that respects ALL ANIMALS
You want to eat delicious, nurturing, inexpensive, healthy meals that are easy to prepare
You’ve always wondered, “What do vegans eat?”
You are vegetarian or already cutting back on eating animal products, and you want to go vegan but you don’t know how
You think that you’ll have to give up cheese, ice cream, and burgers if you go vegan (You will be amazed at all of the scrumptious vegan versions of everything!)
You want to improve your health and well-being, as well as the health and well-being of your friends, your family, other humans, and all animals
You want to do your part to end our climate catastrophe
You are already vegan and always overjoyed to find more vegan goodies
You want to make a consequential difference for our world with every bite
To be clear, a vegan is someone who chooses not to participate in any form of animal abuse, exploitation, or slaughter, which includes abstaining from using, wearing, and consuming all animal products, such as dairy, eggs, honey, gelatin, wool, leather, silk, feathers, skin, and fur. Vegans avoid all forms of animal exploitation. Simply stated, veganism is not just about food: It is an ethical stance for total liberation of ALL CREATURES.
What you’ll find here…
In this guide you will find lots of ideas, menus, product suggestions, and advice about what to eat when you don’t eat animals! This resource is designed to get you thinking about what’s abundantly available for you to eat that doesn’t come from unimaginable suffering and utter devastation. You might be amazed at how many fruits and vegetables you will learn to prepare in a myriad of new ways. Find links to thousands of vegan cookbooks and literally millions of vegan recipes online! That is, if you love to cook, which I DON’T.
This guide is about easy, delicious, satisfying vegan meals, and includes lots of menus, so that you can see how varied, satisfying, and “easy breezy” it is to be vegan. Also included are product brand names, which are in bold and linked to websites, so that you can order them online, find them at locations near you, and request that your local stores and restaurants carry them.
To the best of our knowledge, all products in this guide are vegan. We have included companies and brands that provide only vegan products, but, unfortunately, some of them are owned by corporations that sell animal products and/or test on animals; you will have to decide for yourself which brands you purchase.
In this guide you will also find irrefutable, horrifying, and powerful facts about the consequences of our food choices on…oh, just the entire world!
Thank you for making a difference with every bite!
Words fly down from high places
to congregate as sentences
where the foothills turn to texts
and stories true and false
begin to spread their wings. Nobody
knows which to believe: the ones
with long, curved beaks or
those with stars sprinkled on
their feathers of the night. Murder
watches from the thermals
and romance
with its rosy face
chatters all the way from
lonely heart to lonely heart.
Tales from ancient myth
appear, suspended
from a mystery and with
endings beyond credibility
with an iridescent glow
All teachers are shepherds,
herders to the water-troughs,
civilisation’s culture-pots. Some
shepherds are more creative
than others, it has to be said.
You can lead a horse, but
who knows whether it will lap,
ignorantly wait & yawn,
or merely urinate
into the Grecian Urn?
(Dedicated to all my friends & colleagues who diligently work in ‘the field of education’)
Mark Wilson
MarkWilsonhaspublishedfourpoetrycollections: QuartetFortheEndofTime(EditionsduZaporogue, 2011), Passio (EditionsduZaporogue, 2013), The Angel of History (LeakyBoot Press, 2013) and Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is the author of a verse drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two. Hispoemsandarticleshaveappearedin:The BlackHerald, TheShop, 3:AMMagazine, International Times, TheFiend, Dodging the Rain, Epignosis Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, RasputinandLeZaporogue.
An empty shunned house,
Front door smashed to flinders.
So, in two bounds
He’s away up the stairs,
In one leap
He’s tightroping a banister,
Tail a ramrod, eyes black,
Whiskers thrumming
But then hears a faint sob.
It runs down walls,
Billowing cobwebs
And one mouth is soon
Joined by others:
Dust whirls rising in columns
Outline she-humans sawing
The air as clouds shape
Into babies forever just
Out of their reach: so in one
Leap he’s back down
On the stairs, in two bounds
He’s back out the front door,
Pausing only to empty his bowels
On a fallen sign lettered in gold:
Sisters of Mercy Mother and Baby Home.
We are people from all walks of life with one aim: To make it impossible to own a huge polluting 4×4 in the world’s urban areas. We are defending ourselves against climate change, air pollution and unsafe drivers.
We do this with a simple tactic: Deflating the tyres of these massive, unnecessary vehicles, causing inconvenience for their owners.
Deflating tyres repeatedly and encouraging others to do the same will turn the minor inconvenience of a flat tyre into a giant obstacle for driving massive killer vehicles around our streets.
We’re taking this action because governments and politicians have failed to protect us from these huge vehicles. Everyone hates them, apart from the people who drive them.
We want to live in towns and cities with clean air and safe streets. Politely asking and protesting for these things has failed. It’s time for action. Join us.
We have no leader – anyone can take part, wherever you are, using the simple instructions on this website.
It’s always the day after something: anniversaries, elections, terrorist atrocities, or flash sales. There’s a temporary screen in the town square that I think is for sport, but when I get closer it’s showing the procedure for if a gunman opens fire. If you are able to evacuate, get as far away from the danger area as possible … An ellipsis like a held breath, or the heartbeat you will to stop for fear it may be too loud. The police may be unable to distinguish you from the attacker, they may treat you firmly … A new ellipsis the weight of panic, the weight of a small rucksack, the weight of off-the-record accounts the day after a failed bombing attempt. Include anything else you think is important. A full stop, uncompromising, a hollow point through presumed guilt. It’s the day after escalated uncertainty, a distant relative’s birthday, the unrecorded loss of a refugee boat, a charity dinner for old Etonians, a party in the park, a longer queue at the food bank. Stop others from entering the area.
‘Can I interest you in our discount offer?’ the young saleswoman asks. ‘Ten percent off a bottle of Prosecco when you buy a bouquet of flowers. Give your mum a treat for Mother’s Day…’
‘I’m afraid you’re too late,’ the customer says. ‘She died ten years ago.’
The saleswoman gives him a sympathetic look. ‘Oh I’m so sorry. Perhaps you could remember her instead. Maybe drink the Prosecco yourself – while thinking about her?’
‘Actually I think about her a great deal already,’ the man replies. ‘More probably than you’d imagine. You see my mother had a problem with bunions.’
‘Bunions?’
‘I have a bunion too, on my right big toe, just like the one she had. She ended up having surgery, though that didn’t really help her much. Now it’s my big toe starting to lean across, rubbing the one next to it the same way hers did. There’s a small sore forming. I could show you, if you have time.’
A kind of retrospective of the noisy, quiet, ambient, Dark Gothic of TMC from Alan Dearling with help from Keith Rodway
I’m rather guessing here. I think This Mortal Coil may have passed many 1980s’and early ‘90s’ listeners by. That’s the case with myself. I had been getting into Massive Attack, Leftfield, David Sylvian, occasionally Kate Bush, and the Chemical Brothers. But, had only dipped a small toe into the Gothick deadpool of the Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Modern English, Throwing Muses, the Wolfgang Press, Colourbox, Xmal Deutschland, Breathless, the Breeders and later, Shelleyan Orphan. Dystopian, fragile, creepy and both over-blown, over-produced and also sparsely elemental and empty. And so it has come to pass, as things do, I was listening to a radio programme celebrating the life and work of Tim Buckley, (dad of Jeff Buckley, another haunted spirit), and one of the original class of 27-ers. Those who died way too young. Tim was a supremely gifted songwriter, singer and visionary. During that radio broadcast, two recordings of Tim’s songs were aired. Both by different ‘versions’ of Tim’s songs, re-imagined by This Mortal Coil. The first was, ‘Song to the Siren’ featuring the distinctive voice of Elizabeth Fraser from the Cocteau Twins, and the second, ‘Morning Glory’ featuring Deirdre and Louise Ruthowski.
It tempted me into something of a journey back into the three album adventure of This Mortal Coil, who were never a band, rather a conglomeration of artists who worked with, or were known to, Ivo Watts-Russell, the sonic adventurer behind 4AD records. He called TMC a “pursuit of the Happy Accident”. He also adds that it was a journey for him “to realise a dream I didn’t know was in me.”
In 2011, the three original albums from This Mortal Coil were re-mastered by John Fryer, Ivo’s sound wizard, accompanied with deliciously dark, haunting, arty visual images of a particular muse and model, Pallas Citroen, photographed in soft focus monochrome by Nigel Grierson. Pallas was the visual persona of TMC. It all fits in a strange way. TMC were a different and evolving collective of musical artists and Ivo Watts-Russell was the engine behind the ‘sounds’, the atmospherics and the ‘dreams’. Pallas wasn’t one of the musicians in TMC.
It is these Japanese re-mixed releases on CDs in lovingly crafted card covers, picturing photo montages and artworks that I’ve been listening to. Each album is a melange of ‘covers’ of quite obscure songs, particular from the late 1960s/‘70s. Compositions from the likes of Tim Buckley, Tom Rapp, Gene Clark, Van Morrison, Syd Barrett, Randy California, Colin Newman, Roy Harper, David Byrne and Brian Eno. Many feature female voices full of harmonics and angst – a common thread – the strong, individualistic voices of Elizabeth Fraser, Lisa Gerrard, Alison Limerick, Louise and Deirdre Ruthowski, Kim Deal, Tanya Donnelly, Heidi Berry and Caroline Crawley, plus the sonic skills of artful men like Howard Devoto and Dominic Appleton. Lots of musicians too. The whole sum is even more strangely ethereal and surreal than the parts. There’s a lot of echoes, repetition, segues of sounds, drones, waves of double-tracked phasing, backwards, warped and often rather unpleasant walls of sound, and over-laden banks of sonority. Light and shade/black and white/loud and silent.
The first album, ‘It’ll End in Tears’, features Elizabeth Fraser and Lisa Gerrard; Dominic Appleton, Alison Limerick and the Ruthowskis are notable in the forefront of the second album, ‘Filigree and Shadow’, but the third, ‘Blood’, is really the masterwork. It’s more finely honed, tuned and crafted with much more input from Ivo Watts-Mills himself. It’s a set of conceptual soundscapes, full of lush and dramatic audio productions. It reminds me of a funeral, conjured up by a master magician, filmic and sometimes disembodied Laurie Anderson artscapes – a depth of white noise nightmares and dreams, a macabre sometimes floating subterranean world. Not a pleasant place or space, but mesmerising, a bit like the Sound of the Siren, in fact!
Here are some of the more accessible moments from the This Mortal Coil crypt!
“This sounds like the most beautiful love, and all the sorrow and heart break possible at the same time. Overwhelmingly beautiful and haunting forever.”
Caroline Crawley from ‘Blood’: ‘Late Night’: Creepy, darkly sensuous and full of the TMC ‘Iced-Goth’ ingredient:
The 1980s was for me a baffling time. It started well. In the UK post-punk took the fuck-you primal roar of classic British punk and breathed much-needed new life into the time-worn formula of men-with-guitars. With Echo and The Bunnymen, the Cure, Wire, the Fall, PIL and the Smiths all writing great tunes it seemed rock music had reinvented itself for a new era. It was exciting and forward looking. All seemed right with the world. And with the gender barriers down and women not just admitted to the fold, but claiming at last equal status, bands like the Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Raincoats, Delta 5 and the Au Pairs smashed the myth of women being second class citizens of the macho world of rock.
And then, almost overnight, everything changed. The pale, awkward-looking young men of the New Romantics swapped guitars for bleepy synths and reinvented pop with remarkable results. Machine music had arrived, bringing a refreshing new aesthetic into the arena. MTV ushered in a new era of acts fighting for ascendance where visuals became at least as important as the music, often seemingly more so, raising production budgets and marginalising independent acts such as the Smiths in the process. A whole generation of artists who had been dominant in the previous decade struggled with the new digital production techniques (Listen to the original mix of Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason and you’ll get a fair idea of what I mean). Factor in CDs, the shiny new miracle format, and the putsch was a done deal. Everything now would sound glacial and curiously bloodless, and for me This Mortal Coil epitomised a sense that in the rush to embrace the new sound something vital had been discarded. And all this against the economic backdrop of the Thatcher/ Reagan ‘economic miracle’, when personal greed became a public virtue, and if you didn’t keep up it was assumed you weren’t trying hard enough.
Never really a band, more a series of recording projects for 4-AD supremo Ivo Watts-Russell, TMC was the perfect articulation of an era where minimalist elegance dominated ‘yuppie’ culture – the milieu of the new generation of young professionals. Everything had to be smooth and sleek, with emotion seemingly performed rather than genuinely expressed. 80s albums by Roxy Music and Sade fit perfectly with domestic espresso machines and ‘Scandesign’ – the precursor to homes furnished en masse at IKEA. Out with your dad’s old hi fi, in with discreet ‘music systems’ – radio, CD and cassette all in one unobtrusive unit.
The track that brought TMC to mainstream attention – a cover of Tim Buckley’s Song of the Siren – was awash with glistening reverbs and Elizabeth Fraser’s razor-sharp but austere vocal. It established a winning formula that would serve Ivo well for the years to follow. 40 years later, TMC have an impressive 300,000 listeners on Spotify. This was a band that never truly existed, never toured, never made public appearances. Yet against the odds, they clearly got something right.
Listening to it now I remain unmoved. Everything about it sparkles with a superficial gloss that seems to signify a sense of distraction, stripped of earthiness and urgency, with only a kind of humourless void remaining, remote and unreachable, with the dirt and noise of human passion surgically excised.
ABC Musical Solidarity are a collective of musicians and anarchists dedicated to raising money for those resisting oppression around the world, through music. We operate under the banner of the Anarchist Black Cross.
The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military requires Putin to direct violence to both sides of the battle lines. As his bombers and artillery shell Ukrainian cities, and his tanks roll over Ukrainian fields and wallow in the springtime mud, the Russian state maintains the discipline of war at home. The OMON and FSB target anti-war protestors. The media has been shut down under threat of prison for speaking the truth about the war. When conscripts refuse to participate in this imperialist war, they face threats and punishments from their officers.
In Kyiv and other cities, the Ukrainian anarchist movement – which includes many exiled Russian and Belarusian comrades – has taken up arms. They are fighting to defend their communities, their comrades, and a vision of a liberated future of Ukraine, separate from the aspirations of the Right or the state. Meanwhile, across Russia, our comrades take to the street whether by day in mass marches, or by night to spread the truth about the war through creative means, or to take more direct actions. One draft office has already been burned near Moscow. In the words of that heroic arsonist, “Let [the oligarchs] know that their own people hate them and we will extinguish them. Soon the earth will start to burn under their feet. Hell awaits at home”.
By supporting the fight against the invasion at both the front and behind the lines, we hope to nurture the seeds of the movement that can turn this war between nations into a revolution against the ruling class- a new spring of autonomy and solidarity sweeping across the steppe.
The first ABC Musical Solidarity album release is The Deserter, released as a fundraiser for the Anarchist Black Cross in Moscow. It will help pay for the legal defence and general protection of those within the Russian Federation who are resisting the war and fighting back against the clampdown by the Russian state. Featuring a black poppy and the crossed-out “Z” of the anti-war movement on its cover, the album features songs about political prisoners, inflation, soldiers’ mothers, barricades, and of course, desertion.
The second album release is Mother Anarchy, a benefit album to raise money for anarchist and anti-authoritarians defending their communities against invasion in Ukraine, specifically the Committee of Defence affiliated to the Black Headquarters. All proceeds of this compilation go to the Dresden Anarchist Black Cross, which is coordinating aid to these comrades.
Beginning with the song “Mother Anarchy” written by Nestor Makhno, by album takes the listener on a journey through South African hip hop, lo-fi, German punk, ska, and Makhnovist rewrites of Cossack ballads. The artista includes acts such as Soundz of the South, Darryl Cherney, the Window Smashing Job Creators, Maske, Soho, and a folk collective formed especially for this project going by the pseudonym Tachanka.
A statement by Rev Dia, anarchists from Ukraine that joined the self-defense units.
Many people still do not understand why the anarchists decided to go to war against Russia.
Partly due to Russian propaganda, which positions itself as an anti-fascist force that fights against Nazi Ukraine. Partly because many people see Putin as a fighter against U.S. imperialism.
The point is that this is not a war between Ukraine and Russia, but a war for the future of all the countries of the former Soviet Union (USSR). The Russian government has long been the guardian of the dictatorial regimes in the entire former USSR. It has supported them in difficult times, as it did in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
In Russia itself, a dictatorial regime was being implemented. With a total ban on freedom of speech and imprisonment for 15 years for participating in peaceful demonstrations. If Putin’s dictatorship wins the war in Ukraine, all this will not only become a reality for the Ukrainians, but will also be consolidated in Russia and implemented in other countries. For a long time there will be no possibilities to change this order. Moreover, this will give Putin the ambition to expand his dictatorship to other countries. Not to mention the fact that all activists of any kind of movements will be destroyed, including anarchists, regardless of what position regarding the war they supported.
The war in Ukraine might be the last chance to overthrow and abolish the dictatorship. That is why it is so important to use all possible means to put an end to the dictatorial horde.
Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music , edited by Jason Whittaker, Elizabeth Potter, (Palgrave Macmillan)
This timely and diverse book presents accounts of new developments in industrial music. If you’re looking for a history of the genre a reliable guide is S.Alexander Reed Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (Oxford 2013) which of course is not fully up to date. The current book consists of an Introduction and nine chapters looking at very different aspects of industrial music, although certain staples recur frequently like Throbbing Gristle, pioneers of the genre, and Nine Inch Nails. The editors are Jason Whittaker at the University of Lincoln, and Elizabeth Potter of York University who is doing a PhD on William Blake, and Whittaker is also a Blake specialist.
The nine chapters presented are mostly case studies, on Swans (McCrea), Konquistador (Gunn, Khamis and Collins), Clipping (Gillespie), Nurse with Wound and Cabaret Voltaire (Loydell), Kansas industrial scene (Connor), a sort of microcosm of the industrial genre more generally, and Nine Inch Nails (Potter). Three somewhat more general chapters are on ‘industrial bodies’ (Whittaker), ‘post-subjectivity’ and the ‘occultural’, although the most satisfactory scene setter is Potter and Whittaker’s Introduction.
The Introduction explains the organisation of the book; beginning with four chapters on ‘the body as a site of performance in industrial music and culture’ (p17); the next three on ‘different aspects of music and noise’; and finally two chapters on ‘power relations in industrial noise and bodies’. Thus we have these themes of what the music is doing now, as well as discussing key thematics of power interactions and body consciousness. The book can then be read as either essentially about the music, or more broadly conceived in the position of actors in society. A keynote text for body awareness if not angst is Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford 1987).
The book highlights how music can transcend the aural limitations of ordinary language so, as it were, to try to express the inexpressible. There often just aren’t words cogent or affective enough to be able to convey the experiences involved.
There is also an awareness of the body as place of last resort, what essentially defines the individual subject and his situation as social actor. Aspects of violence and masochism are not particularly unusual, and the final chapter deals with an account of the Nine Inch Nails video for Broken, which has quite an amount of shock value, a fugitive video requiring an amount of effort and resolve to seek out.
A notable commentator on industrial music has been Jon Savage, who identified five key aspects of it,- organisational autonomy; access to information (the notion of an information war); use of synthesisers and anti-music; extra-musical elements, and shock tactics. (p41) As far as shock tactics go, the parallels with a Brecht or Artaud (‘theatre of cruelty’) are apparent and it was not unusual for stage performances to come with visual depictions of extreme body states. Industrial music also identifies itself with the disenfranchised or indeed power subordinate who find it difficult to assert a convincing site of self presence; hence the resort to the body, almost a final line, but there is also the body-mind conjunction while lucidity of thought might still be attainable, although there is no denying that thinking can be obliterated by overwhelming pain as a dominating condition.
Industrial music then has a strongly oppositional aesthetic; it is certainly not mainstream and channels experiences of isolation, discomfort, pain and rage. The creation of this music genre was greatly assisted by the availability of cheap digital instrumentation after about the 1980s. This particular book, closing as it does with a vivid description of the fugitive Broken video does lay the stress on the body and its experience of pain; although ecstatic states are also not inconceivable. Masochism becomes linked to bodily discipline. Whittaker and Potter describe how ‘As Gunn, Khamis, and Collins observe, since the first use of the terms, industrial music and industrial culture have proved to be very broad churches, involving a wide range of styles from abrasive noise to dance and electronic body music.’ (p7)
This music then might be described as a genre of dissent. As one description has it, it can be harsh and challenging. The protagonists are not representative or reputable players in society, they as it were want to populate other kinds of sites and experience, be they pleasant or painful, though industrial music is known for its frequently severe dissonance, albeit that it can occasionally venture into absorbing melodic or dance music. The scene can sometimes seem unrelenting; dipping into states of exaggerated anger or masochism might on occasion be seen to leading into a vicious circle, where release is a long way off, while complications mount. As the Introduction states ‘For those following in the path laid out by Throbbing Gristle, anti-music was a form of disruptive information designed to shake the listener out of complacent acceptance of the systems in which they found themselves.’ (p9)
So that this is a very pertinent update on the present condition of industrial music, a trail blazed by Throbbing Gristle particularly from The Second Annual Report on but taking in quite a variety of musical acts, including the roster at Chicago’s Wax Trax Records. Marilyn Manson in the US, briefly mentioned here (p5), has been associated with this genre, as of course also Nine Inch Nails. Throbbing Gristle are no more, P-Orridge died in 2020. The future of the genre is open to question with these certain elements being taken up in the States. The genre exploits dissonance almost to the point of noise music, and has some qualities at times of dark ambient or black metal. It has become established with a small but resistant coterie of adherents. As a singular niche the music would appear by now to have well established itself, but like so much is a genre in continuous transition.
Jack Kerouac with Al Hinkle, San Francisco, 1952. Photo courtesy of Gerald Nicosia.
You would have to be dead or in a coma to have missed the fact that March 12, 2022, marked the centenary of the birth of writer and lonesome traveller Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road. To mark the occasion, Leon Horton talks to the writer and scholar Gerald Nicosia, author of Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century,Beat Scrapbook, and the sublime and authoritative Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, widely regarded as the definitive Kerouac biography.
Hello, Gerry. With the centennial of Jack’s birth and your biography Memory Babe to be re-released in September, you must be extraordinarily busy at the moment. How are you?
I’m worse than “extraordinarily busy.” I’m going through a divorce and have to move out of the home where I’ve lived for 30 years. I have literally tons of books and papers to pack up. And yes, I’m handling the publication of the new Memory Babe at the same time.
Have you been involved with any of the great many Kerouac celebrations that have taken place this month?
No, thanks to the ongoing blacklist of my work by the Sampas family, who control the Kerouac Estate thanks to a Will that was proved in court to be forged (but which they kept because of a statute of limitations), I was not invited to a single Kerouac celebration.
You studied English and American Literature at the University of Illinois, but when and how did you first become aware of the works of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation?
When I was a graduate student at the U of I, I was a teaching assistant to help pay my way. Kerouac was not taught in any classes there, nor was he taught in any college in the U.S. at that time. But I shared an office with a fellow T.A., a hip Jewish kid who had gone to Harvard, who was forever taunting me about not having read Kerouac. So one day, to shut him up, I picked up The Dharma Bums, and I was converted from that moment on. Despite having read dozens of contemporary American novelists in my classes – Updike, Mailer, Roth, Bellow, et al – I had never encountered one who asked “the big questions,” as Kerouac did from the first few pages of The Dharma Bums: Who am I? Why am I here on earth? Who put the stars up in the sky?
It concerns me, what with the outbreak of “cancel culture” and both ends of the political spectrum seemingly unable or unwilling to contextualize works of art and literature, that many of the Beats will be sidelined or completely written out from future discourse on what constitutes great writing. The Beats have always had their defenders and detractors, but have you seen this happening at all?
Well the Beats were cancelled early on. They were called “sponsors of juvenile delinquency,” “black spots on America,” and so forth. Their story is a story of coming back, refusing to be buried, and reappearing in every successive generation. I don’t worry about “cancel culture” because the Beats have proved already that they can’t be cancelled. They are among the few writers in America’s three centuries of literary history who actually tell the truth; and people, especially young people, will always be hungry for the truth – Vladimir Putin notwithstanding.
Kerouac’s star has risen, dipped, and risen again quite a few times since his death in 1969. There was a great resurgence here in the UK in the early 90s, when many of his books were republished and found a new generation of readers, including myself. How do you think his reception has changed over the years?
Here in the U.S. it’s been a steady upswing in recognition. In the 1980’s we had major conferences, including the Naropa Institute’s 25-year-anniversary-of-On the Road celebration in 1982 and the dedication of the Commemorative in Lowell in 1988. In the 1990’s we saw the re-issue of his spoken-word albums and the publication of many out-of-print and never-published works. In this new century there has been a wealth of new critical writing about him. There is still a backlash of moral criticism that sees Kerouac as Norman Podhoretz did, as a destructive influence on American society, but those voices are growing steadily dimmer. I think you would find few American English departments now who would refuse to acknowledge Kerouac as one of the top American novelists of the 20th century – in the lineage from Dreiser to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Baldwin, Styron, Richard Wright, and a few others who have tackled the really big issues of American society.
He was a prolific writer by any standards – between 1946 and 1969 he wrote 20 novels and 12 books of poetry – and yet he was often wrongly described as an overnight success after the publication of On the Road in 1957. It is nonsense, of course, we all know “overnight success” takes years – but did his writing become a way of escaping from the responsibilities and stresses of being a published author?
I really don’t understand your question. Kerouac was dedicated to writing and telling the truth. After On the Road was rejected, multiple times, he took what was essentially a religious vow of poverty.He vowed to himself that he would keep writing the truth, in the most radical way that he could (pushing farther and farther into post-modernist subjectivity, tracing the actual workings of the mind), no matter if anyone understood him or published him, no matter if he never made another dollar at it. Having his radically innovative works published began to seem an impossibility to him, so he assumed he’d have to go on working rough jobs like seaman and brakeman on the railroad in order to survive, or living as just a bum or hobo. In this he had the model of some other American writers, such as Whitman and Jack London.
Kerouac described the major body of his work, books of prose and poetry, under the overarching Proustian title The Dulouz Legend. Each book can be read independently, but to the uninitiated, which three books – we’ll take On the Road as a given – which three would you recommend they start with and why?
The Dharma Bums is probably the easiest to understand, a kind of update of Jack London’s style, and it is also one of the first attempts to see America through spiritual eyes, see America as a spiritual questing-place. But I have to also recommend they read Kerouac’s three greatest books: Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, and Desolation Angels. In my new Memory Babe, I call Visions of Cody the first postmodern novel – because Kerouac is now approaching “reality” as a mind-construct. In 1952, no other writer had yet done this, and now, of course, exploring the subjectivity of consciousness is the main thrust of modern writing. Doctor Sax is also a pioneering postmodern novel, because Kerouac attempts to merge fantasy and reality, which is much like Latin American “magical realism.” And Desolation Angels is a great novel because it portrays a vast swath of America, from the fire-lookout mountains of Washington State to the coffee house/poetry culture of San Francisco to the sophisticated world of New York. All of America in the 1950’s is in that book, and no-one else did such a thing. And don’t leave out Jack’s poetry. Mexico City Blues influenced a whole generation of poets – was a major influence on Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Robert Creeley, Gregory Corso, and so many others. Kerouac was creating a new kind of poetry where everything, from the real world to the writer’s random thoughts, could blend together in a musical mixture easy to read, fun to read in its rhythmic musical choruses.
His poetry – Mexico City Blues, Scattered Poems, Old Angel Midnight – he’s in there with some greats: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti …To use a mixed metaphor, he was batting alongside some heavyweights. As a poet yourself, do you rate his poetry? Do you think it stands with the best of his work?
Oh yes, his poetry was a watershed. It was landmark work that influenced the whole flow of modern American poetry. It’s hard to find a major poet of Kerouac’s generation that wasn’t influenced in some way by him. The amazing openness of the writing, the ability to let in so many different aspects of consciousness, while still tying it to a personal identity, completely changed the conceptions of American poetry, and left academic poetry back in the dust. Even those who didn’t openly acknowledge him, say Robert Lowell or John Berryman, began writing much more personal poetry after Kerouac and the Beats hit the nation like their own kind of atom bomb.
There have been numerous attempts to bring Jack’s books to the big screen, starting with the lamentable The Subterraneans in 1960. It seems quite logical, given that he saw his writing as “book movies”, but so far the results have mostly been unimpressive. Why has it proven so difficult to translate Kerouac to celluloid?
Because the filmmakers who have taken him up seized him for the wrong reasons –because they thought he was hot or sensational property. They did not see him as a psychological or spiritual novelist, which he was. Can you imagine The Subterraneans as made by John Cassavetes? Cassavetes, who had so much more of a deep appreciation of personal idiosyncracy, personal crises, could have done Kerouac justice. I’m not sure what filmmaker today is up to doing Kerouac, but I’d like to see Jim Jarmusch take a crack at it.
Your biography Memory Babe has been out of print for 20 years but thankfully an expanded centennial edition will be released in July. Described by William Burroughs as “by far the best of the many books published about Jack’s life and work,” Memory Babe earned the Distinguished Young Writer Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters when it was first published in 1983 – a truly incredible yet much deserved accolade. How long did the original take to research and write?
Six years. Two years researching – 50,000 miles and 300 interviews – two years writing – and two years wrestling with publishers to see it done correctly.
What can we expect from the new edition?
A lot of new materials about different areas of his life, a lot of new photos. I deal with the discovery of the Joan Anderson Letter, the truths we have learned about his ancestry, his last years, and his estate, and a lot more.
You once described yourself as “raised poor – an Italian Catholic outsider in my own way”. When you were researching Jack’s working-class childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, did you find yourself relating to your own background in Chicago?
Yes, I identified with Jack in many different ways. One shrink thought there might have been too much “transference” going on; but another shrink said the positive transference pushed the biography into interesting areas where it otherwise might not have gone.
Did your view of Jack change during the research and writing? Assuming you had any – I promise you, I’m not – did you find you had to rethink your own presumptions and prejudices as you unearthed more material about Jack’s life?
I knew from the start that he was a self-destructive alcoholic, but I found that he was far more deeply troubled, psychologically disturbed, than I had ever imagined. He had real troubles relating as a human being among other human beings, and certainly as a man relating to women. Art, writing, was a safe haven for him from the real world, and that was one of the reasons he poured so much energy into it. I started out admiring him enormously, but in the end felt really sorry for him, for the enormous pain he endured just living from day to day.
Jack’s friendship with Neal Cassady has been well documented through his writing and in numerous essays and biographies. I think it is fairly well known – something, correct me if I’m wrong, that Jack himself complained about – that people often confused him with freewheeling Cassady (or his alter ego Dean Moriarty in On the Road). Was that part of the reason their relationship waned?
No, their relationship waned because they were really very different sorts of men. They were tied together by women they both loved, like Luanne Henderson and Carolyn Cassady. I talk about this in my earlier book One and Only. Cassady was a man who was always out to have a good time, he was an incredibly physical man, and Kerouac was most comfortable when he was living in his head. The real world scared him in a lot of ways. The way Cassady tore recklessly through the real world fascinated Jack on an intellectual level, but when Jack had to live it with him it scared the hell out of him.
Much has been made of Jack’s complicated relationships with women – most especially with his mother Gabrielle and his three wives – often discussed and usually dismissed as misogynist. Was he a misogynist? It seems a little unfair to single him out, especially from the other Beats, when they were all living through times where women were often bound by the strictures of a staid and patriarchal society.
He feared women and the demands they put on him. Women were constantly forcing him to live in the real world, to meet obligations, and as I told you, the real world was a scary place for Jack.
Jack Kerouac in Italy, 1966. Photo courtesy of Jon Collins
People often think of Jack as being the life and soul of the party when he was taking “a slug from the jug” but he was actually a very shy man, not effusive at all. Was he an intrinsically lonely man, do you think? Loneliness, after all, is a crowded room.
I don’t think Jack was lonely. He was easily bored, might have had ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), which wasn’t diagnosed much, if at all, in those days. He had to have an endless stream of excitement in his life; but he couldn’t deal with that excitement unless he was anesthetized with booze. A bad formula, one destined to kill him young.
Jack Kerouac at corner of Columbus Avenue and Broadway, North Beach, San Francisco, 1960. Photo by James Oliver Mitchell.
It was the booze, of course, which destroyed him in the end, not helped by his overbearing mother Gabrielle. I don’t think we should seek to make excuses for his alcoholism – it is what it is – but do you think it was exacerbated by his family?
His sister and cousins can’t be faulted for thinking he should have gotten a regular job and supported himself. But his mother was enormously controlling of him, didn’t want to let him go. At the same time, she put unreasonable expectations on him, wanted him to be the “saint” that had been lost when her other son Gerard had died. The pressure from his mother was certainly part of his becoming an alcoholic; but as I said earlier, he had a very hard time dealing with the pressures and experiences of ordinary life. The fact of death, which he experienced very young, was always hugely traumatic for him.
Since we are on the subject of families, we must talk about the Sampas family, Jack’s final family, as it were, through his marriage to Stella Sampas. I’ve read some terrible things: the forged Will, their attempts to blackball you, selling Jack’s belongings piecemeal to private collectors – I even heard they sold his underwear, for Christ’s sake. Is there anything you would like to say about them?
They have done an enormous disservice to Kerouac, selling off his papers to collectors, censoring scholarship of him, aiming all their efforts at making his work produce the maximum profit. I don’t want to spend more hours here talking about that. I have written about it at length in my recent book Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century.
In an interview you gave to Beatdom in 2021, I was shocked to read about the appalling treatment meted out to Jan Kerouac – not just by the Sampas family but, much to my disgust, by Allen Ginsberg of all people, who had her forcibly removed from a New York University conference on her father. What the hell was going on there?
At the end of his life, Ginsberg wanted major recognition – even a Presidential Gold Medal. He had to work with the Sampases to see certain of his projects fulfilled, like the publication of his letters with Kerouac. He told Jan to “stop rocking the boat,” but the boat he was talking about was his career. Jan was fighting for her own life, and for the fate of her father’s literary legacy. Ginsberg’s supposed “compassion” was often a crock of shit – excuse me for calling it as I see it.
There are many different Jack Kerouacs, it seems to me, not just the man and the writer but the legends perpetuated by critics and fans alike. If there is one thing about Kerouac that people consistently get wrong, what would you say that was?
They don’t understand that Kerouac was always on a spiritual journey, always trying to define and understand his own relation to God and the universe. Even when he was getting drunk, fucking his brains out, he was asking himself questions like, Why is God putting me through all this? That’s deep stuff, and Jack was deeper than almost anyone yet has recognized.
Finally, and I appreciate how broad a question this is, but what do you think is Kerouac’s lasting legacy to literature? Will we be celebrating him in another 100 years?
Absolutely. Kerouac was one of the handful of literary pioneers who took the helm of world literature and steered it into postmodernism, the examination of the mind’s role in creating reality, the vast exploration of subjectivity that is the current state of literature. While minutely recording the details of his own life and world, he was at the same time always looking at how his mind was perceiving and really creating that life and that world. That stuff was hugely revolutionary, though we now know, through the discovery of The Joan Anderson Letter, that Neal Cassady had given Kerouac a big kick in that direction.
Photo of Gerald Nicosia
Memory Babe will be officially released by Noodlebrain Press and published on Amazon and in all good bookstores on September 6, 2022. The author can be contacted for advance copies at [email protected] or PO Box 130, Corte Madera, CA 94976-0130.
About the author
Leon Horton is a writer, interviewer, editor, and member of the European Beat Studies Network, published by Beatdom Books, Beat Scene, International Times, Newington Blue Press and Empty Mirror. His essays include Where Marble Stood and Fell: Gregory Corso in Greece and The Beaten Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg, Thompson… and the Battle of Chicago. He is currently working on a project with the renowned biographer and punk historian Victor Bockris.
In the early 60s, when I was 16, the high school English teacher of a friend who’d moved to Arizona mailed me a half-dozen books I’ve come to think of as “the Beat packet.” This teacher, who boasted shirttail connections to the Beat scene in California, inadvertently introduced me to the avant garde of contemporary American literature: Ginsberg’s Howl, Corso’s Gasoline, Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, and Kerouac’s On the Road —altogether they were the Holy Grail of esoteric adult experience to a teenager living in a small northern Wisconsin mill town.
No matter that I hardly understood a word of it—I have always had a high tolerance for mystery. Of all these writers, Kerouac proved to be strangely the most relateable to my own life and so the most useful to me personally. Maybe it was the common fact of growing up in mill towns, his Lowell, Massachusetts of textile mills and my paper mill town, Cornell, Wisconsin, though the cultures of these two places couldn’t be more different.
Maybe it was our mutual dissatisfaction with the world, and specifically the Americas into which we came of age, he rejecting the mechanized “Moloch” America became when it shifted to a permanent wartime economy after World War II and myself of an age to reject the senseless waste of lives in Southeast Asia by the Vietnam money-war machine.
Kerouac a “Beat,” a term he coined but disavowed, and I a hippie, uncertain heir of the Beats’ rebellion.
The upshot is that I spent most of my twenties on the road to one place or another, never sure exactly why I was traveling except to escape the doom I was certain would drop upon my back if I stopped. And maybe that too was a way I resembled Kerouac. Although Jack is often caricatured as an arms-wide-open, life-affirming free spirit, that was only part of him and maybe not the best or most important part. You don’t have to read far in him to see the troubled Kerouac, who even after 100 pages of his most rapturous prose in The Dharma Bums descends from that mountain peak, for the rest of the book, into modulated melancholy and disappointment.
That Kerouac is the mystical Catholic-Buddhist Kerouac who for all his celebration of jazz, sex, and kicks could never find a home in this world and who ended in alcoholic desolation, dying from a massive abdominal hemorrhage at the age of 47 while living with his mother in St. Petersburg, Florida. When in a 1958 interview Mike Wallace observed, “You don’t sound happy,” Kerouac responded, “Oh, I’m tremendously sad. I’m in great despair.” I believe that that thread of profound melancholy combined with Kerouac’s tenderness is what ultimately keeps us emotionally tethered to this spectacular writer who was so unable to form a consistently life-sustaining relationship with the phenomenal world.
Most of us who read and romanticized Kerouac and participated in what Gary Snyder’s character in The Dharma Bums called a “rucksack revolution” had no real inkling of the horrors of addiction our hero suffered, the binges and withdrawals, the self-disgust and soul-sickness. Kerouac’s friend John Clellon Holmes reports sadly that in his last years Kerouac was downing more than a fifth of Courvoisier each day.
I had a fortuitous connection of sorts with Kerouac. In 1970, the year after he died, I followed a college girlfriend to St. Pete in hopes of propping up a shaky romance. Didn’t work, but that’s another story. Robin’s father Claude was a social worker in the Tampa Bay area, and when I learned that he’d actually hung out with Kerouac, I was eager to hear more. As we’d say now, a single degree of separation!
Pressed for details, Claude told me that he and Jack Kerouac had both patronized a bar called the Boar’s Head near downtown St. Pete, which I passed in my wanderings many times. Among the regular clientele was an insanely violent drunk who once literally bit off someone’s nose. When this man got juiced up to do some harm, Claude said, Kerouac was the one who could gentle him out of it. Kerouac, with his deep compassion for suffering humankind, who himself lived in a state of spiritual suffering for which alcohol became the convenient medication, must have seen enough of his own darkness and common humanity in this savage character to somehow quell his rage and calm him down.
I treasure that story, as I treasure the page I ripped out of the St. Petersburg phone book that still listed Kerouac the year after his death, now in fact his mother’s number I hadn’t dared to call, knowing her dim view of the vagabonds and hangers-on who adopted her “Ti Jean” as their patron saint of the road. As I myself did, and as a consequence was blessed, it may be, for a little while with safe passage in this world.
Modern Buildings in Britain. A Gazetteer, Owen Hatherley (hbck, 605pp, Penguin)
This is a fantastic book if you are at all interested in 20th and 21st century architecture. Hatherley unapologetically champions the houses, civic buildings, street architecture, workplaces and shops that have been so wrongly maligned and discredited over the years. (Usually by the likes of Prince Charles who prefer buildings and villages as Toytown pastiches of the past.) This isn’t to say Hatherley isn’t critical when he wants to be: he is unafraid to be forthright and mildly abusive about buildings he does, sometimes it has to be said, buildings that I think are wonderful! And of course, the opposite is true: he praises the likes of the UEA ziggurat student accommodation buildings, which may be fantastic on the outside but whose interiors are a kind of unusable overdesigned hell.
But I quibble. In the main Hatherley functions as an erudite and informative tour guide, offering brief histories, technical specifications in everyday language, history and context, in addition to his opinion. The book starts with an informative overview of architecture and idealism in the 20th century, with nods to planning, new cities, cultural aspiration as well as critical and public responses, before offering a short series of definitions. Then it is on to the gazetteer itself, organised by region, with several specific cities and areas within each section. There are plenty of black and white photographs (though not every entry has one) along with several sections of colour photographs.
As Hatherley says, this isn’t a book to read from front to back, it’s one to dip into; one to check out where you live or where you are visiting, follow trails left by an architect or architectural practice, or read what Hatherley stars as essential or marks with an exclamation mark to note that it is in danger of demolition. So I have been checking out not only London where I grew up and Cornwall where I live now, but Newcastle where my daughter lives. It’s opened my eyes to a number of buildings I’ve walked by and areas I’ve walked through without paying attention, explained some of the concrete anomalies which are the result of half-completed regeneration projects, and given me a list of stuff to look out for.
It’s also added to my enthusiasm for concrete, cityscapes and utopian idealism, for innovative engineering and forward thinking housing design. Most of the problems that have afflicted modern buildings are not architectural, they are problems of maintenance or social deprivation, civic short-sightedness, political ignorance or the result of irresponsible builders (cf. Grenfell Tower). When architects work with their clients and those who are actually going to inhabit or use the buildings and gardens they design, the result can be what many of the entries in this book showcase: glorious combinations of spaces, views, walls, materials, lines, curves and light.
Workers fight back as ferry company drops job loss bombshell.
One of the UK’s foremost ferry companies P&O sacked 800 staff with no notice yesterday. Officers and seafarers were dismissed via Zoom call at 11 am while still on the ships. Balaclava clad security guards were ready with handcuffs to quell resistance as the Dubai based parent company DP World made their move to replace career crew with cheaper agency workers.
DP World is majority owned by the Dubai Sovereign Wealth Fund, the piggy bank of the filthy rich and undemocratic Gulf petro state. The company also claimed millions from the UK government furlough scheme during lockdown.
However, not everything went according to plan, as disgruntled crew in Hull and Liverpool metaphorically hoisted the Jolly Roger and seized control of the boats, pulling up the gangplanks and staging an occupation. In a cross between a strike and a mutiny sacked workers on the ships barricaded themselves into cabins to make eviction more difficult. There were unconfimed reports of wildcat blocking of the M20.
A hastily assembled RMT picket in Dover temporarily blocked acesss to the port.
With security booked weeks ago according as exposed by trade unionists and the transport secretary Grant Shapps having been made aware at least 24 hours before these workers were well and truly left in the lurch.
With you on my mind
I had traveled the timeless streets of Kathmandu.*
Away from Kathmandu
The waterfall falling with
The alphabets of your name,
The hill that made my mind balanced
Like a surface of eternity.
I had seen a valley covered with
Dazzling lights from the hill,
The air that was too costly since then
Has no more been a cheap remedy.
The sea is my dream,
The rain has sunk me deep
Outside these borders if I travel
I would again raise your kingdom.
Yes, this is a hope with new petals
Maybe this time the color is miraculously new
Like a wet paint brush shining with novel shade of color.
I am a barrel of time,
I am a dead clock
That is felt correct twice a day only because
Heart was pure and it still is.
*Kathmandu is a capital city of Nepal.
Sushant Thapa Illustration: Claire Palmer
Bio: Sushant Thapa is a Nepalese poet who holds a Master’s degree in English literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has published three books of poetry, namely: The Poetic Burden and Other Poems (Authorspress, New Delhi, 2020), Abstraction and Other Poems (Impspired, UK, 2021) and Minutes of Merit (Haoajan, Kolkata, 2021). His poems have been published in Sindh Courier, The Kathmandu Post, Trouvaille Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Journal of Expressive Writing, Dissident Voice, Harbinger Asylum, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Litehouse, My Republica, New York Parrot, International Times, Literary Yard, The Beatnik Cowboy, Dumpster Fire Press, and Impsipred among many. He lives in Biratnagar, Nepal.
When the early fire rests calmly
on the slopes, the inner life of rocks
comes to the surface. Trails flow
toward the sky, arroyos
dig their teeth into the gravel
and spit mesquite seeds
to guide them
back when they come down.
There’s a fault line
connecting the sun to a highway
that never sleeps, but
every shadow knows the way
to where the natural world
falls silent.
Listen
when the owl folds up its wings
and disappears; the Earth is breaking open
to release the prayers by which
the birds sing the sun
out from in between the clouds.
Television. No matter how much information it supplies, it always makes the people work, it takes away their power, it always makes them passive spectator, it never takes them to another life, another perception, dots and all, cool aspects and all, it diminishes awareness, it always says: I am the great machine, the miraculous transporter of images thru the air, I am magic and you therefore believe in me (because magic depends on belief). I am strong and you are weak, I am power and you are flesh, I am intelligent and you are stupid, I speak and you listen, I am and you watch, I do not see you, I do not hear you, I do not care about you, I convert you into a sack to receive me, I convert you into a consumer society, consume my message, you are a thing that buys, you are a pouch for my insipid information, I do not want to touch you, I do not want to involve you, I want you to sit there, to be conditioned by your own passivity, go into debt to possess me, feel your weakness, feel my strength, worship me, desire me, be my slave.
Audience involvement as antidote for this, in which people don’t just watch heroes and heroines acting it all out, but in which the people themselves take action and become heroic. Because the play/event only works—and the solution to what is otherwise a tragedy is only discovered—in the moment when the people are no longer slaves of images parading before them, in the moment when they are instead possessed by the Creator Spirit and act out the creative impulses.
When the theatre bypasses the field of artificial fiction, the old system is short-circuited. Flash, shock, revelation. New conditions.
The museum kills art as experience by the behavior it demands of the visitor. Be tranquil, repressed, inexpressive, well-behaved, whisper, walk softly, respect the inner trip of the stranger, hold back, do not laugh with the madness and glory of what your senses perceive, hold it in, kill it.
Individuals don’t need to desire money in order to perpetuate the money system. The abstract corporations do it. They beam control, they want the money. Prestige is the corporation and its symbol, the hideous signature, their trademark.
Many signs of death begin to appear . . . induced by technology, corporations, museums, television.
Yet thru technology anarchism becomes all the more feasible. Democracy does not. In democracy, technology controls. In anarchism, technology serves. Because the people are aware. Democracy, by delegating power, underdevelops awareness.
a café in England’s North West doesn’t overwhelm
where’s the tree where the wagtails roost do they
still granular embossed polished brushed
throwing hoops at the hook the galleon on the bartop
am I war zone up in the clouds in mist
compulsory water feature in town square turned off
witchy hills landscapes of plate meat pie undulating
for reasons Robin Hood takes the bus to Sheffield
signature collage mushy peas gravy lovely salad
in the gallery mirror shows the top o’ mi yed
hollow irregular bulbous spiked
shiny views hoodies in Reeboks with longbows
grey hills walks to the castle bedrock redistributes
wealth but the rich get still richer bookshops closed
Mondays cat-café and coffee by the station
I call how’s your embodied privations those days
people were living in caves up till the 20th
century vertical balanced peaks don’t
get out much these days do you like curly fries
ten minutes to the cricket ground bollard in charge
of the street fossil criniods in the walls of St mary’s
council offices please wear mas and keep
social distance registering palpable ambience
of sculpture based on the Venus of Willendorf bumpy
hallucinating presence old photos paintings quotidian
as plastic banquettes used to come here a lot
before during and after see you soon narrative
“And this house, and the sea, and the gulls, and memories: I have those you know . . .” Lucy Muir
Finally reading the book on which Hollywood classic, The Ghost and Mrs Muir[i] (1947) is based, it was pleasing to discover that my whimsical linking[ii] of the film to Morecambe and Heysham was quite justified in spirit, since the original novel, albeit set on the south coast rather than the Moriancabris Æsturis[iii] [Bay of Morecambe – fourth inlet north of Wales as classified by the Romans] has a much more suburban setting than the isolated clifftop mansion[iv] glorified by the black and white film.
Ideal bench for an aggressive Munch[v], August 2021
Though enjoyable, the book is not in the same league. More sensible than semi-detached or swooning, it remains comparatively anchored to the earth. In the film, disconnected over time from everything, Lucy Muir – in love with a ghost who for me is as ‘real’ as anything else[vi] – passes a frontier infinitely less tangible than that between the beach and the waves, to leave her house behind, an airy tomb by the sounding sea . . .
Though this resembles a nocturne by Albert Pinkham Ryder[vii], an artist latterly influenced
by Poe[viii], it’s actually a cheap camera’s sterling effort to capture a moon
over Morecambe Bay. Sept 1st, 2020.
Unlike Edgar Allan Poe, I once knew an Annabel Lee[ix] – though we were never in love, she never lived in the Morecambe area, and we weren’t exactly children any more. (I’m also fairly sure she had no “highborn kinsmen”, but I didn’t know her that well). In any case, she spelt her first name with two LLs and an E. So much then for my archly romantic title, at least on the surface . . . The subtitle[x] however, is frequently true enough around here, especially in fine weather.
Tilted suburbia, Bare, Morecambe, January 2022
So is the shade of Lucy Muir the occasionally present queen of this undefined kingdom of mine? – As if the house she came to rent at the turn of the last century, once stood, quietly isolated above Heysham sands[xi]. Can the environs of Morecambe and Heysham even constitute a kingdom except in some arcane yet light-filled cavern at the back of my mind?
May 2018
In Heysham old village further down the coast, a lumpen, wall-mounted relief, depicts the Spirit of Heysham as a gormless Medusa being careless with the stars and some species of ball[xii]. I took an accurate photograph of this depressing sculpture in 2019 but have no wish to tarnish all myintangible feelings with the inevitable result. It’s certainly not her kingdom that my itinerant mind dwells upon. Break free! No deities or personages are necessary – not even Gene Tierney[xiii] as Lucy Muir. A more abstract genius loci is fine.
Moonfleet . . . sorry, Heysham Old Village graveyard. But where is Stewart Granger? May 2018
Chains of association are very personal. When I feel free, all my lived time easily fuses. It’s quite natural for me to sideslip from The Ghost and Mrs Muir through Poe’s Annabel Lee[xiv], into Roger Corman’s filmic adaptations of Poe[xv] with their frequent evocations of kingdoms either by the sea (The Pit and The Pendulum, 1961[xvi]) or so misty (all of them), that the fog becomes a sea itself, a sea in which the film floats . . . just as the dacha[xvii] at the end of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972)[xviii] is created – a new, possibly untrustworthy or regressive island in a swirling sea – by the empathetic inquisitions of the strange planet or entity.
The questioning path? St. Peter’s Heysham, 26th August 2019
Despite forced perspective[xix] or the complications of the Schüfftan process[xx], despite the use of cardboard, paint or lashings of dry ice, all the most vivid filmic places (detached if necessary from stupid characters and plots) can be more real than reality – at least in memory. This can certainly be true of the atmosphere which permeates sections of 1970s maybe underrated film, The Dunwich Horror[xxi].
The Tan Fade Horror, 18th January 2022
The best version of films, books, paintings and so on, is frequently that impression left behind in your head – a separate thing which can both condense and expand over time, often leaving the source material a disappointment. Films especially, being relatively short yet generally narrative driven, often complete themselves in the watching. I’m convinced that all the truest art – in whatever medium – never does this and always remains open – its perfection concealed within its ‘imperfections’, its chords ringing inside us[xxii].
P L E A S U R E L A N D , New Year twilight, 3rd January 2022
The Dunwich Horror’s dream-haze landscapes share real Californian coasts with The Ghost & Mrs Muir, while distribution and production link it to earlier Poe adaptations. Here though we are in a world derived from Lovecraft – whose links with Morecambe, I would have imagined non-existent. Not so, for Morecambe and Heysham are the setting of a Cthulhu Mythos[xxiii] novel The Weird Shadow over Morecambe by Edmund Glasby (2014).
The shadow of night over Morecambe’s West End – reputedly the rougher part of town, 18th Jan 2022
Glasby’s title alludes To Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth[xxiv]. Both seaside horrors are as yet unknown to me[xxv], but there’s no doubt that the sweep of Morecambe Bay gliding south from the relative isolation of Park Point and Far Arnside via Silverdale to Jenny Brown point[xxvi], skimming on to Hest Bank, Poulton-le-Sands[xxvii] and central Morecambe, finally to alight at Heysham’s old village (with its lingering similarities to the 18th Century world of J Meade Faulkner’s Moonfleet[xxviii] as well as its 1955 film adaptation by Fritz Lang[xxix] starring Stewart Granger) contains such a wealth of contrasts, that from pantheism to cosmic indifference[xxx], practical type thoughts need rarely enter the mind . . . unless you really can’t shut them out. The charging immediacy of the places is also apt to banish such housework.
According to a positive review, Edmund Glasby conjures an “increasingly bizarre version of reality” from some of Morecambe and Heysham’s most distinctive lineaments[xxxi] – presumably not including any references to the person or statue of that well-loved comedian of my childhood, Eric Morecambe?[xxxii]
Happy Mount Park, May 2018
[Notes from 2018]:
After lunch at Happy Mount park (!) where the collective air was like something from a William Roberts fantasy . . . though neither so tubular nor robotic – a kind of ideal proletarian paradise . . . Shame most of these citizens probably vote conservative?
Happy Mount Park, August 2019
Anyway, after the park, K took the children to the beach while I boarded a 1957 double decker bus to Heysham Village. It’s hard to believe how beautiful this area was – I’d assumed that all the Heysham peninsula would be an industrial wasteland leading to the mess of the nuclear power stations, but Heysham old village coastal area and chapel was more like Dorset (in fact it reminded me of a walk K and I did from Weymouth to Wyke Regis via Sandsfoot along the beach in summer 1990). Meanwhile above Heysham Sands, streets of a slightly downmarket Metroland adjoin a curving bay with buttercup fields and an almost Moonfleet atmosphere – even in bright daylight.
Heysham houses down to the sea, May 2018
Short suburban roads lead to a prospect of the sea, the bay and across the water all the distant mountains of the Lakes . . . yet soon you’re back into the seedy ‘Kiss-me- Quick’ Morecambe of run-down hotels and dodgy looking markets – a scaled-down, gentler version of Blackpool perhaps?
‘Personal and planetary, political, societal, accusatory; against tact, against compromise, against the
inner deaths and personal prisons we tirelessly remake . . . all the nails of the human condition are
hammered home.’ [xxxiii] Morecambe arcade, 18th January 2022
To live off grid has always been one of my aims – which may be next to impossible with a family in a small, overpopulated country. For years we manged to live in areas where the landscape was too remote or bleak to be easily colonised by tourism, second homes or holiday lets. There are aspects of the grid acceptable to me – how else could anyone read what’s written here? But even without television, radio or a mobile phone, is it possible to maintain such a stance in the middle of a town?
West Street, Morecambe, looking towards the promenade and sea beyond the bushes
It’s not that I have anything against people. In fact, I’ve been lucky enough in the last couple of months – via a Morecambe writer’s group with multiple incarnations including a film night – to make an entirely new circle of friends. It’s more the inadvertency of society to which I object: that en masse it’s going in a direction few of us would ever want as individuals.
“I am not a number, I am a free man!”[xxxiv] August 2019
Yesterday my sister emailed me to quote from Glennon Doyle’s Untamed[xxxv], “Maybe my inability to adapt to the world is not because I’m crazy but because I’m paying attention. Maybe it’s not insane to reject the world as it is. Maybe the real insanity is surrendering to the world as it is.”
A temporary FUNLAND just east of the Midland Hotel – likely site of a new Eden project. Sept 2021
Even back in some imaginary, loose-form Heysham suburbia of the 1900s, was Lucy Muir frustrated by the human condition? Despite her spark and occasional engagement, she certainly appears to weary of human life very quickly. For someone who apart from a little scrubbing and water-bottle filling and a walk or two along the beach, (plus a few months transposing the words of a dead sailor – or seaman as the captain prefers, “sailor is a landlubber’s word”) the flour gathers more quickly in her hair than in that of her hard-working servant Martha.
The Brunswick Road Laundry, 3rd January 2022
Edna Best[xxxvi] who portrays Martha, was 20 years older than Gene Tierney but ends up looking younger. Is it Lucy Muir’s daily engagement with the metaphysical that makes her increasingly grouchy with Martha and tires her out? I’ve always hoped that the opposite would be the case. In human terms, Martha must be equally lonely, but being working-class her inner feelings are assumed to be of no interest[xxxvii]. When, not long after scolding Martha for “bossing” her, Lucy shuffles off with middle-class dignity – suffering no more than a funny pain in her arm and causing no more trouble than a glass of split milk for grief-stricken Martha to clean up – her ghostly version brushes past the servant with at least a passing sympathy. Despite that my own grandmother worked as a domestic at only a slightly later point in time, I don’t feel too bad about this. The implication being that all inequalities will be put right after death by eternity . . . which might be true yet can also function as a dangerously complacent notion pandering to the “All things bright and beautiful” scheme of class fate.
All things blanched and beautiful: The Midland Hotel[xxxviii] seen from a 40s double decker, May 2018
As almost everywhere, the railways of Morecambe were once far more extensive[xxxix], encompassing even a problematic harbour. Like Morecambe’s two piers, this has vanished apart from the stone jetty once forming its more southerly arm, now incorporated into coastal defences, with its old station building, now a café. Declining from a traffic peak in the 1950s, Promenade Station closed in February 1994, its tracks removed to terminate at buffers 300 metres further inland. At least the original building, opened by the Midland Railway in 1907, survives as a pub, restaurant and entertainment venue.
Pre-grouping[xl] railway companies were notoriously determined kingdom builders. The North Western Railway extending its tendrils from Leeds and Bradford[xli] made Morecambe (sometimes referred to as Bradford-by-the-Sea) a favoured resort for holidaymakers from the West Riding of Yorkshire, during Wakes week[xlii].
Heysham Avenue, May 2018
So where does my post-railway-empire, kingdom by the sea, careless of reality – begin and end? Not surprisingly, its frontiers shift. The positive feelings engendered by its seaside suburban heart are summoned especially by fine weather. In bright sunlight the kingdom expands across the water or sands and sediments revealed by the tide, north and south along the coast.
Park Point, Far Arnside, April 10th, 2021
Beautiful weather certainly held sway on my first rambling exploration of Morecambe and Heysham in May 2018[xliii] – an occasion that came about quite by chance, when posters in a bus stop near where we lived on the opposite side of the bay, advertised the Ribble Vehicle Preservation Trust’s[xliv] annual vintage bus day[xlv].
Sunderland village – tidal road on the way to Sunderland Point, 25th January 2022
Perhaps the kingdom extends south as far as Sunderland Point[xlvi] whose village out on a spit where the Lune loses itself in the sea, seems inclined to resist the drag of society. Until last month I’d never been that far. A good friend who lives there warned me that you need to know the tide times, for the road is cut by the rising sea twice a day. Apparently, Sunderland Old Hall[xlvii], on first sight, immediately reminded her of The Ghost and Mrs Muir.
Far Arnside Holiday Park – one of many caravan paradises – April 10th, 2021
Far Arnside, 20 miles up the coast, with its upmarket static caravans and ‘lodges’ in the woods left behind, on a good day might feel the furthest northern point of the kingdom. Beyond the tarmac trails, slender woodlands slope to short white shingle beaches or fade to rocky maritime outcrops above the tides. Inland, winding paths rise to high knolls outlying, unencumbered, also crowned by gorse . . .
Moonscape: Sea of Tranquillity. August 2019 Once Morecambe’s West End Pier[xlviii] stood somewhere here and I like to think that it would have
had a mermaid attraction like that central to Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide of 1961[xlix]
Back in Morecambe, when the tide recedes, does the sense of interior space expand? Land for water is available if you keep an eye on the time. If you watch and listen carefully for the sea’s, at first insidious[l], return. Even if actual quicksands are rare, their location constantly shifts.
August 2019
Lucy Muir has no such fears. In her bay, the shingle and sand are fixed no matter how high the waves crash. The time condensing sequences – in the tradition of fluttering candles, flying clock hands, blown leaves – thanks to the universal emotion of Bernard Herrmann’s music[li], are concise and poignant. Lasting only 50 seconds, more than a decade passes. Later, to shift the film towards its close, another 20 years is over in 37 seconds.
“How you’d have loved the North Cape and the fjords in the midnight sun, to sail across the reef at Barbados where the blue water turns to green, to the Falklands where a southerly gale rips the whole sea white! What we’ve missed Lucia! What we’ve both missed.”
So runs Rex Harrison’s farewell speech to a sleeping Lucy. Sensing he’s become an interloper in her life, regretfully the ghost captain has determined to fade away. His rousing soliloquy is a clear cinematic precursor to Rutger Hauer’s tears in rain monologue in Bladerunner[lii]
Ancient rock-cut graves at St. Patrick’s Chapel[liii], Heysham Head, 9th December 2020 –
the site features often in Glasby’s The Weird Shadow over Morecambe
Of at least five other films which are heavily or crucially dependant on the music of Bernard Herrmann: Citizen Kane (1941) Vertigo (1958), Psycho, (1960), Fahrenheit 451, (1966) and Taxi Driver (1976), The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), not surprisingly, is the most conventionally constructed – a calculated product of the studio system. Yet despite the surface of the formula, it’s a bittersweet tragedy with a triumphal mystical ending – as perhaps befits a film produced shortly after the Second World War.
Hest Bank, looking south west, 9th Sept 2021
More concisely, the kingdom probably centres on the coast between Hest Bank just to the north of Morecambe and Heysham Head to the south. Beyond the headland lies the port for Irish freight and the Isle of Man. Dominated by the looming blocks of the two adjacent nuclear power stations, even sun-struck this zone is dystopian. The two generators are threatening punctuation marks, easily visible from as far away as the Furness Fells above Ulverston.
Heysham 2 (on the left) and 1 nuclear power stations. Disasters in the making . . . July 2020
Alternatively, closing in further still, the promenade which stretches from Happy Mount Park over 4 miles south to Heysham old village to the south, could be seen as the drawn bow defining where this kingdom meets the sea, that ‘tenuous fringe – path, railings, sea defences’ which ‘draws a submarine future between silent bedrooms and the elemental roar.’[liv]
‘Their gardens wait – territories guarded by the characteristic stones beloved of walls around here:
whispering knights[lv], frozen warriors, melted chess pieces after the blast’ [lvi]. Aug 2019
Ideally, I would have liked to have finished this digression in a relaxed flaneur-shallow manner at the beginning of last year, when Morecambe and Heysham were places I could visit and leave, travel through on the swift surface of the tourist promenade, without getting sucked into the backstreets, the social and political reality.
[vi] Personally, I don’t believe as certain critical studies assume, that the Keats-quoting ghost is a creation of Mrs Lucy Muir’s mind – a reflection of herself, her inner desires – projected from the portrait of Captain Gregg found in the house he used to own. Even the constantly intriguing and challenging BFI study by Frieda Grafe, [ ISBN-13 : 978-0851704845 ] with plenty of justifiable axes to grind and sparing with academic double-talk, appears increasingly to lean this way (page 38): “Mrs Muir becomes the author of her own life. That is not only a paradox, it is heartbreaking.”. Or on page 46: “Obstinate as she is [ ] she has [ ] imagined the lover herself.” Such interpretations are interesting, valid, even necessary for some, yet I prefer the simpler, more romantic notion of a lonely woman who falls in love with a ghost and expanding herself in the process, escapes her narrow world. No matter how un-postmodern, I believe wholeheartedly in the ghost! In any case, since Lucy’s daughter Anna later explains her passion for “sailormen” as deriving from Captain Gregg, they would have had to dream the same recurring dream over the same period.
[xiii] Gene Tierney – sporting a very unliikly dress for the turn of last century! Personally, I don’t share the relatively low opinion of Gene Tierney’s acting capabilities that seems to be abroad, including this from Grafe: “She is not a great actress, her impetus quickly falters, her diction is monotonous . . .” but even those who do, must surely agree that the part of Mrs Muir is as perfect for her as the built-in remoteness/woodenness of Madeline and Judy were for Kim Novak in Vertigo? In The Ghost and Mrs Muir, Tierney gets the perfect mixture of obstinate naivety and haughty, high ideals – as well as an underlying sense of Schopenhauer’s proposition that as the world and life can give no true satisfaction they are not therefore worthy of our attachment to them. To quote another (French?) writer Grafe doesn’t credit: “in some films” Tierney was “simply a genius”.
[xxii] An email from my son Joe, Jan 29th, 2022: “I am strongly inclined to agree that the greatest artworks never ‘complete themselves’. Not just in the sense that there’s always room for reinterpretation, but also perhaps because through them you seem to glimpse a world in which you could dwell (or in which you have dwelt?) Maybe this is also connected to the way in which you as a viewer/reader are involved. I suppose in the most strictly ‘Classical’ (‘Apollonian’) works you are a detached spectator to whom a perfect whole is exhibited, which contributes to the sense of completeness. But on the other hand, if you are too deeply caught up in ‘the action’ – the intention of many novelists and filmmakers – then there’s nothing left at the end, you’re just back in the ‘real world’ and it’s done-with. So, I think the best stuff somehow places the reader/viewer(/listener?) somewhere in between, as if you’re a background character perhaps. Obviously this all applies mostly to novels and films, loosely narrative art, I wonder if there’s an equivalent analysis for painting and music …”
Part of a reply, Jan 30th, 2022: “Celeste & I rewatched The Ghost & Mrs Muir yesterday and for a Hollywood product it’s surprisingly (inadvertently?) resistant to completing itself – I always feel I could watch it again next week even though the first 40 minutes of the running time is so relaxed that via the two extreme time jumps (10 or 12 years spanned in 50 seconds, then later, about 20 years in 37 seconds – both to Herrmann’s music of course) the conclusion feels distinctly rushed. But perhaps these very imperfections (into which you can subconsciously pour all your own thoughts/alternative lives/sympathies/questions etc)are exactly what make it both perfect and inexhaustible?”
[xxv] Though I recently acquired a copy of Glasby’s book and am trying to find the Lovecraft which may be in an anthology in one of our boxes still unsorted after moving to Morecambe.
[xxvi] See the forthcoming (part 4) ‘Image supplement’ for photographs of the wider kingdom
[xxxi] A synopsis of The Weird Shadow Over Morecambe: “Drink-addled Mandrake Smith, former Professor of Anthropology at Oxford, now barely surviving in Morecambe, would be unrecognisable to erstwhile colleagues. He has many things to forget, although some don’t want to forget him. Plagued by the nightmares of his past, he finds himself dragged into a morass of supernatural activity centred around the deposition of filleted corpses in the ancient rock-cut graves at St. Patrick’s Chapel, Heysham Head. Drafted into helping the enigmatic Mr Thorn, he grudgingly assists in trying to stop the downward spiral into darkness and insanity that awaits Morecambe, and then the entire world…”
[xxxii] WRONG AGAIN: The Weird Shadow Over Morecambe is not only satirical but absurdly comic in places . . . and on page 88 of my Linford Mystery Library, large print edition, Eric turns up in effigy: a five-thousand-year-old Egyptian statue unearthed in a local archaeological dig (at a time when Eric was only a boy), turning out to uncannily represent (or presage) – “ Glasses, funny stance and all” – the future comic. Perhaps Glasby had the DVD cover/poster of Morecambe & Wise’s The Intelligence Men at the back of his mind?: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059315/mediaviewer/rm51354624/
[xxxiii] From: Bombed Out (in Morecambe), November 2021
[xxxvi] Edna Best’s best-known role could be in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) as a champion shot, who grabs a rifle from a police marksman to save her daughter . . .
[xxxvii] Martha seems to be both friend and beloved servant – a faux, salt-of-the-earth cockney who like the woman of colour, the ‘mammy’ so common to films of an earlier and overlapping period, were always the most stable, loving and dependable people of all. The token gay, fat, ugly or non-white best friends who took over the steadfast person role in the 1970s and 80s – were they a step forward?!!
[xliii] I first visited the town without much attention back in 1981, to look at a student let, though I was never an official student myself. Over the years I found the promenade on a couple of other occasions but never explored south of The Battery – the building which, until 1928, marked the boundary between Morecambe and Heysham.
[li] Herrmann’s music is universal also in the way it often evokes and links emotive passages of other films he has scored, such as Vertigo and Fahrenheit 451 . . . allusions to hover at the back of the mind.
We follow the science through a forest of unprecedented words, isolated and of interest, until every lateral flow leads to a still pool with paper-dry teasels crackling in the wind’s unpredictable respiration. Ravens, rooks, and crows: keep calm and carrion; keep your distance; keep your morbid thoughts to your chuckling selves. Here is the news. A thieving magpie cackles from a branch of its family tree – yellow-leafed and rooted in rich soil – its soiled riches accumulating beneath the sharp upward slant of the latest sensually massaged figures. We follow the silence until birdsong becomes a myth, our dreams haunted with peepee-ee, peepee-ee, and our children, no longer able to speak, carrying new variants home from school in jam jars. Here is the news. There’s jam today and jam tomorrow for those with all the bread. Keep calm and carry wipes and sanitiser; don’t let your mask slip, and do not attempt to breathe life – I see you, I see you – into dead air without first analysing the statistics. This just in. No news is good news and good news is often no news at all. Words increase exponentially and just because we have trust issues doesn’t mean no one is lying. Follow the signs and carry on until the party/work event is over: a tissue of lies and we all fall down.
Alan Dearling shares some of the secrets discovered by Urban Solo
On the south coast of England, Royal Hospital Haslar was historically an important hospital, originally a naval facility built over Haslar Creek on the outskirts of Gosport in Hampshire. It overlooks the Solent, with the Isle of Wight in the near, often grey and misty distance. A lot of its history was bound up with the treatment of military personnel – much of which work was psychiatric, it incorporated an asylum, and at one time a lot of the treatments were based on the now debunked
‘science’ of phrenology. It was also apparently the location of the first major UK ‘blood bank’. Very recently, most of the hospital site has been redeveloped into luxury waterfront retirement apartments, but a part of the old hospital is still intact, but being gradually demolished. It is subject to security patrols and control. This is a place where Urban Solo and colleagues have been visiting over a period of years – including very recently!
They are Urban Explorers. Here’s a link to two of the UK sites about ‘urban exploration’ – including a range of information about Who they are, What they do. And, Why!
What urban exploration seems to be, is different for different individuals. Some are amateur historians and archaeologists. Some are climbers, cavers, sportswomen and men. Some are excitement junkies. Many, or perhaps most urban explorers, are curious, inquisitive, active and ‘seekers’. Theirs can be an occasional hobby, an adrenalin-fuelled adventure, or, a gateway to ‘way of life’. Or, even verging on the obsessional…
A lot of urban exploration occupies a borderline of ‘legality’. Entering abandoned, decaying, empty, guarded or unguarded old(er) buildings. Photos and video are the ‘records’ of such explorations, not physical objects. Many urban explorers invest large sums of money on ‘gear’ for recording and for other aspects of the explorations, such as communications between team members. There is risk and danger, and in some cases the possibility of a criminal conviction and potential punishment. There’s no single set of rules, but most (but not all) adhere to a code of behaviour that loosely follows the dictum set out by author, Jeff Chapman, editor of the zine, ‘Infiltration’. He suggests that genuine urban explorers, “Never vandalise, steal or damage anything.” The thrill comes from “discovery and a few nice pictures.”
Urban Solo’s small team of Urban Explorers visited (actually re-visited) Haslar over a recent weekend. Their findings, photographs and video are concerning. Worrisome in fact, as many patient files are still at the site – abandoned, and far from private and confidential.
A bit of Haslar history
From Wikipedia:
“The hospital’s remit became tri-service in 1996 when it reverted to being called the Royal Hospital Haslar. A hyperbaric medicine unit was established at the hospital at that time. To mark the handover of control to the National Health Service in 2007, the military medical staff ‘marched out’ of the hospital in 2007, exercising the unit’s rights of the freedom of Gosport.
All remaining medical facilities at the site were closed in 2009.”
“The Admiralty acquired the site selected for the hospital, Haslar Farm, whose name came from Anglo-Saxon Hæsel-ōra (English: Hazel Bank), in 1745. The building was designed by Theodore Jacobsen and construction of the main building was completed in on 23 October 1753. On completion it was the largest brick building in Europe. Building works cost more than £100,000, nearly double the cost of the Admiralty headquarters in London. In its early years it was known as the Royal Hospital Haslar.”
At its closure, the hospital reverted to the original name.
The hospital has something of a mucky past history. For instance, the BBC local Hampshire history site recalls that:
“When Haslar first opened, some compared it to a prison. There were overcrowded buildings, discharged patients taking up home in the attics and reports of drunkenness and petty theft among staff and patients.
It’s said that buried in the paddock to the south-west of the hospital are tens of thousands of servicemen, and is thought to be the densest area of burial in the UK of those who died serving their country.”
The burial site was investigated by the Channel 4 TV Time Team along with experts from the Cranfield Forensic Institute, in a programme entitled: ‘Nelson’s hospital’, which aired their findings in 2010, saying that,
“It established that a large number of individuals (calculated as approximately 7,785) had been buried in unmarked graves.”
According to the Portsmouth D-Day Museum: “Between 1944 and July 1945 the United States Military ran the hospital treating Allied D-Day casualties and wounded German prisoners of war. To cope with the large numbers of casualties arriving at Haslar the basement was used for two operating theatres. The casualties taken to Haslar in the three months of the D-Day landing period was 1,347 out of the 17,566 casualties received.”
The Abandoned Royal Haslar Hospital
Beautiful Staircase takes you all the way to the roof.
Words from Urban Solo at Haslar Royal Hospital
“After 5 years, 3 failed attempts and we are in. Just a shame that many of her wonders have been destroyed!
New Year’s Eve 2021 bag is packed, unpacked and packed again. Camera, batteries, tripod, climbing rope. Gloves, first aid kit, head torch, food and drink. The list goes on. I’ll soon to regret taking so much stuff.
4:30 am New Year’s Day 2022 and I am out the door. Thankfully a short journey in and I am soon looking at the fence.
Having had Covid over Xmas I wasn’t looking forward to the climb.
Over I go, I know I’ve got to be quick, I am right under a camera, time is not on my side as Haslar has one of the most highly regarded security teams and camera systems .
Get to the second fence, under this one.
CAR !!!!!!
That’s them. I am at the face of the main building, and darkness is on my side.
I find a door and it’s open. But I have company.
Hiding in the shadows for what is an eternity – then the security gives up.
I make my way to the main staircase and hide up and wait for the sun.
Mind-blowing.
Sun’s up, and it shows Haslar off, in all her glory.
Room after room of equipment, just left to rot. Surely it must be worth something…££££
But no, it’s being dumped in skips…
Sadly this is the true reality of today’s Society.
One of 3 scanners left in this part of Haslar. There were many more in the newer part, now demolished
What’s left now is nothing compared to what was left. But the most shocking find was yet to come. On a return trip to Haslar to explore with two friends.
After a 12 hour stint I felt I’d seen what there was to see and slowly made my way home, feeling rather tired.”
Second explore.
“Three of us this time, urban-not-so-solo for this one.
Run-up to the exploration was the same really, apart from a few more beers and an early night. Covid, a distant memory.
We made our way to the hospital, early doors again, as darkness is our friend.
Fences done and we are in. We hide up, take some refreshments and start our explorations.
Something about being in an abandoned hospital puts you on edge!!!
Well, for some of us.
We find our way to the basement level, it’s massive. Good torch needed.
The second room we come to. Files everywhere, medical files…Names, addresses, DOB, current age at time of operation. We all look at each other, for a second we all think this is cool to find, but then the realisation kicks in that this is all confidential info that shouldn’t be here. Why is it here? Records from 1981 to 2000.
This is WRONG.
I’ll finish my account tomorrow. Falling asleep.”
Patient Records. I was shocked to find this information. Surgical Information and medical records with names, addresses and age for all to see. Very naughty!
Sent from my iPhone
“We continue on from our find through the maze of tunnels and room under Haslar and I find myself entering tunnels under the basement level. Sadly I wasn’t able to go further, as they look like they flood and are full of mud. We come to a section that is lit up like a Xmas tree, we can hear voices! We remain as stealthy, quiet as possible. I poke my head around the corner to see to builders sat down having a chin-wag and cup of tea. Oh boy, would I have loved to scare the shit out of them. But we back off and make our way to the nuclear medicine section of the hospital, with part of a lab and a few scanners dotted about.
We get to the lab. Cameras at the ready, as there are a few good shots to be had here. After the lab, down to the remaining theatres/sadly gone in the last week!
Then we start thinking of our way out! By this time the place is crawling with people. So, the way in is a big, ‘No-No’.
Haslar Lab. This lab is opposite the Nuclear Medicine section. Lots of nasty stuff in here.
After a few more sections of the hospital we find ourselves on the ground level. One of the group has a bright idea. Let’s just walk out of the front gate. Well, why not.
As we walked closer to the security, we hear voices, and around the corner we see a guard looking straight at us, and another shouts out, ‘Who are you?’ The other guard just comes out with: ‘I don’t want anything to do with this.’
And that was it, we were out.
Since then, I met a security guard on site, he threatened me with physical violence. And anyone else that came onto site. I had to laugh, I’m sure that didn’t help matters, but the gentleman couldn’t even dress himself properly.
Let alone catch me.
Since then I’ve be in 2 more times without any bother…”
Jimi Tenor always sounds like a million dollars: his albums are beautifully recorded, well mixed and carefully arranged. Yet his music is all constructed at home, in this instance using only a synthesizer, flute and saxophone, all layered over drum machine and synthesizer beats to produce a kind of deconstructed smooth jazz techno.
Think Grover Washington Jr and the CTI Records team at their best, and then mix in some funky 1960s flute grooves, along with some afrobeat and ambient samples. Dust lightly with brass flourishes and some soft vocals and you have it. It may tread dangerously close to pastiche and nostalgia at times, but mostly it’s just engaging and enjoyable, soulful music, with plenty of surprises for the listener.
Tracks thin out to reveal the loops, beeps and beats before saxophones honk and flutes flutter in unison, harmonics and strange tones echoing in the mix. Nearer the end of the album ‘Raju Raju’ arrives as a skittering, nervous surprise with its drum’n’bass rhythm track, relentless piano riff and freeform flute; and as on a few other tracks there are wordless vocals too, as Tenor reinvents the Swingle Singers as vocal ghosts for the digital age.
What becomes more and more intriguing is the tension between and fusion of the old and new, the future and past, the nostalgic and innovative. There’s just enough points of reference to allow the listener to understand what’s going on, plenty of melody and rhythm, fantastic textures and tunes, but repeated listening reveals how experimental and clever it all is, even as your head nods and feet tap along to the twelve tracks here. Tenor is, to use the title of one this album’s tracks, a ‘Baby Free Spirit’, and a very clever one too.
Revolutionary Letters, Diana Di Prima (191pp, £13.99, Silver Press)
This new U.K. edition of Revolutionary Letters gathers up fifty years of Di Prima’s anarchic and insightful series of poems which she started writing back in 1968. Moving to New York City in the 1950s she embedded herself in the alternative culture of the Beatniks in Greenwich Village before embracing the Black Panther movement, drugs, feminism, counterculture politics, direct action, and what we now call small press publishing.
The book contains freeform rants, comments upon topical events, advice to friends and/or would-be revolutionaries, lists, cynicism, utopian ideologues and utopian dreams. Somewhat surprisingly, alongside the down-to-earth survival techniques she shares there is also the presence of the spiritual weaving through her work alongside questioning insight:
You cannot write a single line w/ out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes
[…]
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector.
(‘Revolutionary Letter #75’)
As soon as we submit
to a system based on causality, linear time
we submit, again, to the old values, plunge again
into slavery.
(‘Revolutionary Letter #51’)
At other times, however, she is jubilantly optimistic and proclaimative:
I will not rest
till we walk free & fearless on the earth
each doing in the manner of his blood
& tribe, peaceful in the free air
(‘Revolutionary Letter #20’)
Other poems offer dialogue with other poets – be they famous or unknown, or immediate responses to local (the NYC police clearing Tompkins Park of the homeless, her neighbours’ need for money or food) and international events such as 9/11, The Gulf War, or The Occupy movement:
Occupy the planet
the Oceans
as well
as the Land
Mind is unlimited
Can go anywhere
Occupy the Night Sky,
Mother Nuit
Occupy your breath
Your Body & remember
We are one Body
Occupy with Love
(‘Revolutionary Letter #108’)
I like the fact Di Prima is often angry, sometimes anti-technology (‘did you ever try to email chicken soup?’) informative and instructive, and that her work includes both elation and despair. She cuts through the crap of political rhetoric, points out what is actually important in society – be that local or international, and reminds us that we can change the world as individuals, starting with where we live, how we live and who we live with or next to. It’s easy to be cynical about poems as a container of comment or narrative, let alone as a catalyst for revolution, but words do affect us and can inspire, effect and facilitate change.
Di Prima’s work, like that of Adrian Mitchell, Kenneth Patchen and Julian Beck, can often be labelled simplistic and obvious, naive and unnuanced, but as I numbly watch the bombs fall on Ukraine and wonder what on earth I can do, it’s good to be reminded as a writer that poetry can matter:
What matters:
the memory
of the poem
taking root in
thousands
of minds…
(‘Revolutionary Letter #110’)
Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE READER: I suppose, like everyone else, you’ve been glued to the new series of Killing Eve. Who did you think was the…. MYSELF: Sorry, can I stop you there? READER: What? Why? MYSELF: Because you, along with everyone else have supposed wrong. I am neither fascinated by the dense moral maze of Killing Eve, nor beguiled by the sexual/political intrigue of Strictly Come Dancing. Furthermore, I have no desire to loiter around “water coolers” in the hope of having “moments” with bores whose lives depend on having vicarious relationships with fictional characters. READER:Oooooh! I’m so sorry Mr. Superior! I’d forgotten you resided on a higher plain than the rest of us. I mean, pardon me for existing! MYSELF: I hate to have to remind you, but you actually don’t exist. Just like the cast of Eastenders, Coronation Street and the inhabitants of Love Island, you too are a fictional character. READER: Wait a minute! Fiction? Love Island? Come off it! Where do you get this stuff? MYSELF: Let’s just say I know somebody who regularly drinks with someone who’s work colleague is a person known to have connections with certain other persons who must remain anonymous, if you catch my drift. READER: I’m gobsmacked. Next thing you’ll be telling me Doctor Who isn’t a real person. MYSELF: I would hate to be the one to shatter that illusion.
MUSIC REVIEW: HASTINGS HAYSTACK HOEDOWN Scrotum & Bagge, 3rd March Rockabilly enthusiasts packed Hastings’ top venue The Cat’s Pyjama for a rare visit from redneck banjo wizard Earl Scrotum and his longtime sidekick and spoons virtuoso Lester Bagge. Despite being 3 hours late, as their 1962 anthem Pork Barrel Romance blared from the PA system the redneck legends were eventually wheeled onto the sawdust-strewn stage to thunderous applause, clutching gallon jars of Trailermash their famous home-made liquor brewed from sassafras and roadkill. Sure enough, despite their ages the feuding cousins Lester (79) and Earl (a sprightly 82) soon abandoned any attempt at music, and began pounding each other with their instruments. Lester slipped on some of his own blood which had leaked from an early blow to his head from the business end of Earl’s banjo, but to the audience’s delight, he managed to poke him in the eye with a sharpened dessert spoon on the way down as he lapsed into unconsciousness. The Cat’s Pyjama is closed until further notice.
WHAT THE PAPERS SAY A new item featuring random excerpts from regional Sussex publications
A Piddinghoe man, who cannot be identified because of his mother’s connection with a religious sect which worships telephone kiosks, has been charged with masterminding a complex pyramid scheme designed to embezzle thousands of pounds from a charity sponsoring a spelling competition for overprivileged children from all over the UK. Harry “Bongo” Tuttenhurst (43), the stilt-walking clown who regularly busks outside Sidcup railway station, claimed in his defence that he was using the money to fund WAKO, an Australian right wing think-tank in Gecko Falls, New South Wales, which promotes the idea that arm wrestling is the true path to spiritual enlightenment.
TEABAG STUCK IN SPOUT The Upper Dicker Examiner A minor crisis was averted when villagers rallied round after being alerted to a major blockage in the catering-sized teapot employed by the Upper Dicker Women’s Institute Bowling and Crochet Club during their annual meeting at Lower Dicker Masonic Lodge. “It was lovely seeing everyone pull together,” commented retired fitness coach Wendy Carthorse (93), “it reminded me of the atmosphere during the London Blitz, except without the incendiary bombs”. To everyone’s relief, the guilty teabag was soon fished out and disposed of by the eager volunteers. Detectives from Upper Dicker constabulary’s forensic team later established that the teabag had become wedged in the entry to the teapot spout during pouring, causing the flow of tea to diminish to a trickle.
EPIDEMIC FAILS TO MATERIALISE The Beyondenden Chronicle Sadly, this newspaper’s recent prediction of a catastrophic zombie outbreak in Beyondenden which, we warned our readers, could result in 50,000 angry undead, failed to live up to our expectations. We understand that on our advice, many of you built elaborate, secure shelters and stockpiled food and weapons in order to protect your families from marauding hoards of walking corpses. We offer readers our full and unconditional apologies, in the sincere hope that your loyalty will remain undiminished, regardless of the tragic unintended consequences of this misinformation.
MALE STRIPPER STOLE BILLIARD BALLS TheChiddingly Tricycle Torville Wellington, a wallpaper remover of no fixed abode, was remanded in custody, accused of possession of illegally acquired items; namely three billiard balls (one red, two white) which, it is alleged, he concealed about his person and then removed from the Temperance Billiard Hall, Chiddingly, without prior permission.
SOCCER LATEST: WARRIORS ON THE UP Since Hastings & St Leonards Warriors’ inexorable plummet to the bottom of the Nuclear Waste Disposal Solutions League (South), caretaker manager and former Warriors’ ruthless enforcer Nobby Balaclava has taken the team to four successive narrow defeats, a club record. Last Saturday’s 7-0 defeat by Herstmonceaux Cannibals was a case in point. “I’m proud to be associated with this great club,” Nobby told us the morning after the match, when we met at The Withered Spoon for its famous ‘All Day Brexit’ – a pint of Cider, two shots of Sambuca, a margherita and a lightly boiled egg, £7-75 with a free muffin.
“To be fair, the result has delighted the fans. Once they scored that seventh, I signalled the lads to revert to 11-0-0 with a flat back 10 and it worked a treat. Goalie Tim Smegma did a great job considering he couldn’t see any of the play and we pegged the score at 7-0. So far this season we have failed to concede less than eight goals. If we continue this positive upward curve we could be only losing 2-0 come the 2023/24 mid-season. That’s progress whichever way you crumble the cookies”. As we were leaving, he borrowed a felt tip pen from a barmaid and scribbled next week’s team selection on the bald head of the unconscious man at the next table, before punching a waiter and running upstairs, where he exited via the window of one of the pub’s immaculate toilets and was later tasered by police. I was able to capture this exclusive preview of next Saturday’s Warriors’ squad with my smartphone:
SAY GOODBYE TO IRONING MISERY! When added to your weekly wash, new formula Botoxydol, with Botulinim Toxin A, will guarantee youthful, wrinkle-free clothes.
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Our team has prepared detailed reporting — with direct quote sources and on-the-ground updates about the devastating situation in Ukrainian animal shelters.
We’d be happy to provide extra information — translations, quotes, or access to sources, photo and video materials — for your organization to cover the events.
TL:DRs:
Over 5,000 animals and volunteers in animal shelters are under blockade with no food supplies in the Kyiv region, Ukraine. Volunteers cannot get there to provide assistance, the Russian armed forces are blocking access.
Two volunteers were blatantly shot dead near Kharkiv when attempting to feed animals in an occupied zoo.
Animal shelters across Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mykolaiv regions have been under attack and urgently need humanitarian aid.
Three volunteers were shot dead in their vehicle by Russian forces when attempting food delivery to a Bucha animal shelter.
Since the war in Ukraine erupted in the early hours of Feb, 23rd, thousands of volunteer-led animal shelters have been fully cut off from the supplies. Risking their lives, volunteers still attempt to evacuate the trapped animals or at least deliver food supplies to facilities, located amidst ranging warzones.
As of March 10th, over 5,000 animals are stranded across the country in Kyiv Oblast’, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and other hot zones.
Oleksandr Todorchuk, founder of “UAnimals” movement for animal rights says:
“The situation with animals and shelters is just awful. We know about the shelling of at least 4 shelters in Ukraine, which were intentionally or accidentally hit by a bombshell. Many animals died. In Mykolaiv as a result of the selling by Russian
occupiers 100 cats in the shelter were lost. Two employees of the Feldman Ecopark (Kharkiv) were shot by the Russians when they came just to feed the animals.”
Apart from deliberate shootings, Russian forces are denying humanitarian corridors to allow animal volunteers to access affected areas and bring in supplies or transport the animals out to safer zones.
Kyiv Region
Over 3,000 animals and volunteers are trapped in the county’s largest shelter, Sirius, located in the Dymer community, 60 km north of Kyiv.
Iryna Lozova, “Sirius” shelter coordinator, says:
“Since February 24, “Sirius” has been under blockade. There is no access to the shelter: all the routes are blocked by the Russian occupiers. They do not allow the transportation of food or medicine for people and animals of the Dymer community. People and animals are on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe. There is no electricity in the community and animal shelter, no water, no cellular connection, and no Internet, there is constant shelling.
As for the shelter – the animals there are very scared by shelling and the sounds of war, they are trying to escape, they are getting injured. Two dogs are in critical condition, three dogs, unfortunately, died. Pet food is available until Saturday. We are very grateful to the locals who give us cereals, potatoes, beetroot, carrot, offal almost for free or even for free – and we are able to feed the animals. All attempts of volunteers and humanitarian organizations to transfer aid to the territory of the Dymer community mostly end with shelling by the Russian occupiers.
We are negotiating over the possibility of evacuating our animals, but the main issue today is the lack of a safe passage, a “green corridor”.”
Further updates from “Sirius” are available via their FB page.
Hostomel shelter is one of the oldest shelters in the country, where over 700 animals and 4 people remain stranded since the start of the war. Local volunteers have already survived two weeks of heavy shelling with nearly all urban infrastructure destroyed.
The shelter has been hit by shells three times and attacked by a tank. As of March, 10th Hostomel shelter team reports:
“We have no food and water. We need a humanitarian corridor to not just evacuate people from the shelter, but also to allow humanitarian aid to be delivered to the shelter. We need to provide animals with food, water, and a generator for heating”.
The volunteers urge local and international animal organizations to intervene and facilitate the establishment of safe passage before all the animals are dead.
“Best Friends” shelter, located in Makarivs’kyi district of Kyiv Oblast’, was deliberately targeted by Russian troops on March 1st. The shelter is situated in a remote rural area, miles away from any object of military significance.
Over 900 animals were at risk of dying when the shell hit the facility, causing a major fire. Volunteers managed to release some of the animals from their enclosures — but over a hundred died in the fire.
The team says:
“Our shelter is bombed to the ground. But we didn’t abandon our pets. Two brave volunteers come to visit it each day — our manager Kristina and her husband. Under heavy gunfire, they keep coming to feed the animals, who are now roaming in the nearby village and across the fields. We are waiting for a miracle to evacuate our animals. [Humanitarian aid] already tried to reach us — but they weren’t allowed to pass.”
Photos and videos of the current situation are available on Best Friend’s Facebook page.
Eastern Ukraine, Kharkiv region
In Kharkiv, an animal shelter was hit by a shell on March, 8th. 293 dogs were at the premises during that time. Five dogs died and five enclosures were ruined. Six more dogs got different wounds — Animal rescue Kharkiv, Ukraine NGO reported.
Feldman Ecopark — a private zoo, located in Kharkiv Oblast’ — was also shelled by Russian forces on February, 24th. Five shells exploded on the territory with many animals severely wounded or killed.
On March 7th another attack was carried out on the Ecopark. In a posted video, the Ecopark owner, Alexander Feldman says:
“Two volunteers entered the park to try and feed the animals. They were met with gunfire and shot dead by the occupant forces. […].Yet, we are doing everything we can to save the animals in the Eco Park and not endanger humans.”
Southern Ukraine, Mykolaiv Oblast’
On March 5th, a shell hit a two-story building, located in Kalinovka urban settlement, Mykolaiv Oblast’. The building housed a local animal shelter. Over 20 animals died in the fire. Two people in the nearby house were wounded and taken to the hospital.
Animal volunteers shot dead in Bucha, Kyiv Oblast’
UAnimals and international news outlets also reported the death of three animal volunteers, who attempted to bring in animal food and evacuate some animals in the Bucha town in Kyiv Oblast’.
Their vehicle was attacked by Russian soldiers, operating in the area before they could reach their destination. All three died on the spot.
Ukrainian volunteers keep supporting animals despite grave risks to their lives, but need your support!
Despite facing direct threats to their lives Ukrainian volunteers relentlessly continue rescue efforts and keep shipping humanitarian aid to shelters.
However, without wider awareness from the global animal rights activities and urgent advocacy for establishing safe humanitarian aid passages, wider efforts cannot be carried out.
We’d be happy to provide further reporting, quotes, and fixing with local sources for you to cover the grave situation in Ukraine.
We need greater coverage and awareness among international NGOs and governments to pressure the Russian forces to establish safe passage and green corridor and stop killing innocent people and animals!
#SaveAnimalsInUA
Brave Nick Tadd is driving his pick-up into wartorn Ukraine to save the country’s pets
‘Life beckons me. It whispers, it calls me and in the end, it screams at me.’ Tony Parsons
On the phone to Krakow this morning and one of those clear moments when the obfuscation of doubt falls away and truth sings in all its fullness.
I am unsure who said it first, but a definitive and pulsing silence said we hit pay dirt.
‘The divine will not intervene, the world will not change, until the vast majority of people are on their knees, praying, asking, begging for help.’
Does that mean that things will have to get worse?
Much worse.
In a flash, I travelled back 35 years when I was alone in a room, my body poisoned by alcohol once more, desperate yet unable to stop drinking.
I slithered to the floor and cried to an unknown god – an instinctive response which shook me with surprise.
When all else was gone, everything stripped away, that’s where I landed; on my knees, knowing I would soon die.
My first sincere prayer was answered and it wasn’t long before I sobered up for good.
‘It has to be just like when you quit drinking,’ said my telepathic friend, going on to tell the story of the late journalist Malcolm Muggeridge who found himself in Ukraine – perhaps not a coincidence – at another singular moment, in a church surrounded by dead bodies, people praying.
It was entirely profound and holy in a way that few of us will either experience or comprehend.
It seems our stubborn pride, the dream of individuality, as Parsons calls it, acts as a bulwark between us and God. Calamity is the sword that hangs over us until like Damocles we realize with great power comes great responsibility.
Yet in our fear of such power, we have willingly handed it over to others we hoped would keep us safe – from Covid, Russians, Isis, the next biological eruption.
We didn’t know they would abuse that power, needing to believe in their goodness and infallibility, trusting like naïve children, terrified of growing up.
And we have become so entrenched in our denial about our ‘saviours’ that we refuse to believe their villainy despite the mass of evidence, gathered like wheat in a barn, but with doors firmly closed.
Few people want to look, almost no-one wants their bubble burst, for that would mean the end of the universe as we know it, the one we carefully constructed over decades on a crumbling armature of lies and deception.
It’s why most therapy clients fail: they cannot bear to hold mummy and daddy up to the light of scrutiny, preferring their dreams of an idyllic childhood, which is almost never the case.
This gap between fantasy and truth is the cause of much mental illness and it is where most people find themselves camped, refugees from reality, holding aloft government scientists and corrupt politicians, Big Pharma and Big Tech.
If they had any psychological training and knew, for instance, the Karpman Drama Triangle, they perhaps would have understood the perilous relations of the triangular victim-persecutor-rescuer.
In short, if you are a victim and seek rescuing, your rescuer will almost certainly become your persecutor at a later date.
It’s all a con but it’s too big a con to take on board. Most people simply lack the courage; it is not the despotic psychopaths nicely suited and smiling at the helm of self-elected bodies for the rich and powerful that are the real problem.
It is the wounded child still in need of wish fulfilment returning to his abusive parents again and again.
What’s that definition of insanity? Oh yes – to keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
The modern ostrich will not only stick his head in the sand but – and this is a new trick – can perform any number of mental gymnastics to stay within the bounds of untruth, thus on the side of the majority.
Yet if history shows us anything, it’s that the masses rarely see the truth and will persecute unto death the good guys who want to relieve them of their insanity.
The peculiarity of the human species is that we defend our right to remain insane and side with our oppressors who lure us to despise an enemy ‘over there’ while all the time the true enemy is in front of our face.
Rare is the individual who wishes to research, understand context – which is vital – sincerely seeking the truth of any situation.
The lazy mind will quickly saddle up and ride off into the sunset with the Mail, BBC or The Guardian who have adroitly triggered their emotional wounds and got them all clapping like seals for nurses, soon switched from saviour to enemy on the turn of a dime.
This absurdity is now leap-frogging from one twisting tale to another and no doubt the same people are hopping.
Hopping or clapping, it’s all nonsense, total tosh for those who have lost the capacity to move the neo-cortex in any meaningful way and are stuck with all the horrors of the reptilian brain.
Instinctive, animal responses are as far as most travel, never questioning official narratives, holding up flags for some countries as directed, completely ignoring others relentlessly persecuted for years by our own side.
Psychological projection at its most basic. I will take the evil I can’t bear to see in me and stick it on you, then direct everyone to hate you.
It’s classic misdirection, stage craft turned state craft.
We are already the poorer for it, but there’s further to go. In the end, there will be only one place left and we won’t be standing.
Where four-wheel drives with combat jeeps
Joust and bully by your plate-glass shops
Where coffee-parlour prices hike to meet smart eateries’
Money frowns disdainfully and contemplates your high-street
This real-estate of ‘Londongrad’ is not a deal to sniff at
Canny money haggles for the high life
One birthday cake so easily becomes
A binge with charming chums in a private flat
Above ‘the shop’ – so what?
Lightweights tie themselves in knots
Sticking bygone labels onto libertine new bottles
Statesmen of the world stand firm
Statesmen are a ‘Firm’ of worldwide dealers
World-wide wheeler-dealer leaders
All affirm no fire exists without due confirmation
A flagrant conflagration?
History prefers its smoke machine
Would some wag suggest ‘cocaine’ is present
Inhibition bent by vintage ‘wine’
Muscle-bound emasculating paranoiac ‘steroids’
Disturbing moral compass of the brain –
Others claim imaginary ‘cocaine’
As ‘tonic’ sets them ‘sober’ after ‘wine’
The very reverse is true –
Coca-ethanol corrupts sound judgement
Impulsive action seems a safe resource –
This is not inspired by any god
But tangled wiring stuffed in ailing brains
Pressing keys of macho mis-education
Rendering its bearers obsolete
Grandiose plans then fumble for a number
Chums prepare to hunker in a bunker
(“Let the bodies pile up in the street”)
‘Cockaigne’ of Elgar’s London may persist
Where ‘politics’ continues to translate
As predatory mania for possession
Where acquisition check-mates moral ethics
Negotiable notions of evil
Prevail where the ‘great and the good’
Are utterly convinced of their own ‘good’
IMPERMANENT
If now your ears are ringing
Ring-doves ceased from singing
Old cold war once more insists
Impermanent the peace you dreamt exists
The column that thinks a man without a corduroy waistcoat is like a barbecue fork without a window
READER: Where are you? MYSELF: I’m over here. Why are you wearing a blindfold? READER: Just in case you hadn’t noticed, as well as being blindfolded I’m also tied up. MYSELF: Tied up? READER: You kidnapped me yesterday and locked me in your office. MYSELF: Oh yes, I forgot.
CLASSIFIED ADS
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Legend of the Dark Spoons by Hugh Jaarce
(1st edition slightly foxed) £35
Tintin & the Belgian Eels by Hergé. Very Rare Walloon edition (mint) £253.75 Cheer up it’s only a Shoe (English translation) by José Tonto Guacamole. ( Page 42 missing hence £5)
Dear Wendy, Ever since (for reasons best left to the imagination) my husband Malcolm decided to become Lithuanian, I have been unable to understand a single word he says. Dining has become a nightmare of miscommunicated sign language and ruined appetite. Can you recommend a good crash course in Lithuanian – or should I just settle for blank looks?R Peggio (Mrs)
Dear Mrs Peggio, Many a woman would gladly swap an anally retentive Englishman for a fiery Lithuanian stud, language barrier or not. Since most ideas can be conveyed with a saucy twitch of the eyebrow or a knowing wink, I would consider learning a difficult Balkan language to be not strictly necessary. However should you insist on going down that terrifying linguistic rabbit hole, may I suggest Lithuanian Without Tears, by Hadjik Kpetliana, (Hummous & Pterodactyl, £17.99) Tegul jūsų virtuvė visada būna aprūpinta žiurkėmis! Wendy
To Mrs. Rameses III, of East Chillingly
Regarding your interior design query – please don’t take this personally, but I feel a stuffed and mounted pangolin is going to clash, particularly with your curtains. If all you require is a conversation piece which you can just leave casually lying around to startle guests out of their comas, you might consider a publicity picture of John Wayne from The Ten Commandments, or failing that, a cordless electric dog warmer.
MIDNIGHT COW BAR Police were called to Jus Teat, the new all night Spanish milk bar in Herstmonceux, shortly after its official opening. Nigel Farage, who had been been tempted out of retirement to cut the ceremonial ribbon, was clearly under the influence of something stronger when during his speech he made sarcastic reference to the Spanish Inquisition, greasy foreign muck and Catharine of Aragon, whom he compared unfavourably with Liz Truss. Members of the audience, many of them carrying concealed alcohol, became unruly and began to throw articles from the tapas bar at Mr Farage, who was reported to have burst into tears after being hit in the face by a dish of Gambas Pil-Pil. Chief of Police Hydra Gorgon ordered the East Sussex armed response helicopter unit to the scene which was unfortunately prevented from landing owing to a performance by The Herstmonceux Observatory Motorcycle Display Team which was taking place outside.
“Mr Farage is entitled to his opinion,” Chief Constable Gorgon told us, “but the
misogynistic comparison between Henry VIII’s barren wife and our fecund Home Secretary was a juxtaposition too far. Mr Farage should be thankful that his ambulance arrived just before we did, the armed police unit having been forced to divert to nearby Lydd airport and make the rest of the journey by bicycle.”
Detectives are keen to question the meddling guru of gobshite directly he regains consciousness.
FARMWORKERS PAY DISPUTE DRAGS ON
Farm workers gathered yesterday in a Sussex turnip field to voice their objections to the goverenment’s proposed pay increase. The offer of a 25% salary rise was described by FWU spokesman Ted Lard, 47, as “far too much” as he led the protesting workers to Cockmarlin’s Landfill ‘n Seagull Sanctuary, where they ceremoniously dumped two hundred 5 kilo sacks of Zapitall Weed ‘n Wildlife Killer into the adjacent reservoir. SLURRY SEEMS TO BE THE HARDEST WORD One marcher, William Doult 49, of Beyondenden said “What do they expect us to do with all that extra money? My wife already has her hair done three times a week. It’s a scandal. We are being made scapegoats. An all-out strike is planned. When the lack of tractor-drawn slurry wagons blocking the roads begins to bite, you’ll see public sympathy start to swing our way. Mark my words, emergency stockpiles of well rotted manure will not last for ever. Underestimating the feelings of the general public on this one could leas to riots. Ordinary folk will not stand for it, and if management insist on behaving like ostriches, then they are living in what can only be described as cloud cuckoo excrement.” SANDWICHES Ted Lard later attended a fringe meeting at the Horse & Nightmare public house in Upper Dicker where he appeared tired and exhausted after the day’s protests. During a speech to the assembled farmworkers, just prior to falling into the assorted sandwiches laid on by Mrs Rumsfeld of the Upper Dicker Women’s Institute, he accused Landowner Lord Alexi Andreyev of wearing ladies undergarments, and playing the balalaika to his neighbour’s livestock during the breeding season. Lord Andreyev made the following statement, via Zoom, from his Dacha in Eastbourne:
“It is not for me to to comment on whether this is or is not a significant step in one direction or another. Whether there has been any progress or indeed egress in either direction i cannot say. Even were I privy to such information, the laws of sub judice would require that I refrain from comment, and furthermore, do not say anything”.
Asked whether any of Mr Lard’s lurid accusations had any basis in fact, he added,
“The most I can tell you, one way or the other, is no comment”.
READER: Sorry to interrupt, but when are you going to untie me? MYSELF: When they pay the ransom.
Sausage Life!
Colin Gibson • Emmet Ives • Anita Makris
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What a fix! From hot-water bottle days I stretched out – alone – to find an entire industry and economy, a civilisation, hierarchical and clambering, its apex annual awards for struggles with identity and rewarding ethnicity.
But the texts! Never had mankind been so blessed. Production was uncontrolled, except by mentors & experts, throwing rope-ladders down to mendicants & supplicants, thrashing in the icy waters.
I got one foot out, one spidery hand onto a rung. Someone in Covent Garden grabbed my thinning thatch – I was saved – but ideology unsound sucked me back down, beneath the dying swimmers, into the depths where madmen fought over the pillaged wreckage.
Identical yet bigger and better, the firework displays far above, the lectureships and Masonic networks, tentacles twitching through our lassoed culture, strangling any single voice.
I have taught ‘London’ too many times not to know the harlot’s curse, not to smash my brains out on those palace walls.
Oh you bastards, hypocrites, witches – your treasures are toilet paper for odourless faeces.
Worried she looks everywhere,
spots silly Teddy hiding under
the pillow. But Dolly isn’t there.
Mummy said to pick one toy, but
she struggles to leave cuddly pals.
She can’t ask Daddy. He hunts,
muttering. Papers, they’re here.
Passports, must find them. Must.
The noise again, that horrid monster
howling. It really scares Dolly.
Mummy is packing. Holiday!
Mummy did talk about shells.
She must tell Dolly. The seaside,
not down in the inky underground.
If only those nasty noises would stop.
Outage / outrage
.
Black ribbon in a prayer book,
mothballs in granny’s woollens,
mice in a sharp trap, it slips
into the News, slides between
bombings, safety corridors.
No power at Chernobyl. No
cooling of radioactive material.
Slicing onions I sense storm
clouds dispersing over Europe.
We fled underground in the fiery red-faced dawn With the eyes of Armageddon shedding all our ties Who will forgive or forget; this is where freedom dies Families split, looking for shelter, food, begging for water Sirens wail, crack & crush hearts with our children’s fear Still, empty streets look up to dervish flashes in the sky Then tanks and soldiers march and there’s no reason why
Voices heard across the world, this war, ‘not in our name!’ These weapons of destruction, they’re fixing in our mind Bow down to the despot’s dream, just deaf, dumb and blind Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose ‘Though they may never leave, the men they take up arms Some old and frail stay behind; it’s the only life they know I may never see you again ‘Take this memory of me, go!’
Politicians & those who preach proclaim we’ll make a better place Bombs of ‘freedom’ fall all around, a vanished life in our Ukraine Women and children, downcast, trembling, packed on the train So strange that only yesterday saw happy crowds in the streets Now we’re citizens of nowhere, refugees without a place or home Destination unknown, beginning new life & friends, it’s safe to cry.
Then quiet with us, our shelter, food & drink; freedom will not die
“…forgive or forget” Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose – Janis Joplin
‘citizens of nowhere’ in Thomas More’s book, Utopia, 1516
Henry VIII appointed him Chancellor of England in 1529 & beheaded More in 1535
the scatter-winds of February redistribute last week’s garbage from there to here in a cascade of a hundred yesterdays, until I no longer know if JF Kennedy, Buddy Holly and Monica Lewinsky are history or myth, there are reality shows where Thai girls endure cosmetic surgery to become Shakira, or Barbi dolls, there are political theorists to explain how Watergate was perpetrated by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, ethical issues have become a Freeview game-show with trick questions to catch out the unwary, such as whether HG Wells made the first moon landing or if it was a CBS telecast, contestants get a five second countdown to decide, Martin Amis puts characters called Martin Amis in his novels, but swears they’re not him, I no longer know if Jupiter is really the size we see it in data from the James Webb Space Telescope or if fortune is simply a poem by another name
Some reflections on this bastion publication from the UK’s intentional communities: Alan Dearling
A new edition of an ‘old friend’! This is the latest incarnation of ‘Diggers and Dreamers’, which is an amalgam of articles about, and from within intentional communities, co-ops, co-housing, communes and more. Plus an update of the directory of the UK’s self-identified ‘intentional communities’. I’ve visited many such spaces, places and groups of people around the world – especially those in Australia, and the Netherlands, Denmark and Lithuania AND some of those based in the UK. Some started out as squats, some even were based on the experiences of festivals and the Green, eco-movements, spiritualty/religious beliefs. Many are rural, a fair few are urban, some have involved self-build, a lot feature low-impact responses to modern living.
There have been many communities that have existed from the 1960s and ‘70s, evolved, morphed and some of those included are very new and are more extensions of the co-operative movement as responses to the on-going housing ‘crises’. Some are hi-tech and experiments in alternative and cutting-edge technologies. Others are very low-tech, off-grid, and involve tipis, benders, and earth-bermed structures lovingly formed by crafts-people rekindling old skills (often borrowed from other world cultures). There are also places which are based on ‘communality’, shared ownership and explorations of new social relationships and economic structures.
As the Diggers and Dreamers’ Website says:
“For many people another way of living starts with this book…
So you’re fed up with living in a little box. Maybe just by yourself. Maybe with your family. Just being a docile consumer alongside the billions of other docile consumers. And the combined outcome of it all is a wrecked planet.
Isn’t there something more to life than this? Couldn’t we have access to many of the best things in life without doing such harm if we were prepared to share more with our neighbours? Perhaps in an intentional community – that’s a community that has come together by intention rather than by chance.
Believe it or not, many people have been living in intentional communities like this for decades. And it’s not all hippy crash pads where nobody does the washing up! This website will open your eyes to the multifarious ways in which communal living happens in the 21st century.
It’s your way into the future!”
‘Diggers and Dreamers’ as a loose-knit organisation offers a gateway into what is a ‘parallel universe’ that has continually evolved, and the new edition reflects the diversity of intentional communities. The 12th edition of the Directory offers ‘stories’ from the ‘edges’ and ‘hearts’ of these communities, and views from some of those who research such. It also offers practical insights and links, opportunities to go out and meet people who live in intentional communities. It suggests opportunities for volunteering, taster-visits, self-build courses, WWOOF-ING (worldwide on organic farms) and more.
From my own (about) fifty years of visiting friends and colleagues in some of these spaces – the motivations, beliefs and daily practices of the people are just as varied and sometimes conflictual as ever. The articles in the book and some of the Directory descriptions share some of the issues. For example: Rules and personal and communal ‘boundaries’ and ‘relationships’, sexual and otherwise! – ownership – inheritance – sharing in the work – age structure – degrees of communality – finance issues – relationship with the outside community and society – personal beliefs – pets – child-rearing – cleaning and maintenance etc. It’s a long list…and can equally be a source of creativity and challenges!
The D&D network is nicely eclectic. So, whether you’re a potential ‘dreamer’ of new options for living, or, a ‘digger’ wanting to get your hands dirty with self-build and permaculture – this is a way of finding out more. They also have many more books and resources which you can look at on their website. Kirsten Stevens-Wood, one of the editors of the Directory, says: “During the last couple of years we have seen an upsurge in enquiries to our website and on social media.”
Chris Coates, one of the main D&D movers and shakers has kept in touch with me over many years, especially in connection with European free cultural spaces, new Travellers, festies and more. His blog is a great resource through ‘Communes Britannica’: http://blog.utopia-britannica.org.uk/
For intentional communities in Europe and beyond, you might also want to explore Eurotopia: https://eurotopia.directory/
The Gipsy was written by Bob Pegg, and recorded by the English folk rock band Mr Fox in 1971. The song was released on the LP also called The Gipsy, on the Transatlantic label. It tells of a journey through the Yorkshire Dales by a man in search of his Gipsy girl friend.
Mr Fox were an early 1970s British folk rock band. They were seen as in the ‘second generation’ of British folk rock performers and for a time were compared with Steeleye Span and Sandy Denny‘s Fotheringay. Unlike Steeleye Span they mainly wrote their own material in a traditional style and developed a distinct ‘northern’ variant of the genre. They demonstrate the impact and diversity of the British folk rock movement and the members went on to pursue significant careers within the folk rock and traditional music genres after they disbanded in 1972 having recorded two highly regarded albums.
Fear of the Dark is a common tendency in culture and the arts that rejects subjectivist forms and movements; it rejects the workings of the Lyric Ego and it rejects Romantic Individualism more generally. Ironically, Fear of the Dark in its contemporary form (it has, of course, been with us for as long as the dark itself) may well have originated with those Romantic pastoral poets and thinkers who rejected all aspects of modernity, rejecting especially the exigencies and demands of life in the urban metropolis.
Fear of the Dark is a phobic fear of introversion and inwardness, sometimes disguised by would-be ascetics with moral arguments against ‘self-indulgence’, ‘egotism’, the ‘worship of false gods’ or ‘ivory tower aestheticism’. In truth Fear of the Dark is a horror of the psychic depths, fear of the uncanny, fear of the Shadow and the shadow world, fear of the dark-side and fear of the unknown.
Anxious critics and commentators who suffer from Fear of the Dark tend to privilege the Apollonian over the Dionysian, the impersonal over the personal, the abstract over the figurative and value the Classic over the Romantic. At the same time they usually promote high-brow ideas of ‘elevated’ taste, ‘great’ traditions and cultural superiority. This fear is often projected onto the consumer society, onto mass entertainment, advertising and industrial mass production. Such phenomena are often treated with disdain, defined as ‘kitsch’, denigrated as ‘decadent’ or, even condemned as idolatry.
Radical nonconformists may well feel they are on an iconoclastic mission to cleanse the world of distracting images and the products of the imagination. However, as Jung says, the Shadow ‘cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness’. Furthermore, this fear can also be transformed into hatred because it reminds us of our ‘helplessness and ineffectuality’ in the face of the unknown – hence the zealotry of puritans driven by a compulsive phobia – Fear of the Dark.
A disembodied voice above a clattering rhythm gives way to a sawing guitar, only to return accompanied by the sound of metal being tortured by squeals of feedback and wittering synths. Welcome to ‘Morning Land’, the opening track of Faust’s new album Punkt.
I say new, but this is the first stand alone release of an album made back in the early 70s as the final gasp of the band’s original line-up, which was also part of a wonderful 2021 box set which gathered up all of Faust’s music from 1971-74. At the time, Virgin refused to release Punkt or to foot the recording and hotel bills, so the band smuggled the tapes out and then sat in prison until two of their mothers paid up!
It’s actually one of Faust’s best albums, with a focussed energy, intriguing instrumentation, and a wide sonic palette of sound. There are abstract, distant recordings that sound like proto-dub at the far end of an echo chamber (‘Crapolino’), rousing wailing horns above a demented motorik beat (on the very wonderful 11 minute ‘Knochentanz’), whilst ‘Juggernaut’ offers an eerie take on rock music before mutating into a reggae skank underpinning what sounds like a jet plane taking off.
Elsewhere there is a two minute miniature, ‘Fernlicht’, a sound haiku that offers a stately procession between longer tracks; the more rambling and gentle ‘Schön Rund’, a piano sonata with noise interludes; and the closing ‘Prend Ton Temps’ which is constructed from looped vocals, backward tape percussion, distant chants and more clattering drums, all sounding like a demented war rally. Eventually it sputters to a halt, but since I have been playing the album on repeat, it all starts over again.
Faust, Can and Tangerine Dream, are the bands which pretty much defined krautrock for many in the UK. They each made very different music from the others, but all went on to damage their reputations and musical legacy with inferior albums, endless line-up changes and more mainstream, commercial or self-derivative work. There are at least two different Faust line-ups currently making music and touring (and of course not talking to each other), so Punkt is a welcome addition to the core body of work which Faust’s reputation rests on. Almost 50 years on this music remains fresh, original and innovative; it’s great to have an official version of this album at last – and it’s one of Faust’s best!
the parting shot
on ambulances of desire
from labour lords to sink estates
the chain of command grips a nation
in waiting for its hero alliances
those who smashed the records for
partying hard into the night and jockeyed
out the requiems in tablets of stone
faced civil servants who far from civil
list attributes now fallen into disarray
while onlookers dance rhythms of dismay.
‘The emergency powers’ we have witnessed being enforced in Canada – and by another name in Austria, Italy, France, Australia, New Zealand and Greece in recent weeks – are quite obviously without precedent. The spectre of Prime Ministers and Presidents awarding themselves demagogic powers of over-reach to force their citizens to comply with the prison persuasions of a police state – represents outright war on humanity.
Brutal acts of thuggery that, in one fell swoop, smash what until now most have considered sacrosanct civil codes of justice and basic human rights.
Evoking such ‘emergency powers’ to crush the right to peaceful protest sets all the red lights flashing simultaneously, putting us on high alert.
The precipitous events in Ukraine have stolen the focus from the swelling voices of reason amongst citizens under the Covid cosh. But this doesn’t take away from the fact that an actual war has been declared right in our own backyards and is being pursued here and now. A war that is essentially as repressive and vindictive as classical weapons based wars of attrition.
The evoking of dictatorial powers to crush a nation’s own people is deeply criminal. Evoking such powers to brutally enforce absolute control over peace loving citizens is a crime of truly heinous proportions.
The major question raised in the minds of all sentient humans is who could possibly be so devoid of humanity as to be able to enforce such a crime?
In attempting to answer this question we should consider whether this form of evil stems from a recognised psychological sickness, or whether it results from a pathological form of conditioning carried-out on those who willingly open themselves to being programmed?
A form of such conditioning is widely found to be operating within the ranks of technocratic institutions under the title ‘applied behavioural psychology.’ One of a number of psychological tools used by the 0.5% cabal seeking to establish a New World Order/Great Reset centralising power over mankind – including the theft of human DNA and ultimately the complete robotisation of human kind.
What we can ascertain without the need for further uncertainty is that amongst world ‘leaders’ of today, a percentage are clinically insane – seriously mentally ill. So when dealing with those who have no qualms and no emotional instinct against using extreme repression to get their way, one must start from the position of clearly recognising that one is dealing with a person who, in rational circumstances, would be hospitalised and under special treatment. Not running a country or deciding the future direction of the planet.
One doesn’t plead with a clinically insane person for the return of one’s stolen civil liberties. Nor should one attempt to enter into a rational/intellectual conversation with someone who is regarding one as ‘abnormal’ because one has feelings and emotions. A pathologically possessed person sees a balanced individual that way – and his cold heart finds no commonality with the great majority of human beings.
Brave leaders of resistance movements can suddenly find themselves face to face with a senior state figurehead in an immaculately pressed and ironed suit, perfect manners, seemingly steely resolve and a pre-prepared script in his brain – and think this individual must be clever, successful and strong – but somehow gone astray. Someone who, with enough gentle persuasion and/or prayer, must finally come around to taking a rational and understanding view concerning resolving the conflict in question.
But in truth the good resistance leader in such a situation, is delusional. He or she is not aware that hoping for a rational response from a pathologically driven individual is a futile expectation.
Trudeau’s training as one of Klaus Schwab’s ‘young leaders’ guaranteed that no answer would emerge in response to the Canadian trucker’s call for dialogue. The training indoctrinates the trainee to have no other position than the one which gets the job done.
The same goes for senior technocrats, most politicians and virtually all employees of State hierarchies. We are dealing with entities that are programmed to perform; so what one is facing is a programme that looks like a human.
Only once we have absorbed this fact can we then plan an approach that fits the circumstances. Develop a tactic which fully takes-in the reality that one can’t negotiate with a pre-programmed cyborg.
To be successful, such a plan must be based upon a methodology which fits the reality. That addresses the actual circumstances.
In Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film ‘2001 a Space Odyssey’ the space mission’s logistics are heavily reliant upon ‘Hal’ the onboard computer. But the hero (Dave) is not aware that Hal has been programmed to follow a suicidal mission deep into space.
Hal is programmed to issue advice verbally and persuasively. It takes a strong action of will for Dave (captain of the space mission) – having discovered the deception – to de-programme Hal and manually re-set the mission’s course back to Earth.
Precisely the same act of courage is needed now, in 2022. The world has been set (programmed) on a course that, if not diverted, will dehumanise the human race and disinvest the planet of its living soul.
In Kubrick’s film, the hero manages to retain his individual will power and self assurance, ultimately resisting and reversing the instructions being proffered by super computer Hal.
Make no mistake, that is exactly what is required of us at this critical moment of history.
Julian Rose
Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. Julian’s acclaimed book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info
Free from all other associations, now Youth releases
His first solo album, opening his heart and past for a future
In a selection which mixes Monkees like moments
With shades of Johnny Cash, Jilted John; not to mention
The Doors and the sweetened swish of the Velvets,
And the gentle grace of Tims Hardin and Buckley;
With each chord catherdral he seems to congregate
Holy songs. Title track SpinningWheel rolls him straight
Into the heartland of the ballad. Over his dexterously played
Acoustic, he sings for the first time in a yearn spun,
High, lace like voice that sounds like a loom has threaded
Him into being as he sings of red and gold skies above him
And the sky making naked the still sheltering soul
For whom the fabric of freedom can at last bestow choice.
Youth plays all instruments, with guest spots from
Simon Tong and Violinist Jerry Driver. David Nock’s drums
Also feature, as does Samantha Marais on BV’s.
But this is Youth now for all time and for the first time
As frontman, sat by the fire and spinning his words
To appease. WoodenFloor briskly scores the teenage
Doors he once walked through, in Earls Court
(as he told the tale at The Troubador album launch)
And with Alex Paterson as his roommate, before success
Settled in. It is a sharp and sexualised interlude
As he details their respective encounters either side
Of the bookcase where women lay to ‘Spillwine Frommymouth ‘ for love’s win. ChariotteSays Says a lot about an early love and adventure,
As they ‘pop a pill, have a party’ or lay down and play
‘Likecatsanddogsonthecarpetfloor.’ The Runaway end
Is ecstatic and anthem like, a drug score. As is Pure, with
Imperative the narcotic as you ‘killthebeastinsideyourheart’ And ‘loseyourselfinherfire,’ The dark of desire and a scent
Of myth to the music makes the listening heart crave for more.
Basslines take a backseat for one of music’s best bassists,
As the crafted songs and production of this LA Canyon
In Clapham by way of Cadiz starts to stun. There are Mazzy Stars
In this sky, as well as Syd Barrett, Leonard Cohen and Stephen
Stills humming the beautiful mood Youth’s begun. Each song
Sets a scene, smoke fused and golden, the BePure refrain
Haunts you as night and day now combine. Play these songs loud
And the land shifts beneath you, the tremours of inspiration
Shake to make water in laughter and tears flood the mine.
Songs styled by light quickly alleviate shadow, while bringing
Mist and soft whispers to the blisters and burns dealt by time. CharcoalMan banjos in with its loneliness portrait,
And its fairground fandango at the midway point is indeed
Startling, while That’sTheWay playfully soundtracks seduction,
As its smooth verses sample with a kind of cockney appeal
Fun and sin. The songsmithery shines, as original as it is
Reminiscent, and ShaaLaaLaa–I LoveYou is 1966 to perfection
For 2022’s need for change. Songs become summonings.
And this particular chorus seems captured from a better time
In our past that Youth as artist and producer joyfully comes
To arrange. And so he rolls the dice from this unexpected
And gloriously surprising direction, coming with fresh colours
In which the dare and the dye has been cast. HearTheDolphins Shimmers through like light on sea’s surface, as ‘herdressmoved Withoutrestriction ,’ and the swaying sense to the singing
Ensures that the woman walks on the water through which
Love’s ease swims with peace; while TheKingofLosers upends
That particular piece of contentment with a classic chord pattern
From which uplift itself is released. While the lyric burns bridges
Down the aspirant soul remains rising. And Smiling’s ‘Coldmouth fierceflower’ also contrasts with its tune. And this is how real music
Is made, by counterpointing dimensions. A pumping squeezebox,
Determined is like Frank Tovey’s Sam Hall spitting runes. Final song CloseMyEyes is both classic Rodriguez, as well as Youth fusing Dylan
And Lennon with McAloon and Costello to ‘closethedooronfantasy.’ Sendknowledgetothestars,’ and ‘closehiseyestothinkofyou.’
Which is what will feel true as pleasure is drawn from this bounty,
Of personal anthems, treasured for years; listen, glisten
And then you will know what to do, as the Rockstar reveals
And revels in his beginnings to sing of the progress time
In its spinning and its wisdom like wheel now accrues.
There is Youth’s life in here as well as the mystery
We’re all chasing. He plays his own heartstrings to help us.
Look, its so simple; sex, love and light form the clues.
Although a car breaking down never happens at a convenient time, it’s not always a bad thing. The contemporary human spends so much time rushing around, that sometimes, external forces are required to bring them to a halt. The functionality of a machine is dependent on it working and a broken-down car becomes a useless, large lump of metal, as soon as it looses it’s ability to move. Unless it happens to be raining, when a car, whether it can move or not, becomes a temporary cave. The inventor of the steel roof and the designer of comfortable seats, become gods. Lifting humanity from cold, damp drudgery to an evolved, dry, comfortable world.
Being human, in relationship with another human is a wash with nuanced experience. A human lives a complicated, often, over thought out life, that requires the presence of other humans, to reflect and illuminate their gifts and short comings. Two facing mirrors create infinite reflection.
Speeding down a duel carriageway I pass a broken down car. My windscreen wipers are on full, furiously slapping away the huge drops of rain that threaten my safe progress. To my left, in a lay-by, sits a car with its hazards on. Behind the misted glass, I can just make out the shape of two human beings, sat, twisted toward each other. Deep in conversation.
‘Why does it always happen when you’re doing something? We’re supposed to be there in in fifteen minutes.’ The driver throws himself back in to his seat and sighs. The human being in the passenger seat seems more relaxed. ‘If we weren’t doing something, we wouldn’t be in the car’, he says, looking straight forward, unsmiling. ‘Oh, piss off clever clogs’, comes the well trodden reply. They both laugh.
‘How long ‘til they get here?’ asks the passenger. The driver lifts his phone. ‘An hour at least, apparently’. A lorry speeds past them causing the car to rock, and water to dowse the glass of the driver’s door. The red of the lorry’s tail lights smudge across the windscreen. Both men, shudder. The driver, twisting round in his seat, reaches in to the back and pulls a woollen coat in to the front. Leaning forward, he clumsily works his body in to it. Huffing and puffing with every change of position. The passenger watches, enthralled. Smiling.
Once both arms of the coat are filled with the corresponding limbs, the driver lifts himself, smoothing the coat under his bum and thighs, before landing again in to the seat. Releasing another sigh, he looks over to see the smiling passenger. ‘What?’ he asks, shrugging. ‘Nothing’, the passenger replies, not taking the opportunity to let the other man know how much he enjoys watching the way he conducts the little things in his life. ‘Well, stop grinning’, the driver orders, while he straightens out his coat. Busying himself by looking through the pockets, ‘I feel like the entertainment’. ‘You are the entertainment’, the passenger replies. The routine playing out beautifully.
The driver finds a biro with no lid, three scraps of paper, (that he carefully unfolds, examines, refolds and puts back in the same pocket he took them from, a sweet wrapper and an unidentifiable piece of thin metal, which he looks at for a minute, before showing it to the passenger to help identify it. ‘What’s that then?’ he asks, holding it up between them, with his left hand. ‘Hmm, I don’t know’, admits the passenger, ‘let’s have a look’. He pulls the metal from the drivers hand. ‘Careful’, the driver snaps, ‘it’s sharp’. The passenger doesn’t respond, scrutinising, with a furrowed brow, the item, now held up between his fingers.
The driver watches the passenger. Trying to read his face for any clues to the answer. Then, impatiently asks, ‘So, what is it? ’ The passenger, without removing his gaze from the mystery trinket, that he is now turning in his fingers, thoughtfully replies, ‘ I’ve no idea’. He stretches the words out as if he’s a detective examining a new piece of evidence. Then turns to face the driver. Pouting slightly.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t catch that’. The driver replied, blinking his eyes and shaking his head. ‘You don’t know what it is?’ The drivers voice climbing in pitch as sarcasm is engaged. ‘You, the man who has an answer for everything, does not know what it is?’ He reaches forwards to lift his phone from the dash board in front of him. ‘I better post this, so I can look back and remember the moment. He lifts his phone and takes a photo of the passenger who scowls at the camera and launches the small piece of metal at the driver, who swerves to miss it while his thumbs work at speed to complete the post. In no more than a couple of seconds the job is complete and the phone gets thrown back on the dashboard.
‘You think you’re so funny’, the passenger says pulling his body forward and lifting his bum, in order to retrieve something from his back pocket. ‘I wish we had a flask’, said the driver. ‘Why didn’t you bring a flask?’ The passenger looks at him in disbelief. ‘Why would I bring a flask? We’re only going three miles up the road. Why didn’t you bring a flask? Why is it always me that has to bring things?’ The driver turns away from the passenger’s accusing eyes to face the windscreen, watching the rain, as the flattened drops distort the outside world, before turning back and replying. ‘You’re better at it than me’. ‘Better at what?’ replied the passenger, knowing full well what the answer will be. ‘Better at bringing things, you know, thinking ahead. And, anyway, I haven’t got a flask’. The driver shuffles back in his seat, folding his arms. Content with his defence. ‘You could have borrowed mine’, the passenger suggests, winning the point.
The atmosphere in the car is close. There is a warm dampness to it. Condensation runs down the inside of the windows. For want of something to do, the driver turns on the fan. The sudden invasion of noise and moving air, startles the passenger who, without speaking reaches over and turns it off again. ‘oh, I see, its like that is it’, says the driver, mocking. ‘I hate that noise; you know I do’, the passenger says looking away from the driver. ‘It’s bad enough being stuck in here with you, without being insulted by that. If you want to clear the mist, why don’t you open your window’.
The driver tuts and raises an eyebrow, before turning the key in the ignition and making a big deal of pushing the button to lower the window, which comes down much too fast, letting in the pouring rain. The driver, suddenly drenched, becomes flustered and battles with the switch to raise the glass again, whilst simultaneously fending off the rain with his left hand and, unsuccessfully, dodging rain drops. Much to the hilarity of the passenger. ‘Stop bloody laughing. Its not funny’, snaps the driver, as he manages to coax the window to the top.
He turns, and sits back in his seat. Water dripping off his hair, down on to his forehead. He shakes his hands, sending water across the front of the car, which hits the passenger. ‘Watch out’, the passenger says, trying to avoid it, still laughing. ‘Look at me’, says the driver, ‘I’m bloody soaking. You did that on purpose. You knew that would happen. That’s just like you that is. For goodness’ sake’. He raises himself up, twisting round, to look in the back for something to dry himself with. ‘And stop bloody laughing’, he adds, laughing slightly himself. Cuffing the passenger on the head with his wet sleeve. ‘You think you’re so funny’.
The tea towel I used to dry your sister’s dog off last week is there somewhere’. The passenger laughs at his own joke. ‘Will you just stop it. I’m having a bloody crisis here. You just wait until you’re next needing some help. It’ll be all fun and games then, I can tell you’.
After some rummaging, the driver pulls a shirt in to the front, sits back in his seat and dries his hair with it. Throwing it back between the two front seats once he has rubbed his face and hands. ‘All better?’ the passenger asks. ‘Get lost’, replies the driver. ‘Don’t get in a sulk’, says the passenger, ‘it was good comedy’. ‘Ha bloody ha’, the driver mocks annoyance, folding his arms across his chest. ’I’ve, got something to cheer you up’, the passenger waves his piece of paper in the air. ‘What is that, peace in our time?’ the driver asks, unimpressed. ‘What? ‘, the passenger gives him a quizzical look. ‘Nothing’, says the driver. ‘I can’t be bothered to explain. And stop waving that bit of paper about. You’re annoying me’. He lifts a hand to the passenger’s wrist, and tuts.
The passenger adjusts his position, holding the piece of paper with both hands, in front of him, announcing: ‘This my new comedy routine’. The driver, predictably, rolls his eyes, laughs, lowers his face in to his hands and shakes his head. ‘Oh god save us’; he mutters in to his hands. ‘Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse. You send me a comedy routine. Why? Why?’ Sitting quietly, watching, the passenger let’s the driver have his moment. Then, when the driver lifts his head, carries on. ‘I’ve been writing a comedy routine, and waiting for the right time to try it out. It might as well be now. Seeing as we’re on our own, together for a change’.
The driver turns towards the passenger with raised eyebrows. ‘I can think of other entertainments’, he suggests, reaching over to touch the passenger’s thigh, who brushes away the hand. ‘No, we can do that any time’. This is a red rag to a bull. ‘Any time, like when time?’, the driver becomes animated, straightening his back. ‘You’re always doing something. Writing this, making that. Chatting with this lot or visiting them lot. I never bloody see you’. The well rehearsed tirade pours out of his mouth. ‘I’m up for work and out the door first thing, back late a lot of the time. Our weekends are taken up with one family or the other, and here we are with a little bit of surprise time together and you want me to listen to a bloody comedy routine. Honestly’.
The driver receives a text notification. He lifts his phone to read the incoming message, before throwing it back on to the dash. ‘The recovery truck will be another forty-five minutes ’. ‘Perfect’, says the passenger. He begins to read. ‘It seems to me, that life is going to happen, no matter what’. The driver stops him by raising his hand. ‘Do we have to do this? I’m really not in the mood’. The passenger reaches out a hand, tenderly cupping the driver’s cheek. ‘Please’, he says, ‘let me do this. It means a lot to me. I’ve been working on it for ages. Like you said, we rarely see each other these days’. The unexpected tenderness disarms the driver, who takes a moment to look in to the passenger’s eyes. Seeing that all the passenger’s love is there, as it always is. The driver thinks, how rarely he looks for it in the passing of the days. Making a pact with himself, then and there, to make a point of looking more often. ‘Daily if possible, no, that’s too often, once a week would probably do, you wouldn’t want to over do it…’. He catches his over active brain mid flow and comes back to the moment.
The passenger has removed his hand from the driver’s face, and sits with the piece of paper in his lap. ‘OK’, says the driver, and settles himself in his seat. The passenger exhales loudly, as if he’s been holding his breath. Turns to smile at the driver, bringing the paper up to eye height, clearing his throat. ‘I’ll start again’, he says, like an apology. ‘Good idea’, agrees the driver. ‘From the top’.
A beautifully content pause fills the car. Torrential rain pelts the roof. A river runs down the windscreen and over the bonnet. The couple sit, as under a waterfall. A subconscious, cellular familiarity is stirred by the charged ions flowing around them. It vibrates through their bodies, before permeating as joy through the skin. They don’t notice, of course. To them, it is just a feeling. Later in life they will remember this moment when asked to return, in their minds, to a happy place.
Breaking the silence, they both speak at exactly the same time, then laugh. ‘What?’ asks the passenger, ‘I haven’t even started yet. This should be great, if its got you laughing already’. ‘I’m sorry’, said the driver, ‘I was just thinking. Remembering something’. The passenger replaces his piece of paper in his lap, shrugging his shoulders and sighing. ‘No, no’, says the driver, ‘it’s fine, I’ll tell you later’. He pats the passenger on the leg. ‘Honestly, please, carry on’. The passenger knots his brow. ‘Sure?’, he asks. ‘Yes, absolutely’, the driver replies, nodding his head ‘Please, carry on’.
He closes his eyes and with a grinning face, sits back in his seat. The passenger, lifts the piece of paper again. Pauses. Looks over at the driver, who is quite clearly, holding back a laugh. ‘It’s no good’, the passenger says, lowering the paper again, ‘You’re thinking about something else. Come on tell me. What is it?’ At which point the driver bursts out laughing and turns towards the door with his head in his hands. His whole body shaking. ‘Oh, for goodness sake’, says the passenger, who now also begins to laugh, even though there is no joke, as far as he can tell. ‘Come on, tell me.’ He pokes the driver in the ribs. ‘What’s so bloody funny? Apart from you, obviously’.
The driver pulls himself together for a minute, turning to face the passenger. As soon as he sees the passengers face though, he’s off again. Tears roll down, and he holds his sides. The passenger sits, laughing. Staring at the spectacle. Feeling a little awkward at being the joke. He’d not seen the driver laugh like this for years. He was laughing like a teenager. He pokes him in the ribs again, just to have his fun. ‘Get off’, the driver manages to get out between gulps of air, swiping a hand at the passengers finger. Trying, for all his might to stop laughing.
The driver, turns round, sitting up to compose himself. Wiping away tears from his cheeks, with the back of his hands. ‘Feeling better?’, the passenger asks, smiling. ‘Yes, much better thank you’. The driver pushes out a breath, looking over at the passenger, who smiles back. ‘I’ve not laughed like that in ages’, he breathes again and fans his hand in front of his mouth ‘Oh, that feels good’. He breathes again. ‘You are ever so funny’, he holds his right palm, flat on his chest, trying to catch his breath.
‘I was remembering the time’, he continues, ‘on that city break. You know, when we’d just met’. ‘In London’, the passenger reminds him. ‘Yes, in London’. ‘Oh god’, says the passenger putting his hand to his mouth. ‘Not the naked weekend?’ Now its the passengers turn to laugh. It bursts out of him, mingling with the crashing of the rain. Setting off the driver again. The outburst lasts a few seconds. Another lorry speeds past, encouraging more laughter in the rocking car.
After a minute or so, the passenger shakes his head, bringing his laughter to and end. ‘I’d forgotten all about that. What on earth made you think of it’ The driver exhales again and straightens his back, as if a better posture will ground him enough to be able to regain his speech. He swallows before saying, ‘ I just had an image…. ‘, he descends in to a fit of giggles again, trying to carry on speaking through it. ‘An image of you and…. and…. and the room service manager’s face’. An eruption of laughter explodes from both of them.
On the weekend in question, the two of them, on the passenger’s suggestion, had decided, while staying in an expensive hotel in London, to be naked every time someone came to their room. It made for an interesting sub plot to a long weekend of little sleep and lots of sex.
The first time the room service waiter brought them drinks, the passenger greeted him, naked at the door, whilst the driver lounged on the bed. To give him his dues, the young waiter was seemingly unimpressed. Mechanically, going through the motions of the transaction, as if every thing, (including their clothes), was in place. Spurred on by his nonchalance, the couple preceded over the weekend to elaborate on the joke.
The second time the waiter arrived, he was ushered in to the room, by the naked driver, whilst the passenger adopted the form of a table to put the tray on. Naked, of course. When the chamber maid came to change the bedding. One was the standard lamp, the other, a rug. At breakfast, a living replica of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’, occupied the centre of the room. At lunch, it was Michael Angelo’s ‘David’. The ruse peaked on Sunday afternoon, when the young waiter was greeted by the passenger dressed only in a nun’s wimple and a levitating flannel. It was, according to the, very embarrassed, room service manager, who came to have words with them on Monday morning, the state of arousal required to achieve the levitating flannel, that tipped the young waiter over the edge. ‘We have all enjoyed the joke this weekend gentleman’, the manager had, very sternly said, ‘but’, he continued, ‘there is nothing funny about erections’. Which had the pair of them laughing, all the way home.
The unexpected in the usual, or the unusual in the expected. A glitch in the predictive, controlled hallucination. The laughter switch.
The shared memory of the room service manager juggling his conflicting emotions of embarrassment and anger, now had the couple roaring with laughter once more. That, and the empowering sense within themselves, having over come societal expectations and pressures, to live an experience they, alone imagined, filled the car with joy.
The driver responds to a text alert and the laughing subsides, ‘The truck will be here in a minute. That was quick’. The driver ruffles his hair and looks in the mirror. The passenger folds his piece of paper away, still chuckling. ‘You know what they say’, comes the predictable response, ‘time flies, when your having fun’.
‘You’, says the driver, leaning over and kissing the passenger on the cheek, ‘you’, tracing the line of his chin with his finger, ‘are such a cliché’.
* Comment made at Echo Moskvy independent radio station as the staff exited in protest at official demands regarding the reporting of the invasion of Ukraine.
(On FIFTY CATACOMB SAINTS by Iain Sinclair (Tangerine Press, 2022)
Masked by McKean beneath Tangerine’s hand crafted cover,
Michael Curran’s Tooting /Earlsfield workshop now releases
Iain Sinclair’s earth sent saints, as in this beautiful book of fifty
Sinclair prose poems the Hackney/St. Leonard’s magus masters
The known and unknown through word paint. Surfaces Undulate,
Phantoming Mould’s Mechanisms, as in five sections these poetic
Portraits transpose; one part Eden, one here, as the paragraphs
Scratch at perfection, exposing the failings that the commonplace
Can’t disclose. Chris McCabe’s eloquent postscript performs
An authoritative autopsy of these anthems, that resound through
Ghost places, auch as Abney Park Cemetary, where Sinclair
Witnesses, while listening to the leavings of figures possessed
Of more presence and purpose than the present day’s pedantry.
Catacomb Saints, or the Katakombenheilige baggage is weighed
Down by catholic corruption as the Church of 16th Century Rome
Stole dead icons and put them on sale to salve sin, inventing
Both story and Saint for the God-gullible, as if, from
The graveyard what the flesh cannot find, the soul wins.
‘ThesmileofthefirstSaintishardblacksugar,’ Sinclair says,
As, ‘DriftsofAlaskansnowarecodedwithrunesofyellowWolfpiss.’
His dense sentence symphonies music through as each image
Annunciates grandly, while each one word riot reveals both
The poet’s command and his kiss. Sinclair searches for such
Saints everywhere, with the second one churched and coastal;
Witnessed, arms spread in a window under ‘distantstars stilluncounted’ in a place where levitation is leavened
As accompanying sparrows bristle and burn in a bush.
In reclaiming the wrong of a former age, Sinclair’s Timelord
Echoes Eliot pre TheWasteland, as well as a Bunuellian
Babe in Saint’s raiment due to the work and the willing
Of a supple prostitute’s poise and push. The Fourth is
A homeless ‘bonelesstarpaulinhumpcookedwithoutspiceson
thebrokenboardsofhischosendinghy;’ a fallen Lucifer
By a lamppost, who, in a turn of phrase to transform you
Is seemingly ‘olderthanwood.’ Anthracite rinds, ruffled lakes
Are part of the terrain his shape measures and it is these
Flint impressions that give spark to the flame of gain’s
Good, as we start to see what this book conjures forth,
Under the care of publisher Michael Curran, whose
‘Carepentry’ binds and fashions what no larger printing
House ever could; proof of the true artisan, which
These days we can only carbon copy with coffee,
Whilst here, with hydraulics of the primitive kind,
Faith’s declared, as Curran, a former carpenter carries
Each precious page for the poems just as Christ carried
The message of both the Christian curse, and its care.
Meantime, Sinclair works (and walks) The wilderness
Machine for this printing, as publisher becomes poem
And what he publishes becomes creed; for there is a way
To live by these words and by the wisdom revealed
Across image, as Palermo meets both pueblo and parsley
In this word-swirl of magick and Iain Sinclair’s sainted
Screeds. Books begat their own culture and here,
A proper climate is created, containing ‘rainbownimbus’ As ‘ovariesspringemeraldmoss,’ in paragraphs made
To prize; at once graspable, gruesome, solid, and yet
Also riven with beauty, as Curran cranks at the lever,
So as to make sure all’s embossed. Dave McKean’s
Drawings enchant as he illustrates Iain. They seem
To be made of gold and metal, even when set down
By pen. But each portrait performs as they glare
And glisten straight at us, making the printed page
Bubble, as if the paint and ink were excited
By the special approach Dave defends. And so the saints
Shimmer on, from a Mexican bound DH Lawrence,
To Charles Olson in Yerma writing to Robert Creeley,
To a charcoal portrait by Frank Auerbach; a proper
Catacomb scrape, or finger marked, smeared autopsy,
The ashes applied from cracked fires as the medium
Itself leaves a mark.‘Theseatonightisa shiveringspider’s hammockinanoxidisedcrittalwindow,’ is proof enough
Of the pulse and the poem whose Sinclairian craft
Curran serves, as Iain’s eye envelopes the poetics
Behind chosen moments, with each one’s tenancy
Now made mythic in a modernist word world
Where it manufactures the mystic for what even
Those who disbelieve might deserve. ‘Anirishsailor cannotabidetheconvulsionsofthesea,’ while ‘redVincent inpainter’sLadyBird legend’ is cyclically ignorant,
As he word walks the Medway, upto Childish’s
Chatham and then decidedly downriver, as ‘ribbed
condoms’ and ‘mudflats’ ripple between celebrants.
Terry Gilliam becomes a punchline. Garbo stalks
Lawrence Durrell. Eric Ambler stays private,
While Margaret Thatcher medusas as a ‘corvine BishopparchesatHastingsgroyne.’ Cyclops trades
His gold teeth, as the one eyed Raoul Walsh part watches,
Aping Iain’s book named for Jack Elam and the single
Oracular stare past words joined. In other images;
Fools dream of cheese, while Vorticists smoke enamel.
The secret ministry of frost is an emblem of spiritual agency.
Rare salts breach coarse pores, held by fishermen’s twine
For dreams floating, while England is just poor people
And Dickens whilst under the pariah Uriahs for whom
There should be no clemency. Such visions astound.
And there is the sound of search on these pages, to which
Curran listens as he makes each dream Tangerine.
Curran truly cares for these works which occur outside
And despite cold commission, allowing Sinclair
To reconnect to the culture hrom which his first
Chapbook artfully manned his first schemes.
There is then a way to read what’s set here as a new
Form of Bible. Not a Gutenberg, but one greater,
Because it is both book and tree; still part of the skein
That was skimmed from pulp to press and word anvil,
As one man sits down to write it and a second one
Remains standing in order to purvey poetry –
Of the highest stamp, as well as the hardest.
For this is writing as challenge, satisfaction and seal:
The full meal, which has been prepared by three
Cooks as they curate craft and kitchen to feed
Inspiration’s bright fire and quickly advance
The pale real. And this is only half way through
The book – as it is not my place to contain it –
But to simply supply a taste and a hunger for what
Iain Sinclair, Dave McKean and Michael Curran
Now mix; from Earlsfield to your eye, and from
Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel, these non-scarlet
Tracings are a Draculean bite and drug fix.
You should dream of this book, for there is a sense
Of Shangri-La to its pages. I was myself privileged
To visit and catacomb in with the papers, as Michael
Kindly invited me to its preparation , so that I could
Sit and take notes, write and see. It felt like that scene
In CitizenKane where Thomson reads Bernsteins diary.
And so it proved. Its stayed with me. As each word
Strikes I’m made saintly, which in a day full of demons
And at an imprisoning time still feels free.
Hunt this book out. Marry someone who now owns it.
Chant its name a la Borges and let it retain regency.
These words rule the waves broadcast between visions.
The Saints are served. Now, the earthbound stare down
1. teach the children the small ones
infiltrate the educational system
blow the kids’ minds
prepare them
form free schools
give all our knowledge away
study the revolution and teach it
widen the spirit
initiate great dreams
2. infiltrate industry
talk to farm laborers the workers the poor
help them to organise themselves
to combat their daily misery
rent medical aid exploitation harassment
help them to recognise the reality of their oppression
3. infiltrate the media
whoever can
but remember they’re geared to speak for the system
4. start communes
we need to figure out the problems
like how to supply each other with what we need
we need also to supply examples of communal solutions
and of social relations that work
5. found newspapers magazines make posters illegal radio tv
stations that can transmit and jam the main lines
with vivid information
tell the people what the revolution is for what against
how to do it
open ears to new sound of whole earth
6. make free stores
get people habituated
to the idea of free
give yourself away
7. infiltrate the army the police
8. form cells
groups of five are good
people you know intimately and can trust
soon it may not be as easy for us as it is now
people you can work together with easily
study a craft
or an industry we may have to supply our own needs
during harder times
study the revolution together
organize a place for public discussions
get to know the police of your city
study medicine
first aid
police and military tactics and how to subvert them
study the jails the architecture
study the courts
and oil and science
study electronics
and cybernetics
and publicize the information
study the city plans
how to gum them up and make them function like poems
9. deliver mail free
find time in your life to do free services
repair cars
clean streets
the digger thing
it undermines the props of the system
it blows people’s minds
it makes light enter
it lifteth the spirit
10. write on the walls
11. figure out how to take over the system
how to distribute the food
how to produce it
and all the other stuff we need
and be sure there are enough workers ready and people
to start living without money without police army
state and prisons all forms of coercion
and do it
12. the cell that flashes the people with
an experience of beauty
so that they have something to move towards
and of the ugliness to move away from
because the sense of beauty is gone
and with it the sense of god goodness and the creative
and what remains is the ugly destruction
that can only be answered by our beauty
therefore
anywhere
just by our being there
the confrontation happens
as we walk down the street and in public places
the love force in the face
remembering always
that we have to re-create beauty and love
because beauty and love as we know them have been shaped by
authoritarian capitalism and loaded with its content
13. clusters working together
network of affinity groups processing anarchist theory
and practice
14. autogestion syndicates
networks of volunteers voluntarily unified processing anarchist
theory and practice
15. be more specific
if necessary
develop exercises
to sharpen our thinking
the hard work
of transforming the poetry
into planning
the plans
into action
16. keep inventing further actions
as long as necessary
Tracklist:
Larry Marshall – Run Babylon
Vin Gordon – Babylon Rock
Baba Brooks – Solomon a Gundy
Big Youth – Solomon a Gundy
K.C. White – Anywhere but Nowhere
Delroy Wilson – Funky Broadway
Toots and the Maytals – Funky Kingston
Keith Hudson – Nuh Skin Up Dub
Frankie Paul – Pass the Tu Sheng Peng
Bob Marley and the Wailers – Hypocrites
Trinity – John Saw Them Coming
Dawn Penn – No, No, No
Naomi – Lipstick on Your Collar
Wayne Smith – Under Me Sleng Teng
Tenor Saw – Pumpkin Belly
Super Cat – Trash and Ready
Buster’s All Stars – Jet 707
Pat Kelly – Somebody’s Baby
Pebbles – Positive Vibration
Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks – Ethiopia
Cornell Campbell – The Gorgon
U-Roy – Gorgon Wise
Wailing Souls – Row Fisherman Row
A gang of unknowns leaves a coffin
with a rotating lid
amidst the shrubs, debris, and nothings.
I strain to divert my daughter’s eyes
by raising my finger at the sky.
She fails to fathom why
we call it blue when she sees
the dirty laundry spread between
the dust collared trees.
She wants to watch the people
entering and farewelling
as the coffin’s lid swings.
I show her how two fists eclipse births and deaths.
In his swaggering hat,
Thrimblenorton navigates forgotten seas
Where derelicts drift
Buoyed up on weed
Or else he’s lashed to the wheel
As waves curving claws
Slash down from topmast
To keel or making safe anchorage
To hack-wade his way
Through some Midnight-forest
Brimming with decay,
Only to wake at sunset
In some doorless shed,
Hear the rain sink
To a simmering drizzle
That dies
As his back bends concave
Like an overloaded bridge,
He yawns, sneezes,
Goosesteps three paces forward,
Hunger driven vaults a garden fence:
Ears up nostrils wide whisker tips tingling
He senses movement,
Falls back on his haunches,
Yawls, teeth bared
Slams down one paw
In a spine snapping crack
And having tasted hot blood,
He’s fully re-charged
And ready for love…
After the storm, the swarm; after the countdown, the cooldown. After the votes are counted, the crying starts, the lying starts, and the statisticians state the obviously false. There’s a bullet in the chamber, ready to rock, and chimes announce bulletins at the top of each hour. Ours is not to question why, not to weigh the what and where, not to wear our hearts on our sleeves. There’s an art to dodging the issue, an art to dodging bullets, and an art to seeing through the artificial distinctions between the two when bullets are issued like prescription painkillers. After prescription, proscription. Where the script is missing, we must improvise, improving our chances of survival with a ready store of lies and crocodile tears. After the statistician, the statesman, charming in his chamber, ready to rock, tearing up uncounted votes, vetoing the bulletin at the top of the hour, lying about the bullet in his obviously false heart, lying about the storm.
I just got this email from my Pal Putin which is a reply to an email I sent asking him to clarify the Ukraine situation …thought it might interest you.
Dear Comrade Alan
Thankyou for your email relating to the current situation in Ukraine, I am happy to clarify our position as clearly it is being misrepresented in the Capitalist media.
Let us get some historical facts clear. When Russia was known as the USSR the whole of the rest of the world spent billions on goading, mocking and eventually destroying us. You in Europe, under instruction from your puppet-masters in the USA, erected nuclear missiles to halt us from building communal farms and factories, to drain away our resources… you cut off access to essential world-resources and employed sanctions with the deliberate intent of starving the Russian people (these same people who had fought at your side to defeat Hitler)… and you broadcast lies about us and surrounded the whole of the borders of the USSR with nuclear weapons.
We don’t forget this.
Like a schoolboy bully you pushed us around and lied about us until we were broken and laying at your feet …but because you were/are bullies that wasn’t enough for you; even when you had cowed the Russian people into abandoning their peaceful socialist experiment you now began to worry that we might use the nuclear weapons, (which you had forced us to create), against you. Being bullies, with bullies’ minds, you thought that now we in Russia are strong and can fight back, we in our turn would hurt you. So even though we had capitulated, even though we had abandoned the greatest peaceful experiment ever undertaken on this planet, you kept adding to the nuclear ring you threatened us with and your propaganda machines still churned out lie after lie about us, until, despite the fact that we are the largest country in the world by far, and despite the fact that we have now more nuclear weapons than the rest of the world put together, (though unlike YOU and your ‘experiments’ on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have NEVER used them) you prod and bait the Russian bear and, because we educate our people fully, they/we know WHY you do it.
Over 60 years ago the puppet-masters in the USA created the greatest weapon ever envisaged which was designed to goad the citizens of our Russian State even more, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and you invited every country in the world to join this organisation, or at least ‘selective’ countries, you centred on the ones in Europe oddly enough and favoured those who had borders with Russia. (Russia itself though was never asked to join, nor was China or Cuba; which somehow betrays the REAL purpose of NATO surely?) The USA was/is the puppet-master for NATO; its sole aim is to continue to goad the Russian bear, to attempt to provoke another world war in Europe with all the puppet states of NATO attacking Russia while the USA sits safely back and makes billions of dollars selling arms to Europe in the same way as they sold arms to Britain and all the allied countries during WW2.
NATO has no other purpose.
THAT is how the world came to be where it is now; you/the-USA, talk of the current ‘war’ in Ukraine but you in the west, who are simply puppets of the USA, (which incidentally has attacked and bombed and massacred people in over 60 countries and it has conducted genocide in the USA itself by all but wiping-out the native-American peoples.) have been waging ‘war’ upon any country, including Russia, that ‘steps out of line’ or which appears to be getting as ‘strong’ as America. You, European servile puppets, wage war against us by continuing to line up American nuclear weapons on American bases in every single border country surrounding Russia and you pour out lies and propaganda about us 24/7…
THIS is how you cowardly people conduct YOUR wars now…
But surely you know that there is/are only so many pokes from your cruelly barbed stick that the bear can take before s/he unfurls claws and retaliates? Of course you know it; because war, real war expending human-life and property, is what your corrupt and crumbling System requires. As Marx told us; to maintain the consumption of surplus values and to ensure Capitalism thrives the wars must be continuous… THAT is why the USA is continuously at war and has been every day since its conception.
And so, to the point of the current Russian temporaryoccupation of Ukraine.
Ukraine was a part of our socialist experiment, you starved the people there, Russian people, in the midst of their experiment… and because of YOUR actions over four million innocents starved to death and ALL Russian peoples went hungry, listened to your propaganda, suffered hardship and deprivation. Then you infiltrated and installed puppets to run the government in Ukraine under the guise of your version of ‘democracy’; installed an ex-comedian who has himself been reprimanded by the Ukrainian people for salting loot away in off-shore countries under his wife’s name, something which even your own corrupt media can’t conceal… and NOW you invite this new country you have created and nurtured to join the forces already surrounding Russia and you bribe them with filthy lucre and promises of ‘wealth’ but never tell them how Capitalist wealth is created. We in Russia accepted the decision by Ukraine when it chose to be an ‘independent’ country even though hundreds of thousands of people within that great country have been waging a revolution for close to ten years, a revolution whose aim is to unite Ukraine again with Russia, a revolution that YOU in your alleged ‘free world’ eliminate from your history books. So we, the peoples of Russia, have said ‘enough’. We have drawn a line in the sand. We have said (as millions of Trades Unionists, liberals, socialists and free-thinkers world-wide have said repeatedly since it was created), we say ‘NO to NATO’. For we see through your creeping evil and we know enough of Marx and History to see precisely what your end-game is… and your end game is WAR. War in Europe preferably, well away from the USA. Our temporary occupation of Ukraine has but ONE purpose which your lying propaganda machines ignore totally, we have the aim of preventing yet another row of nuclear missiles being erected on USA armed-forces bases that are aimed at our beloved country. OUR aim is diametrically opposed to the aims of the European puppets of the USA, it is to PREVENT war in Europe on the scale that the USA longs for.
To answer your specific question more fully Alan… perhaps more specifically, more honestly, more accurately, I will expand and say this; tell the USA and Europe to STOP threatening us. STOP bullying us. STOP your aim of world-capitulation to the USA. STOP your propaganda war in the media. STOP peddling the notion that war must be continuous. IF you don’t then note this; we have drawn a line, we have said
‘this far and no further’
…take note for our nuclear weapons now can reach the Americas and if you goad and goad and goad then you will reap the consequences.
I hope this explains the situation more clearly for you…
I can be the spotlight
I can be the stage without the fright
I can be the sunshine cracking
I can be moonlight resting with the night
I can be the pathos of hospital beds,
The broken medicine man.
Your name heard daily in the loudspeaker
From afar, cannot just be of a lesser belief.
I can be the healing seed
Of a Rudraksha.*
The journey of a spree.
The ambition of a standing tree.
I am a harmless wind,
I am tasteless water
That drives away the taste of thirst.
Let me be a glory
A unique dream
That wakes up in sleep.
*Rudraksha is a prayer bead.
Sushant Thapa
Picture Nick Victor
Bio: Sushant Thapa is a Nepalese poet who holds a Master’s degree in English literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has published three books of poetry, namely: The Poetic Burden and Other Poems (Authorspress, New Delhi, 2020), Abstraction and Other Poems (Impspired, UK, 2021) and Minutes of Merit (Haoajan, Kolkata, 2021). His poems have been published in Sindh Courier, The Kathmandu Post, Trouvaille Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Journal of Expressive Writing, Dissident Voice, Harbinger Asylum, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Litehouse, My Republica, New York Parrot, International Times, Literary Yard, The Beatnik Cowboy, Dumpster Fire Press, and Impsipred among many. He lives in Biratnagar, Nepal.
Here’s a music video cut together with footage from the classic apocalyptic sci-fi film Metropolis, combined with sci-fi folk song In The Year 2525 by Zager & Evans. They fit together in a dystopian transhumanist meets Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World kind of way. What awaits humanity after the intense technological and biological developments have been set in motion? Thea von Harbou had some intensively accurate visions of the future, and Fritz Lang did the visual masterpiece. All this is now a classic topic about the future of humanity. This video concentrates on the idea, the message and visions of the future, combining the classic hit song and outstanding vintage film.
LYRICS
In the year 2525, if man is still alive
If woman can survive, they may find
In the year 3535
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
You ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes
You won’t find a thing to chew
Nobody’s gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms hangin’ limp at your sides
Your legs got nothin’ to do
Some machine’s doin’ that for you
In the year 6565
You won’t need no husband, won’t need no wife
You’ll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
In the year 7510
If God’s a coming, He oughta make it by then
Maybe He’ll look around Himself and say
Guess it’s time for the judgment day
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake His mighty head
He’ll either say I’m pleased where man has been
Or tear it down, and start again
In the year 9595
I’m kinda wonderin’ if man is gonna be alive
He’s taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain’t put back nothing
Now it’s been ten thousand years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what, he never knew, now man’s reign is through
But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight
So very far away, maybe it’s only yesterday
In the year 2525, if man is still alive
If woman can survive, they may find
In front of my house I met Kirill, who is part of the Kyiv night club scene. He said: “It has become very difficult to have faith in others. As it turns out, they can suddenly throw bombs at other people and think they’re right about it, too.” [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]
Day 10 (Saturday, March 5): “A Great Beauty”
Tenth day of the war. I learned how to darken the windows of my apartment with the thin blankets I have, so that inside there is a soft, muted light. I remember the first morning of the war. Everything was as usual—I woke up a little late, at nine, and saw a series of messages on my cell phone from friends and acquaintances: “Please, answer the phone!” Again and again the same message.
The catastrophe needs to be represented: only as part of a story can it be recognized as a catastrophe. Communication can also be a way out—the hope is that once everything is reported and communicated, one of the addressees can end the catastrophe.
Our skies are still open to military planes and bombs. That is why our cities with men, women, children, homes, and museums are still accessible to artillery. This morning I read that in Bila Tserkva, one of the most beautiful towns in Kyiv Oblast, twenty residential houses were destroyed by an air strike. Bila Tserkva means “White Church” in English. The number of victims is still being clarified. Fortunately, a timely evacuation was organized.
A friend from Zaporizhzhya, in southeastern Ukraine, called me and excitedly told me that humanitarian aid in the form of food and medicine was finally being delivered to Mariupol. His neighbor heard from supposedly reliable sources that this war will be over as early as mid-March. Laughing, I said goodbye.
I remember an elegant lady I saw earlier today. She was wearing a long black coat with fur, high boots, and a hat, and was waiting in line in front of a pharmacy. My mother had also waited, for five hours, in this line. The air was cold, so my mother walked around to warm up. At some point I joined her and we decided to go for a little walk. No one in line, including my mom and I, looked particularly fancy. Businesslike, but dressed somewhat casually. So the lady in the fur coat stood out a little. Her eyes looked worried, but for me, at that moment, she was a kind of beacon. One that reminded me, and perhaps the others in line, of a bygone Kyiv.
On the way back, I met a young man in front of my house and spoke with him. He said his name was Kirill. He apparently was part of the Kyiv nightclub scene, which has developed very rapidly in recent years. Now, nearly every day, he makes an almost unimaginable trek from the eastern bank of the Dnieper across to the western bank, to cook food in the kitchen of a restaurant for people in bomb shelters and the Kyiv Territorial Defense. When his time permits, he engages in art, music, and shamanism. Our conversation was a little strange.
“It has become very difficult to have faith in others,” he said. “As it turns out, they can suddenly throw bombs at other people and think they’re right about it, too.” He looked directly at me. “Do you happen to be a journalist who could write about me?” I replied that maybe I could write about our meeting, in this diary. “Then I want to say,” he seemed very passionate now, “that everything that is happening at the moment is a great beauty. I don’t want to hide. Feel free to take my picture if you like.”
I must have looked at him in amazement because he launched into an explanation. “People are acting better than usual right now, and our country…” His thought trailed off. Then he said, “Everything is changing, even internationally.” His good humor mixed with my bitterness. I began to laugh.
When I got home that evening, I learned that the food and medicine that was supposed to go to Mariupol did not reach the city. The humanitarian corridor did not work and was closed because of continuous shelling. Two people from my circle of friends, an artist and an art historian who live outside Mariupol, have been unreachable for four days. The messages on the Telegram channels from Mariupol are becoming less frequent.
I know from a close friend that the village of Horynka, near the forest of Pushcha, was badly damaged. The number of victims is unknown, and my friend’s uncle is currently hiding in a basement. We are looking for evacuation routes for him.
It is difficult for me to finish this text. The war continues, but the fear of the aggressor—the respect for him—must finally stop. I get letters from my German friends, who write: “Save yourself! Putin does not tolerate any losses. He has a reputation for destroying everything.” I wonder what they mean by that. How did he get such a reputation? What does it mean that he doesn’t want to lose? What does it mean for the whole world?
As I took my camera out of my pocket to photograph an empty street, a car stopped next to me. Four armed men jumped out. They searched my cell phone, my bag, then asked who I was working for. Then they excused themselves, all four looked nervous and tired. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]
Day 9 (Friday, March 4): “Follow Me On Instagram”
During the night I read that in the city of Enerhodar the nuclear power plant was attacked. I slept fitfully. There were wounded employees who could not be evacuated for hours and bled to death. The fire department was shot at. Three employees died, and in the morning the wounded were evacuated. The nuclear power plant in Chernobyl is occupied, and for ten days the employees have not been able to go home. It is very dangerous to stay there for so long. The news was unbearable. I fell asleep again.
The next morning I woke up quite early in a bright mood and with the feeling that this sunny day had something to offer me. I wanted to get out on the street earlier than I did yesterday, to see what was happening in the city. Little was left of the melancholy I felt yesterday. Then I discovered the reason for this change: I no longer believe in the war! It simply can’t be, I thought. It isn’t true. What neighboring country bombs a city to rubble, in the twenty-first century?
The invaders have no political plan, they have no ability to come to power here permanently. You can’t occupy this country. It is unrealistic. The war is a dream, a dictator’s fantasy.
I wanted to see if the little store next to our house still had bread. I have not been able to get bread since the third day of the war—it is usually sold out.
The store was full. With some amazement, I discovered a group who I took to be representatives of the international military. They spoke English and needed help translating. Then I realized that they were not soldiers, but unarmed, if well-protected, escorts of a war photographer who was also shopping in the store. I tried to help her choose a detergent. The small group exuded enthusiasm, humor, and inspiration. My mood suddenly darkened. One of the three escorts proudly said to me, “Do you know who you are standing with? This is one of the best photographers in the world!”
The photographer laughed and shrugged it off. “Please,” she said, “I’m embarrassed.” Then she told me her name. I can’t remember the name. I’ve been having a hard time concentrating lately. Then she said, “You can follow me on Instagram.” The group bought a lot of detergent, almost everything in the store. I told them, “Good to have you with us,” and said goodbye. But quickly an uneasiness came over me. I realized that it is not a good sign when a well-known war photographer sets up shop here with a group of escorts.
In a side street I discovered a bakery that used to be quite expensive before the war. It was open for business. Nice white bread was on the shelves, and they also had coffee. It was a miracle. My first real cup of coffee from a cafe. Men and women stood there drinking cappuccinos and discussing whether or not to stay in town. One older man, who looked like a geography professor, said he would not leave the city until he had to spend every day and night in the shelter. The bystanders tried to convince him that it would never come to that. Kyiv was a holy city after all. The city would never permit it!
Afterwards, I went to an empty street to take a photo. As I took the camera out of my pocket, a car stopped next to me. Four armed men jumped out. They took my cell phone, searched my bag, then asked who I worked for. It took a few minutes. Then they excused themselves, all four of them looking nervous and tired.
One of them said, “I understand it’s your job, but please don’t take pictures! You can see what they’re doing.” He meant the attackers. “They are shelling the residential buildings now, they are using everything as a target. It seemed unimaginable, but it is happening. There are 840 injured children.”
My photos are harmless, I thought. I’m being careful, after all. Besides, our city is photographed all the time anyway. But maybe I need to be even more careful.
I thought about that number: 840 injured children. Our sky must be protected! The news repeated that number, but it’s hard to really grasp it.
I am sure that the world will not continue to just watch this—I can’t watch it anymore either. Do not be afraid of this criminal, he acts without logic. If you protect the sky here, you save so much!
At home I got a message that a friend of mine is looking for her acquaintance, an artist who lives with his wife and two small children in Mariupol and has been unreachable for three days. The last message from him was, “If you know anyone who works for Western media, tell them: We are here almost without water, without food, without medicine, and now the electricity is cut off. They are destroying our town. Sartana, a village, keeps getting shelled. I don’t know if there is anything left. So many victims.” I know that Mariupol—a Russian-speaking town in the Donbas, with beautiful little houses from the nineteenth century—is in darkness, without electricity.
840. This is no longer war, this is mass murder of the defenseless. The Ukrainian army is protecting us, but the Russian tanks, artillery, and rifles are aiming at peaceful people, women and children, at residential houses! It is time to stop being afraid and close the sky.
In Russia, independent media are either shut down or censored; what remains is the opposition newspaper Republic, which is trying to survive despite censorship. One headline read, “Russia is trying to restore the Soviet Empire. But there is little chance of that.” That’s what some Russian oppositionists fear: they believe there is a chance, albeit a slim one, that the empire will be restored. In reality, there is no chance at all.
I came across this photo of an elderly woman on my camera today. It means a lot to me. The old people in Kyiv are so open, strong, and caring. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]
Day 8 (Thursday, March 3): Alienatio
It is the evening of the eighth day of the war, and I am looking at photos of empty streets taken on my cell phone or my small digital camera. When I take photos on the streets, I try not to show faces. I feel that anything that has a face, anything that could be identifiable, wants to stay in the shadows.
A week has passed since the invasion began. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember any particular news or event from that first day, even though I’ve been carefully writing down important news in a notebook. Have I become accustomed to these events? Today, a sense of alienation came over me: I felt at a strange remove from everything. I try to place the moment when this strange state began, and I find it.
In the morning, when I was still in bed, I saw a video clip of a Russian soldier operating a Grad system: a multiple-rocket launcher that the Russian army has been using to attack peaceful districts in Ukrainian cities. The soldier in the video was crying. He said he wanted to apologize to his young daughter because he may be guilty of killing children in Ukraine.
Then he addressed other members of the military and asked them to disobey orders and not to come to Ukraine. I watched him cry again and again. Then I saw pictures of the destroyed apartment buildings in Chernihiv. These two pieces of news merged in my perception. Many friends of my mother live in Chernihiv. They were always proud of this small and clean city. I know that now, as I write this, the city is being shelled. An oil depot has been set on fire, and the small town, which was a favorite vacation destination for many of my acquaintances, is now threatened with ecological disaster. The danger comes from the sky, the houses are bombed. One begins to count the victims.
Over the past few days, I have been wondering how obedience works. The soldier in the video cried only after he had obeyed his orders. That was too late. This war can be ended if the orders to shell homes are ignored—by soldiers, even by generals. I know that sounds naive. But on such a day, naivety is the best shelter. The walls are not very thick, but it is deep enough.
So far, thirty-three dead residents have been found in the rubble of Chernihiv. Today feels particularly ominous. Almost every half hour an explosion can be heard outside on the streets.
A young woman living in the house next door is trying to rescue pets that were left behind. Perhaps the owners could not take them when they fled. She finds them comfortable, warm places and gives them food. An elderly lady who lives across the street goes shopping several times throughout the day so that her neighbors can stay home in safety.
A well-known teacher, eighty-six years old, spends most nights in the basement of a school that is next to her house. Today she recorded a video. In a distinct, almost forgotten, and noble Kyiv accent, she addressed the women of Russia: they should not let their sons go to war.
It is snowing, the air is damp and cold, and it seems to me that I can no longer get close to my own city, the place where I live, whose events I witness. I resist the violence more than I used to, I resist acknowledging that the war is going on, that it is allowed, that it has been allowed.
I can try to accept it. I can try to face reality. But then I ask myself: how will we all be able to live with the thought that these war crimes took place, every day, on our doorsteps? At some point we will have to forgive ourselves that this inhumanity was even possible. But to really be able to do that, you have to protect the skies in my country. The bombing of homes must finally stop.
The streets of Kyiv are mostly empty these days, filled with droning silence. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]
Day 7 (Wednesday, March 2): Time to be brave
The city is sinking into spring fog, but it is still cold. Since yesterday, here, in the center of Kyiv, you can tell a story about the war on every street corner. Almost every intersection is guarded day and night by armed members of the Territorial Defense. There are more groups of saboteurs in the city, more violence. I look with relief into the eyes of the men and women of the defense. In one of the faces yesterday I recognized with amazement a barista who was popular in our neighborhood because he painted particularly beautiful swans on the milk foam of the coffees.
Outside, I hear another explosion. At such times, fear overtakes me, and I think about how to save myself and the people I love from this situation. It is always a chain of relationships that I think about, it is not only my father and mother, but also my aunt who is lying at home sick and weak. And not only my aunt, but also her whole family, and then I see other connections that are hard to break.
The answer is to keep everyone safe, not just individuals. Now is the time to act bravely and find strong, effective means against the aggressor. In my imagination, a hundred variants are already playing out for how all this can stop, how the war will end, at this specific moment. Then I imagine us dancing in the streets.
My day has been long and feels like it has several days locked up in it. The images of the empty streets filled with droning silence are still before my eyes. I have experienced and seen a lot today, I even visited an exhibition.
The artist Nikita Kadan, a friend of mine, has moved to a small private gallery located in a basement. Really, it’s not a gallery anymore, but a space that serves as a shelter and apartment for artists and their friends. Yesterday Nikita called me and invited me to a group show he was putting together from the gallery’s collection. I was about to go meet him, but then the sirens howled once again, and I had to stay inside.
So the exhibition “opened” yesterday without visitors and was supposed to close the same day. But then he decided that it would stay open for me to visit today. I would be unspeakably happy about such an honor in peacetime, and even now, when the air over the city becomes more sinister, I notice the traces of joy that this feeling leaves on the sandy bottom of my restlessness. The exhibition is called “Fear.”
There was another air alert, and when I was finally about to leave this afternoon, my father called me and asked me to take him along. Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed. And then the three of us went! My father, my mother, and me.
Our way was long, the city seemed strange. We must have walked more than half an hour—it was my longest walk since the beginning of the war.
The way back was shorter, short like a jump.
I enjoyed the exhibition very much. I am still thinking about the pictures and this incredible opportunity to look at them in the midst of the war and include them in my memory.
What can art do? What can a single voice do? What can the courage of resistance do and what is the point of resistance in the first place? I keep getting emails and messages telling me to be pacifist. Ukrainians have never provoked a war, never wanted or supported a war. The values of pacifism are among the most important values of my country. I grew up with a saying: The most important thing is that there be no war (лишь бы не было войны). The shuddering memories of the Second World War, some of which took place on Ukrainian soil, are still very much alive.
However, there are values much bigger than Ukraine that need to be defended. There are situations where resistance means salvation. And it is not about self-help, it is about rescue from a much greater violence, from a much more terrible war. I hope that every day more people understand this, wake up, and put an end to this violence.
A friend of mine, the artist Nikita Kadan (right), has opened an exhibition in a basement gallery. Here he is chatting with my parents about the untranslatability of the exhibition’s title “Tryvoha,” which means “fear” and “alarm” at the same time. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]
Day 6 (Tuesday, March 1): Not a minute more of this war!
Russia has announced that it will bomb the area around St. Sophia Cathedral, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Not the St. Sophia Cathedral itself, but a secret service building that is in the immediate vicinity. If they do that, the cathedral will certainly be affected as well.
My parents and I live next to St. Sophia. I had decided to spend the nightly curfew at their place today. Meanwhile, our worried neighbors went to the shelters. Everyone has long since chosen a shelter for themselves; they try to do everything they can to feel comfortable there.
I am in an absurdly good mood. But this good mood is of little use, superimposed as it is on a deep anxiety and sadness. Our apartment is darkened. I learn that the western bank of the Dnieper River in Kyiv is under fire, including Zhulany Airport, which is on the eastern bank fairly close to the city center. The number of casualties is unclear.
However, all my thoughts are with Kharkiv. I see videos of burning streets on Twitter and Telegram, and I know from acquaintances in the city that people there have been staying in shelters for days. The well-known economics professor Oleh Amosov, head of the Department of Economic Theory and Public Finance at the Kharkiv Regional Institute of Public Administration, died of injuries after an attack. This is the second day the city has been bombed. My next thoughts are for two cities in the Luhansk and Donetsk districts: Severodonetsk and Volnovakha.
I was often on the road around Severodonetsk. Even in 2014 to 2016, during wartime, this city looked cheerful. Cafes and restaurants were open almost all night, and the mixed crowd there always amused me: Western-dressed and sometimes haughty representatives of the international press mingled with exotic, spoiled young women from Donetsk, who had decided to spend a few months in their home region on the escape route to central Ukraine.
Now, Severodonetsk and Volnovakha are being destroyed. There is no more electricity, no water, Russian mortar shells are falling from the sky. All those who try to provide themselves and their family with food or water are dying in the streets.
I would like to scream. Save these people! Journalists who have experienced wartime in Donbas and lived in the mostly peaceful Severodonetsk, get outraged! We need humanitarian corridors and zones where men, women, and children can save themselves. Put even more pressure on Russia. Putin has sentenced these cities to death, Russia is destroying the Donbas. No, that sounds wrong. “Donbas” is just a word, and this word says little. You have to save the inhabitants of these cities. Actually, you have to save everything, the whole country. Urgently.
Now I’m trying to understand where my good mood comes from.
It is the sixth day of the war, which I feel has already lasted fifty years. Today I drank a cappuccino for the first time since the invasion began.
I went for a walk to breathe some fresh air on this first day of spring and maybe do some shopping. Knowing that many supermarket shelves were already empty, I decided to visit a larger department store that had recently opened not far from us. How pleasant it was to be there! The shopping hall is deep underground, everyone felt safe and walked past the shelves with a slowness that has not been seen in Kyiv for six days.
An elderly lady stood next to the coffee machine. Her shopping bag was small and half empty. Then suddenly I saw a young, fashionably dressed woman approach the lady and press a bill into her hand. The lady was surprised and said, “But I didn’t ask for anything, I have everything!” A young man came up to her; he also slipped her a bill. The elderly lady resisted at first, but then she seemed happy and grateful.
On the way back, I took a picture of an old man sitting alone on a bench in a park. He wanted to talk to me. His wife was ill, he told me, and he was taking care of her. He wanted to take care of her until tomorrow—then he will join the Kyiv Territorial Defense. He and his wife are sixty-six years old.
In his youth he served in the military. He said he no longer wanted to just watch our city suffer from this constant shelling. I started thanking him—I couldn’t stop. I used all kinds of words and phrases of thanks, but I wanted to add more to these expressions, as if that would prevent this elderly man who is caring for his sick wife from risking his life.
I expect a solution. The solution must be discovered, worked out, and implemented. The aggression must stop. Not one more minute of war!
The sirens are wailing again. My father sits in the next room learning English vocabulary. A good friend of mine calls and says that perhaps the last evacuation bus will leave from a Kyiv synagogue tomorrow. Maybe I can try to convince my parents to leave the city after all. In vain I try to talk to them about it. We are needed here more, they say, it is not the time to leave Kyiv. I agree and try to sleep a few more hours. We’ll stay and see what happens.
On the way back from shopping, I photographed an old man in the park. He said his wife was ill and he was taking care of her. He intends to take care of her until tomorrow, then he will join the Kyiv Territorial Defense. [Photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]
A wrecked car near the botanical garden: the unbearable realization that this war, this unimaginable, illogical, criminal war, is still going on after all. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]
Day 5 (Monday, February 28): the new vulnerability
It’s a sunny spring day that, like the last three, ends in darkness. I sit in the darkened apartment. Some lights burn, but those lights are dim and hidden. I read the news that Mariupol is bravely resisting Russian troops, but is also largely in darkness. Russia is attacking infrastructure as planned, putting people in the city under artillery fire, without electricity. Fighting around Kyiv continues.
But my thoughts are with Kharkiv. I see the images of apartment blocks destroyed by rockets and mortar shells and know that today Putin’s army murdered nine people, including three children, in this Russian-speaking city that is resisting occupation. Thirty-seven people are injured, eighty-seven apartment buildings ruined. I live in Kyiv in a similar building—a vulnerable refuge, my own apartment, where I always feel so good. Even now! Even now!
This war is demonstrating a new level of vulnerability to the world. Almost all pharmacies are closed. Electricity, water, and heating are under constant threat of failure. The wounds are getting bigger. But there is a whisper constantly repeating in my ear, even if it is sometimes almost silent: they keep fighting, we keep fighting—then the wounds heal faster.
The public spaces, squares, streets in the city are empty. The horizon is suddenly closer, the Kyiv hills, the asphalt, the courtyards of the buildings, everything seems to be invited and involved in the war.
At noon I decided to go for a walk: on the fifth day of the war, when the curfew lifted, I accompanied a German friend, who could not stay in Kyiv, to the railway depot. We were going to take the subway first. Inspired and almost drunk by the idea that the subway in Kyiv was working again, we walked to the “Golden Gate” station. Then, at the entrance, we learned that this station could only be used as a shelter.
(As I write this, sirens shatter the silence. It is 2:30 in the night and I decide to stay where I am and finish this diary entry).
So we had to walk to the railway depot. A journey of twenty-five minutes, which for me was a walk into another vast reality. Since the beginning of the war, I have not visited Shevchenko Boulevard, a wide street leading down to the depot. We walked along the street and every house, every intersection carried something new, a new language, a new narrative about our shared reality. The city looked peaceful, the sun’s rays made this image even more jarring. We quickly said goodbye, and I strolled back alone.
I wanted to cross the street, so I could overlook the old botanical garden. Suddenly I saw a pile of metal on the side of the road—a shot up, deformed car—then a second one nearby, plus a broken advertising sign—shattered glass, metal, and plastic on the ground. The botanical garden was wiped from my mind. What remained was the unbearable realization that this war, this unimaginable, illogical, criminal war, was still going on after all.
At about the same time, peaceful residents of the city of Berdyansk in the south of the country gathered in front of their local government building, which was occupied by Putin’s army and guarded by armed soldiers. The women shouted at the soldiers in Russian, “How can you look your mothers in the face? You brought war and slaughter to our land! Shame on you!” Old people were also in the crowd, they were not afraid. The soldiers looked demoralized, they replied: “We came to protect you!”
The women resisted, they continued to protest, “We were never in danger here. There was no threat to us here before you came. Now, with you, because of you, we are in the greatest danger.” Then came cursed insults, which have a very great richness in the Ukrainian and Russian languages.
This ability of the residents of Berdyansk to fight on and on, to approach the soldiers unarmed and shout the truth in their faces, even when the city has almost fallen into Putin’s hands, promises a lot. It is hope itself.
I see fewer and fewer journalists in the city. Here, someone is filming a line of people in front of a pharmacy that was closed for almost two days. Only a few pharmacies are still open. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]
Day 4 (Sunday, February 27): an extinguished city
Normally, the many brightly lit windows in Kyiv warm the city’s cold February days. The lights have something secret, private, but at the same time cozy about them. But now the city has gone out. People are afraid of Russian missiles and artillery fire. I have taped my windows shut in case of shelling, so that they won’t shatter. I go out on the balcony to check if my apartment is dark enough. I put only one lamp in each room—they hardly give any light and are on the floor. It is difficult for me to find my way around the apartment, but I try to discover a new form of coziness.
The sirens that warn of air strikes wail with a long signal, somewhat reminiscent of the playful sounds that elephants use to communicate. In Kyiv, the wailing of sirens is also a form of communication, but the message is always the same: hide, hide well!
When dawn came, for some reason I decided to clean my apartment. I thought: right now you have to stick to the plans, to the usual routines. From the outside, my apartment is almost black, with its empty, dark windows greeting all the other apartments in the city, which are also empty and dark.
The darkness is frightening, but at the same time I sense that the city has decided to defend itself. On official Telegram channels, I read about so-called “diversionary groups,” Russian units moving into Kyiv as a vanguard. Like terrorists. Their goal is to destabilize the city, carry out attacks on politicians, and ultimately take Kyiv. One such group appears to have shot at the car of two women who had decided to flee the city with their children this morning. The women and their children died.
My thoughts become as dark as the windows of my apartment. While cleaning, I thought that when I write this diary, I should make a joke about housekeeping during war. My tip would be: “Cleanliness is a must in a dark room with taped windows—if you were going to do it earlier and are almost crying now, go ahead and mop your apartment anyway. True, you will not see anything. And the apartment may not get much cleaner, but following procedures and implementing plans is more important.”
The fourth day of the war is over. Half the city is fighting against the normalization of violence that is knocking on every door. War also tests us to see if we have even a touch of compassion for those sent here to murder. Since the war began, 16 children have been killed across the country. In my town, nine “civilians” (I hate that word more and more) have died so far and 47 have been injured, including three children.
The destruction of the small town of Shchastye, “Happiness,” in northeastern Ukraine began with an electrical station being shelled. At some point it was destroyed, the light went out, the water, the heating. In distress, people, especially elderly residents, went outside to get water or food. Then the soldiers attacked, with artillery and rockets. A bus with fleeing people was fired upon. No journalists work in this area at the moment, no one counts the injured, the dead. Who will describe what Putin has done to the Donbas since the beginning of the war, since his operation to “Protect of the People of Donbas from Ukrainian Fascists”?
By occupying these territories and waging information warfare, Putin has managed to isolate this region from the world. Human rights organizations have not been able to freely operate there since 2014, and now the Russian army is once again showing how little it values the lives of its people.
From the news I learn that in the settlement of Ivankiv in Kyiv Oblast, the Regional History Museum was destroyed. In it were the works of Maria Primachenko, one of the most famous twentieth century artists in Ukraine. A joint exhibition of my photography and her painting had been planned for the fall, which is a great honor for me. I am sure that, somehow, somewhere, this exhibition will take place.
Day 3 (Saturday, February 26)
My first night in the bomb shelter. The Telegram channels of the Kyiv government warn that it will be a heavy night and that the Russian military will attack the city. But here in the shelter it’s pretty much empty. Many are trying to stay at home, in hope that nothing will happen. As of Saturday night, there is an almost 30-hour curfew in the city. It probably won’t be possible to leave the room on Sunday.
Our small shelter is located in the center of Kyiv, not far from the Golden Gate. It is one and a half floors deep underground, to be precise—a network of corridors and corridors. They are clean, comfortable, and warm. I like this place because it provides shelter for more than 100 people. There is drinking water, everyone brings something, there is also enough food. Everyone who can’t stand the sirens and the thunder of the artillery and rocket fire is allowed to come here. There are also some families who are here most of the time.
At the dark entrance to our basement, I see the silhouettes of residents scurrying past each other. You can overhear their occasional, petty arguments.
Two older shadows pass by two younger ones:
“Good evening!” “But the evening is not good!” the younger ones protest. “We wish you a good evening anyway,” the older ones say in a triumphant tone, “because we mean well. And we will continue to wish it, to you and to the others!” The shadows disappear into the depths of the cellar.
I orient myself in the present because the days offer little structure. At some point I visited my parents, both of them are not ready to leave Kyiv. They want to stay here until the moment of “our victory,” as they say.
My father is a translator, he translates German poetry into Russian. Thanks to his translations of Paul Celan, I fell in love with this poet when I was still a student. For years, since the Maidan Revolution, he has published his translations almost exclusively in Ukraine.
He took part in protests back then, I remember calling him from Berlin and finding out that he was standing with the demonstrators at the parliament building. Then I heard an explosion; luckily he wasn’t hurt. Now he is in Kyiv. He feels quite weak after a long cold and cannot go to the shelter. Maybe he doesn’t want to either. Every day I see how he continues to work on his translations. Despite the rocket attacks, despite the danger, or maybe because of it.
As I write, it occurs to me that during the day I saw many smiling people. For example, a woman who was sitting in the park on a bench next to two big shopping bags. She spoke to me in an absurdly happy voice, saying that she was waiting for her nephew to help her carry the bags home. “I’m so happy to have you standing next to me now, talking to me. When there are two of us, I’m less afraid of the artillery.”
She used to work as a museum guide at St. Sophia Cathedral, she said, now she’s a pensioner. She is convinced, she said, that Ukraine will defeat the Russian invaders. “When I think about the frescoes of St. Sophia, I believe that Ukraine will be protected by the whole world.” She smiled, tears standing in her eyes. “We will be victorious,” she said. I didn’t know if she was crying more or laughing more, but I felt her courage and admired her.
Is today only the third day of the war? Mariupol: 58 civilians wounded. Kyiv: 35 people, including 2 children. This is far from a complete list. It feels strange to find myself in this broad, unarmed, almost delicate category: “civilians.” For war, a category of people is created who live “outside the game.” They are shelled, they have to endure the shelling, they are injured, but they do not seem to be able to give an adequate response to it.
I don’t believe this to be the case. There is something hidden in the smiles that I saw several times today. A secret weapon, a sinister one. I must try to sleep at last and reach my apartment in the morning. Having breakfast in your own kitchen—that would be an enormous pleasure!
The smiling woman with the shopping bags in the park said: “We will win.” [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]
The night has suddenly become silent. Just an hour ago, around midnight, sirens could be heard, then distant thunder, perhaps rocket or artillery hits. And now—a tense silence.
We should be in the shelter by now, but I’ve already been there twice today. My parents are tired and I’m staying in the apartment with them for the night. The idea was that you can rest up here, if only a little bit. We are ready to leave the apartment on a minute’s notice and take shelter in the basement of the house.
I find it difficult to collect my thoughts. Different experiences of today crumble into the sensation of many days, more or less the same, standing grey one next to the other. The space in the city is changing. The walk from my house to the nearest grocery store, which usually took no more than ten minutes, stretches out, the distance becoming a longer trek.
The fact that the store was open at all was a miracle. I bought apples, vegetables, and buckwheat—but when I returned to the area an hour later, I saw the disappointed faces of two women now standing in front of a closed door. Someone said there was another grocery store 500 meters away, down the same street. But it wasn’t good news for the two women—500 meters on foot? The sirens are wailing, and fewer and fewer people are in the streets.
Time is also changing. On the way back from the grocery store, I found out that a kindergarten near the city of Sumy, in the north-east of the country, was shelled today. A kindergarten and a shelter. 17 children injured, two seriously. I stopped and leaned against a wall of a house. The day suddenly became infinitely long. Can this war be endured one more minute? Why doesn’t the world put an end to this happening?
It was a spring day, the sunspots played on the walls of the houses and the white walls of the St. Sophia Cathedral. The sirens wailed again—the signal to go to the shelter. A good friend of mine, the artist Nikita Kadan, had lost his credit card and the two of us walked the streets to find a working ATM.
One journalist had a backpack with him, with everything he might need in the coming days. We saw some passers-by and reporters standing in front of one of the big hotels with their cameras, reporting. The second day of the war, as it turns out, is a step already taken in a repeating sequence.
In the evening I learned that a town in the Luhansk region had been 80 percent destroyed by the Russian army, a beautiful little town that was in Ukrainian-controlled territory. It was called Shchastye, meaning “Happiness.” The husband of a friend, who was already safe, managed to escape. He left town without a toothbrush, socks, or suitcase.
A car picked him up on the road. He told my friend that as he drove along, he saw the corpses of people lying next to their houses, doors, and the small cellars where many Ukrainians store potatoes for the winter. So these were “the people of the Donbas” that Putin claimed he was saving from “genocide.”
Happiness no longer exists. I was there a few years ago and photographed streets, also admiring a hill that dominates the landscape. In the city people spoke Russian and Ukrainian—I wrote about them and about their strange and funny homemade playgrounds.
Then I fall asleep in this black night after all.
Day 2 (Friday, February 25): air alert
I wake up at seven in the morning to the sirens warning of air raids. My mother is convinced that Russia will not dare to shell the thousand-year-old St. Sophia Cathedral in the city. She believes that our house, which is in the immediate vicinity of the cathedral, is safe. That’s why she decides not to go to the shelters. My father is sleeping.
I think if a UNESCO monument would actually stop the Russian army from shelling, this war wouldn’t have started in the first place. My head is throbbing with thoughts: Kyiv under fire, abandoned by the whole world, which is just ready to sacrifice Ukraine in the hope that it will feed and satiate the aggressor for some time.
Kyiv is being shelled, for the first time after the Second World War.
I am struggling with myself. I know slowly the world is waking up and starting to see that it’s not just about Kyiv and Ukraine after all. It’s about every house, every door, it’s about every life in Europe that is threatened as of today.
Everyone in Kyiv is trying to stay alert and do whatever they can to protect themselves and others. Here, our neighbors get a pink balloon from a tree. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]
Day 1 (Thursday, February 24): the beginning
Today I woke up early in the morning to see eight unanswered calls on my cell phone. It was my parents and some friends. At first I thought something had happened to my family and that my friends were trying to reach me because for some reason my parents had alerted them first. Then my imagination went in another direction and I thought of an accident, a dangerous situation in the center of Kyiv, something to warn your friends about. I felt a cold uneasiness. I called my cousin, because her beautiful voice always has a calming effect on me, brave and rational. She just said: Kyiv has been shelled. A war has broken out.
Many things have a beginning. When I think about the beginning, I imagine a line drawn very clearly through a white space. The eye observes the simplicity of this trail of movement—one that is sure to begin somewhere and end somewhere. But I have never been able to imagine the beginning of a war. Strange. I was in the Donbas when war with Russia broke out in 2014. But I had entered the war then, entered into a foggy, unclear zone of violence. I still remember the intense guilt I felt about being a guest in a catastrophe, a guest who was allowed to leave at will because I lived somewhere else.
The war was already there, an intruder, something strange, foreign and insane, which had no justification to happen in that place and at that time. Back then, I kept asking people in the Donbas how all this could start, and always got different answers.
I think that the beginning of this war in the Donbas was one of the most mythologized moments for the people of Kyiv, precisely because it remained incomprehensible how such an event is born. At that time, in 2014, people in Kyiv said, “People from Donbas, those Ukrainian Putin-sympathizers, invited the war to our country.” This alleged “invitation” has for some time been considered an explanation for how the absolutely impossible—war with Russia—suddenly became possible after all.
After I finished the phone call with my cousin, I paced around my apartment for a while. My head was absolutely blank, I had no idea what to do now. Then my phone rang again. One call followed the next, friends came forward with plans to escape, some called to make sure we were still alive. I quickly grew tired. I talked a lot, constantly repeating the words “the war.” In between, I would look out the window and listen to see if the explosions were approaching. The view from the window was ordinary, but the sounds of the city were strangely muffled—no children yelling, no voices in the air.
Later, I went out and discovered an entirely new environment, an emptiness that I had never seen here, even on the most dangerous days of the Maidan protests.
Sometime later I heard that two children died from shelling in Kherson Oblast, in the south of the country, and that a total of 57 people died in the war today. The numbers turned into something very concrete, as if I had already lost someone myself. I felt angry at the whole world. I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common space where we live and hope for a future.
I’m staying with my parents tonight. I’ve visited a bomb shelter next to the house, so I know where we’ll all go when the shelling comes later.
The war has begun. It is after midnight. I will hardly be able to fall asleep, and there is no point in enumerating what has changed forever.
Driving one day in the city, I saw
in a library window a sign
that read WE BELONG TOGETHER. A warm
hand, a hand of human language, reached up
to touch my heart. It was as if the split-off
lost side of myself had spoken. What Eros
in the story those three words tell. Imagine
if we adopted them as our message, could
anything stop us? What if we came
together around the shared beauty
of who we really are, beyond labels
and identity? If we said “We belong
together” and meant it, think what we could do.
I kept thinking of trying to telephone a girl I hadn’t seen in years, but her number looked so strange now in my old address book. There wasn’t even a ringing tone. I began to stamp my foot and curse. My wife wondered what all the fuss was about and decided to leave me there and then, in the muddy field where there had been a fair that day, but which was now almost deserted. I was sure the number had once worked in the days when I spoke the girl’s language fluently.
FIRE
The only way to get the small child
to the street below was to carry her
in one arm and use my other
to let us both down
two curtains tied together
but by the time I got to the ground, the child
was no longer with me. Had I dropped her
or in my panic had I left her behind at the top?
Or had she made her own way, faster
and more agile than me?
When Mahatma Gandhi was studying law in London, a professor named Peters had a bad attitude … but student Gandhi never lowered his head and they met very often.
One day Peters was having lunch at the university canteen, Gandhi came with his tray and sat down next to him.
The very arrogant professor said to him, “Student Gandhi, you don’t understand!” “Pig” and “bird” don’t sit down to eat together. ”
Gandhi replies, “Be calm, Professor, I will fly!”
And the situation has changed. Professor Peters, filled with rage, because he understood that the student had called him “Pig”, decided to take revenge on the next exam …
But the student answers all the questions brilliantly.
Then the teacher asks him the following question: “Gandhi, if you walk down the street and find two bags, one with wisdom and the other with money, which of the two will you take?”
Gandhi replied without hesitation, “Probably the money, Professor.”
The smiling teacher tells him, “I would grab wisdom in your place, don’t you think?”
Gandhi replies, “Everyone takes what they don’t have, Professor.”
The already hysterical professor writes “IDIOT” on the exam sheet and returns it to the young man. Gandhi takes the sheet and sits down … after a few minutes he turns to the teacher and says, “Professor Peters, you signed the sheet, but you didn’t write my grade …”
Some time around the end of the last century, a small team of us were re-pointing the small, Norman Church of Edburton in East Sussex. The smooth, curvaceous hills of the South Downs create tranquil, hidden valleys, that people have made home for thousands of years. In the early spring, wild flowers shone bright in yellows and pinks through the lush greens of the low lying flora. Edburton church was a beautiful spot to be.
Nature though, was intent on not letting the three of us become complacent, by supplying us with an intermittent stream of cold, fresh water from the sky. Heavy showers of big, full drops, kept Grassy and I swearing and cursing our way through days on the scaffold. Our labourer Nick, who was to keep us supplied with muck, by staying on the ground, manning the mixer and sending buckets of lime morter up to us by rope, made no mention of the weather. He spent most of his time, seemingly, in a dream state. This story is all about how, all these years later, I have the utmost respect for Nick, although at the time, I found him infuriating.
The work was dirty and monotonous but satisfying, and Grassy good company, but, it was, still work; and work was not my thing. Finding joy in the present seemed impossible to me, as my mind drifted to the book I was reading, the song I was writing, the music I was making or the fun I could be having.
It didn’t occur to me at the time, that being paid a reasonable wage to spend two weeks up a scaffold, wrapped round a thousand year old church, looking out over the Sussex countryside, could be a pleasant experience. My over arching sense was one of ‘just wanting to get the job done’, and Nick’s inability to provide a constant supply of morter was not helping to achieve that aim.
(My poor brain hadn’t worked out that when this job was done, there would, most likely be another one, and another one, and another one, etc, etc, etc.. But, well, as the poem goes, ‘When I could have done this, I should have done that. I would of said this, if I could have been that. It’s OK, we’re all idiots’).
Anyway, to get back to Nick, the most challenging of labourers. One day, under deep grey skys, Grassy and I are up the scaffold, calling down for more muck. We get no response from Nick. We call and we call and eventually Grassy climbs down the scaffold, grumbling and cursing, to see what’s going on. After a couple of minutes I hear Grassy’s voice and the mixer start up again. Just as Grassy makes it back up the scaffold, puffing and panting, there’s a tug on the rope and I start to pull up a bucket of morter. It turns out, much to our hilarity and dismay, that Grassy had found Nick meditating in the church porch. This scenario was to be played out countless times over the next couple of weeks. (We would call for muck, Nick would ignore us, one of us would climb down to find him meditating or just gazing). It turns out that Nick was having trouble focusing on the job in hand. Remaining in the present he could manage, it was staying in the one dimension, that he found difficult.
Ultimately, it was good comedy that kept Grassy and me entertained, until one day, Nick’s interdimensional roaming came very close to killing us. I have no idea how it happened, but one very wet afternoon, the scaffold became live with 240 volts. It seems that there was a split in the power lead to the mixer and the water, that so generously poured from the sky, had led to the electricity from the church’s main supply, to the scaffolding. Grassy and I stood, terrified on the boards as blue bolts of electricity arced around us. We shouted and hollered for Nick. We could see him, wandering around among the celandine at the far end of the church yard. His stretched woollen jumper and jogging trousers, heavy from the rain, dragged along with him. No matter how hard we shouted or how loud we called, our voices just couldn’t reach him.
Finally, after what seemed an age, Nick turned back towards the church, heard us shouting and shuffled a bit quicker in our direction. We then, through the wind and the rain, had to describe what a fuse box looks like and explain how to cut off the supply of electric to the scaffold. Much to mine and Grassy’s relief, after a few minutes, Nick managed to come to our rescue, and the arcing stopped. We climbed down from the scaffold, shaken, soaking wet, cold, scared and very angry.
This is the part of the story where I explain how, all these years later, I came to have great respect for Nick. Firstly he came back to work the day after he nearly killed us, and didn’t apologise. When Grassy and I, whilst sitting in the porch, having tea before we stared work, grumbled at him, he just shrugged, as if to say, ‘these things happen’, and set about getting ready to make a mix. At the time I considered him arrogant, rude and uncaring and Grassy and I climbed the ladder back to our work, disgruntled and determined to let the boss know, we were not willing to work with Nick any longer. Only now can I respect his way of coming to terms with life’s challenges. ‘These things happen. Why look for blame’.
Secondly, and this is the big one. A week or so before the near death experience, I arrived at work in a terrible state. At this time in my life, most weekends I was partying ‘quite hard’. Which means to say, I was, quite often, staying up Friday through to Sunday, then grabbing a few hours kip before getting up for work on Monday. Usually, by the time Wednesday arrived I was functioning physically, but emotionally I was ruined.
A challenging domestic situation had been nurtured by my being more focused on creativity and enjoyment than money and employment. Myself, my partner and our son, found ourselves living on a particularly unfriendly council estate nestled nicely between the railway line and the retail park, just behind a busy main road in Brighton. The flats were built as overspill accommodation for the barracks at the end of the road, to house army families who were waiting to be posted to the Middle East, during the gulf war of the late 80’s and early 90’s. Consequently they were constructed quickly and cheaply, leading to the experience of, quite literally, living with our neighbours, but for two sheets of plaster board.
After we had moved in, we discovered that the estate was where the local council put all the families who had been moved from the larger estates in Brighton because they had, in some way upset their neighbours to such an extent that the council were forced to rehouse them elsewhere. It was a ‘cul-de-sac’, in the most realistic terms.
As the flat we were living in previously had been condemned by the council, they were legally bound to rehouse us. As new council tennents, should we turn down their offer of accommodation we would be removed from the housing list, so we, much to my dismay, had to move in to a plasterboard box, in the naughty corner.
We made the most of it though, my partner, thrilled about finally having a place ‘of our own’, made a fantastic job of designing the interior and I set to work, employing all the kids on the street to help make the garden nice. Bringing home bits and pieces from work to build a small patio, plant a tree and fill the tiny patch of land with shrubs and flowers.
Three years in and the garden was slowly coming together, as they do, and after it had been vandalised for the third time by one of the neighbours, I was sitting on the step outside feeling dispondent. My neighbour from downstairs came out and, handing me a warm can of Fosters lager, sat next to me. We chinked cans and the ring pulls clicked and hissed in unison. After we had both taken a sip of the sugary spume, my neighbour, after wiping his mouth, nonchalantly said, in his thick Glaswegian brogue, whilst looking straight ahead, ‘You know what the problem is Ben?’, ‘No’, I answered, readying myself. ‘The problem is, that we’, he gestured up and down the road with a sweep of his arm, took another sip of lager, smacked his lips, and continued, ‘we know that you are only making this garden nice, to make us’, (with emphasis on the word us), ‘look like a bunch of cunts’. I blinked and twitched my head slightly. My neighbour stood up, patted me on the shoulder and went back in side, leaving me with his truth, and a reality gulf too deep to do anything with.
Anyway, back to Nick. I came in to work, one wet Wednesday morning, with the council on my back about council tax arrears, my partner on my case, because the council were on my back, my neighbours endlessly arguing, fighting, shouting at the kids, a car on the verge of being scrapped, a realisation that I was working all the hours I could and only making just enough money to pay the rent on somewhere I didn’t want to live, and stay alive long enough to go back to work the following week, to do it all again. As if that wasn’t enough and to really heighten the experience, my continual search for escape through partying had drained my body of all its nutrient and my brain was being forced to operate virtually starved of endorphins and serotonin. (An experience akin, (to the uniniated), to running an engine without oil. Every thought and movement grates, as the cogs and wheels of the human mechanism grind against each other). In short, I arrived at work in a terrible mess and was letting Grassy know all about it. Ranting and raving on about this problem and that problem. It was a big, poor old me, crisis lecture. After a few minutes of me going on, Nick, who had been silently watching my performance, leaned over to be closer to me, touched my arm, looked me in the eye and very calmly asked ‘are we not, all Buddha in the garden?’
I exploded with rage. The nerve of the man. ‘Buddha in the garden, Buddha in the fucking garden? Could he not see what the world was doing to me? It was destroying me. Ruining me. Driving me to madness through torture. I was a blameless victim brought to hell by societies unwillingness to let me be free, and he calls me Buddha in the garden’. To the sound of Grassy’s deep laughter, I climbed the ladder to start taking my frustration out on the old church.
I don’t think I ever spoke to Nick again, never working with him after Edburton church. What became of him is a mystery to me. His legacy however lives on within me. In that soggy porch that morning, Nick sowed a seed in my mind that has taken twenty odd years to germinate. I now finally see, that yes, we are all Buddha in the Garden, and that garden will be filled with whatever Buddha brings.
On Steven Berkoff’s A World Elsewhere (Routeledge, 2022)
Berkoff’s new book is a hard won grimoire to glory.
Published by Routeledge, that academic arm grasps his Art,
As Steven studies himself in this running discourse
And catalogue of creations which have helped to redefine
Modern Theatre, and what an actor can do, gripped by craft.
Convention was never for him, as his autobiography FreeAssosciation first detailed. As did Diaryof aJuvenile Delinquent, Prisoner of Rio and TalesfromanActorslife,
Some past tomes. But this book above all is the one from which
Students and actors too can gain entrance, not just to the man
And his theatre, but to the spirit which fired the still stunning
Flesh on those bones. SB is now in the ‘sere’ of his years,
As he writes, quoting Shakespeare, but he is still Steven Berkoff,
With the same force and fury that commanded tides to make seas
From a fistful of words; he shaped shores and oceans
Across which pioneers started sailing, just as his inspirations:
Olivier, Artaud, and Jacques Lecoq, fuelled his speed. From Stepney
He sprang, bubbling forth in the Sixties; nearly ruined by Rep,
He tore pages from Kafka and Poe to reform what could be done
With the word when it was it spotlit on stage to score shadow;
For in passing through these great classics he became
Seminal. From Kafka’s InthePenalColony for Jim Haynes’
Arts Lab in 1968 his world started. Ploughing a field grown
From torture, and the Sentence machine scoring victims,
Branded like bled animals. The first Metamorphosis gained
New ground as his second production; now seen across
The world with all countries embracing Berkoff’s Kafka
Coloured cockroach, whose metranomic insistence saw
The Berkovian style effervesce. With that followed fast
By an impressionistic MissJulie, before Agamemmnon
For RADA saw his London Theatre Group coalesce.
Berkoff taught in Drama Schools as he learned how
To perfect his intention, gaining sympaticos
And companions, he peopled a pure and poised Theatre
Which made everything possible, such as corridors made
From hands. Or the magic of books as man music.
And a new style to speaking that gave oratory access
And made poetry unstoppable. His FallofTheHouse OfUsher exists in its Amber Lane text and some photos,
Gauze and light grounding the haunted air in his stare.
He writes of remounting it now, nearly fifty years later.
What a sight to see! The Man/house as a horror
Which would even today form a dare against the conventions
And creeds he’s raged war at for decades; as evidenced
By the writing of his first original play. In all of these works
He’s contained, but in their release he’s explosive.
A powder keg in his Eighties, just as he was in youth’s day.
Berkoff is Mike’s cunt speech in East, but he is also Valeria’s
Exquisite mimed stitching in (his) Coriolanus. He is Roderick’s
Slow scream in Usher and in Salome, Herod’s howl.
But in that first play, his verse equivocates London
With Stratford, as Shakespeare meets Stepney,
And the Cockney stamp rears fresh Hamlets who
Do not stoop, doubt or cowl. East was a sensation
And played at the early National Theatre. It also gave
Steven’s squadron their first proper sense of attack.
And in this book there is praise for all of those who formed
With him; from Barry’s Stanton and Philips, to Matthew
Scurfield. Bill Stewart, Linda Marlowe, and Joe Papp.
Whose belief with first wife Shelley Lee, initially bibled
Berkoff, alongside each musician and actor who let
The work and way set them free. As it would now,
As reading this book makes eyes moisten just as it turns
Hearts to fire when one sees what’s achieved
When iconoclasts cast aside theatre’s slick shackles,
As Berkoff’s bounty, seen in this valued volume is to do
With playwriting and the production of such as a screed
For what creation truly is, or must be: a series of shifts
And small innovations which allow former totems
To topple and ruins to rise in the dark, in order to find
And reshape the space in which we can fully encounter
The Angel and then court the demon who whether we
Like it or not, leaves its mark. Decadence did that next.
As did Greek, Kvetch, Massage and Messiah, and some
Of the pieces not mentioned, such as Lunch and Sink
TheBelgrano, which immediately spring to mind.
But what Berkoff begets sets all stories rolling; formative
Stones that once thrown make mountains, and thus
Dramatic testaments for new times. Art is and must be
Defined by the contribution it offers. Separate to subjectivity,
The objective is to re-engage with the world and remake
It elsewhere, or to perhaps bring that realm closer, an aim
That resounds within this book’s title and to the rallying flag
It unfurls. For this is the world and ‘cuntry’ he kissed
And these plays are those kisses. They are also the sex
And the struggle, the Sturm und Drang in his cup.
And as he tells us his tales and maps out his methods;
From OneMan to Acapulco, Ophelia’s secret love,
And the scumbags who litter (his) Brighton beach,
The jig’s up, and yet as a dance it is both forceful
And graceful. His hilarious Dog made him Maestro
Of mime as have all his productions, such as Greek’s
Word only fistfight and of course, TellTaleHeart,
And those endless locks, and five minute (at least)
Spiral staircase: another belly laugh bred for wonder
And yet another example of Steven Berkoff and his
Sixty year art. The meal Berkoff bakes is both sweet
And sour. It contains the smell of fresh bagels
And the handmade chopped herring from home.
It is a cuisine carved from care about what actors are
And can accomplish. From a young man’s frustration,
He balanced with beauty a way to celebrate the alone;
Through both stories and stares, from Iago to Titoreli,
To Mike, Dad and Eddy, to Beverly Hills Cop’s
Victor Maitland: A WorldElsewhere crowns the glory
Of what Steven sculpted from both breath and the body:
He stepneyed out, and space spurred him to carve
His own landscape. This book shows that detail and how
Through that drawing he’s found some fucking life
Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, Erica Chenoweth
(Oxford University Press, 2021. Civil resistance is a method of conflict through which unarmed civilians use a variety of coordinated methods (strikes, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, and many other tactics) to prosecute a conflict without directly harming or threatening to harm an opponent. Sometimes called nonviolent resistance, unarmed struggle, or nonviolent action, this form of political action is now a mainstay across the globe. It was a central form of resistance in postwar anti-colonial movements, the 1989 revolutions, and the Arab Awakenings, and people are practicing civil resistance at higher rates than ever before around the world, including in the United States. If we want to understand the manifold protest movements emerging around the globe, we need a thorough understanding of civil resistance and its many dynamics and manifestations.
In Civil Resistance: WhatEveryone Needs to Know®, Erica Chenoweth–one of the world’s leading scholars on the topic–explains what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance. Featuring both historical cases of civil resistance and more contemporary examples such as the Arab Awakenings and various ongoing movements in the United States, this book provides a comprehensive yet pithy overview of this enormously important subject.
Features:
Introduces the essentials of how and why civil resistance works in a conversational and accessible style Concise yet systematic overview that draws from both historical and contemporary cases, including the present-day United States
Demonstrates the important role of civil resistance in the world we live in today
“This book is a remarkable achievement, synthesizing up-to-date research, new case accounts, and significant new insights in a way that is accessible to all. Take its title literally. It is a guide for everyone—whether new or with years of experience—to the dynamics of nonviolent movements fighting for rights, freedom, and justice. I highly recommend it.”
– Hardy Merriman, President & CEO, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
“This book is as much advocacy as it is an analysis of nonviolence. Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know is an unwavering introductory guide and comprehensive toolkit to civil resistance’s methods and potential.”
– Maiyoraa Jeyabraba, Journal of Peace Research
Harasho, harasho, I run this freakin’ show! You think I can’t speak English? There’s nothing I don’t know. I know that World War III, nobody wants to see, so please EU and USA don’t mothersuckers mess with me. ooooh, Yes I Ken cause I’m the president with the greatest plan, to make my Mother Russia number 1 again, and by the way, I hit better than Jackie Chan, I’m gentleman. Do you want peace or you wanna piece of me? I’ve got gas you see, don’t play games with me. You want my gas? Well, you can kiss my ass! When I play chess be quiet or eat my Pussy Riot! Putin, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putin, Putout! Putin, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putin, Putout! Putin, Putout! HEY! Putin, Putout! HEY! Putin, Putout, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putin, Putout! Putin, Putout! HEY! Putin, Putout! Messin’ with Putin HEY, HEY is a sin! It’s great to be president of the biggest country, you can have Winter Olympic Games in 40 degrees, and by the way, Eurovision is so gay, just please don’t take my soccer World Cup 2018 away! I sang for charity, la la, and tranquilized a tiger on a killing spree, bang bang, I fight terrorism with my big army, I am nice, why oh why can’t I get a Nobel Peace Prize?! Do you want peace or you wanna piece of me? I’ve got gas you see, don’t play games with me. You want my gas? Well, you can kiss my ass! If you are a prick – suck my Moby Dick! Putin, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putin, Putout! Putin, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putin, Putout! Putin, Putout! HEY! Putin, Putout! HEY! Putin, Putout, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putin, Putout! Putin, Putout! HEY! Putin, Putout! Messin’ with Putin HEY, HEY is a sin! Niet I won’t stop! Until I wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin! Putin, Putout, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin, Putout, Putin! HEY! Putin!
KING CRIMSON: A British progressive rock band formed by the guitarist, Robert Fripp which debuted in 1968.
In 2015, for the first time in 12 years, the band toured Japan with an unparalleled three-drum performance on stage, which intensely excited their enthusiastic Japanese fans. In 2018, the band held a 50th anniversary tour in Japan, which was the culmination of an impressive career, and it was a great success and a fantastic performance.
And in 2021, Japan was such a very important place for KING CRIMSON that they concluded their last tour there.
Blood, Sweat & Chrome: the Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, Kyle Buchanan
(hbck, £20, William Morrow)
I persuaded my friend Pete to come and see Mad Max: Fury Road in the first week of its UK release. Of course, he’d seen the first three on TV late night re-runs, but he wasn’t – ok, neither of us were – prepared for the full-on mayhem of the fourth instalment on a big screen. ‘What the hell was that?’ said Pete as we emerged blinking into late evening sunshine, deafened and overstimulated by car crash after car crash, special effects after special effects, not to mention fight scene after fight scene. ‘What happened?’ he asked, again hoping for an answer that didn’t come, since I didn’t have much of a clue either.
Fury Road is basically two long chase scenes back to back. Max, this time played by Tom Hardy not Mel Gibson, escapes from a warlord’s desert fortress and runs away, teaming up with escaped members of a breeding harem (led by Charlize Theron’s character Furiosa) on the way. Together the group continue on to a kind of promised land, The Green Place, a desert oasis town where Furiosa grew up, only to find it has become desert. So back they go, all the time battling with the warlord’s War Boys: troops who they also fought on the run out. It’s live-action mayhem, full of extreme cartoon violence, crazy cars and weapons, huge desert- and weather- scapes, energetic jumpcuts and camera shots from all angles, with the absolute minimum of dialogue or explanation. This is post-apocalypse pandemonium; engaging, awe-inspiring, loud, ridiculous, engrossing over-the-top dystopian pantomime. No wonder it was a box-office hit and audiences have been promised another episode – supposedly a prequel about Furiosa – before too long.
What wasn’t obvious from the film, but this book explores, is the epic story of how George Miller managed to make Mad Max: Fury Road despite having studio backing pulled, logistical and technical issues, difficulties filming in the Namib desert, and casting and personality clashes. Kyle Buchanan has undertaken hundreds of original interviews and collated quotes, opinions and information into the story behind the film, a film that never had a script but was filmed from a 3500 frame storyboard drawn years before shooting began.
It is a story of tenacity and sticking-to-your-guns, a story of dedicated stuntmen, cameraman and prop makers. A story of engineers dedicated to constructing makeshift cars from salvage; actors prepared to shave their heads and live out their characters’ obsessions in the unbelievable desert heat, sometimes layered in masks and leather; photographers prepared to film whilst hanging off high-speed vehicles as they crash into each other; and colleagues of Miller’s bending the rules or playing games. One of my favourite stories in the book is when a hundred or so vehicles plus equipment (72 containers full!) are put on a boat to Namibia even though the studio have said that it is too risky to film in Africa.
Chris deFaria [producer]: ‘I remember a studio executive going, “What the fuck are you fucking talking about? The cars are on a boat?” Doug [Mitchell, producer] goes, “Yeah, the cars are on a boat and that boat is going to Namibia.”‘
Kelly Marcel [screenwriter]: ‘Doug doesn’t give any fucks. Zero, zero, zero fucks. You can’t fight with someone who doesn’t give a fuck if you’re not going to make their next movie or not. You have to be like, “I’m doing it.”‘
And Miller and his team were doing it. And did. Living as a temporary community taking over a small desert town, miles from anywhere, they had to learn to handle freezing nights, high temperatures at noon, dust storms, muggings, burglaries and isolation, not to mention working together. They learnt to live in close proximity, even on their days off, travel in groups to avoid violence from the locals, and accidentally started a small glamrock revival because the War Boys’ black eyeliner wouldn’t properly clean off their faces: ‘as we got towards the last two or three months’, says stuntman Harrison Norris, ‘all the locals in town […] were wearing guyliner as well. We accidentally glam-rocked the shit out of that place.’
The book is full of quirky stories and events like this, as well as those more pertinent to the film getting made, with lots of personal memories and insights, but thankfully it rarely sinks to gossip. The nearest it does is the recently resurrected and widely publicised disagreements between Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron. Since the book is an approved one, it feels very much like a deliberately highlighted and topical story which has been carefully mentioned to the press again, and seems to derive from Hardy’s method acting (living in character) and being prone to bad timekeeping, whilst new mother Theron wanted to get back to her baby. In the end she confronted him about being three hours late and got sworn at and threatened for her pains, resulting – she says – in her feeling scared.
With hindsight, it’s clear this wasn’t dealt with very well on set but that there were other things going on. Marcel says ‘I’ve been on some crazy sets and been involved in some fraught movies, but this is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in terms of sheer determination and grit and scraped kneed and bloody injuries and tears and frustration’, whilst video assist Zeb Simpson declares ‘[t]his was a once-in-a-lifetime job’. Producer George Miller states that ‘we’d still be there if we could, except they took away the cameras and we’ve wrecked all the cars.’ Despite all the problems over many years, Mad Max: Fury Road was both a critical and commercial success, attracting huge audiences and nominations for awards and as film of the year.
Miller’s refusal to compromise, be that on where to shoot, how to shoot, budget restrictions, design aesthetic, or any dilution of his vision, the film he saw in his head, resulted in an astonishing and original film, perhaps one of the last action films not constructed using CGI, which is what gives it such a visceral presence on screen. This beautifully designed book offers illuminating insights into the whole creative process, from conception to final edit, via the technical, social and machinations of the film industry. The only book it might be compared to is Eleanor Coppola’s Notes: The Making of Apocalypse Now, and it is just as exciting, readable and important a document as that.
Tracklist:
Ennio Morricone – The Strong
Tim Maia – Que Beleza
Etta James – Something’s Gotta Hold on Me
Betty Davis – Special People
Procol Harum – Cerdes (Outside the Gates of)
Dee Clarke – Fever
Karen Dalton – Same Old Man
Ramsey Lewis – Wade in the Water
Arthur Russell – A Little Lost
Phil Phillips – Sea of Love
Kai Winding – Time is on My Side
Tom Waits – The Ghosts Of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone’s Pizza House)
Bob Dylan – Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Nina Simone – Sinnerman
The Gospel Clefs – By the Waters of Babylon
Etta James – I’d Rather go Blind
Techno, house, garage or hip hop: electronic music is a driving force in pop culture today. Almost forgotten is its origins in the post-war classical avant-garde of Europe, with figures such as Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen. This 2021 documentary is the story of how rooms full of bizarre equipment were able to become miraculous places whose vibrations set the whole world abuzz. The film traces the history of electronic music from Europe to the great post-industrial cities of America, with exclusive interviews and little-seen archive footage.
Quite a voice. Always atmospheric. Another gemstone from Canada. This is her new album and it’s out soon. Perhaps a tad over-produced. Lots of strings and waves of sound. Lush, in extremis!
Basia is not that well known in the UK, but she has something of a cult following – but in a mix of styles and genres including country/blue grass. Not surprisingly, hints of Joni Mitchell too.
Back in 2013, she is in folksy-mode with ‘It can’t be you’ from ‘Bandstand Busking’ in London.
A brand new album full of Outer-Spaced Messages. Stereo audio flying lessons. Psyched-up, inter-stellar, mucho-alien space zounds. Many swirling whirrings, echo-ey vocals and discombobulated galactic noodles. Phased-out-rock from an Old Skool curriculum. Think of yourself and mates shakin’ ‘n’ gyrating, your long hair streaming in the strobe lights, going weird-blind in the waves of repetitive beats. Then, out of body, it takes you and your granny floating into the astronaut’s headspace above ‘2001’. Another Space Odyssey!
Thanks for the share from multi-instrumentalist, Niall Hone. Niall informs us that,
“After disembarking from the good-ship Hawkwind, following a 12-year voyage and touching down on terra firma, I’ve fired-upped my refuelled engines for this new project ‘Lords Of Form’.”
Niall was bass-player and keyboard player with Hawkwind. Here’s a double click link to ‘The Electric White Highway’. The album can be ordered here too. https://lordsofform.bandcamp.com/
Excursions and incursions from the Hawkwind outer fringes, or, is it fridges?
Lords of Form are: Niall Hone, Ross Fuller and Jamie Gillett.
The Ballad(s) of Johnnie Armstrang
The stories of the Border Reivers are much lauded and loved in the musical heritage worlds of Scots/English border ballads. Tales of thievery, looting, hangings. Heroism and cowardice. Here’s a wee dram of an introduction to the ones featuring the tale of Johnnie Armstr(o)ang.
First up is ‘Johnnie Armstrang’, as arranged and performed by my Scottish associates, Lori Watson (voice) and Innes Watson (guitar):
And, singer/guitarist, John Armstrong and friends from Todmorden in their new version. Here’s what they said about their venture into video music-making after a current namesake, John Armstrong, delved into his ancestry, he discovered a tale of treachery and bravery…
“Introducing ‘The Ballad of Johnny Armstrong’.
This is an authentic revival of a historical ballad, written in tribute to the late Johnny Armstrong and his clan of reivers from 1500s. It is reimagined by descendant John Armstrong and friends.
The story was filmed in and around Gilnockie Tower/Clan Armstrong and Reiver Centre in the borderlands, while the band was filmed and recorded live in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. Film by Trusty films.”
This is a new collection curated by Heny Rollins of remixes and covers plus two new tracks. Music from their whole career spanning 1977-2002.
A much lauded outfit. Underground and art-school. Successors to the Velvets in many ways and influential on many of their peers such as Nick Cave and the Jesus and Mary Chain. Suicide were one-offs, Alan Vega and Marty Rev. Moody, eccentric electronica and much more. Purveyors of many styles of music.
Here’s a video of ‘Ghost Rider’. Almost apocalyptically frightening in darkling intensity.
Suicide are much loved by many as icons. For their music. For their image. And for their association with many cult films, including those by Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. Oozing in love gone awry and bygone times. Lost love. Here is a black and white video of ‘Surrender’:
Eco-feminism? And/or: Pop confetti, but upbeat and fun. What’s not to like?
Hurray for the Riff Raff have new album out. Entitled ‘Life on Earth’ on the Nonesuch label.
Hurray for the Riff Raff (aka the Bronx-born, New Orleans–based singer/songwriter Alynda Segarra) has announced that, ‘Rhododendron’ is about, “finding rebellion in plant life.” It’s a real ear-worm. Catchy as hell, a bit edgy, replete with a chugging Jonathan Richman riff (raff) as the undertow.
Much loved by the late John Peel, this old/new album from HMHB is being unleashed on the unsuspecting public. Often loud, punky, wordy, sweary, usually lunatic-tinged. ‘Rogation Sunday’s Here Again!’ Definitely bonkers.
When the moon’s yet to rise
Thrimblenorton sends out a yawl
And other cats come running:
Once they are thirteen
He leads them silently
Through back-jiggers
To an overgrown garden
Where forming a circle
As the moon rises
They start to sing:
Eyes black swaying on hind legs
Front paws claws retracted
Mouths gaping teeth and tongues
Shining, each scents their own mother,
Feels soft belly fur
Kneads for a nipple
Guzzles thick milk until
The moon fades into dawnlight:
The air is different:
Clouds smoulder,
Shadows separate
And so do they:
Five to wait on back steps
Until the first kettle goes on;
Four to slip through cat flaps;
Three to scrounge what they can
And Thrimblenorton
Who’ll find the best place
Because he always does…
Reports come in of a ripped city and a painted sigh, a pained sky, a tainted cup passed from lip to lip as ships pile up until they block out the sun. Reports come in of a running child trailing grey rags, stray flags, flayed skin streaming like a river, or a ribbon, or a roll of dirty bandage unwinding from a wound. Reports come in of trembling foundations, troubling privations, tumbling divides of dry skin and sinew slit from faces that look just like yours or mine but which could not be identified beneath ash and brick dust. We have learned not to trust the evidence of gouged eyes. We have learned to be sceptical of split tongues. We have learned to ignore the broken hand that tugs at our sleeve and gestures towards towns torn from picture books and erased by fire. It’s time to leave but reports come in that we’re trapped in a burning house, in a city we’ve never heard of, and in all this time we’ve learned nothing but smoke
SAUSAGE LIFE The column that doesn’t shrink when you put it in the tumble dryer.
MYSELF: You like a little puzzle don’t you? READER: Oh I do, I do. What sort? A jigsaw puzzle? A Christmas cracker riddle? MYSELF: Neither. I was sent this combination poem/riddle, which I thought I might include for the amusement of our readers. See if you can guess the answer.
WHO AM I? By Celia Putty A narcissistic vacuum
who’s dependent on his mama’s milk,
a sub-moronic sociopath,
a pedlar of ersatz silk.
A naked porcine emperor
resplendent in his sty,
whose porky hirsuit kisser
isn’t easy on the eye.
A tweeting twat
whose surplus fat
could feed a thousand Innuits,
whose shop-bought wife
has swapped her life
for glitter, glitz
and bigger tits. Who am I?
READER: Are you Lars Vøndervøndervønder the Swedish jazz saxophonist? MYSELF: Close, but no cigar.
THE FOOD OF LOVE Classical music has gained the patina of middle class respectability over the years, but this contemporaneous account of a rowdy London concert in 1765 by Times’ music critic Archibald Ferret reveals a somewhat different story:
Crowds packed the upstairs room in city alehouse The Swan & Harp, a to witness, for an admission price of two shillings and sixpence per person, a concert by the Austrian musical prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mr Mozart’s air of detached arrogance was punctured somewhat as he confronted the rickety upright piano provided for him by the management. The general attitude of those attending is perhaps best illustrated by the following exchange with the inebriated ruffians who had commandeered the front row seats.
MAN1: ‘Ere Mozart! Go on! Give us a tune! How about a bit of Chopin?
MOZART (wrestling with locked piano lid): No!
LADY OF THE NIGHT (to ribald laughter): Oooh, I do like a man who can tickle the old
ovaries!
MAN2: A bit of Bach’s prelude in G minor then!
MAN1: Yeah, or the andante sostenuto from Haydn’s P.9 Symphony in B-Flat Major! MOZART (standing up and throwing piano stool at audience): Fuck off, I only do my own stuff.
SUPERHAT Failed politician, bully and litigious star of Russia Today ‘Gorgeous’ George Galloway, is suing the entire population of Scotland for the recent, tragic loss of his hat, which he blames on the rise of the SNP. “My hat is me,” he told us, “and I am my hat. Without it I am but a mere mortal, less powerful than a locomotive, and unable to leap even the smallest buildings with a single bound.”
The narcissistic gasbag was overheard the other day in Dunn & Co the famous London hatters, shouting at cowed shop assistants as he tried on yet another ridiculous fedora. “Does my head look big in this?” he was heard to whisper to Ivana, his Slavic assistant from the corner of his cupid-lipped orifice as he gazed at his adored reflection, which, he thought, resembled nothing so much as a younger, slimmer Orson Welles.
DICTIONARY CORNER Gullible (adj) food easily digested by sea-birds, eg: fish & chips, Macdonald’s, pizza, rubbish bins. Outsource (v) to compete successfully against a sautée chef. Detractor (v) one who has reverted to horse-drawn farming.
WENDY WRITES
Sound all-round advice from our highly unqualified expert.
Dear Wendy,
I own a beautiful Victorian doll’s house with 4 bedrooms (2 ensuite) and 2 receptions, which also features an original Victorian kitchen with miniature utensils. It is now on the market for £385,000, but has been occupied by a family of mice. There were only four of them at first, but now the place is, frankly, overcrowded. Citizen’s Advice and social services have offered no solutions and I am now at the end of my wits. How can I achieve vacant possession so that I can take my rightful place on the property roundabout?
Westphalia Tendril, Bexhill.
Dear Westphalia, I think you’ll find it’s a property ladder by the way, nonetheless I do sympathize with your predicament. I once owned a bicycle whose hollow frame was occupied by a boa constrictor which had escaped from a nearby bedsit. I enjoyed the notoriety at first, but once the novelty had worn off, I was forced to employ a professional snake charmer. Unfortunately after having very efficiently charmed the reptile out of my bicycle, he hypnotized me and stole my life savings. Anyway, as long as you are not averse to the sound of screaming rodents, there is a huge choice of mousetraps on the market, or you could try one of the many deadly poisons available (stay clear of Novichok though!). As a vegetarian animal rights activist I would be more inclined to pursue one of the more humane options, like heavy sarcasm or music aversion therapy. Mice hate the sound of the Argentine tango accordion by the way, if that’s any help. Wendy
Dear Wendy, I wonder if you could settle an argument. My husband insists that it can be potentially fatal to eat any seafood beginning with the letter W, unless there is an R in the month. I reminded him that on February 29th 2016, three catholic priests died from an attack of ciguatera poisoning after eating contaminated winkles at a leap-year miracle party in a Lourdes nightclub. He maintains that February, having two Rs, is exempt from that culinary rule, adding rather cruelly that it served them right. I say that surely having two Rs makes the month twice as dangerous as the others viz a viz seafood poisoning,? Who is right? Amelia Sternbagel, Silverhill
Dear Amelia, I’m sorry to have to tell you that your husband’s rather brutal assessment of the situation is in fact correct. February, contrary to TS Elliot’s opinion, is in fact the wickedest month, but not in a hip-hop sense. Due to its quadrennial elasticity and its double-barrelled R, it can also be frisky and anarchic. Those two Rs, when coupled with a leap-year can easily cancel out any food-related pearls of folk wisdom, exposing the confident oyster swallower, or in the sad case you describe, the ecclesiastical winkle gobbler, to unexpected stomach cramps, convulsions and speaking in tongues. My advice with any seafood, regardless of the month in which it is consumed, is to boil it thoroughly in a spacious cauldon with two tablespoons of bicarbonate of soda and a dash of goat’s urine for about three hours. Then leave to ferment before adding 500 grams of well-rotted manure. Leave to cool and consume within four hours. It may taste like the decomposing scrotum of a dead possum, but you can rest assured it will be quite safe to eat. Wendy
Sausage Life!
Colin Gibson • Emmet Ives • Anita Makris
SAY GOODBYE TO IRONING MISERY! When added to your weekly wash, new formula Botoxydol, with Botulinim Toxin A, will guarantee youthful, wrinkle-free clothes.
Take years off your smalls with Botoxydol! CAUTIONMAY CAUSE SMILEY FACE T-SHIRTS TO LOOK INSINCERE
R3 Soundsystem, London’s radical protest + music collective present an all-star line-up of underground DJ’s to raise emergency funds for the emergency in Ukraine.
On Friday 11 March 2022, we will host 9 hours of back-to back music across two rooms at venue MOT, on a South London industrial estate in. As part of the fundraiser, we will raise crucial funds destined for aid, refugee assistance and evacuations.
The people of Ukraine deserve our solidarity at this time that has already brought deep suffering and destruction. Deaths are already rising, and during these times of terror and anguish innocent people are paying the highest price.
Thousands of people are fleeing the country and seeking protection, and there is an urgent lack of safe accommodation, food, essential medicine and provisions on the ground.
Your donation will help key our partners Bündnis Entwicklung Hilft (Alliance for Development Help), Fulcrum UA & All Out to provide humanitarian help on the ground, and support people in Ukraine and refugees in the neighbouring countries that they are fleeing to.
We stand against the Tory government’s right-wing ties to Russian business interests, its corrupt cronyism and its stance on asylum seekers. We are also encouraging supporters to contact their MPs to demand action now, and to stand against the unjust invasion of Ukraine.
Soho Radio & Love Music Hate Racism in London joins hands in solidarity with this cause and will be broadcasting live on the night of the event.
We have seen overwhelming support from so many artists that are watching in horror as events unfold, and are proud to be standing shoulder to shoulder with them in solidarity with Ukraine. Roisin Murphy has postponed her show in St Petersburg on the 11th March and beyond until there is a complete ceasefire, she will be performing at this fundraiser instead.
Confirmed DJs so far as follows, with more being added daily…
Hot Chip (DJ set) / The Blessed Madonna / Hot Chip / Midland / Roisin Murphy / Dance System / Gideön / Shay Malt / Hannah Holland / Dan Beaumont / Nyra / Helena Star / Craig Richards/ Chapter 10 x Adonis / Horse Meat Disco/ Helena Star / Dan Beaumont
“To see Putin crush the wonderful city of Kyiv and destroy the incredible cultural explosion was underway breaks my heart and makes my blood boil in equal measure. Music is our weapon and R3 Soundsystem will continue to use it as a force for both international solidarity and political change”
R3 Soundsystem is a consortium of DJs, musicians, producers, recording artists, record labels, festivals, nightclubs, sound systems, activists, movements and cultural organisations, all united in our love of music and our rejection of right-wing nationalism.
R3’s three Rs stand for RESIST / REJECT / REVOLT.
R3 Soundsystem has organised major sound system interventions at many national demonstrations including the Stop Brexit, Stop Trump and Anti-Fascist protests.
We represent solidarity between all nations, races, tribes, genders, sexualities, faiths and musical tastes. We are together in music.
Bündnis Entwicklung Hilft (Alliance for Development Help) is an alliance of nine German development and relief organisations – Brot für die Welt, Christoffel-Blindenmission, DAHW, Kindernothilfe, Medico International, Misereor, Plan International, Terre des Hommes, Welthungerhilfe, and are are also associated members of German Doctors and Oxfam. Together they unite larger and smaller aid organisations that work together to respond to complex emergencies and conflicts. The alliance members provide both short-term assistance, which ensures immediate survival, and long-term support to overcome hardship and conflicts in the long term and to prevent new crises.
Fulcrum UA is one of the largest non-governmental LGBTQ organisations in Ukraine, and are advocates and champions for the community, lobbying for legislation prohibiting discrimination, civil partnership (including same-sex partnerships), and combating LGBTQI discrimination. They are currently working on the ground in Ukraine to help the LGBTQ community in cities under attack.
All Out work towards a world in which nobody has to sacrifice their family, freedom, safety or dignity because of who they are or who they love.
Assemblage is a recently rediscovered film produced for broadcast by San Francisco’s public television station KQED in November 1968. Created in collaboration with director and former dancer Richard Moore, the film features Cunningham dancing with early dance company members in a public “happening” in San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square. Conceived from the beginning as a dance staged for the camera, the performance is amplified by Moore’s special effects and complemented with a soundtrack by John Cage, David Tudor and Gordon Mumma. A testament to Cunningham’s groundbreaking investigations of dance and movement within the virtual spaces of film, Assemblage presents a dance that unfolds across fractured space and inside shattered time. Cunningham explained that “the finished film [would] deal not so much with dance in the narrow sense, but with various motions – boats moving, people walking, and, of course, groups dancing.” On screen, Cunningham’s dancers walk, frolic, and scramble through the shopping concourses and promenades of the square. The soundtrack, assembled contemporaneously by Cage, Tudor and Mumma, was likewise comprised of concrete sounds mostly recorded on-site around San Francisco.Cunningham and his company spent three weeks rehearsing and filming on location in fall 1968, creating what Moore described as “movement modules.” From these sequences, Moore and film editor Bill Yahraus crafted a motion picture collage of overlapping movements and moments, which occur sometimes in fragmented film windows, sometimes within superimposed planes. Moore used extensive optical illusion and process photography, dancers were filmed as silhouettes and superimposed on different backgrounds. In one composited sequence, Cunningham’s company becomes a miniaturized troupe of Lilliputian dancers, weaving in and out of the dancing legs of gigantic versions of themselves. Rediscovered after Cunningham’s death, the restored Assemblage was transferred and colorized the film from the original 16mm prints by filmmaker Charles Atlas, a longtime collaborator on Cunningham’s dance films.
The incensed torn paper walls
Grasping at tiles of air
Jagged resources launching
Repair bills to middle-class
Tropes disabled by the nightly
Visits from the department of
Work and dissensions labelled
And frog-marched into factories
Long-since abandoned by obsolete
Questions marked by neo-capitalist
Verses and to render obsolete plastic
Dimensions to boris’ ligature of literature
The songs of the lion king scrawled
On damp toilet walls where escapees
Drill through dashing holes into crushing
the hopes of the useless caste – the usual cast
throwing reformation at the winds of history.
The enigma is that there’s no default factory setting for the human being.
As a species, as well as for the individual, we are dropped into these meat bodies running.
From the moment of birth we have an urgent need for nurturing, and for sustenance. Those things are immediate overriding imperatives. Without them we die. No options or time for choice.
We conform to a set of expectations as part of the survival strategy. Adopting behavoiral patterns through a process of osmosis. This is the tried and tested way that humans perform as a species, and specific to the time, place and cultural norms in which we happen to find ourselves. We imitate. And learn by imitation. Given the full vastness of time and geography we can count ourselves fortunate to have been ejected into the liberal tolerant inclusive welfare culture of the twenty-first century. It could have been a lot worse.
Where ethics are situational, and where morality is a human construct anyway, how are we supposed to determine right from wrong? By a slow and torturous process of dialogue and cultural conjecture.
Speech seems something integral to the human experience. A survival gimmick that enables the passing of detailed information down through generations, in order to resolve problems by comparison with the resolution of similar earlier problems. The linguistic theory propounded by Edward Sapir and developed by Benjamin Whorf, known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that language also determines world-view. Which means that the structural content of the languages of Native Americans, indigenous Australians and the Japanese will be radically different, and hence their ways of reasoning. The opposing Noam Chomsky viewpoint is that humans have an innate capacity for acquiring language, a capacity programmed into us genetically, which determines the syntactical structures and ways of putting things together. Does speech arise from a shared neural centre? Are we hardwired for speech? On the principle that speech arises from hearing it spoken, Mughal emperor Akbar is said to have experimented by having children raised in total silence by mute wetnurses, reasoning that those raised without hearing human speech would remain silent. That the children reportedly died in infancy before the experiment’s completion can either be seen as evidence of its truth, or its refutation.
That print technology enabled communications on a vaster and more impersonal scale opened up yet greater interactivity. It forms a virtual connection between minds, that links across years and continents. That print also shapes the process of thought itself was suggested by Canadian academic-theorist Marshall McLuhan, so that ‘the medium is the message.’ In print, a paragraph is constructed through a series of statements that build up into a logical whole. Which becomes the method by which we build a rational dialogue. A purely visual vocabulary would not result in the same sequential process of ideas. Humans create a technology, which then shapes subsequent humans.
We imitate and absorb the cultural norms around us. This defines our potential, and also our limitations. The way our senses are channelled and shaped by hand-to-eye coordination. There’s no operations manual on how to be human. Instead we respond to the unconscious stimulus of approval or disapproval. A process by which we learn to control our bodily functions so later we will discipline our anger. Learn not to touch ourself, or others, in those places that please most, so that later we will breed in convenient Family units. To accept the limitations we are assigned and the role to which we must conform. To accept our own worthlessness in games we are not intended to win. We are disciplined through religion so we’ll accept suffering passively and accept authority gratefully, and to love Royalty so we accept hierarchy and respect those who exploit us.
Yet because there’s no default factory setting for the human being, we can never truly know how individuals could develop without that coercive social shaping…
— 0 —
I never really saw much of my father. He was there for the conception. Then he showed up again when I was seventeen. And he immediately spirited me down to London. To Soho. A tawdry strip-club. ‘No real woman will ever be quite as exciting as your fantasy’ was the only perceptive observation of any depth he ever said to me. If we learn by imitation, beyond that revelation, he was never a factor. Whatever I’ve learned about the ways that genders interrelate, was learned elsewhere.
I’m a literary kind of person. I relate to the world through the intermediary of pages. I always have. I read. I write. Whether it is boy’s adventure comics, the escapist futures of science fiction magazines. Or the interior world of novels. So inevitably I encounter, experience and explore sex in the same virtual-reality way. Words. Images. Print. Paper. Hey, there are even packs of ‘Adult Playing Cards’ out there, the ‘Gaiety Brand’ – featuring fifty-four models with a topless Jayne Mansfield as the King of Hearts. Here is sex that takes place in an alternate continuum over-stuffed with fictional motifs where all laws of actuality are suspended, and new rules aim only at the tease of temporary suspense, and soon-come gratification.
But where do you find erotic images when it is 1959 and you are twelve years old, living in a rural satellite of Kingston-upon-Hull? Well, you find them everywhere. All you have to do is look. It’s there in my mother’s magazines. The modest underwear ads in ‘Woman’, ‘Woman’s Own’ or ‘Woman’s Realm’. Those strangely fetishistic corsets with the geodesic domes of intimidatingly massive white bras. Early sexual experiences are more intense simply because your brain is more open, more pliable, more impressionable. Which is why it can be hazardously habit-forming. Which is why it can determine the future course of your desires. When you’re young and eager, when your new sexual ‘equipment’ comes online, there’s a burning urgency to try it out. Humans have no default factory setting. Are we genetically hardwired that way, so we are biologically predestined, and have neither free-will nor choice? Or is there some lightning-flash incident in our early sexual development that is so life-changingly intense that we spend forever trying to recapture that moment, like a junkie ever-striving to relive the incandescence of that first high? Whatever, there is a need for caution, for wariness, for protection of the vulnerable until informed consent is possible, until the legislated age of maturity.
Yet it’s there in the school library too. ‘The National Geographic Magazine’ has tantalising photo-spreads of aboriginal peoples in various states of ethnic undress. Each of them subject to the closest of adolescent scrutiny. My favourite – rapidly developing into a doomed star-crossed fixation, was with a perfect Amazon rain-forest teenage girl. Continents and ocean separate us. But the open curve of her smile, the natural curve of her gleaming outwardly-pointing breasts make it no distance at all. I long for her. Ache for her. So I take her. When no-one is looking, I’m separating the page by an agonisingly gradual process of furtive discrete rips. Until she vanishes into the safe darkness of my school satchel.
But the school library also has Art books. And Great Art tends to involve nudes – as we are quick to realise from a not-altogether aesthetic point-of-view. A particular favourite is a two-page spread contrasting the Maja nude duo, for which Francisco Goya had painted two identical images of his mistress-cum-model – one naked ‘La Maja Desnuda’ (1800), the other fully clothed ‘La Maja Vestida’ (1803). What’s the story behind the two identical, but significantly different poses? One for his own delectation, the other for his client, her husband? The first, acclaimed by critic Fred Licht as ‘the first totally profane life-size female nude in western art’ (1979), the other forced upon him by a disapproving clergy? Was it the Duchess of Alba, or a streetwise knife-carrying ‘maja’ from Madrid’s Lavapiés district? This devious tease element only adds to its lure – we were seeing the secret she shared exclusively with him. She looks out of the page, directly at me. I am seduced. I’m unable to resist. I rip out the pages and sneak them into my school satchel for my now-growing collection.
Desecration of library books is no minor offence. But I’m unable to resist ripping out other art-explicit pages. It was very quiet. My satchel lies on the green/black tiled floor resting against the chair-leg on which I’m sitting. Footsteps somewhere beyond the stairwell emphasise the silence, then even they are gone. I’d been assigned, by rota, to an afternoon as School Library monitor. A Library Monitor’s duties entail sitting behind the desk and date-stamping, searching for and locating tickets and generally attending to the running of the library for whichever classes happen to be allocated to that particular room during that particular afternoon. So far, there have been three classes, and this one ‘free’ period, during which I’m alone… with the books.
There are no windows. Bookcases line the room filling its silence with words struck dumb and preserved on clean white paper. During a ‘free’ period it is the duty of the Library Monitor to replace returned books to their correct shelf. To check the shelves, the rows of titles and authors. To replace any misfiled books in accordance to alphabetic or Dewey system. After a while I transfer a few of the more obvious titles to their approximate stations, and deposit the rest at random on the shelves. Then wander around the dwarfing wall-to-wall banks of tomes. The silence intensifies. Eventually, as if by pre-determination, I found myself looking at the shelves on the wall adjacent to the library’s only door. I ease the tension from slightly bagged and decidedly grubby trouser knees with the fingers of first left, then right hand as I crouch down to see the bottom shelf. The fingers, not only the nails, are bitten down, and occasionally painful. Shoe heels gently accept the weight of buttocks.
The period is approaching its halfway point. I look at the Art books furtively. Slide one gently free from the slight pressure of its fellows. A thick book. New. Falling open to my fingers there are Classical, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Impressionist, Fauve. The classifications mean little. The only common denominator of attraction is the areas of bare skin depicted. Female skin. Classical thighs in smooth white marble photograph. Renaissance virgin breasts suckling infant messiahs. Baroque demons torturing naked heretics. Impressionist nudes. Symbolist nudes. Surrealist nudes. Breasts of lovers, of warriors, saints, whores and angels. Breasts in shadow, in half-concealing robes, in elegant poise, in a sinner’s torment, in maternal tenderness. With eclectic disregard for period or style I found endless satisfaction in the instant fantasy of the timelessness of woman. At length, feeling my satchel so close to my heels, it was the work of just a second, with the exertion of only slight pressure, to rip one of the colour plates free, and transfer it from book to bag – in anticipation of further, closer examination later. A second plate follows, as inexorable as breathing. Fingers slightly sticky with sweat, leave little ridged fingerprints on the clean white margins. Aware of a sense of detachment. Of watching myself secreting picture after picture into the school satchel. Of watching in a sense of almost disinterest the fumbling excitement of each rape, desecration, and theft.
But the two divergent selves – sensual and cerebral, were instantly re-united in a second of breath-catching noise. The library door rattled, once. Rattled twice. Someone is attempting to open the door. Fortunately, it sticks. The rattle crashes decibels, echoing around the sterile walls that are thickly-insulated with dead words and petrified ideas. Ricocheted to apocalyptical proportions, assailing the guiltily crouching boy from all directions. Guiltily crouched over a satchel that is suddenly, amazingly, crammed with artwork that has just as swiftly been transformed to pornography by the attention of the adolescent theft. There’s a face smudged up against the window set into the upper half of the door. Staring straight at the crouching petrified boy. Into, through the boy, ransacking braincells for traces of dirty thoughts and grubby impulses, rifling memory banks for smut and filth, checking each hateful idea frozen on the point of realisation… all is frozen for a long ten-year second. The door swings inwards, screaming Armageddon. A master’s head thrusts through, into the room setting up shockwaves of disturbance. ‘Mr Nelson… I’m looking for Mr Nelson. Shouldn’t he be taking a class here this period?’ Dumb. Mindless. Head-shaking.
‘I was sure he was supposed to be here. But obviously, he’s not.’ The head withdraws. The door closes. The celldoor thuds into place howling relief, echoing solitude in ripples through the charged air. Fear explodes. My hands tremble. My stomach pounds. Yet there’s a strange distant detached voice of triumph. I straighten almost too quickly. The door is closed, the footsteps recede, and they’re gone. The satchel full of guilt sprawls there, smugly accusing me. The sundered book seems blatantly thin in the clasp of my hands. The spaces where stolen pages have been must be obvious to all. I hurriedly thrust it back into the shelf, ensuring that it is correctly filed, and that its spine is at exactly the same level as its fellows. I strap the satchel up carefully, after strategically re-arranging its contents to hide – as best I can, the thick load of incriminating evidence. I return to the librarian’s desk feeling slightly giddy, almost unreal and numb. Studying columns of French verbs diligently until the bell eventually – centuries later, announces that the ‘free’ period has ended…
Joe Orton got his first-ever press write-ups not for his gender-quake plays – but for his appearances at the Magistrates court for desecrating library books. I’m lucky. I was never caught out. Fortunately, I manage to avoid the social and financial disaster that would have entailed by a close pubic whisker. But you see what I’m getting at? It isn’t that the ‘Girlie Books’, Top-Shelf Mags, or the Soft-Porn Jazz-Mags ignite unnatural desires in innocent young minds. That prurience is already there. It’s more that they kind-of meet it halfway. They intersect a need that’s already rampant with fleshy hungers desperate for satiety.
I have to tense up to buy copies of ‘Spick’ or ‘Span’ in a state of agitated determination from the man with the knowing leer in the kiosk outside Paragon Railway Station. Then walk swiftly to the deserted riverside wharf by the empty Old Town warehouses, all warped timber and the stink of stale rivermud, with the magazine thrust-hidden deep in my jacket, to sit on the metal bollard in the pale warmth of the sun, and extract it. To turn each page is a feverish new discovery. A new nude opened up to appraisal, my throat becomes drier, my mind increasingly befugged, detached from all else but their posed monochrome fascination, my blood raging. She alternately conceals, and reveals. She is totally available. Wanton. Explicit. But absolutely inaccessible. A fabrication of half-tone dots in a sexual guise that offers all, yet stays safely untouched beyond the lens. Which is – after all, as close as I can get to the feminine mystique. Masturbation, sometimes it’s a spurt of the moment thing. A Wank. A lift-Off Booster to every adolescence. But as we enter the new Space Age, it also becomes rhyming slang for ‘having a Jodrell… (Bank).’
Ex-Small Faces musician Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan recalls ‘back then, there being no nudity on television and not enough in films for my taste, just about the only place you’d see a naked woman was in ‘Health And Efficiency’, a nudist magazine, or ‘Line And Form’, a much more interesting dirty book…’ Me too. In fact I even added motion to the ‘Health And Efficiency’ photos by scissoring erotic cut-out collages for the prurient amusement of friends, made difficult for simulating penetrative sex by the determinedly down-angled flaccidity of available male members, which were – however, quite useful for paper oral sex, inserted into smiling accessible slit-mouths with a jig-a-jig motion. There were also single-sheet home-drawn sketches passed around the schoolyard, to be sniggered over on conspiratorial gaggles. Except that the images tended to peter out in vague mermaid forms where the boy doing the drawing wasn’t exactly sure what girls actually looked like… down there. John Bratby’s autobiographical glimpses in ‘Knave’ include his ‘realising then that there was a shortage of pornographic literature available to the boys in the school, I decided, when I was in the fourth or fifth form, to write some stories myself, and to sell them for a penny a read. I wrote three stories, laboriously in longhand, and made a small fortune. I did not need to advertise my wares. The chaps would talk to each other, and customers would arrive from the furthest reaches of the school building, and I wished that I had more than one copy…’
Science Fiction writer Brian Aldiss also relates – in his autobiographical ‘The Twinkling of the Eye’ (Little, Brown, 1998), how he circulated his own ‘penny-a-read’ fiction at the Buckland School, producing a form of ‘dirty SF’ and ‘dirty crime’ in which ‘screwing featured largely,’ which were often written ‘in the dormitory, under the bed-clothes, by torchlight.’ Me too, although not quite on such an industriously entrepreneurial scale. A friend in my same school year, and a near-neighbour – called John, and I came to a similar conclusion, and so decided to write our fantasies at length for each other’s consumption and furtive gratification. I duly hand him my tight ballpoint script pages of soft suckings and sensual mergings, only to be startled and confused by his own altogether more brutal and abusive take on eroticism, in which a naked girl is tied up and dragged around behind a speeding motorcycle. Both disturbed and distinctly un-aroused by this insight into his psychosexual fantasies, our literary experiment progressed no further. Presumably he was equally disappointed with my comparatively tame contribution…?
In New York, 1956, young Samuel R Delany was doing something similar. ‘Secretly in those years, I would write down my masturbation fantasies in a black loose-leaf binder I kept beneath my underwear in the tall, stained-oak bureau against the wall in my third-floor room. They had nothing to do with… any of my childhood experiences and experiments with sex. They were, rather, grandiose, homoerotic, full of kings and warriors, leather, armour, slaves, swords, and brocade, mixing the inflated language and the power fantasies of Robert E Howard (‘Conan The Conqueror’, Gnome Press, 1950) and Frank Yerby (‘The Saracen Blade’, 1952), whose books I hunted out in the local library or from the third-floor bookshelves of my Aunt Virginia’s Montclair home, with the street language of Seventh Avenue and the off-colour anecdotes collected by the brothers John and Allen Lomax in their five and six-hundred-page scholarly tomes that I found at the home of my Aunt Dorothy and my Uncle Myles – language whose erotics, in both cases, came not from the constellation of specific sexual associations but almost wholly because its ‘god-damn’, its ‘nigger’, its ‘shit’, its ‘kike’, its ‘piss’, its ‘wop’, its ‘prick’, its ‘fuck’, its ‘pussy’ was – in our house – wholly forbidden, and the specifically sexual words were, I knew, by law, forbidden to ordinary writing’ (quoted from his autobiographical ‘The Motion Of Light In Water’, Arbor House, 1988).
However, Delany discovered other elements to his handcrafted porn. ‘A fantasy I had not written out yet, or had only begun to write, would last me a long time, over several days – even a week or more. If, however, I wrote it down, filling in descriptions of place, atmosphere, thoughts, speech, clothing, accidental gestures, the whole narrative excess we think of as ‘realism’ making my written account as complete and as narrationally rich as I could, my own erotic response was much greater, the orgasm it produced was stronger, more satisfying, hugely pleasurable. But, once this has occurred, the fantasy was used up. It became just words on paper, at one with its own descriptive or aesthetic residue, but with little or no lingering erotic charge. I would have to create another…’ Inevitably his mother found the incriminating loose-leaf binder concealed beneath the underwear, and passed it on to young Delany’s pudgy Cuban therapist.
Arousal can be provoked in the most unexpected places. In Stan Barstow’s gritty northern ‘A Kind Of Loving’ (1960) his protagonist Vic Brown thumbs through a copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ which he’d discovered by chance on his brother-in-law’s book-shelf. ‘The next minute I’ve dropped on a bit near the end that nearly makes my hair stand up. As far as I can make out it’s a bint in bed or somewhere thinking about all the times she’s had with blokes. It knocks me sideways, it really does. I mean, I’ve seen these things what sometimes get passed on from hand to hand on mucky bits of typing paper – you know, all about the vacuum cleaner salesman who goes to a house and finds a bint in on her own – but I’ve never seen anything like this actually printed.’ His brother-in-law, David, argues that the book ‘went through several courts before free publication was sanctioned’ and that it’s ‘a masterpiece’, but that ‘I shouldn’t want your mother, for instance, to pick it up and open it where you did. She mightn’t understand.’ And his wife? ‘She hasn’t read it. She knows what it’s about, and its reputation, and she says she doesn’t feel obliged to go any further.’
What was it the ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ trial-judge said about letting ‘your wife and servants’ read such material? To Vic, ‘Ulysses’ is not ‘magnificent’ literature. It’s just something akin to ‘mucky bits of typing paper passed on from hand-to-hand.’ To Vic, writing about sex, in no matter what context, is ‘mucky’. Author John Sutherland’s autobiography ‘Magic Moments’ (Profile, 2008) recalls the hours he spent in his 1950s adolescence locating a notorious unreadably filthy page, the rollicking obscenity of Molly Bloom in ‘Ulysses’ in Colchester Reference Library, while he and his schoolfriends obtain a copy of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and pass it around, frenetically reading it – one-handed, in their dorm.
There existed a strange situation back then in which public libraries used the precaution of ‘block books’ – literally, wooden blocks in place of any books the librarians considered a little too risqué. The unfortunate borrower had to carry the ‘block’ to the counter and then the librarian might grudgingly provide the book from beneath their desk. No doubt with a suitably sniffy demeanor. There was, as a result, a certain habitué of libraries whose visits consist of just going around checking out the shelves looking for wooden blocks.
Walk around any shopping mall clothes store today and there are giant ad-panels of women in lingerie more explicit than the contents of the magazines we hoarded and guiltily concealed during the 1950s. Reading a cookbook doesn’t necessarily provoke a craving for food that must be satisfied. The food stays on the page. It is something abstract and disconnected. You can’t smell its aromatic quality or experience its taste. You don’t feel the need to indulge in it. But to read a sexually explicit paragraph on a page is to transfer that image-of-food onto your own physicality. Your reaction is not only cerebral, it is deeply physical. Poet W.H. Auden pointed out that the only true legal definition of pornography would be determined by first exposing an all-male jury to the questionable material, then checking their genitalia. If they were unanimously erect then the case was proven. For the object of porn is to arouse. It has a bodily function. Even when the motive behind its creation is both to be artistic as well as sexually explicit, the one continually undermines the other. Porn? Censorship? The lines are continually being drawn, redrawn, rubbed out, and re-imposed. In some circles, such publications are frowned at. I certainly frowned upon them week-after-week in the privacy of my bedroom.
Silent walls surround our ancient family –
An absence of pronouncement in the press
Our modest irreproachable dark dress –
Such lives avoid the taint of ostentation
Abjuring waves of monetary transgression
(The lake is placid where a sail expires)
We’ve tacked beyond the wind of all desires
Nor give occasion to the world for envy –
The facile sense that some have found a haven
Without responsibility or fault
(Our family crypt contains a secret vault)
Old money has humility of purpose
Meetings must of course be kept to time
Your quiet tie suggests you have the gist
Regrettably the Rolex tags your wrist
As someone yet removed from subtle battle –
True samurai need hardly show the sword
To indicate all status is distraction
We hope we have begun your education
We trust your stay remains a mystery
INVALUABLE
Those whose work we call
‘Invaluable’
Seldom do receive
‘Remuneration’
Such might be construed
‘Insulting’
It is a ‘Calling’ after all
A whatchamacall…
‘Vocation’
I so wish I had one myself
How I envy you
It must be wonderful
This text was composed together by several active anti-authoritarian activists from Ukraine. We do not represent one organization, but we came together to write this text and prepare for a possible war.
Besides us, the text was edited by more than ten people, including participants in the events described in the text, journalists who checked the accuracy of our claims, and anarchists from Russia, Belarus, and Europe. We received many corrections and clarifications in order to write the most objective text possible.
If war breaks out, we do not know if the anti-authoritarian movement will survive, but we will try to do so. In the meantime, this text is an attempt to leave the experience that we have accumulated online.
At the moment, the world is actively discussing a possible war between Russia and Ukraine. We need to clarify that the war between Russia and Ukraine has been going on since 2014.
But first things first.
The Maidan Protests in Kyiv
In 2013, mass protests began in Ukraine, triggered by Berkut (police special forces) beating up student protesters who were dissatisfied with the refusal of then-President Viktor Yanukovych to sign the association agreement with the European Union. This beating functioned as a call to action for many segments of society. It became clear to everyone that Yanukovych had crossed the line. The protests ultimately led to the president fleeing.
In Ukraine, these events are called “The Revolution of Dignity.” The Russian government presents it as a Nazi coup, a US State Department project, and so on. The protesters themselves were a motley crowd: far-right activists with their symbols, liberal leaders talking about European values and European integration, ordinary Ukrainians who went out against the government, a few leftists. Anti-oligarchic sentiments dominated among the protesters, while oligarchs who did not like Yanukovych financed the protest because he, along with his inner circle, tried to monopolize big business during his term. That is to say—for other oligarchs, the protest represented a chance to save their businesses. Also, many representatives of mid-size and small businesses participated in the protest because Yanukovych’s people did not allow them to work freely, demanding money from them. Ordinary people were dissatisfied with the high level of corruption and arbitrary conduct of the police. The nationalists who opposed Yanukovych on the grounds that he was a pro-Russian politician reasserted themselves significantly. Belarusian and Russian expatriates joined protests, perceiving Yanukovych as a friend of Belarusian and Russian dictators Alexander Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin.
If you have seen videos from the Maidan rally, you might have noticed that the degree of violence was high; the protesters had no place to pull back to, so they had to fight to the bitter end. The Berkut wrapped stun grenades with screw nuts that left splinter wounds after the explosion, hitting people in their eyes; that is why there were many injured people. In the final stages of the conflict, the security forces used military weapons—killing 106 protesters.
In response, the protesters produced DIY grenades and explosives and brought firearms to the Maidan. The manufacturing of Molotov cocktails resembled small divisions.
In the 2014 Maidan protests, the authorities used mercenaries (titushkas), gave them weapons, coordinated them, and tried to use them as an organized loyalist force. There were fights with them involving sticks, hammers, and knives.
Contrary to the opinion that the Maidan was a “manipulation by the EU and NATO,” supporters of European integration had called for a peaceful protest, deriding militant protesters as stooges. The EU and the United States criticized the seizures of government buildings. Of course, “pro-Western” forces and organizations participated in the protest, but they did not control the entire protest. Various political forces including the far right actively interfered in the movement and tried to dictate their agenda. They quickly got their bearings and became an organizing force, thanks to the fact that they created the first combat detachments and invited everyone to join them, training and directing them.
However, none of the forces was absolutely dominant. The main trend was that it was a spontaneous protest mobilization directed against the corrupt and unpopular Yanukovych regime. Perhaps the Maidan can be classified as one of the many “stolen revolutions.” The sacrifices and efforts of tens of thousands of ordinary people were usurped by a handful of politicians who made their way to power and control over the economy.
The Role of Anarchists in the Protests of 2014
Despite the fact that anarchists in Ukraine have a long history, during the reign of Stalin, everyone who was connected with the anarchists in any way was repressed and the movement died out, and consequently, the transfer of revolutionary experience ceased. The movement began to recover in the 1980s thanks to the efforts of historians, and in the 2000s it received a big boost due to the development of subcultures and anti-fascism. But in 2014, it was not yet ready for serious historical challenges.
Prior to the beginning of the protests, anarchists were individual activists or scattered in small groups. Few argued that the movement should be organized and revolutionary. Of the well-known organizations that were preparing for such events, there was Makhno Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists (RCAS of Makhno), but at the beginning of the riots, it dissolved itself, as the participants could not develop a strategy for the new situation.
The events of the Maidan were like a situation in which the special forces break into your house and you need to take decisive actions, but your arsenal consists only of punk lyrics, veganism, 100-year-old books, and at best, the experience of participating in street anti-fascism and local social conflicts. Consequently, there was a lot of confusion, as people attempted to understand what was happening.
At the time, it was not possible to form a unified vision of the situation. The presence of the far-right in the streets discouraged many anarchists from supporting the protests, as they did not want to stand beside Nazis on the same side of the barricades. This brought a lot of controversy into the movement; some people accused those who did decide to join the protests of fascism.
The anarchists who participated in the protests were dissatisfied with the brutality of the police and with Yanukovych himself and his pro-Russian position. However, they could not have a significant impact on the protests, as they were essentially in the category of outsiders.
In the end, anarchists participated in the Maidan revolution individually and in small groups, mainly in volunteer/non-militant initiatives. After a while, they decided to cooperate and make their own “hundred” (a combat group of 60-100 people). But during the registration of the detachment (a mandatory procedure on the Maidan), the outnumbered anarchists were dispersed by the far-right participants with weapons. The anarchists remained, but no longer attempted to create large organized groups.
Among those killed on the Maidan was the anarchist Sergei Kemsky who was, ironically, ranked as postmortem Hero of Ukraine. He was shot by a sniper during the heated phase of the confrontation with the security forces. During the protests, Sergei put forward an appeal to the protesters entitled “Do you hear it, Maidan?” in which he outlined possible ways of developing the revolution, emphasizing the aspects of direct democracy and social transformation. The text is available in English here.
Gathering of an anarchist squad.
The beginning of the War: The Annexation of Crimea
The armed conflict with Russia began eight years ago on the night of February 26-27, 2014, when the Crimean Parliament building and the Council of Ministers were seized by unknown armed men. They used Russian weapons, uniforms, and equipment but did not have the symbols of the Russian army. Putin did not recognize the fact of the participation of the Russian military in this operation, although he later admitted it personally in the documentary propaganda film “Crimea: The way to the Homeland”.
Armed men in uniforms without insignias blocking a Ukrainian military unit in Crimea on March 9, 2014.
Here, one needs to understand that during the time of Yanukovych, the Ukrainian army was in very poor condition. Knowing that there was a regular Russian army of 220,000 soldiers operating in Crimea, the provisional government of Ukraine did not dare to confront it.
After the occupation, many residents have faced repression that continues to this day. Our comrades are also among the repressed. We can briefly review some of the most high-profile cases. Anarchist Alexander Kolchenko was arrested along with pro-democratic activist Oleg Sentsov and transferred to Russia on May 16, 2014; five years later, they were released as a result of a prisoner exchange. Anarchist Alexei Shestakovich was tortured, suffocated with a plastic bag on his head, beaten, and threatened with reprisals; he managed to escape. Anarchist Evgeny Karakashev was arrested in 2018 for a re-post on Vkontakte (a social network); he remains in custody.
Anarchist Alexander Kolchenko after prisoner exchange.
Disinformation
Pro-Russian rallies were held in Russian-speaking cities close to the Russian border. The participants feared NATO, radical nationalists, and repression targeting the Russian-speaking population. After the collapse of the USSR, many households in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus had family ties, but the events of the Maidan caused a serious split in personal relations. Those who were outside Kyiv and watched Russian TV were convinced that Kyiv had been captured by a Nazi junta and that there were purges of the Russian-speaking population there.
Russia launched a propaganda campaign using the following messaging: “punishers,” i.e., Nazis, are coming from Kyiv to Donetsk, they want to destroy the Russian-speaking population (although Kyiv is also a predominantly Russian-speaking city). In their disinformation statements, the propagandists used photos of the far right and spread all kinds of fake news. During the hostilities, one of the most notorious hoaxes appeared: the so-called crucifixion of a three-year-old boy who was allegedly attached to a tank and dragged along the road. In Russia, this story was broadcasted on federal channels and went viral on the Internet.
Fake news from a Russian channel. A woman tells how she saw the executions and the crucifixion of a three-year-old boy.
In 2014, in our opinion, disinformation played a key role in generating the armed conflict: some residents of Donetsk and Lugansk were scared that they would be killed, so they took up arms and called for Putin’s troops.
Armed Conflict in the East of Ukraine
“The trigger of the war was pulled,” in his own words, by Igor Girkin, a colonel of the FSB (the state security agency, successors to the KGB) of the Russian Federation. Girkin, a supporter of Russian imperialism, decided to radicalize the pro-Russian protests. He crossed the border with an armed group of Russians and (on April 12, 2014) seized the Interior Ministry building in Slavyansk to take possession of weapons. Pro-Russian security forces began to join Girkin. When information about Girkin’s armed groups appeared, Ukraine announced an anti-terrorist operation.
A part of Ukrainian society determined to protect national sovereignty, realizing that the army had poor capacity, organized a large volunteer movement. Those who were somewhat competent in military affairs became instructors or formed volunteer battalions. Some people joined the regular army and volunteer battalions as humanitarian volunteers. They raised funds for weapons, food, ammunition, fuel, transport, renting civil cars, and the like. Often, the participants in the volunteer battalions were armed and equipped better than the soldiers of the state army. These detachments demonstrated a significant level of solidarity and self-organization and actually replaced the state functions of territorial defense, enabling the army (which was poorly equipped at that time) to successfully resist the enemy.
The territories controlled by pro-Russian forces began to shrink rapidly. Then the regular Russian army intervened.
We can highlight three key chronological points:
The Ukrainian military realized that weapons, volunteers, and military specialists were coming from Russia. Therefore, on July 12, 2014, they began an operation on the Ukrainian-Russian border. However, during the military march, the Ukrainian military was attacked by Russian artillery and the operation failed. The armed forces sustained heavy losses.
The Ukrainian military attempted to occupy Donetsk. While they were advancing, they were surrounded by Russian regular troops near Ilovaisk. People we know, who were part of one of the volunteer battalions, were also captured. They saw the Russian military firsthand. After three months, they managed to return as the result of an exchange of prisoners of war.
The Ukrainian army controlled the city of Debaltseve, which had a large railway junction. This disrupted the direct road linking Donetsk and Lugansk. On the eve of the negotiations between Poroshenka (the president of Ukraine at that time) and Putin, which were supposed to begin a long-term ceasefire, Ukrainian positions were attacked by units with the support of Russian troops. The Ukrainian army was again surrounded and sustained heavy losses.
Volunteer fighters carrying out actions in Ilovaisk in 2014.
For the time being (as of February 2022), the parties have agreed on a ceasefire and a conditional “peace and quiet” order, which is maintained, though there are consistent violations. Several people die every month.
Russia denies the presence of regular Russian troops and the supply of weapons to territories uncontrolled by the Ukrainian authorities. The Russian military who were captured claim that they were put on alert for a drill, and only when they arrived at their destination did they realize that they were in the middle of the war in Ukraine. Before crossing the border, they removed the symbols of the Russian army, the way their colleagues did in Crimea. In Russia, journalists have found cemeteries of fallen soldiers, but all information about their deaths is unknown: the epitaphs on the headstones only indicate the dates of their deaths as the year 2014.
Supporters of the Unrecognized Republics
The ideological basis of the opponents of the Maidan was also diverse. The main unifying ideas were discontent with violence against the police and opposition to rioting in Kyiv. People who were brought up with Russian cultural narratives, movies, and music were afraid of the destruction of the Russian language. Supporters of the USSR and admirers of its victory in World War II believed that Ukraine should be aligned with Russia and were unhappy with the rise of radical nationalists. Adherents of the Russian Empire perceived the Maidan protests as a threat to the territory of the Russian Empire. The ideas of these allies could be explained with this photo showing the flags of the USSR, the Russian Empire, and the St. George ribbon as a symbol of victory in the Second World War. We could portray them as authoritarian conservatives, supporters of the old order.
The flags of the USSR, the Russian Empire, and the St. George ribbon as a symbol of victory in the Second World War.
The pro-Russian side consisted of police, entrepreneurs, politicians, and the military who sympathized with Russia, ordinary citizens frightened by fake news, various ultra-right indivisuals including Russian patriots and various types of monarchists, pro-Russian imperialists, the Task Force group “Rusich,” the PMC [Private Military Company] group “Wagner,” including the notorious neo-Nazi Alexei Milchakov, the recently deceased Egor Prosvirnin, the founder of the chauvinistic Russian nationalist media project “Sputnik and Pogrom,” and many others. There were also authoritarian leftists, who celebrate the USSR and its victory in the Second World War.
The Rise of the Far Right in Ukraine
As we described, the right wing managed to gain sympathy during the Maidan by organizing combat units and by being ready to physically confront the Berkut. The presence of military arms enabled them to maintain their independence and force others to reckon with them. In spite of their using overt fascist symbols such as swastikas, wolf hooks, Celtic crosses, and SS logos, it was difficult to discredit them, as the need to fight the forces of the Yanukovych government caused many Ukrainians to call for cooperation with them.
After the Maidan, the right wing actively suppressed the rallies of pro-Russian forces. At the beginning of the military operations, they started forming volunteer battalions. One of the most famous is the “Azov” battalion. At the beginning, it consisted of 70 fighters; now it is a regiment of 800 people with its own armored vehicles, artillery, tank company, and a separate project in accordance with NATO standards, the sergeant school. The Azov battalion is one of the most combat-effective units in the Ukrainian army. There were also other fascist military formations such as the Volunteer Ukrainian Unit “Right Sector” and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, but they are less widely known.
As a consequence, the Ukrainian right wing accrued a bad reputation in the Russian media. But many in Ukraine considered what was hated in Russia to be a symbol of struggle in Ukraine. For example, the name of the nationalist Stepan Bandera, who is considered a Nazi collaborator in Russia, was actively used by the protesters as a form of mockery. Some called themselves Judeo-Banderans to troll supporters of Jewish/Masonic conspiracy theories.
Over time, the trolling got out of control. Right-wingers openly wore Nazi symbols; ordinary supporters of the Maidan claimed that they were themselves Banderans who eat Russian babies and made memes to that effect. The far right made its way into the mainstream: they were invited to participate in television shows and other corporate media platforms, on which they were presented as patriots and nationalists. Liberal supporters of the Maidan took their side, believing that the Nazis were a hoax invented by Russian media. In 2014 to 2016, anyone who was ready to fight was embraced, whether it was a Nazi, an anarchist, a kingpin from an organized crime syndicate, or a politician who did not carry out any of his promises.
Far-right fighters with a swastika and a NATO flag. The Azov battalion has a negative attitude towards NATO; currently, the US does not transfer weapons to Azov.
The rise of the far right is due to the fact that they were better organized in critical situations and were able to suggest effective methods of fighting to other rebels. Anarchists provided something similar in Belarus, where they also managed to gain the sympathy of the public, but not on as significant of a scale as the far right did in Ukraine.
By 2017, after the ceasefire started and the need for radical fighters decreased, the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) and the state government co-opted the right-wing movement, jailing or neutralizing anyone who had an “anti-system” or independent perspective on how to develop the right-wing movement—including Oleksandr Muzychko, Oleg Muzhchil, Yaroslav Babich, and others.
Today, it is still a big movement, but their popularity is at a comparably low level and their leaders are affiliated with the Security service, police, and politicians; they do not represent a really independent political force. The discussions of the problem of the far-right are becoming more frequent within the democratic camp, where people are developing an understanding of the symbols and organizations they are dealing with, rather than silently dismissing concerns.
Anarchists’ and Anti-Fascists’ Activity during the War
With the outbreak of military operations, a division appeared between those who are pro-Ukrainian and those who support the so-called DNR/LNR (“Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic”).
There was a widespread “say no to war” sentiment within the punk scene during the first months of the war, but it did not last long. Let’s analyze the pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian camps.
Pro-Ukrainians
Due to the lack of a massive organization, the first anarchist and anti-fascist volunteers went to war individually as single fighters, military medics, and volunteers. They tried to form their own squad, but due to lack of knowledge and resources, this attempt was unsuccessful. Some even joined the Azov battalion and the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). The reasons were mundane: they joined the most accessible troops. Consequently, some people converted to right-wing politics.
Anti-fascists receiving training at the Right Sector base in Desna. It is worth noting that this photo includes two Moscow anti-fascists who joined the armed conflict.
People who didn’t take part in the battles raised funds for the rehabilitation of people injured in the East and for the construction of a bomb shelter in a kindergarten located near the front line. There was also a squat named “Autonomy” in Kharkiv, an open anarchist social and cultural center; at that time, they concentrated on helping the refugees. They provided housing and a permanent really free market, consulting with new arrivals and directing them to resources and conducting educational activities. In addition, the center became a place for theoretical discussions. Unfortunately, in 2018, the project ceased to exist.
All these actions were the individual initiatives of particular people and groups. They did not happen within the framework of a single strategy.
One of the most significant phenomena of that period was a formerly large radical nationalist organization, “Autonomnyi Opir”(autonomous resistance). They started leaning left in 2012; by 2014, they had shifted so much to the left that individual members would even call themselves “anarchists.” They framed their nationalism as a struggle for “liberty” and a counterbalance to Russian nationalism, using the Zapatista movement and the Kurds as role models. Compared to the other projects in Ukrainian society, they were seen as the closest allies, so some anarchists cooperated with them, while others criticized this cooperation and the organization itself. Members of the AO also actively participated in volunteer battalions and tried to develop the idea of “anti-imperialism” among the military. They also defended the right of women to participate in the war; female members of the AO participated in the combat operations. AO assisted training centers in training fighters and doctors, volunteered for the army, and organized the social center”Citadel” in Lviv where refugees were accommodated.
Moscow, 2014: Anarchists marching against Russian aggression.
Pro-Russians
Modern Russian imperialism is built on the perception that Russia is the successor of the USSR—not in its political system, but on territorial grounds. The Putin regime sees the Soviet victory in World War II not as an ideological victory over Nazism, but as a victory over Europe that shows the strength of Russia. In Russia and the countries it controls, the population has less access to information, so Putin’s propaganda machine does not bother to create a complex political concept. The narrative is essentially as follows: The USA and Europe were afraid of the strong USSR, Russia is the successor of the USSR and the entire territory of the former USSR is Russian, Russian tanks entered Berlin, which means that “We can do it again” and we’ll show NATO who is the strongest here, the reason Europe is “rotting” is because all of the gays and emigrants are out of control there.
Very popular stickers in Russia in 2014 and 2015. The inscription reads “We can do it again.”
The ideological foundation maintaining a pro-Russian position among the left was the legacy of the USSR and its victory in World War II. Since Russia clams that the government in Kyiv was seized by Nazis and the junta, the opponents of the Maidan described themselves as fighters against fascism and the Kyiv junta. This branding induced sympathy among the authoritarian left—for example, in Ukraine, including the “Borotba” organization. During the most significant events of 2014, they first took a loyalist position and then later a pro-Russian position. In Odessa, on May 2, 2014, several of their activists were killed during street riots. Some people from this group also participated in the fighting in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, and some of them died there.
“Borotba” described their motivation as wishing to fight against fascism. They urged the European left to stand in solidarity with the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic.” After the e-mail of Vladislav Surkov (Putin’s political strategist) was hacked, it was revealed that members of Borotba had received funding and were supervised by Surkov’s people.
Russia’s authoritarian communists embraced the breakaway republics for similar reasons.
The presence of far-right supporters in the Maidan also motivated apolitical anti-fascists to support the “DNR” and “LNR.” Again, some of them participated in the fighting in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, and some of them died there.
Among Ukrainian anti-fascists, there were “apolitical” anti-fascists, subculturally affiliated people who had a negative attitude towards fascism “because our grandfathers fought against it.” Their understanding of fascism was abstract: they themselves were often politically incoherent, sexist, homophobic, patriots of Russia, and the like.
The idea of supporting the so-called republics gained wide backing among the left in Europe. Most notable among its supporters were the Italian rock band “Banda Bassotti” and the German party Die Linke. In addition to fundraising, Banda Bassotti made a tour to “Novorossia.” Being in the European Parliament, Die Linke supported the pro-Russian narrative in every possible way and arranged video conferences with pro-Russian militants, going to Crimea and the unrecognized republics. The younger members of Die Linke, as well as the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation (the Die Linke party foundation), maintain that this position is not shared by every participant, but it is broadcasted by the most prominent members of the party, such as Sahra Wagenknecht and Sevim Dağdelen.
Banda Bassotti in Donetsk in 2014.
The pro-Russian position did not gain popularity among anarchists. Among individual statements, the most visible was the position of Jeff Monson, a mixed martial arts fighter from the USA who has tattoos with anarchist symbols. He previously considered himself an anarchist, but in Russia, he openly works for the ruling United Russia party and serves as a deputy in the Duma.
To summarize the pro-Russian “left” camp, we see the work of the Russian special services and the consequences of ideological incapacity. After the occupation of Crimea, employees of the Russian FSB approached local anti-fascists and anarchists in conversation, offering to permit them to continue their activities but suggesting that they should henceforward include the idea that Crimea should be a part of Russia in their agitation. In Ukraine, there are small informational and activist groups that position themselves as anti-fascist while expressing an essentially pro-Russian position; many people suspect them of working for Russia. Their influence is minimal in Ukraine, but their members serve Russian propagandists as “whistleblowers.”
There are also offers of “cooperation” from the Russian embassy and pro-Russian members of Parliament like Ilya Kiva. They try to play on the negative attitude towards Nazis like the Azov battalion and offer to pay people to change their position. At the moment, only Rita Bondar has openly admitted to receiving money in this way. She used to write for left-wing and anarchist media outlets, but due to the need for money, she wrote under a pseudonym for media platforms affiliated with the Russian propagandist Dmitry Kiselev.
In Russia itself, we are witnessing the elimination of the anarchist movement and the rise of authoritarian communists who are ousting anarchists from the anti-fascist subculture. One of the most indicative recent moments is the organizing of an anti-fascist tournament in 2021 in memory of “the Soviet soldier.”
Is There a Threat of Full-Scale War with Russia? An Anarchist Position
About ten years ago, the idea of a full-scale war in Europe would have seemed crazy, since secular European states in the 21st century seek to play up their “humanism” and mask their crimes. When they do engage in military operations, they do so somewhere far away from Europe. But when it comes to Russia, we have witnessed the occupation of Crimea and subsequent fake referendums, the war in Donbas, and the MH17 plane crash. Ukraine constantly experiences hacker attacks and bomb threats, not only in state buildings but also inside the schools and kindergartens.
In Belarus in 2020, Lukashenka boldly declared himself the winner of the elections with a result of 80% of the vote. The uprising in Belarus even led to a strike of Belarusian propagandists. But after the landing of Russian FSB planes, the situation changed dramatically and the Belarusian government succeeded in violently suppressing the protests.
A similar scenario played out in Kazakhstan, but there, the regular armies of Russia, Belarus, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan were brought in to help the regime suppress the revolt as part of the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) cooperation.
Russian special services lured refugees from Syria to Belarus in order to create a conflict on the border with the European Union. A group of the Russian FSB was also uncovered that was engaged in political assassinations using chemical weapons—the already familiar “novichok.” In addition to the Skripals and Navalny, they have also killed other political figures in Russia. Putin’s regime responds to all accusations by saying “It’s not us, you all are lying.” Meanwhile, Putin himself wrote an article half a year ago in which he asserts that Russians and Ukrainians are one nation and should be together. Vladislav Surkov (a political strategist who builds Russian state policy, connected with the puppet governments in the so-called DNR and LNR) published an article declaring that “the empire must expand, otherwise it will perish.” In Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan over the past two years, the protest movement has been brutally suppressed and independent and opposition media are being destroyed. We recommend reading more about Russia’s activities here.
All things considered, the likelihood of a full-scale war is high—and somewhat higher this year than last year. Even the sharpest analysts are unlikely to be able to predict exactly when it will start. Perhaps a revolution in Russia would relieve tension in the region; however, as we wrote above, the protest movement there has been smothered.
Anarchists in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia mostly support Ukrainian independence directly or implicitly. This is because, even with all the national hysteria, corruption, and a large number of Nazis, compared to Russia and the countries controlled by it, Ukraine looks like an island of freedom. This country retains such “unique phenomena” in the post-Soviet region as the replaceability of the president, a parliament that has more than nominal power, and the right to peaceful assembly; in some cases, factoring in additional attention from society, the courts sometimes even function according to their professed protocol. To say that this is preferable to the situation in Russia is not to say anything new. As Bakunin wrote, “We are firmly convinced that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy.”
There are many problems inside Ukraine, but these problems are more likely to be solved without the intervention of Russia.
Is it worth it to fight the Russian troops in the case of an invasion? We believe that the answer is yes. The options that Ukrainian anarchists are considering at the present moment include joining the armed forces of Ukraine, engaging in territorial defense, partisanship, and volunteering.
Ukraine is now at the forefront of the struggle against Russian imperialism. Russia has long-term plans to destroy democracy in Europe. We know that little attention has yet been paid to this danger in Europe. But if you follow the statements of high-profile politicians, far-right organizations, and authoritarian communists, over time, you will notice that there is already a large spy network in Europe. For example, some top officials, after leaving office, are given a position in a Russian oil company (Gerhard Schröder, François Fillon).
We consider the slogans “Say No to War” or “The War of Empires” to be ineffectual and populist. The anarchist movement has no influence on the process, so such statements do not change anything at all.
Our position is based on the fact that we do not want to run away, we do not want to be hostages, and we do not want to be killed without a fight. You can look at Afghanistan and understand what “No to War” means: when the Taliban advances, people flee en masse, die in the chaos at the airports, and those who remain are purged. This describes what is happening in Crimea and you can imagine what will happen after the invasion of Russia in other regions of Ukraine.
Afghanistan, 2021: People try to get on a NATO plane to escape the Taliban.
As for the attitude towards NATO, the authors of this text are divided between two standpoints. Some of us have a positive approach towards this situation. It is obvious that Ukraine cannot counter Russia on its own. Even taking into consideration the large volunteer movement, modern technologies and weapons are needed. Apart from NATO, Ukraine has no other allies who can help with this.
Here, we can recall the story of Syrian Kurdistan. The locals were forced to cooperate with NATO against ISIS—the only alternative was to flee or be killed. We are well aware that support from NATO can disappear very quickly if the West develops new interests or manages to negotiate some compromises with Putin. Even now, the Self-Administration is forced to cooperate with the Assad regime, understanding that they don’t have much of an alternative.
A possible Russian invasion forces the Ukrainian people to look for allies in the fight against Moscow. Not on social media, but in the real world. Anarchists do not have sufficient resources in Ukraine or elsewhere to respond effectively to the invasion of Putin’s regime. Therefore, one has to think about accepting support from NATO.
The other standpoint, which others in this writing group subscribe to, is that both NATO and the EU, in strengthening their influence in Ukraine, will cement the current system of “wild capitalism” in the country and make the potential for a social revolution even less feasible. In the system of global capitalism, the flagship of which is the USA as the leader of NATO, Ukraine is assigned the spot of a humble frontier: a supplier of cheap labor and resources. Therefore, it is important for Ukrainian society to realize the need for independence from all the imperialists. In the context of the country’s defense capability, the emphasis should not be on the importance of NATO technology and support for the regular army, but on the potential of society for grassroots guerrilla resistance.
We consider this war primarily against Putin and the regimes under his control. In addition to the mundane motivation not to live under a dictatorship, we see potential in Ukrainian society, which is one of the most active, independent, and rebellious in the region. The long history of resistance of the people over the past thirty years is a solid proof of this. This gives us hope that the concepts of direct democracy have a fertile ground here.
The Current Situation of Anarchists in Ukraine and New Challenges
The outsider position during the Maidan and the war had a demoralizing effect on the movement. Outreach was hampered as Russian propaganda monopolized the word “anti-fascism.” Due to the presence of the symbols of the USSR among the pro-Russian militants, the attitude towards the word “communism” was extremely negative, so even the combination “anarcho-communism” was perceived negatively. The declarations against the pro-Ukrainian ultra-right cast a shadow of doubt on anarchists in the eyes of ordinary folks. There was an unspoken agreement that the ultra-right would not attack anarchists and anti-fascists if they did not display their symbols at rallies and the like. The right had a lot of weapons in their hands. This situation created a feeling of frustration; the police did not function well, so someone could easily be killed without consequences. For example, in 2015, the pro-Russian activist Oles Buzina was killed.
All this encouraged anarchists to approach the matter more seriously.
A radical underground began to develop starting from 2016; news about radical actions started to appear. Radical anarchist resources appeared that explained how to buy weapons and how to make caches, as opposed to the old ones, which were limited only to Molotov cocktails.
In the anarchist milieu, it has become acceptable to have legal weapons. Videos of anarchist training camps using firearms began to surface. Echoes of these changes reached Russia and Belarus. In Russia, the FSB liquidated a network of anarchist groups that had legal weapons and practiced airsoft. The arrestees were tortured with electric current in order to force them to confess to terrorism, and sentenced to terms ranging from 6 to 18 years. In Belarus, during the 2020 protests, a rebellious group of anarchists under the name “Black Flag” was detained while trying to cross the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. They had a firearm and a grenade with them; according to the testimony of Igor Olinevich, he bought the weapon in Kyiv.
Anarchist rebel group “Black Flag”
The outdated approach of anarchists’ economic agenda has also changed: if before, the majority worked at low-paid jobs “closer to the oppressed,” now many are trying to find a job with a good salary, most often in the IT sector.
Street anti-fascist groups have resumed their activities, engaging in retaliatory actions in cases of Nazi attacks. Among other things, they held the “No Surrender” tournament among antifa fighters and released a documentary entitled “Hoods,” which tells about the birth of the Kyiv antifa group. (English subtitles are available.)
Anti-fascism in Ukraine is an important front, because in addition to a large number of local ultra-right activists, many notorious Nazis have relocated here from Russia (including Sergei Korotkikh and Alexei Levkin) and from Europe (such as Denis “White Rex” Kapustin), and even from the USA (Robert Rando). Anarchists have been investigating the activities of the far right.
There are activist groups of various kinds (classical anarchists, queer anarchists, anarcho-feminists, Food Not Bombs, eco-initiatives, and the like), as well as small information platforms. Recently, a politically charged anti-fascist resource has appeared in the telegram @uantifa, duplicating its publications in English.
Today, the tensions between groups are gradually smoothing out, as recently there have been many joint actions and common participation in social conflicts. Among the biggest of these is the campaign against the deportation of the Belarusian anarchist Aleksey Bolenkov (who managed to win a trial against the Ukrainian special services and remain in Ukraine) and the defense of one of the districts in Kyiv (Podil) from police raids and attacks by the ultra-right.
We still have very little influence on society at large. This is largely because the very idea of a need for organization and anarchist structures was ignored or denied for a long time. (In his memoirs, Nestor Makhno also complained about this shortcoming after the defeat of the anarchists). Anarchist groups were very quickly dashed by the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] or the far right.
Now we have come out of stagnation and are developing, and therefore we are anticipating new repression and new attempts by the SBU to take control of the movement.
At this stage, our role can be described as the most radical approaches and views in the democratic camp. If liberals prefer to complain to the police in the event of an attack by the police or the far right, anarchists offer to cooperate with other groups that suffer from a similar problem and come to the defense of institutions or events if there is a possibility of an attack.
Anarchists are now trying to create horizontal grassroots ties in society, based on common interests, so that communities can address their own needs, including self-defense. This differs significantly from ordinary Ukrainian political practice, in which it is often proposed to unite around organizations, representatives, or the police. Organizations and representatives are often bribed and the people who have gathered around them remain deceived. The police may, for example, defend LGBT events but get mad if these activists join a riot against police brutality. Actually, this is why we see potential in our ideas—but if a war breaks out, the main thing will again be the ability to participate in armed conflict.
SAUSAGE LIFE The column whose terms apply but not its conditions
READER: Curling’s coming home! MYSELF: I assume you’re referring to plucky little Team UK’s sweeping performance in the Winter Olympics. READER: Yes! Have you been watching it? MYSELF: Unfortunately, not. Normally I would, but there was some drying paint I had to keep an eye on for a friend. READER: Don’t worry, the good news is you can still watch it on iPlayer! MYSELF: That is good news, thanks for the tip. I may have a window next Thursday when I could… READER: Excellent! You’re going to absolutely adore it. Snowballing, Sledging, Downhill Speed-Dating… MYSELF: Downhill what? READER: Don’t worry, the rules are irrelevant. Wait until you see the Curling though. Amazing sport. An absolute revelation. How would one even begin to describe it? MYSELF: Curling. Let me see… members of the local bowls club performing an ice-ballet assisted by some enthusiastic school caretakers? READER: Exquisite. I couldn’t have put it more eloquenter myself.
New series INSPECTOR DICK INVESTIGATES No.1 The Silence of the Lamb
Saturday 4-27am:
By the time Inspector Dick’s car arrived at the Shashliki, an upmarket Turkish joint in the smart area of town, it was surrounded by scene-of-crime tape and lit by the harsh glare of unflattering spotlights. Vital clues had been gathered by detectives and the evidence was already beginning to mount.
The previous night, Karl Glock, wealthy owner of nearby Glock’s Launderama had left his fiancée Diana Schtumm waiting in the car whilst he called in to the Shashliki to pick up some Lamb Kofta for supper. Security cameras confirmed that he had entered the front door at 6-15pm, but never came out. Diana waited patiently, but when the restaurant closed at 1-30am and Karl had still not shown up, his fiancée began to lose hope. She decided to drive home with Lars Vøndervønder, a Norwegian submarine engineer who just happened to be passing by, promising him she would call off her engagement to Karl in the morning. At 3am she reported Karl’s disappearance to the police.
Whilst Inspector Dick’s trained eye surveyed the area, Raoul Pirez, detective in charge of the case filled him in with some detail. Pirez told him he suspected Mr. Glock was now dead, murdered, and that all the evidence pointed to a connection with Kebab Krazy, a rival Turkish outfit across town. Six men in black suits, carrying an assortment of weapons, had been seen leaving there at 6-20pm and eyewitnesses saw them running into Shashliki 10 minutes after Karl had entered. Shortly afterwards, neighbours said they heard gunshots and screams. CCTV footage revealed the men driving at speed out of the Shashliki’s back gates at 6-35pm in a stretch hearse with darkened windows.
Inspector Dick said nothing. Pushing open the Shashliki’s plush swing doors, he briefly surveyed the deserted dining room, then made a bee-line for the kitchen.
Fifteen minutes later he emerged and looking detective Pirez directly in the eye told him; “You must issue a warrant for the arrest of Dur Tea-Li, the Shashliki’s Chinese laundry supervisor, on suspicion of the first degree murder of Karl Glock.”
The announcement drew gasps from the assembled cops.
“It was Tea-Li who carried out the premeditated crime and this is why: he was not only jealous of Glock’s success in the laundromat business but had also become convinced that he was stealing his mail-order dry cleaning ideas. Here’s what happened next; Tea-Li, a trained pork butcher, lured Glock into the kitchen on the pretext of discussing starching. There, after bludgeoning him to death with a steam iron, he expertly dismembered his body and had the kitchen staff serve it up as doner kebab. It was a busy Friday night. No-one noticed. It was only a matter of hours before the corpse was disposed of without a trace”.
Pirez smiled and shook his head. “How in hell did you figure it all out boss”?
“It was staring you in the face the whole time,” replied Inspector Dick, “The fiancée and the submarine guy were in cahoots with the Chinaman. Together they planned to take over the business once Karl Glock was declared dead.”
“OK, but what about the Kebab Krazy connection?” asked Pirez, puzzled.
Dick climbed into his car, gunned the engine and wound down the window. “A red herring. The six men from Kebab Krazy are entirely innocent,” explained the inspector, “They were operating an illegal undertaker’s business from a spare bedroom in the back of the Shashlik and they were in a hurry because they were late for a funeral. The reason they were armed was because they were officiating at the cremation of a gangland crime boss who had insisted on fancy-dress.”
The detective clicked his tongue in silent admiration as Inspector Dick’s ‘57 Cadillac El Dorado roared off into the night. Pirez turned to his fellow officers: “I guess we’ve all learned something today,” he said humbly.
DICTIONARY CORNER Custody (n) the warm feeling experienced by the victim of a trifle-thrower.
BUDDHA WOULDN’T MELT
Selfie enthusiasts queued for hours to get tickets for the opening of the new Brahma-Dahza Exhibitionist Yoga Ashram in Herstmonceaux’s Wellfulness Centre. Those lucky enough to attend were offered a month’s trial membership, which included free sessions with the tantric mirror and during group exercises in the brightly lit, glass-fronted Narcissus room, the use of a professional body double. Exhibitionist Yoga is thought to promote empathy-cleansing, social detachment and elitism, as well as encouraging ego nourishment and self-satisfaction. Membership applications are now closed.
READER: Shame. That sounds right up my street. MYSELF: Yes it does. Have you tried the Ku Klux Klan? READER: Is that similar? MYSELF: Broadly.
Sausage Life!
Colin Gibson • Emmet Ives • Anita Makris
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She sips her tranquility,
first flush, Darjeeling,
and on the bedizened porcelain
lie some corpses of biscuits.
Her tepid tea still manages to
burn the lips.
The children run amok,
invade the garden,
magnify in the Sun upon
a colony of the ants.
The destruction cools them,
and their mother’s music device
streams, ‘Here Comes The Sun’.
“Have you ever been afraid that
you might die?” I ask her.
My voice dins a nano-noise,
an antsy sound, so here and so far.
The last bit of the biscuits
melts into the tea she will not drink.
I’ve never considered it before, but I assume that delete must be the removal of a lete or –gelæte (OE) – related to lætan (OE) – which gives us leat (16th century), which gave us water, with Sir Francis Drake turning the first sod and galloping on his white horse from Meavy to Plymouth ahead of the glittering line. We were small boys crouching on the bank, bruised knees and caps in our back pockets, arms plunged blue into the icy water that birthed Scott of the Antarctic and other adventures of derring-do – from dorryng do, misprinted in a 16th century edition of Lydgate as derrynge do – which gave us common newts and common dreams, our common tongue, and the Common Market for half a century, freeing Sir Francis Drake for his four wood singles, his precise delivery disturbing the head. When did boys stop wearing caps? When did the leat sigh into dry stone? Delete, delete: I’ve never considered it before, but it’s a long, dry season, without adventures and with borders wreathed in briars. A white horse carves itself into a hill above The Sound – from sund (OE/ON).
An intimate (and instrumental) improvised solo guitar meditation on the vastness of the unknown, from the Appalachian mountains. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 23, 2021
Ian Russell took isolation as a chance to get closer with his guitar, resulting in this lovely set of meditative acoustic instrumentals. Bandcamp New & Notable Dec 1, 2020
Introduction:
This poem was written as I looked forward to a continued recovery from two years of serious inflammation of the brain.
The illness has destroyed many memories. Images from the past have helped restore a sense of self and well-being.
12.
Draw lullabies of comfort from a patch of
mindless chores, and minor catalogues;
miserable, in pain. Can spread from unconnected
treatment; regimes might mask or cure…
Symptoms helpers think are useful till back-stories click
a patterned lid back on the box. And everyone observes.
13.
Self-generating conflicts fill an opening space and
I’d like noise to disengage from details, mind gaps,
potter round a routine chaos. Management reserves
no rights, not even these, the sorts of thing
my father used to do; no commendation in itself.
Know enough to know you don’t. Families do
different things the same. For some of us,
we write in pen and rarely try a change. Some do…
recipes or ventures. Those who’ve passed
have earned an eye-rhyme for the desolate,
a tip of my non-existent hat. Half-done.
They’re home. Dust has settled. Snow, stuff,
and furniture are moved towards their ends.
It’s Christmas. If they have socks and shoes for sale,
I’ll pay. Mine don’t have holes, you’d like them anyway.
MONSIEUR PAUL & LES SOLUTIONS Pourquoi, pourquoi WYLD GOOMS You did me wrong LORD DIABOLIK Le train pour Memphis WITCHES BROOMS I need LOS CUCHILLOS Perdedor STUDIO 68! The feeling LYDSYN Abernes Planet VIBRAVOID The cutting edge PLEASE Paper dream BRIAN AUGER & JULIE DRISCOLL Jeannine THIMOTHY EERIE I Fear The Void Is Waiting For Me DIRTIEST Re del punk rock STUPIDITY Feat. KEITH STRENG Waiking up the band LOW RANGER That girl wants to kill me CRUSHED VELVET & THE VELVETEERS Shake SHANDA & THE HOWLERS Want you anyway DETROIT COBRAS Stupidity + BONUS
‘Scientists have more money, more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve. The most stupid procedures and the laughable results are surrounded by an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society.’
Paul Feyerband was a philosopher of science, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, who became famous for his purportedly anarchistic view of science, his bitingly critical prose on the prevailing scientific philosophies, and his rejection of the existence of universal methodological rules.
The quotes below are taken from Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge.
‘The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal rules, is both unrealistic and pernicious. It is unrealistic, for it takes too simple a view of the talents of man and of the circumstances which encourage, or cause, their development. And it is pernicious, for the attempt to enforce the rules is bound to increase our professional qualifications at the expense of our humanity.’
‘[S]cience has no greater authority than any other form of life. Its aims are certainly not more important than are the aims that guide the lives in a religious community or in a tribe that is united by a myth. At any rate, they have no business restricting the lives, the thoughts, the education of the members of a free society where everyone should have a chance to make up his own mind and to live in accordance with the social beliefs he finds most acceptable. The separation between state and church must therefore be complemented by the separation between state and science.’
‘[T]hose who do not like to see the state meddling in scientific matters should remember the sizeable chauvinism of science: for most scientists the slogan ‘freedom for science’ means the freedom to indoctrinate not only those who have joined them, but the rest of society as well.’
‘A science that insists on possessing the only correct method and the only acceptable results is ideology and must be separated from the state, and especially from the process of education. One may teach it, but only to those who have decided to make this particular superstition their own. On the other hand, a science that has dropped such totalitarian pretensions is no longer independent and self-contained, and it can be taught in many different combinations (myth and modern cosmology might be one such combination).’
Paradise Block is hell, a surrealist or perhaps hyperreal world of poverty, depression, obsession and dysfunction. The characters in this short story collection struggle to work, pay the rent and relate to anyone; their lives – like these stories – spill into each other and into the town of Clutter where they live.
The tower block of the title is falling apart, despite attempts by the alcoholic caretaker to mend the lifts and (literally) fill the cracks. He has a pile of paper scraps with jobs to do written on them, but cannot bring himself to do the work required or even organise a bus and train trip to see his son, who lives with his ex-wife. The tenants around him breed and steal kittens, work (or not) on zero hours contracts in one of the town’s department stores, hide their disabilities from themselves and each other, live on eggs, discount store biscuits or thin air, lust after the doctor who keeps pornography on his computer, communicate by text and shouting. or do not say anything at all. Others hold the only conversations they ever have with delivery men or phone salesmen; and goodness knows what is going on with the Foxes in their damp dark basement.
If tenants manage to escape from Clutter and move elsewhere, or even have a day trip out, their past comes with them: the shadows darken, emotional and financial ties remain. Alcohol, nostalgia, delusion or self-abuse offer other forms of escape but only in the short-term. The reality remains damp stairwells, mouldy walls, empty cupboards, cold beds and the neighbours’ noise from next door.
This is a brilliant book, but also one of the most horrible set of stories I have ever read. A cover quote and some reviewers suggest the work is funny, but I found it intensely upsetting and moving in its strange and obsessive depiction of how others live. Through hyperbole and exaggeration, by focussing on the everyday and what is wrong with the world, Ash has documented and highlighted the (un)realities of how others live, in a way that no formal report or documentary can. This is not real life, but it allows us to imagine what the lives of the broken, unwanted and cast-aside is like, and provoke us into some kind of response against the world that allows it to happen.
My understanding is that this story is from a play, but if you listen carefully, you will find gems of wisdom! A mind-boggling article had surfaced a little while back, about a lost or intentionally hidden interview, with the master of electricity, Nikola Tesla. Circulating rumours suggest that the “Interview” is a fake, but how do we prove it? Impossible!
Well, we now know that the article comes from the theater play, ‘Tesla: Or Customisation of an Angel.’ meaning, “customisation of Tesla,” by Stevan Pešić, a Serbian playwright, but the real question is, did Nikola Tesla really conduct such an interview?
We are all hungry for more of Nikola Tesla’s wisdom on spirituality and his relationship with Swami Vivekananda and we get a beautiful glimpse of that in this interview, even if it’s fake, it still holds thought provoking wisdom.
The play started as a radio drama in Serbia. It became very popular and was made into a theatre play, and was first performed in Belgrade in 1995.
The play was made into a film twice—In 2001 and in 2014.
Apparently, as an inspiration to Stevan Pešić to write this play, he used a true interview given by scientist Nikola Tesla, for the magazine “Immortality” in his laboratory in Colorado Springs.
Happy Mount Park, May 2018
Moonscape: Sea of Tranquillity. August 2019
Hest Bank, looking south west, 9th Sept 2021
