Exotic Connections and Other Such Stuff Vol 2 (various artists)

Dukes of Scuba started life in 2018 as a paper fanzine promoting and documenting improvised and experimental music in Wales. It evolved into a webzine, a label and a concert/workshop series (‘Scratch’) in Bangor. Exotic Connections and Other Such Stuff Vol 2 is the latest release by the label – Recordiau Dukes – and is a follow-up album to Vol 1, which came out at the end of 2022. As the album blurb says: To help document and promote the current Welsh scene, Dukes of Scuba has partnered again with The South Wales Improvisers to create the second volume in a series of download compilation albums of free improvisation and experimental music which shine a spotlight upon new music from across the whole of the country. The emphasis in the first Exotic Connections album tended towards improvised music. The emphasis here is, if anything towards the experimental and semi-improvised, although I’ve not added up the minutes and there’s a substantial amount of improvisation, too.

The first track, ‘Limehouse’, is taken from the album Dérive, a collaboration between Observation Point (the alter-ego of  South Wales musician Antony Thomas) and composer/creator Susan Matthews. The album explores the mythology that has grown up around 18th-century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor’s esoteric designs for six London churches. These are purportedly connected in a geometrical pattern by ley lines (an idea which finds its way into Alan Moore’s graphic novel, ‘From Hell’). Dérive is a term used by psychogeographers for urban wandering that explores (as Guy Debord, the inventor of psychogeography put it) “specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”  The title of the track, ‘Limehouse’, refers to St. Anne’s Church, Limehouse, a Hawksmoor church in Tower Hamlets. Thinking about psychogeography and music it strikes me that a lot can be made of an association between the two: if one goes out on a dérive one expects to be surprised, to see (or hear) things (and see things in things) that one didn’t expect. Listening to ‘Limehouse’, though, I expected to be surprised, but I wasn’t. Thomas and Matthews took a more impressionistic path. That’s not to say the track isn’t effective: it is. It would make great music for a film.

The duo Hopewell Ink (Kathy and David Boswell) combine spoken word with composed music. Kathy writes the words: intense sessions of free-writing are edited down to create a spoken text. David creates the musical element. This might involve a range of sound sources, from more familiar acoustic and electronic instruments to aeolian (wind-powered) instruments and field recordings. ‘No Longer a Car’ (‘It did not liquefy as a corpse should / Instead it became more angular’) was recorded during a live set on Neil Crud’s Punk and Beyond online radio show. Metallic percussion figures prominently in the track and I wondered if metal car-parts were involved (they’re certainly invoked) – a reasonable assumption as we’re talking about an outfit known to fasten contact mics to fences.

John Harvey describes himself, as well as being a performer, as an ‘historian of sound and visual art’. He describes his  ‘Musical Instruments Played the Old Familiar Tunes’ as referencing instances of musical instruments playing themselves under the direction of a medium (a stunt popular in the 19th century). It’s an improvisation for electric guitar processed by software that emulates a ‘spirit box’ – a radio scanner that usually produces white noise which spirits (users claim) can mould into comprehensible words.

Lyndon Owen’s ‘Sonic Fruit and Veg Machine’ is a light-hearted piece of process music. And why not? It’s a process piece that uses the electrical resistance of vegetables to control oscillators. The audience, divided into four groups, are the performers, each group being provided with what sounds like a theremin adapted to be played by cabbages, carrots and such like (with the assistance, of course, of the human participants). From the verbal description, it sounds like it’s great fun to make. The end result is a good listen, even if you know nothing of the process that led up to it. Hopefully, the vegetables are eaten afterwards.

‘Thinking of the River’, created by Martin Lloyd Chitty (better known, perhaps, as a singer-songwriter) is a soundscape using field recordings together with drums and minimal electronics. It’s part of a larger project that takes the poetry of Basil Bunting and the landscape of the Howgills as its starting point.

Lightening In A Bottle is a free improvisation duo consisting of Richard McReynolds (Guitar) & Luke Robinson (Drums). Their performances are spontaneous and unplanned. The uncertainty this creates puts a weight of responsibility on the performers and, listening to this track – ‘Blue Screen Disco Queen’ – I could almost smell the adrenalin. It’s the longest track on the album and, for me, one of the most engaging. Any improvising musician will recognise the chuckles that got caught on the recording at the end, the elation of knowing that synergy happened and somehow, in a way that feels outside your control, what you just did really worked.

We’re not told a lot about ‘CeVoix’ by Simon Rogers (aka Etchedbright). Listening to it, I’d hazard that it’s a piece for violin, electronics, harp and percussion. I, for one, am pleased to think people are still making music like this (be it composed or improvised), in an atonal style that owes a lot to serialism, a sound-world with occasional echoes of Stockhausen. Rogers is a visual artist, as well as a composer.

The Improvisers Ensemble (IE), founded by Spontaneous Music Ensemble-veteran Maggie Nicols, meets every Sunday and makes music over the internet. The line-up varies. ‘Stages of Life’ was recorded in June this year. The piece, the blurb tells us, is based on the title. The line-up is jazz-based – saxophones, bass, drums and voice. The music, as one might expect, becomes less frenetic as time goes on. It says a lot for it that one doesn’t have to know the title and the plan to appreciate it.

South Wales Improvisers meet fortnightly at SHIFT in Cardiff. What we hear of them is a seven-minute excerpt from a session held, again, in June this year. The group welcomes players of all levels, with or without experience. All they ask, to quote their website, is ‘that you love an open mind, a willingness to listen, to respond and enjoy.’ Listening to them made me wish I lived nearer Cardiff.

Pieriant are a duo (Rose and Dan Linn-Pearl) who perform on violin, electric guitar and found objects. They describe what they do as semi-improvised. Their name, Pieriant, translates into English as ‘machine’. One has to imagine not a production line robot but some sort of fantastic device producing curious, enchanting musical artefacts.  The track showcased here, ‘Tri Yn Yr Lolfa’, translates as ‘Three in the Lounge’ which, I guess, refers to the fact that as well as the two adult performers, we can hear the voice of a small child whose contributions (live? pre-recorded?) are not only touching, but ask the question, when we feel moved to make sounds in the world, in what circumstances can we consider what we’re doing to be music? Pieriant describe themselves as ‘[pursuing] moods of minimalism, drone, post-rock, soundscape and spoken word’. Listening to them, I would resist any attempt to pigeon-hole them with a genre. As is the case with a lot of interesting musicians, their ‘style’ is probably best described as being whatever the end-product of what they’re trying to do turns out to be.

As is the way with such compilation albums, every track on Exotic Connections is a potential line of enquiry that can lead the listener into the work of the showcased performer. People will have their own favourites. Anyone who finds it interesting will want to check out the first volume, too, if they don’t already know it (see links below).

 

Dominic Rivron

LINKS

Dukes of Scuba:

https://www.ashcookemusic.co.uk/dukes-of-scuba

Dukes of Scuba Bandcamp page (Recordiau Dukes):
https://recordiaudukes.bandcamp.com/music

Exotic Connections and Other Such Stuff Vol 1:
https://recordiaudukes.bandcamp.com/album/exotic-connections-other-such-stuff-vol-1

Observation Point/Susan Matthews:
https://observationpoint.bandcamp.com/album/la-d-rive

Hopewell Ink:
https://www.freewriterscompanion.com/hopewell-ink-exposed/

John Harvey:
https://johnharvey.org.uk/

Lyndon Owen
https://lyndonowen.cymru/experimental-page/

Martin Lloyd Chitty:
https://martinlloydchitty.com/

Richard McReynolds:

https://richardmcreynolds.bandcamp.com/album/silent-voice

 

Simon Rogers (Etchedbright):
https://www.etchedbright.art/

Improvisers Ensemble (IE):
https://www.youtube.com/@improvisersensembleie5902

 

South Wales Improvisers:

https://shiftcardiff.org/south-wales-improvisors/

Pieriant:
https://peiriant.bandcamp.com/music

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The Script

Inkwells run dry and prices rise, so words are at a premium. Only the ostentatiously wealthy display public circumlocution, indulging in vulgar prevarication and tergiversation, while we the people are brief and pithy. There are, of course, alternatives, and although less permanent than traditional methods, I’ve found that the condensation on crowded train windows makes a workable substitute for perfunctory transactions. It’s something in the distance and waiting, a quality hanging between loss and anticipation, with just the right quantities of boredom, frustration, and nothing at all. It serves for shopping lists and to-do lists and, at a push, notices of the untimely deaths in unexpected circumstances of not-too-close relatives. For some reason, the condensation on bus windows, however crowded, won’t work at all. Cars? Don’t be silly. The deeply religious, of course, deny the need for ink and its analogues altogether, proclaiming the utopian democracy of the Digital Kingdom. But where does that leave us? Lost for words. Lies cost nothing and, even since I started typing, this sentence has changed beyond all recognition.

 

 

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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor

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Whole Earth Index

 

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.

https://wholeearth.info/

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Radical Book Fair 2023: Revolutionary Feeling

The 2023 Radical Book Fair is taking place on 9th -12th November at the Assembly Roxy in Edinburgh!

This year, the fair’s theme is Revolutionary Feeling. Throughout our four days of panels, workshops, publisher and activist stalls, we’ll explore the movement between our inner worlds and the society that shapes them, between personal and collective experience, the individual and the systemic in harm as well as joy. Together, we hope to turn our gaze toward honest futures, definied by care and collective power.

TICKETS: The Radical Book Fair is entirely bookshop run, without outside funding, so any and all support means the world to us. The Fair is FREE to BROWSE Thursday – Sunday and you can drop in whenever we are open.

Events are £5 or free – we completely understand paying for one event and then getting free spots for others. ALL ticket sales help both to anticipate attendance and to help us pay all our speakers. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask!

Events listings and further details at https://lighthousebookshop.com/events/radical-book-fair-2023-radical-feeling

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On Matthew Perry’s Passing

Friends die. It takes a while,
more than the summer of this life,
to realise the verity we knew.

Almost Halloween, the moon waning,
half a life, candied, decays the other half.
No urge to stroll a mile laden with leaves, 
to step in a café at the centre 
of your memory’s city and to see no face
you know, the bodies you left wearing
something new, laughter rolling, shadows, 
and the seats now in Vogue tides through. 

Better yet, stay on the couch, hear
the retro clapping in the backdrop
of a sitcom, spill some icecream soup
or stale caffeine made following a net recipe.

 

 

Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor

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Goldie

                          

“A night of rumbling bass sounds, a rammed, heaving mass of humanity in full dancing mode…with wild moments of madness and mayhem”, suggests Alan Dearling

Goldie is a proper larger-than-life geezer. A star who is also everyone’s mate. He’s a natural chameleon, with an eye-popping, mind-blowing range of artistic, musical and acting achievements behind him. And, obviously more to come.  It was great to meet him, albeit briefly. A little more about him in a wee while…

The event I attended was the Marcus Intalex Music Foundation night. A night celebrating the life of Marcus Kaye…  It was a night of performance with djs and music producers of music providing pulsating, foundations-shaking drum ‘n’ bass. A night too for audience participation. To dance, bounce, gyrate, jump and buzz.

The Foundation itself ran a dj mixing and mc-ing workshop earlier in the day.  Goldie was the headline act, but a lot of the other djs are renowned in this genre.

From their site: “MIMF is a platform to support and nurture music talent in many aspects of music development and the culture that surrounds it.

One of Marcus’ greatest passions was to encourage and guide aspiring music talent, as well as pass on the knowledge he himself acquired over the course of his long-standing and successful career.

His importance to the Manchester music scene cannot be overstated, and as an extension of that, the Marcus Intalex Music Foundation aims to continue working in this spirit.

From workshops and studio sessions, to seminars and events; we will host and facilitate a series of programming for people to explore, learn and immerse themselves in everything we love about music and the people we admire.”

Here are a few images of some of the MIMF team and performers:

 

With Gig, venue host (left) at the MIMF event

Goldie was born: Clifford Joseph Price in 1965. He’s also been awarded an MBE. He first came into the public consciousness working as a graffiti artist, especially around Wolverhampton, and much of his early work was futuristic and also a form of politicised social commentary. But soon he turned to honing his skills as a musician, dj and music producer in the UK world of jungle, drum and bass and breakbeat, hardcore scenes.  From Wikipedia we learn that: “He released a variety of singles under the pseudonym Rufige Kru and co-founded the label Metalheadz. He later released several albums under his own name, including the 1995 album Timeless, which entered the UK charts at number 7.”

He featured on the cover of the ‘Face’ magazine in 1995 as the ‘Bass Explorer’, the ‘Breakbeat Alchemist’, with hobbies including snowboarding, walking the dog and dentistry!

Many folk recognise him from his role in the 1999 James Bond film, ‘The World Is Not Enough’, and from Guy Ritchie’s ‘Snatch’ (2000). UK audiences also know him from the long-running BBC series, ‘East Enders’ (2001–2002). Increasingly he has also appeared in a number of celebrity reality television shows, including ‘Celebrity Big Brother 2’, ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, ‘Come Dine with Me’ and ‘Maestro’. He still occasionally performs as a musician in Metalheadz, having recently put on a show at London’s Koko venue. He is a high-energy, high-octane performer.

A 2020 documentary for Sky Arts called, ‘The Art that made me’, has been very positively reviewed, and Goldie has, since 2007, returned to producing new art work alongside his music and acting careers.  A clip is here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=959291614603097

 

Goldie’s latest offering is ‘Timeless’ (30 years on) – “… ‘re-takes’ not re-mixes”, Goldie says of his new release, 2 x CDs; 3 x LPs and digital. https://goldie.lnk.to/timelessremixesFB

 

Goldie’s Metalheadz logo adorns one wall outside the Golden Lion venue for the MIMF extravaganza – pictured here with local muso, Sam Durham.

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Three Intercepts

                1

measured wavelengths
flag up
customary closed-back
headphones massacre
NEWS FLASH
metaphoric call
it fission
fabulous advances
cemented in
the one
flesh culture
war origins
phantasmal Adamic
paradox ripped
out scarscaped
ore logged
terra di
nessuno ein
Wort to
begin with
global fuelling
a more
            powerful jaw

               2

migrant world
view stabilizing:
habitat breakdown
Noth Atlantic
Culture Specific
Items simultaneously
moving East
historic imperatives
geography spiritual
strategy lift-off
a salire
alle stelle
latterly airless
invasions rampant
alarm bells
trigger Border
Security at
Moon Estates

             3

heritage wreckage
off-screen eternal
return in
real time
sticking to
the facts
matrix for
wave Futures
progressing on
a closed
circuit
         interface
teleport
            space
displaced blue
sky deposits
arrive at
the cashpoint
a century
in advance

 

 

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Adrian Clarke

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My dysfunctional heart

 
My heart is closed to loving these days
I rummage within
Like I search for keys
In my big fat weekday purse
It’s too clustered 
My search, too hurried
 
It flows today
Like the shallow pond
In my neighborhood
The butt of jokes
For those coming from area
Of unending stream
 
My heart doesn’t hold any miracle
An outsider roaming the streets
It isn’t the fabled village well
That migrant maids speak of
It doesn’t become my succor
In time of drought
 
A million caged birds
Entangled vocal chords
It can’t retrieve its voice
 
The hunt is on, nevertheless
In the darkness of late evening
In downtown bars

But recession hit those places hard
There are no happy hours left

 

 

Vandana Kumar

____________________________________________________________

Bio

Vandana Kumar is a French teacher, translator, recruitment consultant, Indie Film Producer, cinephile and poet residing in New Delhi, India. Her poems have been published in national and international websites, journals and anthologies of repute – ‘Outlook’, ‘Madras Courier’, ‘Grey Sparrow Journal’ to name only a very few. She has been a part of seminal feminist anthologies like the Indie Blue publication ‘The Kali Project’. Her cinema articles appear regularly in ‘Just-cinema’ and ‘The Daily Eye’. She was a jury member for the ‘All India Poetry Competition’ organized by ‘Cocoa-Butter’ and also co-edited their debut print anthology that resulted from this competition. Her recent collection of poems ‘Mannequin Of Our Times’ (February 2023) – has been awarded the ‘The Panorama International Book Award 2023’ and the ‘Mighty Pens Awards’ in the poetry category.

 

 

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The Nicompoop of Sadomasochism

I bit my wife today
She punched me in the eye.

 

——————————-

Disclaimer:
No Wifes or eyes were irreparable hurt during the making of this poem.

 

Nick & Claire Victor

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MARCUS AURELIUS DREAMBOOK

 

Dreams are not made by arrangement
Dreams are entirely ungoverned
Dreams are conceived and not made

When dreamers dream ‘outside the box’
Governments may box the dreamer
Dreams do not derive from any box

Grandiosity is sly
When planning to be simple   –      
‘Surely all mankind must live in boxes!’

Dreams are organic and normal
Even with the designate ‘abnormal’  
Governments are institutes of man

His days are re-designed continually
So worn-out nights of worry pass dream-free
Dream-free man is man so easily-governed

Governments merely make boxes
Boxes then developed and adapted
A right box and a wrong box both dream-free

Each holds a mechanical man
Convinced the human mind
Is simply another computer

Beautiful Dreamers   –   nonetheless
You will be on my ‘app.’
If I may be on yours

 

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Bernard Saint
Illustration: Claire Palmer

 

 

 

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LOST & FOUND

the antique roses
were
obliterated by
aphids & alderflies
while
the heirloom vegetables
were
annihilated by
drought & deluge
whereas
it was a good year for orgasms

 

 

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TERRENCE SYKES

 

 

.

 

 

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Sailing on a Strange Boat

The Waterboys, Hall for Cornwall, Truro, 25 October 2023

The Waterboys have covered a lot of musical ground since they began. A trio of ‘big music’ albums – energetic and expansive rock – were followed by a shift to folk-inflected music, before the band disbanded and then reformed, returning to rockier climes but also visiting the poetry of Yeats and Hendrix’s wailing guitar. The one constant has been Mike Scott, on a constant search for and reflection on the meaning of life and how to live it.

Tonight he has a mostly low key bass player and drummer keeping time, whilst he moves between acoustic and electric guitar with occasional visits to the piano, although this is mostly played by virtuoso James Halliwell. And on stage left, looking like Bill Bailey crossed with Rick Wakeman appearing in Night of the Living Dead, is Brother Paul, shaking his hair who hammers away at his Hammond organ or freaks out across the stage on his keytar. (When did you last see one of those in use?)

It’s his initial antics which provided a poor start to the proceedings and distract from the music but after a few songs the band seemed to have warmed up enough, and warmed the audience up enough, to chill into the music, reinventing songs from all over the last few decades, often in totally different arrangements.

‘How Long Will I Love You?’ remains wistfully romantic, the nostalgic narrative of ‘Ladbroke Grove Symphony’ turns almost ska, ‘The Pan Within’ becomes hard rock, bookended by versions of Patti Smith & Bruce Springtseen’s ‘Because the Night’. The most radical new version is a deconstruction of ‘This Is the Sea’, which is not only slowed right down but features sheets of improvised sound from pianist Halliwell, who quite rightly gets huge applause for his efforts tonight.

Another beautiful section of calm amongst the storm comes when Scott reads the ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ from Wind in the Willows, over a mystical, blues-tinged instrumental. Encore and closing song ‘The Whole of the Moon’ of course returns to singalong and wig-out territory, offering a joyous and uplifting end to the evening.

There’s a kind of default setting the Waterboys fall into, a kind of lazy boogie-rock circa 1970s, which Brother Paul’s organ attack doesn’t help rise above the cliché, but most songs tonight avoid this, reaching for something more. There are occasional echoes of Van Morrison, hints of the original Waterboys sound, plenty of new age imagery and impassioned folk melodies in the mix, and asides, limericks (‘There was an old man from Truro…’) and comedy from Scott, all adding up to a lively, busy and engaging gig. I wonder where the music will go and what they will do next? Whatever it is, I’m looking forward to hearing it.

 

 

.

Rupert Loydell

 

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a Hell Bus for the Niger Delta

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A HELL BUS FOR THE NIGER DELTA

 

 

I’ve been back in London for the last week during a gap in the Hell Bus tour, (see below for more on that) but rather than sleeping for a month, time and circumstance has thrown me right into the next project: a Niger Delta Hell Bus!

After my visit to the Niger Delta earlier this year, local Ogoni climate activists asked me to come back and create a version of the Hell Bus for use in their campaigns and for a backdrop for the annual Ogoni protest outside the Shell HQ in Port Harcourt on the 10th November. This annual march commemorates the execution of the Ogoni Nine, community activists who had campaigned against Shell’s destruction of the Niger Delta and who, at the behest of Shell, were framed by the former military dictatorship and executed in 1995. Shell also offered ‘witnesses’ in the case jobs with Shell if they gave false testimony against the Ogoni Nine.

It’s one of Shell’s more shocking crimes in living memory and I’m proud to be involved in commemorating the Ogoni heroes, who won a significant victory in preventing oil extraction in Ogoniland, although Shell’s oil infrastructure still leaks oil into their waterways, crops and communities, as I documented in this short documentary from my last visit:

 

The Niger Delta Hell Bus project is going to involve purchasing a minibus which will be owned and operated by Lekeh Development Foundation as an activist campaign vehicle, allowing Ogoni people to take part in climate demonstrations and actions towards a fossil free Niger Delta. It will also be used to help support affected communities.

I’m also planning to rent some billboard space (a first for everything!) to put up anti-Shell adverts in the run up to the protest, and locally print hundreds of Hell t-shirts to give out to protesters during the march.

I have secured some funding for this project but it’s a bit short of the total needed (turns out buses are more expensive out there than I thought!). As time is short and I’ve been too busy with the Hell Bus tour to apply for funding elsewhere I’m going to cover the additional costs myself, but anything anyone can chip in towards this would be greatly appreciated.

You can donate here.

       

 

HELL BUS TOUR

 

Back in the UK, the Hell Bus tour has gone brilliantly, and I’m absolutely delighted at the response it got around the country.

Massive thanks to Ad Free Cities and Switchit.Green for sorting all the logistics and to all the volunteers and venues who helped make this happen. I give a more comprehensive thanks in my recent blog post, which contains a few more photos.

There is still one more date: Bristol – 30th Oct-1st Nov at UWE, Frenchay Campus (outside the Student Union)

And an additional bonus date in Leeds 4th-5th November for Big Up Fest outside Tetley, although I’ll be in the Niger Delta by then, local AdBlock Leeds volunteers will be holding the fort!

 

   

An added benefit of working with AdFree Cities and Switchit.Green for this tour was that it gave people tangible actions they could take after coming through the bus, whether that’s changing their bank account or getting involved/starting up a local AdBlock group.

In Birmingham me and Robbie from Ad Free Cities did an event about advertising and by the end there was a new Ad Block Brum group set up and trainees signed up for subvertising training! That’s the good stuff.

I’m really looking forward to the bus being useful in activism like this going forward. Also looking forward to a 2024 tour, if you can host the bus please get in touch!

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

PALESTINE

 

It’s been absolutely heartbreaking watching the news come out of Palestine the last few weeks, thousands dead and genocidal rhetoric being broadcast and normalised daily. I haven’t had a chance to make any work during this current crisis, but I’ll link and post to a few older pieces here, including the above which I made during Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2014, prints and postcards available here, 100% of profits go to Interpal.

The below images link to more details and hi-res images.

   

  

 

ZINE FOR PATREON BACKERS

 

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

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

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

Back me on Patreon here!

 

MERSEYSIDE

I’m coming back to Merseyside in November for an exhibition of my work at Future Walls in Birkenhead. I’ll also be doing a talk and screening there on Monday 20th November. Free entry! Come look at art and listen to me blab!

I don’t have any specific details at the moment, but will post them on my socials as soon as I know. But here’s where it is:

75 Argyle St, Birkenhead CH41 6AB

 

 

 

MR DEMOTIVATOR MUGS

 

Got the Mr Demotivator mugs back in stock in time for those lazy winter snooze-ins.

You can order one here.

Also I still have some I Am Become Plastic Destroyer of Worlds t-shirts left in stock. Pink and black only.

 

Available here.

 

This update is public and shareable so please feel free to pass it on. If you’re not on my mailing list but would like to be you can sign up here.

Eternal thanks to anyone who’s ever backed my work on Patreon or through the shop!

And thanks for reading!


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What Holds Mankind Back from Confronting the Forces Determined to Destroy It?

 

 

War, on anything other than a localised dispute level, is a contrived and preplanned event based on ulterior motive.

In the era of globalisation, war is used to create a distraction from something of more lasting significance which the protagonists want to introduce under cover of the smoke and fire dominating imagery and rhetoric of the battle ground. Something that will further enslave a large body of humanity to conform to the desired end game – and at a much faster rate than would otherwise prove possible.

War is also motivated by the desirability of an economic upturn to the fortunes of the military industrial complex, and, of course, as a harbinger of chaos.

Chaos is a vital factor in inducing traumatised populations to call for a big brother saviour to end the conflict. The conflict that these same ‘saviour’ promoting elite control agents have had a major part in starting in the first place.

Given that world events are politically and economically manipulated to give ever greater power to ever fewer institutions and those who run them, ‘enemies of the people’ are easily identified.

However, the difference between a 21st century enemy and an enemy of previous eras, is that the 21st century version uses advanced psychological manipulation as the main weapon of an increasingly virtual armoury.

Therefore today’s public enemy no. 1 – is a master of deception.

Grasping this, means recognising that we have a new dimension to get to grips with in order to develop a strategy able to lay bare this deception and to explode its psychological hold over the better part of humanity.

This can only be done by those who possess the foresight and awareness which enables them to identify the behaviour patterns and motivations common to the chief operatives behind the process of human enslavement.

It includes recognising the main causal elements behind the mass hypnosis of humanity. The inducing of a state of mind (and being) which leads good people ‘not to act’ when everything around them instinctively demands taking immediate action.

On further scrutinising this dire state of affairs, it becomes apparent that there is something jamming the broader survival instinct of a great swathe of the human population.

By ‘survival state’ I mean more than somehow managing to stay alive in a crisis where one’s physical being is at risk. The state which is jammed is not this, it is at the psychic and spiritual level. That state which instinctively gives one a sense of what is right and what is wrong – and a connectedness with others as well as with the natural environment which nurtures us.

When this connected state is healthy, we instantly feel outraged that any part of this collective living entity of which we are a part, is under threat from the egregious acts of other human beings.

But when it is not healthy – when it is sick – this instinctual outrage fails to cut in. Instead, the predominant emotion is one of withdrawal and passive self preservation. And it is this retreat into a self interested cul-de-sac of indifference to the fate of the family of man and nature – which is the real pandemic of our time.

I have described in previous articles how the techno-industrial digitalised-god of mass abstraction, coupled to its promise of ‘a culture of convenience’, has played a large part in drawing mankind away from making any effort to connect to its deeper nature, to respond to the call of a higher goal and guiding soul.

A selfish preoccupation with personal preference is accompanied by an indulgence in essentially cosmetic concerns. And this comes at the very time when the world is being torn apart by pre planned and harshly enforced divisions that are vampiring human values and setting the stage for the central control system to become fully despotic.

Those able to afford the false luxury of selfish self interest at a time like this, brutally stand-out as prime examples of a complete breakdown of humanitarian and spiritual sensitivities which provide life with its true resonance and real meaning.

What we have to do in order to get somewhere in dealing with this all pervading crisis, is to pin-point the source and nature of this great deception being perpetrated on a largely non resistant mankind. Not just the technology – but that which stands behind the tech and which has hypnotised living beings into following its poisonous surveillance and control programme.

Here, once we look deeply enough, we find the anti-life agenda which belongs to that category of human sicknesses we know as psychotic, psychopathic and sadistic. Such a state of human demise holds that there is no God. That it is man who is in charge of the universe – or should be – and that whatever forces exist ‘out there’, only those that help achieve the gross ambitions of earthlings are worth engaging with.

This is a cult persuasion. It is the predominant position held by the rump of world ‘leaders’ today. Their predominant state of being, no less. The younger ones have been trained by Klaus Schwab and his henchmen to be impenetrable and immune to human feelings. This is considered an imperative in the cause of the full techno-digital take over of daily life.

So our job is to understand this. Not to consign it to a box labelled ‘sickness of the 2%’ and put on the windowsill to be forgotten. It is up to us to acknowledge our part in accepting and allowing this cult siege of life on earth.

We, the people, are at least 90% of the problem. At each historical point, when conditions offered the chance to break the dark spell, we opted out. We failed to take action and take control of our destinies as fellow human beings who value truth, wisdom and justice above all else.

We instead allowed the red carpet to be rolled out for WEF ‘Young leaders’ and other psychotic power seekers to do their worst. Helped along by billionaire ego maniacs, corporate kings, queens and vulture bankers.

And if a brave group should rise up and block-off the centre of repressive power, as in Canada for example, then ‘we the people’s’ applause is fulsome. However, on an individual basis most say “Well done them!” but nevertheless revert to an impassive state of isolation, consigning the potentially life changing event to the same box on the window mantlepiece, while ruing the missed opportunity to rise-up as one and turn the tide of history.

It is undoubtedly the case that each of these ‘non-uprisings’ is a gift to our dark enslavers. Each clampdown which follows is more pervasive and more brutal than the last.

The subsequent fear, anxiety and confusion that comes with this, is the fuel which the cult needs to maintain its Satanic regime.

This is not idle talk. Those who worship at the alter of Baphomet pledge to ensure their monster master will be well fed. Masonic temples exist within the British House of Parliament. Wherever ambition involves trampling on others to achieve desired aims, demonic forces are involved.

Washington DC, Canberra (capital of Australia), and the Vatican in Rome are architecturally designed according to Satanic symbolism that embraces and worships money and power as the supreme goal of life. The City of London ‘square mile’ adopts this same obsession and no doubt Wall Street does too – and other such centres of unrestrained Mammon worship.

The deep state operatives could not achieve their global enforcement regime without a direct link to centres of dark energy. Those most determined to be top dog will go to any lengths to achieve their ends.

This is why paedophilia and child sacrifice is resorted to within political and ‘elite’ circles whose calculated way of life is dependent on forever drawing upon the innocent power of others. Of vampiring the pure energy of innocent children and turning it into dark deeds of global repression.

So what is it that keeps mankind on its knees to those who freely indulge in continuous acts of murder?

Fear? Incredulity? Too much comfort? Cynical satisfaction with the ‘bargain slavery of the day’?

Something of each, no doubt. But more than all put together, it is my contention that the key is lack of self belief. And self belief does not mean ‘a big ego’, quite the opposite. It means knowing one is responding to that which offers guidance at the deepest level of one’s being.

Actions which come from this source are the only actions that will finally destroy the perpetrators of deep evil. There is no other answer to achieving the emancipation of mankind. There is no other force capable of deflating and defeating the Satanic vagabonds whose manifest life hating villainy spreads – almost unchecked – throughout a war torn world today.

Our true work, here and now, is to strengthen this bond we each have with our Creator and thereby to become properly prepared spiritual warriors, primed for confrontation with that which intends to destroy us and all trace of that Divine Spark which stirs our souls and makes us into real Human Beings.

Nurturing this spark to grow into a never dimming fire – this is our true challenge today. The call upon us all that will be the true catalyst to cast out the parasites and bring about the birth of a New Civilisation.

Courage, dear friends, courage. Victory is ours if we truly want it – and are ready to fight for it.

 

Julian Rose

Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farmer, a writer, broadcaster and international activist. He is author of three books, the most recent of which is ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’. Go to his website for further information www.julianrose.info

 

 

 

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What to take with you when you flee

Early morning. A Mediterranean-blue haze
seen from a rooftop of my overcrowded block
is the colour of my fear. It presses down on me
like the rubble of a bombed-out building
where only the concrete frame of a door
to nowhere remains. What to take with you
when you flee? A passport? Its official, royal blue
embossed with gold is of little use
when you are not free to cross the borders.
The cerulean shawl worn by my grandmother
as she scrambled onto the donkey cart
from her home in 1948, never allowed to return.
This I’ll carry like a weight around my neck.
Clothes? Toiletries? As many as I can stuff
into this bag and still leave room enough
to gather the severed limbs and bloodless blue
faces of fleeing children blasted on the safe
evacuation route. Water I’ll take in a blue can,
if the pumps are turned on long enough,
and bread, but I’ll leave behind all other
sustenance. It will save space. I’ll pack
the blues of our unemployed youth
in this youngest of populations,
for they will be impossible to leave behind.
And I’ll carry the memory of the blue scrubs,
stale with rusty blood and despair,
of overstretched doctors. The electric-blue
spark of hope has been turned off,
so that will not be coming. Enough! Time is up.
I hear the buzz of drones that turn the sky
from blue to night, each one bearing
a tiny blue star like an approaching
galaxy of death over this thin strip of land.

 

 

Sally Spiers

 

 

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Some Notes On Writing

 

  • EVERYTHING HAS A NARRATIVE, a story of its own – and it isn’t necessarily the story that we think it is, and it isn’t the story that often we’d like it to be. With this in mind, for example – in the songs/pieces I’m writing currently, my ‘way in’ past the surface narrative is that of utilising automatic process  – initially fitting phrases together primarily for their ‘sound’, their musicality. Despite (perhaps) appearances to the contrary, for me as a writer the narrative ultimately is the element in all this that I consider to be the most important of all … because for me the whole business of writing is ALWAYS about communication. Tho, equally, that ‘communication’ would seem sometimes to appear to be a little incoherent and kinda difficult to place, the finished result is usually all the better for it.
  • For me, writing often begins with whatever particular words and phrases I ‘feel’ suit the mood and rhythms of the music. It always soon grows outward from here, however –  and all the while as I build the thing, considered ambiguity and multi layering are always to the forefront of my mind.
  • As I see it, the aim of the writing is to draw attention to a range of different phenomena: it is never just about cause and effect. You might say this is a protest of sorts – against those who would have you reduce the richness of experience into boxes of labels … ‘‘angst’’, ‘‘ennui’’, ‘‘happy’’ ‘‘sad’’ etc, etc. These places are real enough, they the places where people live / have their being – but such containment can’t be anything but reductive and unhelpful.
  • Next, all of this is crafted (of course!) and refined into songs, into some songs more than others. Songs are a mix of music and thought – they are a register of feelings that exist beyond definition – a wholly different place from the areas where ‘beliefs’ and attitudes rule the roost, those received wisdoms that run us all like automatons. It is music that enables/facilitates this, much more so words ever could – there are whole schools of thought that posit the idea that the very first vocal utterances were more akin to song and speech.
  • In writing, my feeling is that the songs, words and music here are NOT discreet entities – they are elements in the same discourse – where each casts certainty or doubt, illumination or shade, upon the other.
  • And, the overarching aim of the writing is to communicate one thing – that sometimes you make decisions for yourself on an obscure level: something in you is WISE, old and wise – wise enough to take care of you.
  • Always, the thing is to paint with words – effect is important and pivotal to the meaning: but meaning is essential. It is the most important factor in the writing – but also, importantly meaning is NOT fixed in place – and I do not see that as being the aim of art. The beauty of all this lies in its ambiguity.

        – October 2023 .

 

Martyn Bates

 

 

 

Martyn Bates has been half of the innovative post-punk duo Eyeless in Gaza, based in the West Midlands, since their inception in 1980. Their early albums were released (and since rereleased) by Cherry Red, who have also issued several compilations, with more recent work on labels such as Soleilmoon,  Monopol, Sub Rosa, Document, Integrity, and Ambivalent Scale.

He has also released several solo albums, starting with the lovely 10″ album Letters Written LP. Other collections include musical interpretations of James Joyce’s poems, noisier music as Kodak Strophes, reinventions of Murder Ballads with Mick Harris, and collaborative albums with Max Eastley, Anne Clarke, and as Twelve Thousand Days. He has also had two collections of his lyrics published as books, contributed tracks to many compilation albums, and reissued his early experimental solo work as The Migraine Inducers.

 

The official Eyeless in Gaza and Martyn Bates page is at https://www.eyelessingaza.com/

Eyeless in Gaza’s bandcamp site is at https://ambivalentscale.bandcamp.com/

Martyn Bates bandcamp site is at https://martynbates.bandcamp.com/

 

 

 

 

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Too Bright for Mr Mason

Bright too bright for Mr Mason
a man who has seen ghosts
a man who has come in
from a garden of sound and
cast his shadow on the wall
of this Church St café

Mr Mason who has kissed
tarnished brass with notes
of caffeine under his tongue
and crumbs of croissant
caught in his beard

Hot too hot for Mr Mason
a man who has studied cool and
who still has friends in the fire brigade
the fire brigade with their engines
gleaming like Alda’s lips red and bright
too bright for Mr Mason

 

 

G.N Deans
Photo Nick Victor

 

 

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WAKE UP! A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO CONSPIRACY THEORISTS

 

What is true about the conspiracy myth? Underneath its literalism, it conveys important information that we ignore at great peril – Charles Eisenstein

Just before the weekend I had an encounter with one of my neighbours. It went something like this:

 

NEIGHBOUR:  Don’t go to town tomorrow

KR: Why not?

N: Well, you know – it’s going to happen here…the same thing…

KR: What is?

N: There’s going to be an attack in the town centre…I’ve got family in Israel…and we’re going to be digital-only by 2025…I can send you some links if you like…

KR: It’s ok thanks, I have my own sources of information

N: Oh good

What my neighbour seemed to be saying was that the recent disturbances in Israel – rocket attacks and a murderous raid by Hamas – were somehow going to be mirrored by a massive disturbance in the town centre of Hastings, with – presumably – street-fights, raids on businesses (those whose businesses and by whom the raids were to be carried out was unclear. We have a strong Baltic community here, a consequence of the relocation of refugees following the collapse in the 1990s of Yugoslavia. Reprisal attacks for whatever perceived slights or harms seemed to be the implication), and a generally risky or potentially catastrophic situation. The following day, having forgotten this encounter, I went into town. Nothing happened. As to the assertion that ‘we’ were going to be ‘digital-only’ by 2025, it was so vague that I struggled to make any sense of it. Yet to my neighbour both the town-centre attacks and the threat of being analogue-deprived in a couple of years’ time seemed to be true existential threats.

 

One of the more alarming consequences of the present era (or diverting and enlightening, depending on your personal perspective) is the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and those who subscribe to them. Until recently, these were almost exclusively disseminated online and via alt media, the theories ranging from the almost-plausible-until-thought-about, through to the outright bizarre.

In recent years, however, conspiracy theories have moved into the political mainstream.

 

Conspiracists attract ridicule and frustration among those who prefer rational analysis to what appear to be fantasy scenarios concerning the way the world is run. Psychologists attribute finding a conspiracy where there notionally is none to a cognitive bias called illusory pattern perception. Yet it may be important to consider what other, more subtle factors may account for the proliferation of such theories at the current time, to try to understand why this is so, and to learn how to deal with the potential impact on one’s personal life. How should one approach friends or family members who become attracted to conspiracy theories? What are the implications for politics in a world experiencing fear and disorientation, where those who promote conspiracy theories seem to be manufacturing them for their own ends? Who then is the conspirator, and who the conspired against? One thing seems certain: as Charles Eisenstein suggests above, if we write off conspiracists as deluded individuals, we ignore a fundamental, if uncomfortable truth that may in itself sound like a foundational myth: we are on occasion being cynically and systematically manipulated and deceived. In the UK, during the Brexit campaign, voters were told that a significant amount of money would be diverted from payments made to the EU to the NHS. It was untrue. The sad irony here is that many people sympathetic to causes espoused by prominent conspiracy theorists either ignored or failed to see this: they ended up voting to leave the EU. Three years later many voted to send a serial liar and shameless charlatan to No 10 Downing Street. This echoed a similar scenario in the US in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected the President of the United States.

 

According to a survey conducted by the University of Cambridge,

            The largest cross-national study ever conducted on conspiracy theories suggests that around a third of people in countries such as the UK and France think their governments are “hiding the truth” about immigration, and that voting for Brexit and Trump is associated with a wide range of conspiratorial beliefs – from science denial to takeover plots by Muslim migrants… Researchers also looked at a number of other popular conspiracy theories. Both Trump and Brexit voters were more likely to believe that climate change is a hoax, vaccines are harmful, and that a group of people “secretly control events and rule the world together’’.[1]

 

Early conspiracy theories, which became increasingly commonplace in the years immediately after the Second World War, included, but were not confined to, concerns about alien influence on human affairs, the development by the US military of an invisible, time-travelling warship, the assassination of JFK and so on. In recent years, largely thanks to the internet and the ease with which information can be shared via blogs and platforms such as YouTube, the frequency with which conspiracy theorists come to prominence has increased. David Icke, a former ITV sports presenter and Holocaust denier, has become something of cause celebre among the conspiracy communities, with his greatest hits including the idea that Royal Family are shape-shifting, baby-eating lizards, that the world would end in 1997, and that Covid-19 and environmental collapse are elaborate hoaxes. Piers Corbyn, brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, believes this of climate change. American broadcaster and Infowars hard-line conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claims that governments have the power to control the weather, and once alleged that the majority of frogs in the US are gay – brought about by a secret ‘gay bomb’, a US government intervention using chemicals to encourage homosexuality and prevent people having children. He also claimed that the Sandy Hook elementary school shootings, in which 26 people died, were a hoax by gun control lobbyists, and claimed that parents of the allegedly murdered children were openly laughing at people who believed that the shooting was real. Donald Trump, and more recently Russell Brand, have claimed to be victims of ‘fake news’, or, in Brand’s case, moves by ‘legacy media’ to discredit him via allegations of sexual abuse, driven in part by envy of his considerable following down the rabbit holes of Youtube.

 

Other topics or preoccupations include establishing global economic reset and the new world order by shadowy groups of billionaires and other malicious actors (often referred to collectively as the Illuminati), with such groups notionally including Bill Gates, George Soros, Hillary Clinton and others; the use of extraterrestrial technology by the military and in experimental medicine; the belief that the Earth is flat, or that it is hollow with ancient tribes of extraterrestrial beings living inside it; variations on the End Times, the Rapture and other ideas expanding on biblical prophesies of the end of the world; that 5G was and presumably still is responsible for distributing Covid-19 ; that aeroplane exhaust fumes deliberately spread noxious substances, referred to as ‘chemtrails’; that the Apollo moon landings never happened; that MI6 were responsible for the death of Diana Spencer; the perceived infiltration of higher learning for sinister ends, leading to distrust of scientists and other ‘experts’; shifting gender identities causing the breakdown of conventional family structures; anti-vaxxing and suspicion of Big Pharma; ‘birther’ theories concerning the true birthplace of Barack Obama; that the death of George Floyd was a set-up involving actors designed to promote division and discord;  that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, designed to legitimise US aggression in the Middle East; the gaining of power via Satanism, cannibalism and ritual child abuse and/or sacrifice; that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ from Donald Trump; distrust of ‘15-minute cities’ as part of concerns regarding restrictions on freedom, and so on.  The last item on that depressing list is especially egregious: the perceived issue with restrictions on driving in crowded city centres, and related animus towards environmental campaigners, came in one particular instance from Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the UK.

 

According to Esther Addley in the Guardian on 7th October 2023,

for a vocal few, the concept has become bound up in conspiracy theories about a ‘great reset’ that will see people confined to highly restricted zones by a cabal of climate-obsessed authorities. The climate crisis, they believe, is a contrivance to allow sinister powers to restrict individual freedoms – and this is one of their tools to do so.

 

 

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Dr Stella Immanuel, a US physician from Houston, Texas, once claimed that a witch attempted to use abortion, gay marriage, and children’s toys to destroy the world, and ‘the gay agenda, secular humanism, Illuminati and the demonic New World Order’ conspire ‘to destroy our homes, families and the social fiber of America’.

 

Dr Immanuel is also a pastor. In one of her sermons, she claimed that many medical conditions – including being gay – could be blamed on demons and witches: According to a sermon she gave in 2013,’They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm… then they turn into the man and they sleep with a man and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves’. When Facebook subsequently removed many of her videos from its platform, she declared that ‘Jesus Christ would destroy the social media giant’s servers if her videos were not restored to the platform’[2].

 

A post seen on Facebook during the pandemic of 2020 outlined a reading of the various scenarios concerning Covid-19:

            ‘The current plandemic is a hoax perpetuated by a global consortium of wealthy and powerful individuals, aimed at gaining control of the world’s population via a compulsory vaccine containing sophisticated microchip nanobots. Using the 5G network, these can be activated inside the host body via an invisible app in your smartphone. Unless you comply with new laws and restrictions put in place by authoritarian governments, your internal organs can be attacked or you can be killed. Trump is funding a space weapon to target these individuals and their organisations’.

 

Also during the global pandemic the American conspiracy theory group QAnon began to ramp up the rhetoric to posit a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles and cannibals looking to take over the world, with help from the Rothschilds, Hollywood actors and other celebrities, and with Donald Trump cast as the angel of light sent to save the world via an event known as the Storm. QAnon has something of a following on the American far-right, including William Armacost, the mayor of a small town, Sequim, in Washington State, who is quoted as saying that QAnon followers are ‘fighting for humanity, truth, freedom, and saving children and others from human trafficking’. Forbes online alleges that 56% of American Republicans believe that claims made by QAnon are ‘mostly or partly true’. During the pandemic, a close friend sat me down and told me straight-faced that children are being kidnapped, locked in cages and tortured: Hollywood elites were countering the effects of aging via adrenaline harvested from children’s blood, oxidised into a psychoactive drug called adrenachrome (referred to by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – ‘There’s only one source for this stuff, the adrenalin glands from a living human body.’) This refers to anti-Semitic myths dating back to the Middle Ages, claiming that Jews murdered children for use in religious ritual practice.

According to such theories, celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and the Rolling Stones use adrenachrome to stay youthful. Judging from recent pictures of the Rolling Stones they’ve wasted their money. But then, according to a QAnon affiliated group of J.F. Kennedy Jr. affiliated ‘truthers’, at one particular Rolling Stones gig, things on stage were not entirely what they might seem:

“People are saying that Elvis was in a mask playing the keyboard,” read one message from a user named Mustang Debbie. “Michael Jackson was there maybe playing Mick Jager [sic]…JFK Junior was playing the guitarist Keith Richards in the yellow shirt and they all had masks on…They are saying it wasn’t even the Rolling Stones doing the concert.” (A representative for the Rolling Stones declined to comment.) [3]

 

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So far, so bizarre. The idea of Mick Jagger being a zombie Michael Jackson is actually quite a wildly creative notion, and it’s not hard to sympathise with David Icke’s notion that the Royal Family are cold-hearted blood-suckers, though only when seen as a metaphor, not hard truth. It’s easy to laugh about the notion that tinfoil hats can provide protection from alien telepathy, but are conspiracy theories the harmless paranoid ravings of those who have lost touch with reality, or are they an indication of something more serious? What do conspiracists have in common that leads them to what seem to be irrational beliefs about events in the world? What are the implications for mental health for people who subscribe to such theories? What are the effects in the political sphere of conspiracy theories?

 

In their journal entry, Understanding Conspiracy Theories, a group of US-based academics offers three distinct psychological imperatives for beliefs in conspiracies – ‘a tendency toward believing that malevolent groups are conspiring and a tendency to believe that official accounts are false’:

            People appear to be drawn to conspiracy theories when—compared to non-conspiracy explanations—they promise to satisfy important social psychological motives that can be characterized as epistemic (e.g., the desire for understanding, accuracy, and subjective certainty), existential (e.g., the desire for control and security), and social (e.g., the desire to maintain a positive image of the self or group).[4]

 

The authors go on to say that such beliefs appear to be stronger when events are especially large-scale or significant, and when mundane explanations seem unsatisfactory.

 

According to an article in Scientific American, a variety of psychological factors can be accounted for when trying to figure out why some people believe that shadowy elites are conspiring to control the world. Among these are low self-esteem, feelings of alienation, disenfranchisement  and lack of control; a sense of political powerlessness; fear or anxiety concerning alarming and seemingly random world events and the need to ascribe a pattern to such events; social and/or economic disadvantage; educational disadvantage or low educational achievement (signalling lack of opportunity due to systemic institutional failure, rather than lack of ability); pre-existing mental health conditions such as narcissism, paranoia, anxiety and depression, and lack of analytical or critical thinking. In a journal article titled The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories published by the Association for Psychological Science, the authors suggest that conspiracy belief may offer an important source of belonging and shared reality. In certain scenarios, people feel better about themselves because they have access to privileged information – the ‘truth’ – about significant events, the nature and implications of which the rest of us have been too slow to appreciate. Any attempt to persuade the conspiracist  that their theories are misjudged, baseless or irrational leads to the digging in of heels, and the suggestion that one is oneself part of the greater problem – that dependence on narratives via mainstream media has clouded one’s judgment, or that one is living in ignorance and needs to ‘wake up!’ [5]

 

To take a case in point, consider the death of Diana Spencer. Which scenario seems more likely – that the British establishment was uneasy about Diana’s association with Dodi Fayed, so MI6 were drafted in to assassinate her; or that the British establishment was uneasy about Diana’s association with Dodi Fayed, but that her death was the result of a tragic accident? The need to impose order on uncertainty regarding the precise circumstances of Diana’s death may lead to the first conclusion, while the lack of any such imperative may leave the second conclusion uncontested. It may be that for the conspiracist, objective truth is secondary to the need to express distrust or alienation from mainstream narratives, and to claim solidarity with others of a similar mindset. With regard to the surprisingly popular notion that the earth is flat – notionally one of the more extremely absurd conspiracist claims – this might seem to be the case. It may be that literal truth – that the Earth is flat – is not what is being claimed. What is being established is the belonging to a group which denies common understandings of how the world works, and how power operates.

 

Sadly, too, trying to persuade a conspiracy theorist that their beliefs may be off-track is often met with resistance. The authors of The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories note that the theories have a failsafe mechanism – they are

            resistant to falsification in that they postulate that conspirators use stealth and disinformation to cover up their actions—implying that people who try to debunk conspiracy theories may, themselves, be part of the conspiracy[6]

 

Essayist Charles Eisenstein, writing in May 2020 identifies the core issue for widespread lack of trust in the institutions we used to hold dear.

            The loss of trust in science, journalism, and government reflects their long corruption: their arrogance and elitism, their alliance with corporate interests, and their institutionalized suppression of dissent. The conspiracy myth embodies the realization of a profound disconnect between the public postures of our leaders and their true motivations and plans. It bespeaks a political culture that is opaque to the ordinary citizen, a world of secrecy, image, PR, spin, optics, talking points, perception management, narrative management, and information warfare. No wonder people suspect that there is another reality operating behind the curtains.[7] 

 

The results of the 2016 British referendum on membership of the EU and the US election of the same year may have signalled that feelings of disillusionment and distrust in certain sections of the population – the ‘left behind’ – towards mainstream political institutions was indeed at a low, signals that were missed by both complacent Remainers in the UK and Democrats in the US, with unfortunate results in both cases. If Trump wins a second term in 2024, the version of America that rose to be the most powerful nation in the world in the latter half of the 20th century may become unrecognisable. This may not seem an unattractive proposition to some. If the fallout from Brexit results in nationalist movements in the UK succeeding in bids for full independence from the Union, there may well be in the future no Britain at all, great or otherwise. All that will be left of the Grand Project will be a racist, back-woods tin-pot shithole called England.

 

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In 1976 Eric Clapton gave a drunken racist rant in which he suggested that Enoch Powell was right and that the ‘wogs’ should all go home. According to Guitar.com ‘Clapton noted that when he told friends and family about his plans to write and record anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown songs’ with that other high-octane goon Van Morrison, members of his personal network were concerned[8]. Questioning their motives led him to the claim that videos on Youtube use a process called Mass Formation Hypnosis or Mass Formation Psychosis to stupefy viewers into believing everything they see on Youtube. This includes the ‘hivemind’ ‘morons’ who queued up for Covid vaccinations without realising they were being controlled by sinister forces. Eric said that ‘I could see it, once I kind of started to look for it. I saw it everywhere. And then I remembered seeing little things on YouTube, which were like subliminal advertising, It’s been going on for a long time – that thing of ‘you will own nothing and you will be happy’’. The irony that Clapton said all this in a video on Youtube seems to have escaped him.

 

My neighbour’s warning that we are all going to be ‘digital-only’ by 2025 taps into the paranoid notion that everything is a scam, expressed as a generalised sense of existential unease, couched in terms vague enough to avoid focusing on precise detail, seemingly on the understanding that the implied threat is already universally understood.

 

According to Professor Richard Evans of the Leverhulme Trust,

There is a crisis of trust in modern societies. Public confidence in the central institutions of representative democracy has been declining since the 1980s. Conspiracy theories play a key part in this process. At the same time, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made Western governments increase the surveillance of their citizens, curtail civil liberties and launch the so-called “war on terror”. Lack of trust on this scale shown by governments towards the people further fuels the emergence and spread of conspiracy theories targeted at governments and states.[9]

 

In our current era of ‘post-truth’, ‘alternative facts’ and the claiming of one’s own potentially highly individualised beliefs or convictions as ‘my truth’, it may truly be that conspiracy theories, or alternative truths, have as much legitimacy in their own fashion as any mainstream account of what is happening in the world. Former conversations about attempts by the BBC to moderate –or ideally stifle – the output of ‘left-wing’ comedians speaks to notions of the deliberate eroding of freedom of speech or expression, and misrepresentation of truth, both personal and universal. Experience also tells us that when the money is good, many comedians tend to become less ‘left-wing’. Ask Ben Elton. Ricky Gervais’s abrasive rudeness at the Golden Globes award show in 2020 was not necessarily holding truth to power, as might have been claimed.  It was an act, a lucrative shtick, capitalising on his most bankable assets – his obnoxious bigotry, complacency and arrogance. Yet both Gervais’s act – his calling out of the many failings and idiosyncrasies of the TV and movie industry, while ignoring his own – and conspiracy theorists’ suspicion of mainstream information outlets, may contain kernels of truth about the world, elaborated upon for theatrical effect. All these years down the line we still don’t definitively or conclusively know what happened at Roswell, who ordered the assassination of John F Kennedy, or whose money was behind the 9/11 attacks; nor the precise circumstances of Diana Spencer’s death. We have accounts that pass into something like folklore, and conspiracy theories play an important part of building the myths that surround these events.

 

Yet sadly, claims that George Floyd’s death was a set-up or that Covid-19 is a hoax plays into the hands of racists, fascists, Trump supporters and a whole panoply of vulnerable and impressionable people, may increase paranoia among those whose mental health is already fragile, and further inflate the narcissistic egos of those who claim to have privileged access to the ‘truth’, while also asserting that the very notion of ‘truth’ is a sham.

 

And, positing Trump as an avenging angel sent to save the world from cannibals and satanic child abuse was never likely to generate a positive outcome for anyone.

 

 

SOURCES:

Cambridge University

CNBC

Forbes online

Guitar.com

Independent online

The Daily Beast

democracynow.org

Rolling Stone

Karen M. Douglas, Joseph E. Uscinski, Robbie M. Sutton, Aleksandra Cichocka, Turkay Nefes, Chee Siang Ang, Farzin Deravi, Understanding Conspiracy Theories’, Advances in Political Psychology, Vol. 40, Suppl. 1, 2019.

Adam M. Enders, Steven M. Smallpage, ‘Who Are Conspiracy Theorists? A Comprehensive Approach to Explaining Conspiracy Beliefs’, Social Science Quarterly, Volume 100, Number 6, October 2019

Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton, ‘Why conspiracy theories matter: A social psychological analysis’, European Review of Social Psychology, November 2018

Evans, Professor Sir Richard, Conspiracy and Democracy, Leverhulme Trust, https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/former-schemes/conspiracy-and-democracy,

 

 

Keith Rodway

 

[1] University of Cambridge Research, 23 November 2018

[2] BBC news online, July 29th, 2020

[3] Rolling Stone, November 4th, 2021

[4] Karen M. Douglas, Robbie M. Sutton, and Aleksandra Cichocka, Understanding Conspiracy Theories, Political Psychology, March 20th, 2019

[5] Karen M. Douglas et al, ibid

[6] Karen Douglas et al, ibid

[7] Eisenstein, Charles, The Conspiracy Myth, https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-conspiracy-myth/, May 2020

[8]Guitar.com, January 24th, 2022

[9] Evans, Professor Sir Richard, Conspiracy and Democracy, Leverhulme Trust, https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/former-schemes/conspiracy-and-democracy, no date given

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Tighten the Spring


 
We see the news and hang our heads
Thank god the villain’s dead
                                or locked away
But in some quiet room in town
There sits another tortured frown
                                with his mind at play
 
Another daughter, another son
Victims of the misguided one
                                & his quest for fame
The cruelty that was handed out
The lies that the tormentors spread about
                                I often wonder who’s to blame
 
The dispossessed are everywhere
So far hidden, they’ve missed the care
                                we forgot to give
Who was it cast that very first stone
The mother, the father or the foster home
                                not live and let live
 
Now, I’m not attempting to forgive
But I question who the victim is
                                the cause then the crime
It’s easy to create a comfortable distance
Just another unfortunate instance
 
 
                                until the next time
 

 

.
Morgan Bryan

 

 

.

 

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Green Ink

1.
From Tokyo to Narita on the Express, the pen’s green ink reminds us of Neruda; and of the bilious ocean; and of envious opinions. We are moving away from them all, even the words that teachers once cherished, that we learnt until they seemed a ‘thusness’ of language—as fashions then endorsed. Now, our language is of the body, and biting air, and words that fall like ginko leaves on the pathways of speaking. You say we will eat sunshine this evening. I say, let us consume the new words at the tip of each others’ tongues.

2.
The first time, there was green ink between my first and third fingers. We sat closer than my heartbeats and, as I chewed on my nail, my bottom lip was tinged with emerald. I wondered if I pressed my lips to yours, would I transfer a sort of greening. Now on a train to Narita, I think of the eels being stabbed and skinned in long sweeps. Knives stained and washed. I tell you our mentors are serpents and you shrug, as if to say ‘I had never understood’.

3.
The houses and apartments flow past the train as if time stamped impressions on the new day. The air is inked with their colours—and the shapes of walls, windows, roofs, gardens, fences. We would sketch them in the green of this contemporary hour, if that were possible—including the shrine that gathers up centuries. Old customs rise, like another way of saying who we are; old literatures speak with modern accents. You see an apartment where an important moment came and went; I am holding you years ago, pointing to the old gates where the Tori signal a pathway up a mountain that Bashõ once climbed.

4.
We learn words for prawn, mackerel and ‘what do you recommend?’ I love how the word ‘hotate’ sits on my lips, my tongue tapping the roof of my mouth. Later, you teach me your quiet; the pause between subject and verb. In the molten sky painting our hotel room window, we watch Mount Fuji’s shadow and haze, the glow that climbs and dissipates, like understandings broadcast into wide, wind-swept air.

 

.

Cassandra Atherton & Paul Hetherington

 

 

.

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Crushed Butter Rock

He liked to think his life enormous in the scheme of things. Unglued, construed, and multi-menacing with stance intact. A cracked denominator strips the figuring of range and fun. Crushed butter rock to spread across the wealth. A weathervane beside the shack. Tactile tools to use to factor in the innocence frayed though staid in mental fact. Delineate degrees of freedom made for the mensch we nimbly love.  A breeze rock, a clock in bloom. Why not domesticate fervor that one might ford the tenor river smoothed across the glide? Sandstone purview tenses hobbly stock. Uber-able distance creased in mind seeking safety in a narrow blind. 

Contractions choiced from speech, that he may know our love and weeds

 

,

Sheila E Murphy
Art: Rupert Loydell

 

 

 

.

 

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Hush Is The First Word of Freedom

(for Jack Foley)

This world’s soldiers pass
the cabinet in the shelled house
with our daughter inside, and 
one opens the door, lowers his gun, 
sighs a “Hush” and lets her exist

in that cell, the first one of many.
Cabinets infest the ruins, fill the city
with a child held within.
Their first word, ‘Hush’, builds hives
in their heads. They hum the same, 
the new God’s name.

They can scratch the other end, wooden,
until a lucky patch opens 
the code ‘Freedom’, the other world. 

 

 

.

Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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Train with no rails

Train with no rails
could be station,
could be transformation for flying,
could be a disaster,
train with no locomotive
could be country,
could be lonely camel found herself
suddenly close to an iceberg…
But train with no passengers
is simply sad..

 

 

Daisy Tsvete
Picture by Mike Lesser and Nick Victor

 

 

 

.

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Tiny Treasures

Alistair Fitchett on ‘Littoral States’ by Junkboy (Wayside And Woodland)

 

Beach walking is such a treasure. It is easy to take for granted when one grows up by the sea, when one’s mind is filled with thoughts of escape to places inland and urban: The bluster of crowds and the thrill of cultural connections so seductive and so much more preferable to the solace of space and Kerouac’s shefalying waves. Then again, Taking Things For Granted is in many respects the default setting for youth, and there is little point in reflecting on the inevitability of age other than to ruefully recognise that it comes to us all and that slipping free from the restrictions of our previous existences is a pleasure in itself. This, perhaps, what generations have meant when saying ‘No Regrets’ since time immemorial and so on ad-infinitum into gaudy futures.

Except… well, No Regrets, certainly, but there are certainly too Ghosts that haunt the liminal spaces of our everyday movements. Flickering presences slipping in from alternative timeframes. Those paths not taken or not even recognised as paths. Timeslips into possibilities endless and unimaginable:  A bigger brighter world, if only. Such collapses in structure tread through our waking dreams and the slippery elusiveness of sleep alike. They are the shifting sands, the subconscious equivalent to that littoral space of the beach walk. And what do we remember? Everything and nothing.

From the mirror calm of early morning summer and a har chill caressing cheeks as the sun glints through to the monstrous cacophony of winter gales and squalls spitting salt onto chapped lips; whitebait tossed to the sand from the surf catching the afternoon sun, glittering like tiny fragments of a mirror ball dashed on the dancefloor; milpreves migrating along the shoreline from cove to cove, carrying gateways to the land of the fae as they go. Staring at the sea and seeing Hiroshi Sugimoto visions as time elapses and retinas flare, giving the lie to David Lynch channelling John Ford’s advice to Spielberg about interesting horizon lines. Or white horses whipping across the wave tips as an Alfred Wallis fishing boat heads to harbour and the warmth of fire and brandy. Everything and nothing.

It’s all about loss, of course. Which is another way of saying it is all about the things we gain when contemplating loss, which are momentary and ultimately elusive but no less a valuable balm for all that.

This is the space that Junkboy tap into with their ‘Littoral States’ album; a record that employs explorations of the shoreline as a means of coming to terms with personal loss. With roots in COVID lockdown walks and the passing of their father, brothers Mik and Rich Hanscomb have built an album that traces generational life lines and the coastal landscape of Sussex. Fittingly, this is captured in abstract terms; in musical forms that flicker and flit elegantly between traditional folk structures and contemporary lenses. Fittingly too the record finds a home on Wayside And Woodland, a record label that has, over the past decade and a half, quietly but solidly rooted itself in that liminal area between suburban sprawl and rural mythology. With a visual aesthetic that is equal parts John Myers, Paul Nash and Vaughan Oliver, Wayside and Woodland is a deceptively calm haven where minutely strange things happen.

So it is with ‘Littoral States’, as the brothers Hanscomb navigate coastal threads from the Bognor Regis of their father’s birth, through Worthing, Brighton, Newhaven and Seaford. Field recordings provide subtle textural backdrops to songs that inhabit a place where ancient superstitious myth and modern progressive thought meander around each other, trading occasional fleeting embraces of mutual attraction. Long term Junkboy collaborators Will Calderbank, Becca Wright, Marcus Hamblett and Owen Gillham provide cello, violins, trumpets, banjo and e bow to colour in the songs, whilst vocalist Hannah Lewis provides an occasional Sandy Denny ingredient to proceedings. The allusion to Fairport Convention is not unintentional of course, for ‘Littoral States’ is certainly a record that places itself on the arc where Folk music is given a smooch of something altogether peculiar and reveals itself to be magically Other. On ‘Sea Captain’ Lewis’ voice follows a fairly traditional folk narrative, but on the terrific ‘Chase The Knucker’ (a legendary Sussex water dragon, I’m told) and ‘Witch Of The Watery Depths’ she dissolves mostly to a kind of abstract, restrained jazz improvisation with a Liz Fraser trembulation. It would have been easy to utilise this Siren song at more points throughout the album, and it is to the Hanscomb’s credit that they recognise the value of scarcity. Less is More.

Less Is More, indeed, and at just 32 minutes in length, the entire 10 track album is eloquently and admirably short. Repeated refrains bind many of the tracks together into a homogenous body of work, and whilst there are certainly no weak points, particular gems can be found in album opener ‘Cormorants At The Mouth Of The Ouse’ and ‘Cuckmere River Rises’. The former is all finger picked notes and succulent strings weaving between each other like wraiths dancing round the Maypole, whilst the latter is a delicious midsummer cornflower blue meditative meander downstream. Both are as glorious little instrumental sketches of Sussex as you are likely to find anywhere and should be filed next to John Nash paintings, or more pertinently perhaps those of Ivon Hitchens whose semi-abstract approach marked him out as the Patrick Heron of the South East.

That fracturing abstraction of vision is, in the end, the most lasting reverberation from ‘Littoral States’. It is a record that gently demands repeated listenings, each one rewarded with tiny details that transport us to places half-remembered and partially, hypnotically obscured. Beach walking treasure, no less.

Alistair Fitchett 2023.

 

‘Littoral States’ is available on the Wayside And Woodland label:

https://digital.waysideandwoodland.com/album/littoral-states

 

This review was first published by Caught By The River: https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2023/10/junkboy-littoral-states-review/

 

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      IM. BOBBY CHARLTON 

 
 
 
 
 
                                                                                                                                                  
b. Oct 1937 d. Oct 2023
 
To BOY BASTIN and ALEX JAMES of THE ARSENAL
whom I’ve heard about many many times 
from my dad
To ‘ACE’ HASKOW of BARNET
who had a Wing Commander’s moustache
and flew down the wing like a Spitfire
and was 
‘The best footballer in the world’
for a very short time
To ‘BALDY HOGAN’ of BURHILL UNITED
who never gave up 
and probably still plays every week 
in the pages of the ‘Adventure’ magazine
To FRANK SWIFT of MANCHESTER CITY
who was killed incredibly 
in the Munich air crash
To BILLY STEEL of DERBY COUNTY
who still volleys the ball
from the pages of my
‘Stanley Matthews Football album’
for 1949
To STANLEY MATTHEWS of BLACKPOOL
whom I watched every time he came to London
because I knew he was
‘The Best Footballer in the world’
To the entire SPURS TEAM of 1951
who were my 
‘LILYWHITE BOYS’
and signed my autograph book
at a cricket match
To LEN SHACKLETON of SUNDERLAND
who was magical player
on his good days
and I once saw him on a good day
To FERENC PUSKAS and the HUNGARIAN TEAM 
who toppled our heroes in 1953
and changed everything
To MANCHESTER UNITED
who were slaughtered at Munich
and I couldn’t believe it
’til I got home from junior school
and listened to the radio
To the SPURS TEAM of 1961
who were very nearly as good
as the  SPURS TEAM of 1951 
To EUSEBIO da SILVA FERREIRA of PORTUGAL
who nearly won the World Cup by himself
To BOBBY CHARLTON of MANCHESTER UNITED
whose high-stepping gallop
and thunderbolt shooting
is one of the great sights of English football
 
with
respect
incredible envy
and love
from Jeff Cloves
 
1966
 
 
NOTE
this poem was first published
in the football edition of my magazine Poetsdoos in 1967
to celebrate England winning the World Cup
‘Poetsdoos’ is a Dutch word
(pronounced Pootsdos I believe) 
meaning shoe shine box
and was a nod to The Provos
a bunch of environmental anarchists in Amsterdam
who launched the Free White Bicycles campaign
 
 
 
 
 
 
.
 
 

Jeff Cloves. 

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Children of the Night (A Halloween Mix)

A short, dark, eclectic mix by Steam Stock, master of the macabre! Zombies, ghosts and Bela Lugosi… what more could you want this Halloween?

Tracklist

Playing tracks by PJ Harvey, Childish Gambino, Sufjan Stevens, Ralph Stanley, The Mars Volta and more.

 

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Roger Waters After Recent Visit To Julian Assange

An important message from #RogerWaters. We must keep Julian at the front of our minds and be ready to assemble when Day X is officially announced.

Please share this message and sign up below for updates: https://dontextraditeassange.com/day-x/ #FreeJulianAssange

Julian Assange has been imprisoned for 1656 days

Message from Stella Assange

Dear Peter

Julian is reaching the end of the road in the British courts. He is now into his fifth year of imprisonment without conviction in Britain’s notorious Belmarsh prison. On the third of July, he spent his fifth birthday in a small isolated cell. 

On June 6th, a single High Court judge rejected Julian’s application for permission to appeal. That means that the British appeal court will not have the opportunity to argue why he should not be extradited to the senior judiciary of the UK, and if that decision is confirmed in coming weeks or months by a panel of two separate High Court judges, Julian will not be able to appeal to the Supreme Court either and the Home Office will initiate his extradition. Julian will attempt to apply to the European Court of a Human Rights, but that avenue is neither automatic nor assured. 

The British Courts still have the opportunity to reverse course and do the right thing. The case is clear cut, this is a political persecution, Julian is the victim of a vengeful prosecution instigated by the same authorities that were plotting to kidnap and murder him. The charges re a fit up, because he cannot invoke a public interest defence. He is being used as a deterrent to bully reporters and citizens not to challenge corruption and abuse.

Those who wish to silence and imprison Julian for the rest of his life have contempt for what he stands for —our right to speak and know the truth and the agency of well-informed people to achieve reform and accountability. 

Julian needs each and everyone of us to stand by him and push back. If you are a UK resident, come to the courts on the day of the public hearing, sign this public petition to the House of Commons to call on the current Home Secretary to take all measures and block the extradition to the United States. https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/petition-to-the-house-of-commons

Check out this Free Assange Emergency Toolkit for other ways to help.

If the US and UK want to hold the moral and political high ground on freedom of expression, dropping the case and letting Julian come home is the only way to achieve it.

Join the fight and stand up for Julian. Don’t stop until he is free and back home with us.

This show of solidarity keeps Julian’s spirits strong as he fights an epic battle for his life and for the future of our freedoms. 

If you wish to donate to Julian’s defence: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/assangeappeal/

You can donate to UK campaign: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/free-assange

You can also set up a regular donation.

Thank you!

 

Stella Assange

 

Get Ready for Day X

Julian Assange is facing his last chance to stop extradition in a UK court. The Royal Courts of Justice have not released a date yet but we have to be ready to protest.

Place: Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Time: 9am BST

Sign Up for the Notification

Sign Petition to UK House of Commons

If you are in UK sign our public petition to the House of Commons which will be presented by an MP. We are collecting as many signatures as possible across the UK asking the House of Commons to urge the Government to take action. 

Sign Petition Here

Our campaign relies on donations from the the general public.

Whether you can give £1 or £1000, your support makes a huge difference. We are raising to help us mobilize massive #FreeAssange protests similar to our Human Chain or the Night Carnival event.

Help us raise funds to keep the #FreeAssange billboard outside Belmarsh prison where Julian Assange is currently imprisoned – Join our Crowdfunder.

DEA Campaign

 

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Alan Lomax’s Massive Music Archive Is Online: Features 17,000 Historic Blues & Folk Recordings

A huge treasure trove of songs and interviews recorded by the legendary folklorist Alan Lomax from the 1940s into the 1990s have been digitized and made available online for free listening. The Association for Cultural Equity, a nonprofit organization founded by Lomax in the 1980s, has posted some 17,000 recordings.

“For the first time,” Cultural Equity Executive Director Don Fleming told NPR’s Joel Rose, “everything that we’ve digitized of Alan’s field recording trips are online, on our Web site. It’s every take, all the way through. False takes, interviews, music.”

It’s an amazing resource. For a quick taste, here are a few examples from one of the best-known areas of Lomax’s research, his recordings of traditional African American culture:

But that’s just scratching the surface of what’s inside the enormous archive. Lomax’s work extended far beyond the Deep South, into other areas and cultures of America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. “He believed that all cultures should be looked at on an even playing field,” his daughter Anna Lomax Wood told NPR. “Not that they’re all alike. But they should be given the same dignity, or they had the same dignity and worth as any other.”

You can listen to Rose’s piece about the archive on the NPR website, as well as a 1990 interview with Lomax by Terry Gross of Fresh Air, which includes sample recordings from Woody Guthrie, Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly and Mississippi Fred McDowell. To dive into the Lomax audio archive, you can search the vast collection by artist, date, genre, country and other categories.

Note: An earlier version of this post originally appeared on our site in March 2012.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPalPatreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Related Content:

New, Interactive Web Site Puts Online Thousands of International Folk Songs Recorded by the Great Folklorist Alan Lomax

Stream 35 Hours of Classic Blues, Folk, & Bluegrass Recordings from Smithsonian Folkways: 837 Tracks Featuring Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie & More

Woody Guthrie Creates a Doodle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Resolutions (1943): Beat Fascism, Write a Song a Day, and Keep the Hoping Machine Running

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Ernesto Diaz-Infante: Diciembre

Ernesto Diaz-Infante made his first recordings in his early teens. When he was 14, feeling bored, trapped, and in need of transformation and escape, he adopted the moniker Nicte-Ha, based on the Mayan legend of the princess who is transformed into a water-lily. Over the next two years he made a series of recordings as a ‘one man band’, using guitar, keyboards, synthesizer and drum machine. He curated and released them years later, in 2020. These hauntingly effective lo-fi recordings have an outsider sensibility about them that will be familiar to anyone  acquainted with WFMU’s 365-Day Project and, especially seen in the context of his later work, they’re definitely worth listening to.

In the 1990s, he produced some of his most approachable music, including the albums It’zat (1997) and Tepeu (1998). He plays the piano on both. In 2001, he and the guitarist Chris Forsyth released the album Wire and Wooden Boxes, an intriguing half-way house between the often sparse simplicity of his earlier piano work and more ‘hard-core’ noise-based free improvisation. The album Untitled (2002) is guitar-based and explores a completely different sound-world to the earlier piano music, incorporating two quarter-hour long sound-collages assembled from field recordings.

In 2005, he released the album Mirrors on the Crisis of the Moment, an explicitly political album, one of several collaborations he’s undertaken with his partner, the film-maker Marjorie Sturm. The tracks bear titles such as ‘Work-Wage System’ and ‘Repression of the Unseen Psychic Fields’. He has cited the American Beat poets as an influence and, as with them, both politics and mysticism find a way into his work. The album wistful entrance, wistful exit (2014), was made during what he described as a difficult time in his life and it’s perhaps the most austere minimalist music he’s ever made. Tunnels (2016) was made in response to the discovery of tunnels built by Palestinians during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. Diaz-Infante described it as ‘a mantra for peace’. The music is, again, uncompromisingly minimal and to listen to it demands an attentiveness which can only be maintained by the achievement of a level of inner peace on the part of the listener. And as you travel down the tunnels of sound, you become aware of subtle changes, although it’s sometimes hard to be sure if the change is real or if one’s centre of attention has simply shifted to a different part of the sound.

Diaz-Infante describes the album Manitas (2017) as a response to the Trumpian political climate. He says of it: ‘It was inspired by listening to Cecil Taylor’s ‘Air Above Mountains’. It’s a spectral way of playing I have been developing, of avoiding melodies or harmonies, and using extended techniques, strumming, free-form fingering and picking, that verges on noise. I’m interested in automatism, letting the unconscious mind take control.’ Interestingly, elsewhere he describes his creative process as ‘bringing order out of chaos.’ I would say the emphasis here is on ‘bringing’: in Diaz-Infante’s music, passages of chaotic, asymmetrical figures will often distil into repeated patterns or drones in a way that reminds one of the way a meditating mind clears away distractions to gain equilibrium.

The workings of the mind are certainly one of his preoccupations (you can see it in his choice of track titles, such as ‘Fear of Love’, ‘Fear of Going Crazy’ and ‘Moving Away from My Mind’).  ‘I suffer from seasonal depression,’ he explains, in the notes that go with his latest album. ‘The holidays are often hard for me.’ Over the Christmas holidays in 2022, he planned and recorded a series of guitar improvisations based on words that reflected the way he was feeling at the time. The result was Diciembre (2023).

There are six tracks. In each (with the exception, perhaps, of the fourth), the music seems to depict a state of mind. This is intriguing, as it goes against the way free improvised music is so often seen, talked about and packaged as a doggedly abstract form of music-making.  For example, in the first track, ‘mania’, waves of sound rise up and down in a noisy, distorted sound-world in which notes, when they emerge, are simply sounds, stripped of any harmonic or melodic context. The second – ‘anxiety’ –  is slower, but no more comfortable with its sharp, insectoid attacks. If this were music for a film in which people were experiencing these states, one could imagine it fitting perfectly. The surprise is the fourth track, ‘circadian’. It begins with a fast-moving, diatonic texture that would appeal to fans of Steve Reich. Throughout it, there’s a sense of cyclic movement.

This isn’t Diaz-Infante’s first explicit musical exploration of mental health. In 2011, he made Emilio, an album which he described as a ‘yoik’ to his uncle Emilio. A ‘yoik’, according to Morton Feldman ‘is meant to reflect a person or place. This does not mean that it is a song about the person or place, but that the yoiker is attempting to transfer the essence of that person or place into song – one yoiks their friend, not about their friend.’ Diaz-Infante’s uncle Emilio was confined to a mental institution for most of his life. As a child, Diaz-Infante visited him from time to time, with his parents. His presence, he said, ‘was mostly experienced in a foreboding and ghost-like way.’ The album was created with various guitars, bajo sexto (a Mexican instrument not unlike the 12-string guitar), singing bowl, electronic tampora and field recordings.

When looking for ways to describe his music (and what I’ve touched on in this article, by the way, is only the tip of the iceberg) I always find myself going back to the twentieth century. There are echoes of the Beats, John Cage, Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Derek Bailey. There is so much to be found in it which was important back then and is still important now. His preoccupations with the mind, mysticism and politics represent – how can one put it? – a search for psychic equilibrium. As someone once said, music is so powerful that the kind you listen to can actually shape the person you are.

Dominic Rivron

LINKS

Ernesto Diaz-Infante’s Bandcamp page:

https://ernestodiaz-infante.bandcamp.com/music

Ernesto Diaz-Infante at Pax Recordings:
https://paxrecordings.bandcamp.com/music

Ernesto Diaz-Infante at Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1M1Cdm65jHkByvZqguSC4i?si=dqw1vCjIQk-VUGypEC4PHA

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I Feel Love

 

As AI shuts down opportunities to feel alive, we seek out the tangible in the body sector, signing up for anything with the promise of discomfort. I’ve a weekend gig as a fairground geek, biting the heads of whatever anyone throws and scratching myself until I’m raw, and I work the odd saint’s day, recreating obscure martyrdoms with nails, or flails, or whatever weird shit’s been handed down from suffering father to suffering son for as long as pain’s been preferable to a cocoon of keys and bright colours. It’s a kind of crusade, like in the films or the five-star 5D Experience. It’s a kind stranger offering vinegar instead of wine. The rest of the time, I work in my sleep, but when the shining people who know what’s best lay soft light across my face, I bruise myself where no one will ever see, and hold on to the tower of fire my father could never escape.

 

Oz Hardwick
Pic: Nick Victor

 

 

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Music is Life! How Psychedelia morphed into EDM (perhaps)!

Alan Dearling

Music has been a major part of my life since the 1960s. It continued to be a part of my lifeblood from my school days on the south coast of England, through my time as a university student (and sometime scribe and promoter) at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) from 1969, during what became known as the ‘Canterbury Scene’. Members of bands like Caravan and Spirogyra, along with Steve Hillage were actually some of my fellow students there. But the legacy of Soft Machine, Daevid Allen and Kevin Ayers lived on. Outsider Music, so-called ‘Alternative Music’ before the term ‘Indie’ was invented. And alongside performers at the UKC – mainstream bands such as The Who, Led Zeppelin, the original Fleetwood Mac and Chicken Shack, many of the students had their own favourites such as Quintessence and the early line-ups of Hawkwind and Family. Not only were these bands dubbed ‘psychedelic’, so too were the drugs consumed by many of the audience at gigs and those early festies such as Phun City, Harmony Farm and the Isle of Wight extravaganzas! The very word ‘psychedelia’ summons up images of hallucinations, ‘trips’ and mind-altering experiences. And it could be argued that in their own way, Raja Ram with Quintessence were amongst the earliest purveyors of ‘psy-trance’, with Indian rhythms and chants combined with the smells of joss sticks and incense. ‘Blissful Company’ was the very appropriate title of their first album in 1969. Raja Ram (actually Ron Rothfield originally from Australia) contributed to my co-authored book with Mook Bahloo, Alternative Australia – and by that time in about 2000 was one of the leading light DJs of the post-Goa techno-tribes, forming Shpongle with Simon Posford. I last saw him wowing the crowd, in a deluge of rain and mud at the Ozora Festival in Hungary in 2019 (first pic and below). I also spent time watching and chatting with Gaudi and Youth at Ozora and Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy (pics below).

But back in the student days of my youth, I was privileged to experience many aural and visual adventures in the presence of Hawkwind, loud and insistent, repetitive, sonic, emitting wave upon wave of mind-frying psychedelic beats. Hypnotic early light shows featuring liquid wheels, background film projections of scenes from movies such as Bunuel and Dali’s ‘Un Chien Andalou’, powerful strobes, oscillators, minimoogs and even theremin and keys (courtesy, over the Hawkwind-years, of a diverse range of musicians including DikMik, Del Dettmar and Tim Blake). These were a major element in the musical Warp factor. It was drum and bass-driven, with Terry Ollis, the legendary naked Hawkwind drummer and dancer, Stacia Blake, providing added ingredients for ‘turning on’ and ‘freaking out’. As Mojo magazine’s Ian Harrison recalled in issue 312 in late 2019, it was a story of: serendipity, LSD, speed, strobes, nudity, idealism and chances taken and squandered.” Entering into the ‘Space Ritual’ was one of the rites of passage. Space Rock had arrived by the beginning of the 1970s. Canterbury was one of its geographic focal points. But, of course, we didn’t know that the Canterbury Scene was happening. Sensory overload was an essential part of the experience. You just lived it. Scarred, possibly for life, but maybe in a good way! The repetitive beats that were the foundation of the Hawkwind sound spawned many other offshoot bands and probably fuelled the nascent electronic dance music phenomenon that gradually evolved from the 1970s onwards.

From 1972, I was a full-time youth worker in clubs in Essex, London and Scotland, with a budget for putting on many bands and performers. It enabled me to support many young people at the clubs that I ostensibly ran to participate in music as performers as well as spectators. I was a sometime writer, contributing to some of the early underground magazines and student magazines, and gradually evolved as a photographer. I wrote literally many hundreds of articles for the youth work, social work and mainstream press about young people, places and events – many linked to music events, bands, the politics of youth and countercultures. From 1979 onwards I wrote, commissioned and edited books, full-time from about 1988. Again, these books often featured music centre-stage. Remembering back to the ’60s onwards, pop, rock, blues, prog (progressive)


and underground and experimental music spread its many tentacles into jazz, free form, reggae and later, punk and new wave. Disco, glam, pop, metal, rave, techno and fusions. Dance was never my passion, but over the years my involvement and understanding grew through my proactive involvement in the Reggae Sound System clashes, featuring MCs, bands like Misty in Roots (in photo). Reggae has always provided the rhythm and beats for dance. I became a ‘regular’ at many Travellers’ festivals and events with their travelling sound systems, visiting Goa’s Calangute and Candolim, and much later at forest raves (‘doofs’) in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia. And I was subsumed into the relatively anarchic dance music of the late 1980s and into the ’90s at Glastonbury, with the likes of Zion Train playing alongside DJs, The Orb and Prodigy. The Orb’s first two albums caught the electronic hearts and minds of a generation – The Orb’s ‘Adventures beyond the Ultraworld’ (1991) and ‘U.F.Orb’ (1992). The original Orb split in two, with Alex Paterson continuing at the helm of various iterations of The Orb, whilst Jimmy Cauty became one half of the hugely influential JAMS or JAMMS (the Justified and Ancients of Mu-Mu) and the mighty, genre-defying,

 

KLF in their ice-cream van (which I believe stands for the Kopyright Liberation Front). ‘TranCentral’, ‘Justified And Ancient’ and ‘What Time Is Love?’ had become signature sounds in the 1990s’ worlds of clubbers, trancers and party people. Cross-cultural interests took my travelling soul to seek out ‘free cultural spaces’ such as Ruigoord outside Amsterdam, Christiania in Copenhagen

(Landjuweel photo), and trips into African music – that is essentially dance music and on the edges of psychedelia from the likes of Sunny Ade and Fela Kuti. Whilst festies like Boom in Portugal (pic on next page), Ozora in Hungary, and events in Uzupis in Lithuania are mostly DJ-oriented, I’ve been enjoying a creative mix of live and DJ-oriented events around Todmorden in West Yorkshire. These have included electronic and psychedelic sets from DJs/producers such as Andy Votel, David Holmes, Andrew Weatherall (photo left), cross-cultural ambassador of techno-punk and much else (before his untimely demise), Goldie, A Guy called Gerald (808 State) and The Orb. And even the snooker supremo, Steve Davis, who currently teams up with Kavus Torabi (front-man from the new incarnation of Gong), and are two-thirds of The Utopia Strong.  Taken together, these gigs, these musicians have taken me into the Freak-Zones of popular music and beyond. I realise now that I have actually become much more involved with Electronic Dance Music (EDM) than I thought. Even, if I’m essentially an Old Hippy!

Delving back to the past…

I was never passive in my musical and cultural obsessions. I made very real efforts to attend gigs and festivals, and went travelling to Amsterdam in the late 1960s and was able to drift in and out of the squatting, arts scene and the clubs like Paradiso and Melk Weg (the Milky Way). There, I met pioneers of the ‘underground’ and the Provos (the Provocateurs), the Gnomes and the members of the Amsterdam Balloon Company who became the first kraakers and took over the free cultural space at Ruigoord. I was at the magnificent mess and madness that were the Isle of Wight festies of 1969 and 1970. The psychedelic music from the 1960s onwards was essentially a mixed palette of styles, instruments and sounds. Electronica was a part, but so were the whimsical psychedelic sounds, sometimes called ‘Acid-folk’, created by the likes of the Incredible String Band, Dr Strangely Strange and Donovan. Psychedelia was a many-headed Hydra. Still is! The Small Faces’ ‘Itchycoo Park’, with its phased instrumentation, was sometimes lumped together with the music of other so-called ‘experimental’ bands like Pink Floyd (who I saw live with Syd Barrett at the Shoreline Club in 1967 on the seafront at Bognor Regis in West Sussex). This was way back when they were performing their hit single, ‘See Emily Play’, along with extraordinary space-electronica such as ‘Astronomy Domine’, with synths played by Roger Waters and Richard Wright and later keyboards and synthesisers by David Gilmour. They were just entering one of their most improvisational/experimental stages. The Beatles’ own experiments in sound demonstrated the effectiveness of electronics with collisions of eastern and western sounds in tracks like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Lucy In Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ and the cacophonous ‘Revolution Number 9’. The UK’s underground press, particularly International Times and Oz, serviced the music and festi scene advertising gigs, reporting on others and promoting the gurus of the day such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and a little later, Hunter S. Thompson. I was a tiny part of that ‘revolution in the minds’ of a generation.

If Hair was the first major hippy musical on the West End stage in the 1960s, the crashing organ and Moog sounds of Keith Emerson of The Nice (and then with Emerson, Lake and Palmer) provided another mythic musical symbol. I’d put them into the same experimental musical category as the dark swirling sounds of Brian Auger’s organ coupled with the rather spiky and ethereal voice of Julie Driscoll on their version of Dylan’s ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’. I was much impressed with the live power and energy, if not always the over-the-top showmanship of Mister Emerson. ELP were one of the headline acts at the Isle of Wight festival on their debut gig.

Likewise, the two-handed mix of piano-bass and electric organ sounds of Ray Manzarek on The Doors’ tracks, ‘Light My Fire’, ‘When the Music’s Over’ and ‘The End were soundscapes for the anti-Vietnam protests, along with some of the music by Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and even Frank Zappa and compatriots. Dance music it wasn’t. But psychedelic and drugs-induced, Yes! ‘Eight Miles High’ indeed…

An out and out favourite electronica album from my student days was the ground-breaking, ‘An Electric Storm’ from White Noise. David Vorhaus formed this outfit with Delia Derbyshire, a member of the innovative, BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. It wasn’t a happy musical relationship. Yet, it still holds up today as being a heady mix of the psychedelic, the experimental and the unsettling. Delia is now oft-referred to as the creator of the Dr Who theme, but to my mind ‘Electric Storm’ really is a mini-masterpiece! The invention of the Moog synthesiser by Robert Moog in the USA (essentially a pitch-alternating oscillator) fuelled many cross-over experiments between electronic and classical music. These included the musical soundtrack recorded in 1971 by Wendy Carlos for the Stanley Kubrick film, Clockwork Orange, which was apparently the first record to make use of a vocoder. Later in 1973, Isao Tomita transformed Debussy’s music into the electronic ‘Snowflakes Are Dancing’, with the Moog ‘sound’ at its heart. Other electronic ambient pioneers who were sometimes perceived as outliers in psychedelia included Neil Ardley, pianist and synthesiser player (‘Kaleidoscope of Rainbows’) and Terry Riley, using tape loops and synths (‘Rainbow in Curved Air’ and ‘In C’) – both perhaps viewed as jazzers. Then there was Tangerine Dream, who I witnessed when working back stage at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1974. The stage was completely dominated by a vast Moog. Their set was relatively early into their career (though they had actually formed in Germany in 1967), and Edgar Froese was busy working on his solo Aqua album. Tangerine Dream were named apparently through a mis-hearing of the line about “Tangerine trees” in the Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’. They were definitely forerunners of psychedelic prog electronica conjuring up panoramic, sweeping soundscapes, way before the pomp and sometimes overblown outputs of the Greek, Vangelis, and from France, Jean Michel Jarre with ‘Oxygene’, which is a sort of ‘Tubular Bells’ for synths. Before and after came Kraftwerk, formed in 1970, but whose career went luminescent from 1974, with ‘Autobahn’. They were the architects of Krautrock, along with Can and Neu! Kraftwerk can be viewed as the masters of machine-music and even techno. I recently took photos at a solo set from Wolfgang Flur (pictured), who was the electronic percussion player in Kraftwerk during their most commercially successful period.

Then there’s possibly the most influential of all in the evolution of electronica in popular music, Brian Eno, who started out in 1971 with Roxy Music, using a VCS 3 synthesiser, but later became revered as an ambient electronic pioneering composer and performer. Brian Eno is also a highly influential producer and worked collaboratively with David Bowie on his Berlin trilogy – albums that took Bowie into new sounds and new musical territories. ‘Low’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lodger’ were ground-breaking, weird and wonderful, exhilarating in equal parts. Electronica through its use of instrumental textures had arrived in the darker recesses of the musical mainstream. ‘Speed of Life’ was a prescient title for the opening track on ‘Low’.

The new Traveller festivals in the UK spawned new sounds, bands and sound systems. And it intertwined with the party scene, garage and squat events. Collectively this somewhat anarchic DiY spirit spilled into the dance tents of Glastonbury and other major events and gradually festival organisers came to the realisation that the true performers at many musical events were the punters  – the crazy dancers. They were also using a different range of drugs like ecstasy and ketamine. For some, the party seemed to never stop. From these pioneers, music – much of it electronica, with many ‘world’ influences, and certainly dance-orientated – emerged from Dubzone, Ozric Tentacles Trans-Global Underground, Inner City Unit, Astralasia, Underworld, Alien Progeny, Leftfield, Massive Attack, Chemical Brothers, Hallucinogen (a Simon Posford project) and Merv Peplar (pic, performing as Eat Static). There were many others too who fed into the music sets from DJ outfits like Spiral Tribe, Bedlam, the Exodus Collective and more mainstream DJs such as Fat Boy Slim, Billy Nasty and Andrew Weatherall. It’s quite a list!

Musical ‘boundaries’ were increasingly blurred, club and house, techno and trance music melded with dub, reggae, world sounds and even Old Skool blues, two-tone, blues, ska and rockabilly. Early reggae MCs became rap stars. But electronic beats, drum ‘n’ bass were increasingly programmed by DJs to segue beats from one track and musical sequence into the next to keep the dance-floors across Europe and the world – pumping! But, there was also a softer side of chill-out sessions, a rise of ambient trance. Still forms of electronica, but of different hues. French creators, such as Air, Daft Punk and even the music of Serge Gainsbourg, have been re-mixed by the like of The Orb and Howie B, adding in their musical spices and herbs to the concoctions. Spiritualised, Portishead, Kosheen and Orbital were significant players too. But there are many, many more.

Luckily, new outfits and conglomerations of artists will always be emerging. For instance, very recently I’ve enjoyed a thoroughly invigorating set from Aircooled (photo), who are largely members of Placebo, the Wedding Present and Neotropic. Aircooled is an exciting new band mixing vocals, instruments and electronica into a newly crafted tapestry of sound. Nu-jazz is also a seed bed for cross-pollination of musical ideas and styles, with the likes of the Ezra Collective and Plant Food using many elements of electronica, EDM and psychedelia and mixing it up in bubbling creations of rap, jazz, soul, rock and more. Another unusual artist in electronica who I saw recently at the Hope Chapel in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire is Dave Clarkson. After the gig, I bought his solo album, ‘A Pocket Guide To Dream Land (Faded Fairgrounds And Coastal Ghost Towns)’, which features field recordings of rollercoasters, penny arcades, spectral ballrooms, steam organs and much more sampled from across the UK which Dave has, he said, “complemented, mangled or untangled”. It’s definitely electronica, full of loops and strangely hypnotic, but it ain’t EDM!

Summing up (sort of)

I’ve been privileged and lucky to make time to see many of these performers as I travelled in the UK, in Europe and beyond, to festies such as Woodford in Queensland, Australia, events at the squatted ADM outside of Amsterdam and Landjuweel at Ruigoord nearby, often bumping into musical friends such as Gaudi, Youth, Chris Tofu (and Continental Drifts’ artists at the ‘London Re-Mixed’ festivals in Shoreditch, London). Then there’s Eat Static and Steve Hillage, performing DJ sets with Miquette Giraudy as System 7 and Mirror System, and in particular the extended families of Gong, Zion Train, Hawkwind and Nik Turner (and his many collaborators) to name just a few.

In the late ’70s, the 1980s and well into the ’90s, I was writing and editing a lot of books, increasingly many with, and about, the new Traveller and eco-protest scene and their festivals in the UK and Europe. I lived on a narrowboat for a while on the River Severn and around the ‘Cut’ as the canal system was known by boaters. I was attending relatively few mainstream gigs and wasn’t in the Manchester and Factory Records orbit at all. I’ve become much more aware of it since moving to a new home in Todmorden in West Yorkshire, where the Mad-chester scene still holds much sway. So, whilst I bought a few of the records that were electronica and then rave – it wasn’t much on my personal radar. More so now on the outer fringes of the diverse worlds of Joy Division, New Order, who brought a Goth-darkness and dance ethos into post-punk electronica, and the more energetic Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, and Primal Scream who originated in Glasgow but later worked with Andrew Weatherall, Alan McGee from Creation Records, and Youth. I only saw glimpses of these bands at festies such as Glasto. It was not a major feature of my life, though the latter three bands could be said to blend psychedelia and rock together with dance beats and ‘mixes’, they were not particularly part of electronica. I think though, that I was fairly aware of the move away from old-style psychedelia, to much more dance-focused sound systems and events. In and around Todmorden, I am taking more photos, writing articles and reviewing some of those bands and even more DJs who were major players in the Mad-chester days of Acid House and famed, Hacienda Club, including working at the Twisted Nerve Records 25 year party event in December 2022 hosted by Damon Gough (Badly Drawn Boy) and Andy Votel.

Andrew Weatherall was last at the Golden Lion in Todmorden with his many worldwide and local fans and friends for the 5th ALFOS weekender (A Love From Outer Space) with Sean Johnston and others, in June 2019. Sadly, it took place only a relatively short time before his untimely demise at the age of 57 in February 2020. I was there for most of that weekend, and had opportunities to chat with him, finding him to be gentle, warm, companionable and deeply knowledgeable concerning many styles of music. The range of music he played over three days was genuinely genre-defying. It encompassed rockabilly, blues, psychedelia, techno, electronica, rave, hip-hop, rock and dance.  But I guess, Andrew will be most remembered for being centre-stage during Acid House and as the producer of Primal Scream’s ‘Loaded’ from ‘Screamadelica’ and My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Soon’. His own electronica trio, The Sabres of Paradise, released three cult albums and others with Chris Mackin in Two Lone Horseman. Recently I was invited to the AW60 weekender to take photos of the event – a celebration of Andrew’s life, along with many members of his family and DJ and musician friends, including Andy Bell (in pic above) (Ride, Oasis, GLOK and solo electronica).  I’ve also been able to watch GLOK – an amazing and innovative electronica extravaganza. All in all, the magnificent parties continue for AW, the Guv’nor!

I like to explore and push my own musical boundaries too and delve into the cracks and crannies of music. I really rather abhor ‘labels’ and categorisations of musical genres. But even before my visits to WOMAD events and the World stages at Glasto and beyond, I guess I was a proponent of music that was ‘Jeux sans frontieres’! The divisions between producers, composers, performers, musicians, DJs, MCs had been warped and twisted into new alien musical life-forms many years earlier. Re-mixes, musical exhumations, recycled… New and Old Skools. And, whether a music set is ‘Banging’ or ‘Cool – the Beats do just ‘go on’!

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Barney Bubbles

The Barney Bubbles Light Show Dury Lane Art lab 1967

Progressive print stages of Barney Bubbles Hawkwind poster. 1970s.


Space Ritual Cover for Hawkwind

The original UK LP sleeve of Brinsley Schwarz‘s Brinsley Schwarz (1970) designed by Barney Bubbles

The original UK LP sleeve of Hawkwind‘s In Search of Space designed by Barney Bubbles

 

https://barneybubbles.com/

https://thamesandhudson.com/the-wild-world-of-barney-bubbles-graphic-design-and-the-art-of-music-9780500296455

 

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EASE OR LIFE: AN IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE BETWEEN LEFT AND RIGHT

In their efforts to understand the conditions of liberty and a possibility of happiness to some degree, presupposing life or ease, two thinkers invoked a hidden hand in their formulaic diptych: Creator or Market – which? One slogan was fundamental, and the other, developmental

“Ease. Liberty.
Happiness.”
     –Adam Smith,
        economist.

“Life. Liberty.
The Pursuit of Happiness.”
     –Thomas Jefferson,
        statesman

WEALTH OF NATIONS,
DECLARATION
1776

 

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Duane Vorhees

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Carrying that Tutu

 

 

I am attaching imges of the screen-printed ballet tutu, machine sewn together with text from my Royal Ballet and Elmhurst School reports!! Yikes!

Plus, the lead and aluminium tutu I created along with my aluminium pointe shoes – these were my Freeds shoes cast in aluminium and are unfinished but I loved the gnarliness of them. These were part of my Bachelor of Visual Arts final work for 2011, a study of ‘weight’ a mighty testy subject for ballet dancers!

 

Requiem Ignotum (2011) amended

 

Requiem Ignotum is an installation about ballet, someone, and no-one.

It explores the realms of dance through sculpture and screen-printing, using autobiographical references. It questions the performative aspects of perfection, body weight, femininity, fragility, text, longevity, and memory. The lead and paper tutus assume

the role of a bizarre pas de deux, the former will remain intact for perpetuity whilst the latter in time dissolves and disappears mimicking the timeline of a dancer.

The scene is set as if on a theatre stage. The suspended ballet costume hangs mid-air as if lifted by an imaginary partner whilst the invisible dancer’s pointe shoes stay motionless appearing to need little prompting to pirouette or chainés to the next stanza of music. They appear as ‘objects out of action’. (Braddock. 2008:13)

The work questions density on many levels, the absurd fantasy of a tutu constructed of lead, (Pb 82), any form of movement would be impossible. The ironic use of lead to stand for the ballet tutu whose composition is lightness and femininity, here the lead resembles body armour. It also interrogates the irrational focus placed on the dancer’s body, trained, and contorted for the aesthetic standard aspired for ballet perfectionism. The lead tutu presupposes the immense weight, density of the dancer’s physical and mental psyche as their striving for ethereal weightlessness becomes the pinnacle of bodily perfection. “It is often said that dance is the creation of illusion: for example, the illusion of a weightless body”. (Sontag, 2003:191)

In opposition the malleability and composition of lead compliments the flexibility of the dancer and her steely resolve to overcome all. Lead for sculptor Anthony Gormley “brings silence and stillness, it is so inert, so dense, its greyness combines all colours”. (Gormley, 1984:12). The lead appears sewn, stitched with rivets such as in a tulle tutu, with the top layer screen-printed in silver text, entrants from my childhood diary, when training to be a ballet dancer. The metal brings a funereal aspect to the work because of its association with death and burial, and death as in the termination of a dancer’s career. Modern dancer Martha Graham laments, “a dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish … without dancing, I wished to die”. (Graham, 1991:238)

The accompanying pointe shoes cast in aluminium are a play on weight and density, it would be impossible to dance in such creations, yet they imbue the identity of their original satin slippers and invent the possibility that the dancer may have momentarily slipped out of them. The lead tutu and aluminium pointe shoes together assume a performative illusion all their own, frozen in time, waiting for the dancer’s body to slide into the belly of the costume and for the performance to begin.

The screen-printed hahnemuhle paper tutu is created in the same way an actual tutu is constructed and sewn, with 24 paper frills of various dimensions (54-75 inches long) and widths 13 by 1.5 inches, each individually screen-printed and stitched by a sewing machine. The tutu signifies my early dreams and ideals as a young dancer, screen-printed journal ramblings appropriated to assume the materiality of the dancer’s skirt. The original pages of my 5-year diary and school reports from Elmhurst & the Royal Ballet Schools, create the wave and pattern of a new fabric. The colours of ink are a theme, red symbolises the emotion and blood of the dancer, paynes grey her steely attitude and strength, and silver for femininity, and theatricality, mirroring the chemical elements.

The process of creating this body of work required endless toil not unlike the ritual of the daily ballet class, rehearsals, performance, repetition to reveal a result – performance versus artwork. Anselm Kiefer refers to personal experience being intrinsic to his arts practice, “he cannot abide an art form which, he imagines lacks the powerful impulse of life experience”. (Rosenthal, 1987:10).

This work embodies such.

 

 

Notes

Auckland University of Technology, 2008.
Braddock, Christopher Gregory. “The artist will be present: performing partial objects and subjects.” PhD diss.,
Graham, Martha. Blood Memory: An Autobiography, Doubleday: New York, 1991.
Rosenthal, M. Anselm Kiefer, Chicago Philadelphia, Presvel-Verlag, 1987.
Salvatore Ala, Anthony Gormley, Coracle Press: London, 1984.
Sontag, Susan. Where the Stress Falls, Vintage: London, 2003.

 

 

Sonia York-Pryce, Dr Visual Arts
https://soniayork-pryce.wixsite.com/mysite

Toucher Légèrment: or how to print an etching through dance.
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/46432756

 

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Echo

She tells me I put everything so beautifully and poetically when I explain it to her. I tell her I wish it was like that in my mind, but instead, I have violent Gods fighting amongst one another. Like the way our situation wasn’t perfect, and I had to let her love walk away out my door that day.

And it’s a shame, like the rose I gave her today, not knowing what it would’ve been like placing it on my gravestone and feeling sad, but then again hopeful, that we would meet up and do it all over again.

 

Paul Butterfield Jr

 

 

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Manchester + salford Anarchist Book Fair

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NOWHERE IMPERFECT

 

A Provisional Cosmology

Nothingness is always an elsewhere. – Sartre

There are secret motions, out of sight, that lie concealed in matter – Lucretius

How can a self-activating universe emerge from nowhere?

Activity in the cosmic substrate (quantum vacuum) involves an indeterminate relationship, governed by the Uncertainty Principle, between the complimentary quantities of energy and time. The Uncertainty Principle is not an intellectual construct but a fundamental characteristic of phenomena.
This uncertainty relation allows for the transformation of ‘borrowed energy’ into a particle called a pion. At a subatomic level pairs of such exchange particles or mesons, provide the attractive intra-nuclear force between protons and neutrons (nucleons) within the atomic nucleus. These ‘virtual’ particles are the objective source of The Casimir Effect, a phenomenon that confirms the existence of minimal energy entities in apparently ‘empty’ space.

There is no absolute void and no such thing as absolutely empty space, even though the Uncertainty Principle ensures that subatomic activity in the void, or quantum vacuum, cannot be described with precise exactitude. A field of absolutely empty space cannot ‘exist’ because the Uncertainty Principle prohibits a field fixed absolutely at zero. In the quantum universe no field can have both a precise value (zero) and a precise rate of change (zero) simultaneously, consequently there will always be a minimum level of uncertainty, a certain level of irregularity, slight fluctuations in the density and velocity of particles. These non-uniform perturbations would be as small as they could be, but would, nevertheless, lead to anomalies in the otherwise smooth regularity of any emerging points of space-time generated by such irregular fluctuations through friction.

The Big Bang event can be understood as the explosive after-effect of an extended chain of irregular perturbations among fluctuating virtual particles generated by borrowed energy comprising the indeterminate pre-cosmic substrate at the quantum level. The density fluctuations already present in the initial space-time singularity, and observed in the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background), formed the basis of subsequent physical irregularities in the early material conditions of the universe and eventually gave rise to all the astronomical features of the observable cosmos.

These astronomical features are the by-product of a quantum eruption, much as the material expelled from a volcano is the by-product of a violent subterranean event. The outcome of this ‘eruption’ is an expanding red-shift universe of galaxies in space-time that, in due course, having exhausted its propulsive momentum, will revert to an original quantum state. In the interim, over immense periods of time, complex chemical chain-reactions, together with the interplay of forces and the synthesis of stellar elements, will engender all the phenomena of organisation and animation humans call ‘nature’, including living organisms such as bacteria, plants and animals on diverse planets. Notwithstanding the vast time-scales involved, ‘existence’ as experienced by these organisms, is as transient as the universe itself – a universe tending to disorder, reflecting latent chaos and where time is an emergent property arising from the red-shift expansion.

There is no substantive role for intelligence, imagination, self-awareness and other capacities of sentience in a value-neutral and non-purposive universe, although the development of sentience in humans gives rise to anthropomorphic interpretations of existence. Such interpretations are based on a false identification of structural organisation with thought. Even though these capacities – survival strategies of evolutionary adaptation – are of great value to physically weak organisms, they have no intrinsic significance. The same is true of all metaphysical speculation which, being a by-product or side effect of self-awareness, is disconnected from the factual basis of actual reality.

A condition known as the ‘no-boundary condition’ applies to both the manifest universe and the pre-cosmic quantum vacuum. Thus, just as there is no such phenomenon as ‘empty’ space, there is no possibility of any ‘edge’ demarcating either the physical macrocosm, or its quantum substrate, from any form of ‘outside’ above or beyond the manifest sphere.

Even taking into account the possibility of ‘other’ dimensions or the possible viability of the hypothetical ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, the substrate and the cosmic totality are indivisible and coextensive. There is no exterior or transcendent sphere of existence, just as there is no possibility of ‘non-existence’ because there is no absolute void: total nothingness cannot exist.

The answer to the perennial question of origination (where does the universe come from?) can be answered with reference to the quantum vacuum. But if we ask how this vacuum in its turn can exist and from where it derives its existence it must be said that the answer cannot be calibrated with absolute exactitude. This failure of exactitude is the natural consequence of the Uncertainty Principle governing indeterminate relations between complimentary quantities, ensuring that the ‘given’ substrate perpetuates itself. Furthermore, this self-perpetuation cannot be seen as a ‘genesis’ or ‘birth’, or mode of becoming, for such an idea would imply that a void lacking a space-time continuum can emerge from a state prior to its own existence – an outlandish and superfluous assumption.

The Uncertainty Principle also explains how, through non-uniformity (anisotropy) and the process of ‘borrowed’ energy, the quantum vacuum may give rise, from an imperfect ‘nowhere’, to any number of expanding but finite space-time universes.

 

 

AC Evans

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Coil’s Journey to Avebury

Here is Derek Jarman’s 1971 Super 8 film of his own journeys around the stones with Coil’s lively, bubbling electronic soundtrack which was commissioned and made for the posthumous release but never commercially released, although it was used on the film festivals circuit. Coil had previously provided the soundtrack to Jarman’s The Angelic Conversation, his exploration of male sexuality and desire which uses the spoken words of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Jarman’s slow-moving visuals to create ‘a world of magic and ritual’.

Coil were formed in London in 1983 by John Balance as a solo side project to Psychic TV, but developed into a full-scale musical group in 1984, when Balance cemented a partnership with Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, who had been a founder of Psychic TV and member of Throbbing Gristle.

When Balance died tragically in an accident at his home in 2004, Christopherson decided that Coil would not continue. Christopherson died in 2010.

Derek Jarman’s films remain available on BFI releases, and some of Coil’s music is available at https://coilofficial.bandcamp.com/

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Go to Docs

Aye def Oh
Shopping IS the new religion some
one must have said to me
once or maybe I made it up
this bullet from the blue
by myself well its fucking 
true the whole retail
park jammed on a Sunday
10am wtf
this cunt nearly flattened
me in his four by four
‘Big Gus 1’ trying 
to get to ASDA as if
his pissed stained 
existence depended on a
pishing bogof or
the freshest stale 
stodge or whether he
could save five 
fucking pence on Carlsberg so
I deems to have
a word with 
him tell him of
his wrong doing
before God
that there is
more to fucking 
life than ASDA
and Argos then I 
sees him a shit
brickhouse sliding
out the side
of BIG GUS 1 and
I thinks maybe
I’ll tackle him
another day and
there is 
four pence 
off a gallon

 

 

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james mclaughlin

 

 

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Hollow

The victory is mine, at last!
I knew this day would come:
revenge for all the wrongful past
and bloody justice done.

Yet… nothing sates my vengeful lust –
how soon my triumph turns to shame –
for all our soldiers feed the dust
and Pyrrhus is my name.

 

 

 

Mandy Schiffrin
Picture Rupert Loydell

 

 

 

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A Potrait of Dennis Gould.

Filmed and Edited by Alasdair Ogilvie
Music: Gareth Carey
Index page photo by Clean Steve

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Women Of Surrealism:

When André Breton, a leader of the Surrealist movement and author of its first manifesto, wrote that “the problem of woman is the most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world,” he was not alluding to the unfair lack of recognition experienced by his female peers.

Marquee name Surrealists like Breton, Salvador DalíMan RayRené Magritte, and Max Ernst positioned the women in their circle as muses and symbols of erotic femininity, rather than artists in their own right.

As Méret Oppenheim, subject of a recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, is seen remarking at the outset of Behind the Masterpiece‘s introduction to “the fantastic women of Surrealism”, above, it was up to female Surrealists to free themselves of the narrowly defined role society – and their male counterparts – sought to impose on them:

A woman isn’t entitled to think, to express aggressive ideas.

The first artist Behind the Masterpiece profiles needs no introduction. Frida Kahlo is surely one of the best known female artists in the world, a woman who played by her own rules, turning to poetic, often brutal imagery as she delved into her own physical and mental suffering:

I paint self-portraits, because I paint my own reality. I paint what I need to. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and painting substituted for all of this… I am not sick, I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts notes that Remedios Varo –  the subject of a current exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago– and Leonora Carrington “were seen as the ‘femmes-enfants’ to the famous and much older male artists in their lives.”

Their friendship was ultimately more satisfying and far longer lasting then their romantic attachments to Surrealist luminaries Ernst and poet Benjamin Péret. Carrington paid tribute to it in her novel, The Hearing Trumpet.

The pair’s work reveals a shared interest in alchemy, astrology and the occult, approaching them from characteristically different angles, as per Stefan van Raay, author of Surreal Friends: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Kati Horna:

Carrington’s work is about tone and color and Varo’s is about line and form.

The name of Dorothea Tanning, like that of Leonora Carrington, is often linked to Max Ernst, though she made no bones about her desire to keep her artistic identity separate from that of her husband of 30 years.

Her work evolved several times over the course of a career spanning seven decades, but her first major museum survey was a posthumous one.

University of Cambridge art history professor, Alyce Mahon, co-curator of that Tate Modern exhibit, touches on the nature of Tanning’s deceptively feminine soft sculptures:

If I asked for two words that you associate with pin cushions, you would say sewing and craft, and you would associate those with the female in the house. Tanning played with the idea of wifely skills and took a very humble object and turned it into a fetish. She crafted her first one out of velvet in 1965 and randomly placed pins in it and aligned it with a voodoo doll. She says it ‘bristles’ with images. So she takes something fabulously familiar and makes it uncanny and strange to encourage us to think differently.

Tanning rejected the label of ‘woman artist’, viewing it as “just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist’.”

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Sigmund Freud!

The famed psychoanalyst’s concept of the subconscious mind was central to Surrealism, but he also wrote that “women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own.”

One wonders what he would have made of Object, the fur lined teacup, saucer and spoon that is Oppenheim’s best known work, for better or worse.

In an essay for Khan Academy’s AP/College Art History course Josh Rose describes how Museum of Modern Art patrons declared it the “quintessential” Surrealist object when it was featured in the influential 1936-37 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism:”

But for Oppenheim, the prestige and focus on this one object proved too much, and she spent more than a decade out of the artistic limelight, destroying much of the work she produced during that period. It was only later when she re-emerged, and began publicly showing new paintings and objects with renewed vigor and confidence, that she began reclaiming some of the intent of her work. When she was given an award for her work by the City of Basel, she touched upon this in her acceptance speech, (saying,) “I think it is the duty of a woman to lead a life that expresses her disbelief in the validity of the taboos that have been imposed upon her kind for thousands of years. Nobody will give you freedom; you have to take it.”

Related Content

Discover Leonora Carrington, Britain’s Lost Surrealist Painter

A Brief Animated Introduction to the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo

The Forgotten Women of Surrealism: A Magical, Short Animated Film


– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Boo
thanks to k
. Follow

her @AyunHalliday.

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LEST WE FORGET: TRASHED BBC2 DOCUMENTARY FROM 1986

The Battle of the Beanfield took place over several hours on 1 June 1985, when police prevented The Peace Convoy, several hundred, from setting up the 1985 Stonehenge Free Festival. Around 1,300 police officers took part in an operation against approximately 600 travellers.

According to The Observer, pregnant women and those holding babies were clubbed by police with truncheons and the police were hitting “anybody they could reach”. When some of the travellers tried to escape by driving away through the fields, The Observer stated that the police threw truncheons, shields, fire extinguishers and stones at them to try to stop them.
 
Dozens were injured  and 537 travellers were eventually arrested. This represents one of the largest mass arrests of civilians since at least the Second World War, possibly one of the biggest in English legal history.

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Marcus Aurelius at the Cenotaph

I have no use for grandiose procession
Victors in a war are unimpressed
By anything save universal sadness
While what an eager populace expects
May differ by degree   –   intoxicants
Such as the siege and slaughter of a foe
Make only a non-combatant trip out
On patriotic fervour

Our nausea we swallow back until
Safely back in barracks we can spew
Indignation that the landless poor
Courageous young   –   and untried soldier
Suffer on all sides in time of war

Those who seek revenge
Can build two coffins   –
One might house our shared humanity:
You kill now at a distance   –   but despatched
To total up the damage
Find a face familiar as your own
Amid the butcher’s block that was a town

I do not care to go to war at all
But if I must I wear a black armband
As going to the funeral of a friend
Forgive me if I keep my armband on
Two or three years more
Beyond all sacrilegious celebration   –
This is Sicilian custom and tradition

.

 

Bernard Saint
Illustration: Claire Palmer

 

 

 

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Benjamin Partridge

 

 
The Beef And Dairy Network Podcast

The Beef And Dairy Network Podcast is a comedy podcast I started making in July 2015. In April 2016, it joined the Maximum Fun podcast network.

It is the number one podcast for those involved or just interested in the production of beef animals and dairy herds.

6 episodes were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April/May 2017 and a further 4 episodes were broadcast in April 2018. Info here.

WINNER – Gold – Best Comedy at the British Podcast Awards 2017.

WINNER – Gold – Best Comedy at the British Podcast Awards 2018.

“A gorgeously absurd comedy podcast by Benjamin Partridge. Played completely straight, it offers total immersion in one man’s comedy world.”
The 50 best podcasts of 2016, The Guardian (read here)

“This is a lovely, funny show.”
The Observer (read review here)

“wonderfully deadpan”
Chortle.co.uk (read review here)

“an impressively funny program, featuring bizarrely hilarious and deadpan dispatches”
The A.V. Club (read review here)

“Walking down the road yesterday with my headphones on, I began to smile to myself, then chuckle, and finally – stopped in my tracks by the strange sensation – I let out a long, loud hoot of laughter.”
The Telegraph (read review here)

“A constant delight”
The Times (read review here)

www.beefanddairynetwork.com

RSS link: https://feeds.simplecast.com/4NOSW3hj

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/beef-and-dairy-network/id1022024768

 

 

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Lost

 

I hear the missiles screaming in the air

My heart feels I’ll soon not be here

 

I scrabble through the strangling clouds of dust

I see the torching flames and feel the heat

Sirens wailing, raised arms, tears of grief

No, no, no, no, it cannot be, the wages of trust

It’s all yours, yours, yours, and my defeat

Torn apart, I reach for you, now only have belief

 

I’m alone again, and dream of dying too

But think I must remain to remember you

 

© Christopher 2023

 

 

 

 

 

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Songs to Learn and Sing

The news is nothing but a background hum – less about tragedies and tiny
triumphs than it is about rhythm, as it insinuates itself into everything, from the
speed at which I eat my breakfast to the jaunty spring in my step as I almost
dance across parched fields where nothing will ever grow again. To my left,
doctors sell controlled drugs in pick ‘n’ mix baggies; to my right, a man in a
brocaded gown smashes a baby grand with a sledgehammer; and straight ahead,
a woman in blood-dashed overalls straps a child to a burning wheel. But there’s
still room for miracles, for turning water into wine, and for raising red dust back
to brimming life; and although it’s so hot that my eyes are melting behind my
shades, even disaster is in 5/4 time and the key change will bring sweet, sweet
rain

 

 

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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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(OTHER)WISE AFTER THE EVENT

 

                                                    On The Otherwise: The Screenplay For a Horror Film That Never Was

                                                               By Mark E. Smith & Graham Duff (Strange Attractor Press)

 

 

In this case its death, as well as daring, as the event
That I’m marking is the release at last of a script
By Mark E. Smith and Graham Duff, two cult fed writers
Who, while their disciplines differed each tailored tales
And stories fit for both stage, screen and crypt.

For this is a well prepared film, the fruit of a projected
TV series, withered on the twisted vine of commission
For being ‘too weird.’ It is not. Off the beaten track, possibly,
Matching the locale of its story: Pendle of all places,
Where mixed with mire lost footsteps lap land and folklore

To mark a location in which time is reminded
That legend licks language and cannot be forgot.
Smith is conjured up too, by Duff.
The Fall are characters in the story, recording an EP,
While three Jacobite ghosts stalk the lane.

And where the sons of witches converge
And come close to endangering women,
And where Smith appears sagely, posing in scenes
Made fag and pint-vivid as the lost man re-emerges
From the simple print of his name.

An old singer’s folk song imprints inside the makeshift
Studio setting. Ancient coins act as switches releasing
Light through water and a mucus like growth
Through the bins of the studio speakers within
As a sense of random violence soon gathers

Alongside plans for rape and resistance,
As eras as esoterica mingle, in this snake-like
Screenplay in which genres are shedding
All expectation and skin. The Fall record all the while,
The songs used as source music. Making this film

Their version of A Hard Day’s Night. Fitting, mate.
As it was sparked by Smith and shaped by Duff
To showcase, the fact that the Fall were a landscape
For riot and rule. A template for what form can be
In line with style; something shifting, as rock

And punk reconfigure under Smith’s Dada speak;
That dense poetry, alongside his avant-narrative explorations
Which are exemplified later as 25 songs as story
Are opened out. Smith’s technique was something raw,
Yet full formed, primed by Can and Camus of course,

And by all of his reading and watching. And this book
Also houses discussions and essays that further reveal
The full man. Who in hitting the North brought an avalanche
Of ideas to all places, as seen in the scribble of his quickly
Written aheets and brain plans. Smith’s widow,

Elena Poulou sets the scene, chronicling evenings around
German Soaps, love and Dallas, while revealing the gentle
Behind the leering gargoyle. While Duff expounds
On Smith’s myth which fashioned fans as disciples,
For him, getting to write with his teenage hero

Made TV’s hoary work holy as wine was traded
For Pilsner and they lit the lamp of art. Laughs as oil.
So this book is much more than a script. Its beautiful bind
And soft, smooth bulk appears human. It serves to disrupt
What was fearsome in and around Mark Smith’s rep.

For as Mark and Graham talk on in transcript form
Time’s rewinding, summoning those old tapes
And bootlegs from which the lost revive, while we’ve wept.
Words return men. And you hear Smith speak through
These pages. For that act alone then, its worth it.

The Otherwise of the story are also the substance
Which Smith inhales as he smokes in some other North,
Somewhere suitably bleak. Stars are raining.
But where he is still heard to cackle, while describing
In words which burn brimstone the meaning within

God’s grim joke. Picture the album cover for that;
Smith and stars, saucers, chimneys, and behind his sneer 
Oozing aether, an alien on guitar. You can feel it all
In this film. He may even have Lindsay Anderson with him.
O, Lucky Man, Graham, to have written with him.

What adventure. The script ends with a shovel
Straight in the face. Words like this win us,
And they can change us too, as they scar.

 

 

                                                                                       David Erdos,  5/10/23 

 

https://strangeattractor.greedbag.com/buy/the-otherwise/

 

 

 

 

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The Gravediggers Blast and Bless[i]

 

 

                              John Steed in the Land of Lost Content

 

Has the ideal of community always been an illusion?

Barring (or including) colonies of artists or other like-minded souls.

Carrion-crow, loner born, am I seeing it wrong?

Yet I can appreciate it from outside: This Happy Breed[ii], the truth in the myth . . .

also, the nonsense and hypocrisy.

Do you love your country? my youngest son asked by a twilight garden drowning in

            crowns and union jacks.

It passed beyond a car park, empty, and I thought of John Steed[iii], Hawker Hurricanes[iv],

            the reddest roses, fish and chips –

All those things I can love about Albion, along with tolerance and saying sorry

but not John Bull with Brexit blindfold, the royal family

the landed gentry or nouveau riche.

 

 

We were at Barkby, Leicestershire – The Heart of rural England – claim signs by the                      motorway

and the richness of the gloaming stole upon my grave, the pedal crank ceasing to turn.

We came to the Malt Shovel and its shade of willows

A pint of Jubilee Ale, bought for me in irony, to contemplate the day

Pomp and pageantry have always made me queasy, Nationalism and Patriotism too.

A dash may help survive a war but the rest blusters, poisons and destroys

Places, feelings, traditions – they are all leaves in a book whose bittersweet pages I like to turn and mostly try to laugh

their shelf gets higher and higher . . .

For reference only.

 

 

Beyond Melton Mowbray (bypassed, still unknown) a miniature tunnel leads to a lake

no longer slowing towards a station where once Dame Diana Rigg was tied to the tracks[v] . . .

Here in April 1965 – fantasy of course – in black and white, lived a lord[vi] whose eccentricity and hatred of cars makes him acceptable

Giving generous funds to ailing railwaymen or so he thinks

His toy signalbox houses a lever that will fatally jam Albion’s radar

leaving us open to invasion – but by whom exactly?

To what happened perhaps?

To technology and acquisition:

Forces no partisans could resist

 

 

For all its timeless artifacts I cannot make this nostalgia paradise fit

The parallels are obvious, but ‘65 too faint, I cannot get back –

From beer tents, classic cars and strolling Sunday visitors

my faith can’t achieve the leap

The landscapes, the villages there and back, are almost too perfect,

lodged, poshed,

at ease.

They don’t care about the era.

 

 

Via Moscow Lane – a green track thwarted, virtually blocked – to Burrough-on-the-Hill

is the improvised weft and wend of our journey back

until a new garden breathing the air of swooping fields

calls a halt.

Late afternoon, flapping flags aloft

swathes of ox-eye daisies bless this memorial to Arnhem

– Operation Market Garden’s 10th Battalion Parachute Regiment[vii]

            billeted here in ‘44 –

(a mere 36 of nearly 600 returned a fortnight later).

If only, within reach, the stones weren’t marred by their clumsy bas relief,

cartoonish figures trite in the face of capture and sacrifice –

What choice is there but to trust,

that it’s the thought that counts?

 

 

Eventually we roll on downhill, too far downhill, and have to come back

strike cross-country for the high decaying arches of John O Gaunt

a red-brick viaduct shut before the Avengers’[viii] jaunty visit.

Into this stratosphere, this time-lapse shift

cloud across the eyes and between them – white canopies bloom –

the flowers of death . . .

 

 

In the Malt Shovel I realise my misapprehension

– a trivial, forgivable one, in a universe of constant delusion – 

of muddling Melton Mowbray with Melton Constable[ix] when the latter

is a hundred miles east

a new town founded by a railway junction whose brief heyday passed a century ago.

There, where the village workshops painted their locomotives in golden ochre[x]

            or “autumn leaf”

all directions met – a fact I will force to be symbolic.

Our zenith is seriously past too

But who’s to say we can’t ever get back?

Or am I duping myself with that last-minute wish?

 

                                                       Stapleford Park, 12th June 2022

 

 

 

For Ivo, June 2022

© Lawrence Freiesleben,

[email protected]

 

NOTES

[i] https://modjourn.org/journal/blast/

[ii] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037367/?ref_=nm_knf_i2

[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steed

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

[v] https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/history/gallery/day-patrick-macnee-diana-rigg-6617588

[vi] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0516912/characters/nm0292226

[vii] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-49577353

[viii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Avengers_(TV_series)

[ix] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melton_Constable

[x] https://www.lner.info/co/MGN/livery.php

 

 

 

 

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Smile

I can smile
With the sun.
By the time
The moon rises
I can still carry on
The game of smiling.
The thunder
Has the light,
Can you,
Decipher the truth?
The truth that
Makes you alive.
What vocation
Shall you choose,
That does not
Enhance the lights
Of the world?
I am a waking constellation
Watched from
A bed of earthen stay.
Every golden sun
Has forgotten darkness.
The dark is the color
Of the evening
That lets the fireflies shine.
Come be the welcoming spirit
In the aftermath of glory,
When no essence
Is only worldly.
Variation is the name of nature
When every essence meets,
And occupies space.
Listen to the roar
Of a dark alley
That makes the blackness,
Just a color.

 

 

Copyright Sushant Thapa
Biratnagar-13, Nepal
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

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Will to Change

 

 

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Mike Ferguson

 

 

 

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Air travel

 

My big Norway maple
dropped a limb in the gutter.
Doo-da doo-da.
 
Keys spin like tops in the wind
and drift beyond the forest margin.
Maples are invasive?!
Who knew? Who knew?
 
What’s a poem to do?
Should I strew fine rhymes
to the online wind
 
or shed an emoji tear
for the last flock of waxwings
gleaning berries in the cedars?
 
My neighbor’s yellow pine
strews pollen in the puddles.
Doo-da doo-da.
 
What a tsunami of dust!
Pearls before swine. Whine. Whine.
 
What’s a poem to do?
Try me on for show?
Sorry I’m so smarmy when I grieve.
I believe we should let leaves be.
 
I flew to Tucson to see how
we’ll flee from what we can’t see.
 
Who can stay sick with sorrow
so many days in a row?
Boo hoo. A slew of news.
Shoo fly. Screw you.
 
It happens so slow I don’t have a clue
if I’m really just blowing smoke. Do you?

 

.

Lance Newman

 

 

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Down and Out and About

     

Underworlds
, Stephen Ellcock (Thames & Hudson)
Weird Walk (Watkins)

Stephen Ellcock is a curator of images and accompanying information, an expert at creating clusters of themed ideas on the page (and online) which encompass material from science, art and the uncanny, in fact anywhere relevant and surprising.

Following previous explorations of Albion’s Psychic Landscape and The Cosmic Dance, Ellcock now offers readers ‘a compelling journey through subterranean realms, real and imagined.’ We start with an Introduction that makes it clear Ellcock is going to resist the human inclination to ‘blaze our floodlights over every secret’ and instead wriggle into the dark corners of both earth and mind.

So there are caves and caverns, potholes and niches, tunnels and stations, microscopic views, medieval illuminations, visual documentation of mermaids and early alchemical illustrations explaining how the world works. There are magical creatures, devils and demons, buried sculptures and ossuaries, sleepers abed in art installations and visits to the chambers of hell. Almost everything, with the exception of Lyonesse and The Wombles (thank you Ros), seems to be here, accompanied by astutely chosen quotes and relevant introductory commentaries.

It’s a gloriously diverse and engaging compendium, as is the Weird Walk volume, which is subtitled Wanderings and Wonderings Through the British Ritual Year, although honesty compels me to admit it isn’t quite as exciting as their Instagram feed suggests and I expected.

The Weird Walkers (there are no authorial names) tread a narrow line here between walking guide, coffee table book, mystical sightseeing manual and hardened drinkers’ recommendations here: it’s unclear if they totally embrace the magic others find at stone circles and ritual events, or just enjoy the views and the nearby real ale houses after a bit of a hike. This confusion isn’t helped by scratchy drawings, deliberately partially sun-frazzled photos, notes of where to park your car and the odd map reference.

Scholars such as the pagan academic Ronald Hutton have shown that many of the strange ritual and celebratory events marking the cycle of the year are not as old as once thought, and that much of the conjecture around what stone circles, long barrows and stone avenues were for, is just that: conjecture, with little evidence involved. Weird Walk are careful to sit on the fence, even occasionally getting tongue-in-cheek enough to undermine their whole enterprise a little.

In the main though, this is a book of delighted engagement with Britain’s historical and eccentric past and what is to be found in today. So there are plenty of (mostly ruined) burial chambers, cairns and standing stones along with man-made hills and landscape drawings, not to mention visits to watch the drunken runners with tar barrels alight on their backs in Ottery St. Mary, and the stag dances at Abbots Bromley. There’s also the odd inclusion of a trip to Dunwich, undertaken as a kind of meditation on the power of nature, as witness to the sea swallowing the land.

Much of what is reported here is secondhand, and offered as possibility not certainty: ley lines, mystical spots, druid temples and ancient centres of pagan worship, offer destinations for those who choose to ‘step out’ on what the afterword deems ‘ancient paths that still hum with vibes’. I like the fact that vibes are enough, rather than claims to hidden knowledge or occult clarity, like the fact that although the weird walkers ‘teased out nuggets of knowledge’ they note that as ‘the pedometers notched up some significant miles, the pubs kept us in (un)healthy balance’.

So here’s to landscape and proper beer, and to whatever lies or lurks below. To the decaying, missing and departed, to what is left and what remains of the past; to the weird and uncanny, the things we can’t fathom or work out; to all those who wander and wonder, then share it with us.

 

 

.
Rupert Loydell

 

 

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What the fuck is it to yourself?

The cell door opens and a young, uniformed police officer enters. The man lying on the bed, continues to face the wall, unmoving. The police officer encourages the man to wake up by jostling his shoulder, and repeatedly saying ‘come on now sir, time to wake up. We need to interview you’.

After a few minutes of this, the man, finally roused, offers the policeman a firm ‘fuck off’, and kick at his shin. The policeman suggests, that there is ‘no need for that’, and should it happen again the charge of ‘assaulting a PC’ will be added to the charge sheet, along with the existing ‘urinating in a public place, being drunk and disorderly and causing a public nuisance, with an additional charge of public indecency’.

The policeman is holding a small plastic cup of black coffee. He suggests the prisoner sit up and drink it, as he is to be taken to an interview room to be questioned on the above offenses. The prisoner suggests that the policeman can ‘fuck his coffee up his ass’. The policeman places the cup of coffee on the floor and leaves the cell. As he closes the door he tells the prisoner he has five minutes to ‘pull himself together’.

Ten minutes later, after a great deal of kafuffle, the prisoner is sitting on a chair, in an interview room, opposite his two arresting officers. Due to the prisoner’s violent outbursts, a large uniformed officer is also present. Standing behind the prisoner.

One of the arresting officers, the male, asks the prisoner his name. The prisoner replies that it may as well be ‘Fuckity McFuck-Fuck’ as far as they are concerned. The female officer let’s the prisoner know that in his wallet are a number of items, including a driving licence, in the name of ‘Fredrick Aleister Brightling’, and goes on to suggest that this is actually his name.

The prisoner mumbles, almost under his breath, ‘What’s in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name we are told is ours’.  The male officer asks the prisoner what he said. The prisoner replies ‘James fucking Joyce’. The female officer asks if the prisoner is known as ‘James Joyce’. The prisoner let’s his head sink to his hands. The male officer looks at the female officer and gives her a quizzical look. The female officer says ‘ what?’, and shrugs her shoulders.

The male officer composes himself by clearing his throat and before asking the prisoner if he is ‘Fredrick Aleister Brightling of Flat 2a, 16 Morden Rd, Tooting?’ The prisoner asks the male officer ‘what he thinks?’. The male officer thinks that ‘William Aleister Brightling’ is actually his name and that if the prisoner doesn’t become more Co-operative then a charge of obstructing the law will be added to the charge sheet.

The female officer calls the prisoner by the name ‘Aleister’ and in a tender way suggests that the police are doing their best to help him. The prisoner replies that forcibly removing him from his journey home, throwing him in to a cold cell and then interrogating him, seems an absurd notion of ‘help’.

The female officer tells the prisoner that it was vital he be removed from the public domain for the safety of the general public.

The prisoner asks the female officer, ‘since when has a man, on his way home from the pub, having a piss behind a bin, been a danger to society?’ and goes on to point out that people have been pissing in streets since streets were invented. He then thinks to add the remark that will prove to seal his fate.

Looking at the male officer then back at the female officer, he calmly suggests that due to their own sense of inadequacy and unfulfilled potential they were forced to take a job that involved the persecution of the lower orders at the instruction of those who present a myth of controlling society, to whom they have subjugated themselves. As a consequence the officers spend their working lives seeking out petty criminals that they can bully in to submission as a way of subconsciously retaliating to the bullying they themselves received as children, and thus finding some solace in the wretched situation that they find themselves, consequently bolstering their sense of self worth.

The male officer calmly replies ‘Fredrick Aleister Brightling I am charging you with public indecency, causing a public nuisance, resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer and obstructing the law. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand the charges against you?’

The prisoner looks the officer in the eye and says, ‘What the fuck is it to you?’

 

 

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Ben Greenland

 

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Tigers

They talk about tigers living in jungles
but tigers don’t live in jungles. They
live on housing estates in poor areas
and take their terror to the masses.

Gordon was a goalhanger. The tiger
pulled his shorts down and changed 
his nappy in the penalty area. I didn’t
know centre-forwards wore nappies.

Then the tiger placed his open jaws right
over Gordon’s head. Swallowed his skull.
They looked like conjoins at the shoulders. 
Gordon’s team wore tiger skin shirts to 

enhance the illusion.
Gordon decided he didn’t want to be a 
goalhanger no more. Tried being a postman
but the tiger ate him for breakfast.

He thought about politics or going swimming
with sharks. Perhaps they were the same thing?
So he tried taxi driving instead. There the tiger
would try to paw him from the back seat and

tell him not to even dream of driving the long
way round. As if Gordon would! Once the tiger
even pulled his jumper down and exposed a breast
where Gordon could see it in his rear view mirror.

Gordon zoned out. In the end, the tiger was 
reduced to telling Gordon to turn left at the next
intersection and not giving him the change out
of twenty as a tip.

Gordon decided maybe this was the best life 
he could wish for.

 

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Gary Boswell

 

 

 

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Ants in Ruins


 
They come and go here too, over
columns, upon little
 
recent corpses, in their antish
lines, returning
 
to their queens. They, too, live out
the day, less tourists and more purists.
   

 

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John Levy

 

 

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Spinning Lies

He’s spun his webs of deceit and falsehoods
in multiple directions for whole decades
Employed accountants and publicists
Lawyers and marketers.

All to spread his lies
Till he almost believes his own spin
He tells The Truth, whilst all around is
fake News, conspiracy and spite.

His opponents try to find some deed
or other that would finish him. All lies
He’s totally innocent. Never done wrong
to anyone or anything.
Ever.

See him preen himself in his glory
at the epicentre of his fantasy world
The spider at the very centre of it all
Casting his nets of falsehoods wider
and wider still.

                        Not realising
His webs have meshed together
Formed an orb-like globe around
his spin. Ensnaring him.
The trap sprung tight; his orb is shrinking as

justice teases out the threads
Multitudinous in their complicity
Knitting themselves into arraignments
A prison garb that’s made to fit
the biggest spinner of them all.

 

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Boakesey Closs

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

 

 

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HQ Fire in the Wire (episode thirteen)

Fire in the Wire is now a bimonthly show, and this latest episode is the most varied yet, ranging from the early 60s to the early 00s. Ska, rocksteady, roots, dub, dancehall and beyond… this is how we do Fire in the Wire!

Steam Stock

Tracklist:
Cocoa Tea – Lost My Sonia
Josey Wales – Let Go Mi Hand
Byron Lee and the Dragonaires – Dumplins
The Gaylads – Wha She Do Now
Alozade & Hollow Point Feat. Mr Vegas – Unda Mi Sensi
Eric Donaldson – Cherry Oh Baby
Eric Donaldson – Cherry Oh Baby Version
The Heptones – Baby
Muddies All-Stars – Loran’s Dance
The Zodiacs – Renegade
Prince Buster – Ghost Dance
Bob Marley and the Wailers – Duppy Conquerer
Clint Eastwood and General Saint – Two Bad DJ
Burning Spear – Throw Down Your Arms
John Holt – If I Were a Carpenter
Israel Vibration – The Same Song
Sophia George – Girlie Girlie
The Fugitives – Cantelope Rock
Alton Ellis – You Made Me So Happy
Dub Specialist – Red Neck
Cocoa Tea – Mr Neck Tie Man
Sensations – Long Time Me No See You Girl
Joya Landis – Your Love is All Over Me

 
 
 

 

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‘ACCEPT THIS INVITATION’: MICHELE STODART INTERVIEW

 

Recorded at Echo Zoo Studios, Invitation is the first solo LP in seven years by core Magic Numbers member Michele Stodart – although written, arranged and produced by Michele, it has additional production touches from long-standing collaborator Dave Izumi Lynch. And while it features Michele on vocals, guitars, bass and percussion, there are appearances from her brother and fellow member of The Magic Numbers, Romeo Stodart (piano), Andy Bruce (piano), Alice Phelps (harp), Will Harvey (violin and viola), CJ Jones (drums), Nick Pini (double bass), Joe Harvey-Whyte (pedal steel), Dave Izumi Lynch (synths).

Speaking about the record, Michele admits ‘Invitation is an intimate, personal record, with songs that touch on themes of motherhood, relationships, mental health, transformation, endings and new beginnings. It comes from a place of inviting in the darkness, the hard times, the sadness, anger, loss, love and grief… all of the unknown feelings that get woken up inside you. To practice staying with them, no matter how uncomfortable. To understand that they are there to guide you.’

‘I believe that it’s in the learning and listening that we can transform, grow, stay conscious and wholeheartedly true, open, honest with ourselves and others. Words are a powerful resource and we can choose to use them to connect deeply with one another. Songwriting has always been my way of trying to do just that, and I hope this album ‘invites’ us to reach out together…’

It was a delight for me to talk with her…

 

ANDY: Thank you for this opportunity of talking to you. And congratulations on a fine album with ‘Invitation’ (September 2023, Keepsake Recordings).

MICHELE: Thanks for having me. You’ve been listening to the record? Oh, that’s great.

ANDY: It’s distinctively different from your work with the Magic Numbers. As though you’re defining your own separate career path.

MICHELE: Yes, it is. Well – yeah, I’ve been writing songs separate to the band from being very young. So I think it’s always been like singer-songwriterly (she illustrates with her hand), in the core of me. It’s something like that. But yes, it is a story I’m telling in some ways when I write.

ANDY: The album has a stripped-back small-group Pentangle feel. You know what I mean?

MICHELE: I do. Actually we’ve been compared to Pentangle a few times. I love that. It was never a direct reference, but actually – yes, I can hear it. Nice it is too.

ANDY: You are a bass-player, yet you employ a double-bass on the album, played by Nick Pini. What quality were you looking for by using an electric bass guitar as well as a stand-up double bass?

MICHELE: Yes, the double-bass actually features in one of the songs called ‘These Bones’, which is played by Nick Pini, and it was a song that we recorded quite live, ‘cos I record all the bass on the other songs, where I use an electric bass and a u-bass as well, but I love this particular song that gravitates towards the double-bass sound, that kind of percussive really almost-earthy sound that the double-bass gives, and particularly with that song, it has that kind of – I don’t know, ‘summoning’ quality to it, and I think the double-bass gives a nice percussive solo introduction.

ANDY: ‘These Bones’ has an unusual melodic structure that swings and dances.

MICHELE: I like that – ‘swings and dances’. I really like that. I might have to quote you on that (she laughs).

ANDY: ‘Drowning’ is an epic not-waving-but-drowning track. Can you tell me about how that came about?

MICHELE: For me… when I wrote that song, I had woken up in the middle of the night, and I felt really sort-of underneath everything. I just felt everything was on top of me. I was weighed down, and being pulled down by my own thoughts and by different issues that I was overcoming at the time. But mostly – ‘Drowning’ was being in a dark place mentally, with my framing by different things. It’s a strange one because usually within songwriting and within reflecting on things I kind-of always draw to there being a sense of hope, and there being another side, reaching out to that other side, and with ‘Drowning’ there was a consistency that I wanted to stay in that feeling. It’s actually quite an anchor to a lot of the album because it’s about basically staying with the hard feelings, with the difficult things that come up, with the thoughts, with the depression, with the darkness, and not trying to always shift it and change it into a positive, but really listen to it and see where it goes and where it takes you, and a lot of the time it will take you to realising the things that need to change in your life, and the things that you need to look at and listen to. So – within ‘Drowning’, is when we learn to swim, and that was the part of the album, the part of why I wanted to finish on that song, even though it’s not the most positive of songs, it’s a sense of, like – we’ve gotta go there. And it was a difficult one to put out, in that way – really. It was more of an internal kind of secret song to myself… and suddenly it’s sitting on an album. Yes.

ANDY: In the body of your lyrics, you say that it’s ‘written out in words on the page,’ and elsewhere that ‘writing’s the only way I know to say just how I’m feeling.’ So your songs can be a process of catharsis.

MICHELE: Yes. It is very much for me, writing is very much a way of processing things that come up, different experiences, and being of that reflective time, but also being in the moment of where I am at that moment of time as well. Yes.

ANDY: In the song ‘Push And Pull’ you’re sitting in the railway station with a ticket for your destination, and you’re not necessarily Homeward Bound. It’s a song of life lived on the move, as part of as touring band.

MICHELE: It is, yes. It’s exactly that. It’s got… there’s journeying in that song, of being pulled and on the move away from different things, but also… The story behind that song was about loving both things, being a Mum and loving being a Mum and being with my daughter – but also loving doing music and being on the road, but that sort-of constant pull between the two things that I love doing, and navigating that as well, and realising that both things can exist, they can coexist together. But – as parents, and mothers in particular, we have these feelings of maybe you’re not allowed to want certain things, to achieve certain things in your life once you become a Mum. And yes, it’s about that really. It’s about processing that and navigating those constant day-to-day issues of a touring Mum.

ANDY: Achieving that work-life balance. But there again, you’ve been touring for the best part of twenty years. If it’s a struggle, it’s one that you’ve clearly adapted to.

MICHELE: Yes it is, definitely. I love connecting with people live. Being able to sing the songs, and every night is different up on stage. I always say there’s no other feeling like when you’re up on stage and you get a response from the crowd, or even – like, having those pin-drop moments, where you are in a whole other dimension really, when you are connecting together in that room just for that forty-five minutes or the hour that you get. It’s a gift. I feel lucky to have that, to be able to be still doing that after – as you say, twenty years. It’s a long time.

ANDY: You write ‘the band has taken me places that only dreams can lend,’ which is a good autobiographical comment on your life with the Magic Numbers.

MICHELE: Yes, it literally has, and we used to say that when… We toured that first Magic Numbers show for four years non-stop, and we had so many dreams that we just didn’t even dare to imagine that would happen, you know? We’ve been on stage with Brian Wilson and we were singing ‘Love And Mercy’, and we got to support Neil Young – and just so many different scenarios and things you wouldn’t think possible. And when you lie in bed and you suddenly realise – ‘Oh my god!’, it’s in the quiet – which is what I was saying, it’s in the quiet times that we get to reflect and think about how we feel. ‘Cos we are just constantly on the move, all the time, y’know.

ANDY: There’s a tradition of sibling rivalry in Rock bands, Ray and Dave Davies in the Kinks, Liam and Noel Gallagher in Oasis, all the way back to feuding Don and Phil, the Everly Brothers. How does it work out with the Magic Numbers, made up of two sets of siblings? Do you fight?

MICHELE: Yes. We definitely have our moments. It’s not like, it’s not physical, it’s not like we’re physically fighting, but there’s definitely a lot of arguing and a lot of slamming doors. But – you know, we’re growing, we’re growing as humans. And it’s usually my brother (Romeo) and me, we tend to argue about the same things, but it’s because we love what we’re doing so much, but usually we end up head-to-head, basically fighting over the same things but at different angles (she illustrates different angles with her hands, resembling the sleeve photo of David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ LP). Different ways of getting there, really. But yeah, we’ve been on a journey with the band, and we’ve gone away to come back to reconnect with each other as well. ‘Cos it’s a hard thing being on the road with family, and we have to balance being a family as well as doing the music that we love together. So yeah, there’s a lot of emotions in there, and a lot of heart.

ANDY: Going back to the very beginning, when you moved from New York to London as children, it must have been very unsettling for you. Did that period help you bond with Romeo?

MICHELE: Yes. I think it did. Moving around as a kid, it did help us to – it sort-of, glued us together as a family. We relied on each other a lot more, and physically saw us just building this kind of unit together. This untouchable kind of thing. And we moved around a lot. We were born in Trinidad, so we lived and moved from Trinidad to New York and then to London, and both places – all three of those places were very different in culture as well. Trinidad was a small island where everyone knew each other, and we were on the street, hanging out and playing, as kids there was a freedom to it, there was a safe feel within in, you had the network around you, that community. And then – all of a sudden, we were in New York, in this massive place where we didn’t know anyone. We knew our Uncle lived in New York, but – like, we’re this small family in this huge place. But there was a dreaming about New York that instilled musical possibility. My brother, Romeo, got into music, then he got into playing the guitar, and suddenly it was like dreams are possible. And the world was a lot bigger than we initially saw it. Which is always exciting as well as scary. But then – y’know, we moved to London and we clung, we definitely clung to each other a lot tighter, because our family had fizzled and was scattered all over the place, which is when we formed the band, the Magic Numbers, which became a sort of grounding, and a constant in our lives there, and it became home faster than we thought. And… yes…

ANDY: When you first went to school in London you must have felt like outsiders. Were you bullied? Was that part of it?

MICHELE: Definitely. I absolutely hated school when I was growing up. It was the worst, the hardest time for me. I was shy, I was so shy I used to hide – I mean, I’ve got a blanket of hair anyway, but I used to literally hide underneath my hair and sort-of smile awkwardly to get out of situations, so I wouldn’t have to say anything. But yeah, I was bullied as a kid. I remember people used to pull on my hair and there was name-calling, a lot of things like that, and also – ‘cos of my accent as well, that was a big thing. My accent was Caribbean mixed with American twang, that was very strange for people. So yeah, we felt like outsiders, and when we released the Magic Numbers record called ‘Outsiders’ – our last album, there was a lot of feeling around that (‘Outsiders’ 2018, Role Play/ Black Candy).

ANDY: What does Roy Orbison mean to you? There’s a track on the Magic Numbers ‘Alias’ album that bears his name (‘Alias’ 2014, Caroline Records).

MICHELE: Roy Orbison? Well – we love his work. He’s amazing. He’s definitely an inspiration, and we referenced it – Romeo referenced it in the lyric because there’s one of the lines where Romeo sings ‘oh, he was Running Scared.’ And that was a reference to the Roy Orbison song. With listening to his music. We get the crowd to say a big cheer for him when his name crops up.

ANDY: What Pop-star posters did you have blu-tacked to your bedroom wall when you were growing up?

MICHELE: Tricky question. I can’t think. Which one am I willing to proclaim publicly? Well – Radiohead was a big one for me. I had Radiohead on there, and – er, a lot of kind-of bands, Fleetwood Mac, and there were some embarrassing ones (she laughs) – I mean, the Spice Girls were on my wall!

ANDY: Was the Magic Numbers playing the Glastonbury Festival a peak moment for you?

MICHELE: Well – we’ve played Glastonbury quite a few times as a band. Which was amazing. And I got to play the acoustic stage with my last record (‘Pieces’, 2016), which was amazing, which was like completely rammed and I think part of it was probably because it was raining, and everybody was sheltering under the tent, so I felt very lucky about that. Weather conditions! But yes, I love playing Glastonbury. We love playing it as a band – there’s a magical feeling there, it kinda feels like Christmas – it’s like the ‘Summer Christmas’ to be honest. You end up just feeling like a kid, running around, getting all your camping gear ready. We played this year, and I was just incredibly moved by the response, like – I was shaking onstage just by the sheer volume of the crowd singing our songs. And I remember backstage I just couldn’t contain myself, I was a mess. And I think there was a domino effect, everyone else in the band was just crying with me. So we had an amazing year this year and we hope to come back with a new album and I hope to come back to Glastonbury playing my own new record as well.

ANDY: Do you prefer playing to a large audience – like a Festival, or a smaller more intimate venue where you can interact more directly with the audience?

MICHELE: Yes, I think that’s really a good question. They both evoke a different emotion, a different feeling, a different connection. I’ve always been really scared by the complete silence of a crowd as well, and recently – doing my solo stuff and building up that, doing those more intimate gigs, and those – as you said, those more listening audiences, has been so rewarding for me. It’s just been an amazing experience. I really love playing those shows, and having those pin-drop moments and that moment where you’re closing your eyes and you just really go there in the song, and then suddenly you open your eyes and you realise – oh my god, there’s a roomful of people! Because everyone’s there with you. Everyone travels with you with the song. And they’re there, you can see them, it’s like there’s something special that happens in those small rooms. But I think even doing those grassroots independent venues is like… all that history, all those gigs, all those moments are in the walls, they’re like, that magic is still in the room, and every time you enter that stage you’re like a part of something that you get taken over by. So they’re very different, very different feelings. Festival shows are a whole other thing, I don’t think you can compare a Festival show with – like, your own Club show in a small venue. And we’ve had moments within the band, playing to big crowds, when it feels so connected, and so like… and so I think it depends, I think outdoor gigs and playing outside (she extends her arms to indicate wide-open spaces) you don’t get that sort-of in-the-room feeling (she meshes her fingers). So yes, I don’t know if that answers your question.

ANDY: With the band there are four interacting individuals. As a gang. But as a solo artist you’re out front there by yourself, you’re the focus without that mutual life-support system.

MICHELE: Yes, it’s a very different place to be. A different perspective completely. And it took me a while to kind-of make that step into actually committing myself to it, and being a solo artist. I kind-of put out my first record because I had those songs that I needed to record and get out there, and Romeo – he encouraged me to do it, I wouldn’t have recorded it if it wasn’t for him doing that. And then, when I put that out, it took me a while to… you know, that first tour I did with that record, it was really hard, it was very difficult not having the band there with me. And I think I sort-of hid away after it, really. And then realised that I couldn’t stop myself from writing songs. I didn’t want to stop myself from writing songs. It became like a responsibility that I had to the song. To release them. To put them out, to sing them. To tell the stories of them. And that has been a long journey for me, to believe in myself as my own thing, separate to the band, I suppose.

ANDY: Romeo has also done some solo gigs. As though you’re doing just a little bit of extracurricular work between Magic Numbers albums.

MICHELE: Yes, he has, actually. He’s started writing a different kind of song at the moment. He taught himself the piano, and he’s got lots of different influences and things, and I think it’s good that he wants to do some solo stuff as well. It all feeds… it comes back to the same thing, we’re all learning and putting ourselves out there and putting music out to connect, really, with ourselves and with others. So yes, I think it’s a good thing.

ANDY: And Romeo is one of the guest musicians who play on your ‘Invitation’ album.

MICHELE: Yes, he is. I roped him in! He’s just a beautiful piano-player. One of my favourite piano-players. And he plays a lot on the record, as well as a good friend of mine – Andy Bruce, they supply all the piano on the record (she spreads the fingers of both hands to indicate keyboard skills), which is – yeh, I’m not yet able to play. Which is good.

ANDY: When the Magic Numbers has finally run its course, would you consider opening a Blackpool Bed-&-Breakfast together? (This is a reference to the role the band played in the 2013 ‘The Harry Hill Movie’)

MICHELE: (She laughs) That experience was hilarious! Andrew – the phone has been going non-stop, it’s been ringing off-the-hook in response to our acting abilities! Working on that movie was… looking back on it now, it feels just like a daydream really. Yes, Harry Hill, he’s a huge fan of the band, so that email was a nice thing to get, the one where Harry Hill wants you in the movie, and we got to act alongside… well, I say ‘act’, we got to be there alongside some amazing actors (Julie Walters, Matt Lucas, Simon Bird and Johnny Vegas as well as Harry Hill himself), and it was a fun movie to make. Definitely. I don’t think we’ll be releasing the ‘B&B Song’ though. (Although it is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rKRZM_A1Z0).

ANDY: Thank you for your time. I’ve enjoyed talking. Is there anything else you want to say about the album, or about yourself that we’ve not covered?

MICHELE: I don’t know. I think we’ve covered most things on there. I can just chat all day. I’ve enjoyed talking to you.

ANDY: You’ve got the image of a crow on the album cover-art. Birds have their own mythology, their own symbolism.

MICHELE: Yes, we can talk about that.

ANDY: Is it a reference to the Ted Hughes poem sequence?

MICHELE: It’s not actually. It’s not directly, no. But the crow, for me, was the transformation. The visual transformation of being set free, but also the internal conflict between all the things resembling that as well, yes, there’s a quote – I forget, there’s a quote about the crow which is on the record that I used… I can text it over…

AND SHE DOES, THIS IS HER RESPONSE:

‘Here are some quotes about the concept around the album … and more about the crow symbolism.

The album artwork and illustrations of the crow, drawn by Joni Belaruski, symbolise some of the key themes of the album: the crow represents transformation, change and freedom. She is a shapeshifter, thought to dwell in both the physical and the spiritual world simultaneously.

I believe that it is in the listening, the learning (and the un-learning) that we can transform, grow, stay conscious and wholeheartedly true, open, honest with ourselves and others. Song-writing has always been my way of trying to do just that. Thank you for listening and being a part of the journey.’

 

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Interview by ANDREW DARLINGTON

 

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it was a turning point

a circular poem

it seemed just like any other day: brief,
peaceful even epiphanic moments,
snatched between the demands of busy-ness,
a thirty-mile drive
(we had to get back for half past four).

I could say perhaps
I should’ve made connections,
although perhaps I did
and, realising I was powerless,
dismissed them.

Reading what I wrote at the time,
it’s hard to ascribe
memories to the written words.
Looking back all I can say is
it was a turning point.

I often return
to the events of that day
and when I do they keep going round
and round in my head,
even though at the time

 

 

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Dominic Rivron
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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Small Publishers Fair 2023

Small Publishers Fair 2023

11am to 7pm, Friday 27 and Saturday 28 October 2023

Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL

Free Admission

Small Publishers Fair 2022, photo @jhmmitchell

Click here for descriptions, images and websites for all sixty eight publishers taking part in Small Publishers Fair 2023.

Readings

Readings, talks and launches take place both afternoons in the Green Room which is on the stage at Conway Hall. On Saturday afternoon there will also be readings in the Library which is upstairs from the entrance foyer.

This year’s exhibition is Forty Years of Atlas Press

Atlas Press was set up to champion extremist and avant-garde prose from the 1890s to the present day. It is the largest publisher in English of writings from the Surrealist, Dada and Expressionist movements, the Collège de ‘Pataphysique, the Oulipo and the Vienna Actionists – mostly for the first time in translation. The exhibition celebrates forty years of Atlas Press and remembers and honours one of its founding editors, Alastair Brotchie, who died earlier this year.


Atlas Anthology 1, editors Alastair Brotchie and Malcolm Green, 1983.
The anthology was typed up on an electric typewriter and printed in
two runs of 100 with a handprinted cover.

Jess Chandler, publisher and founder of Prototype Publishing said:

“The Small Publishers Fair is a crucial date in the calendar for independent publishers: an opportunityto be part of a community of dedicated, passionate and innovative creative individuals and organisations, surrounded by beautiful work, and writing and artwork by vital and often underrepresented voices.

The significant audience it always attracts is testament to the fair’s value and importance, not only as an opportunity for selling books and meeting future collaborators, but as a moment to witness and be part of a truly vibrant and dynamic network, and among publishers whose work is so crucial to the wider publishing ecology.”

The Small Publishers Fair website helps people plan to get the most out of their visit to the Fair whether it’s for two hours or two days. It’s also an online marketplace, an archive and a source of information for anyone with an interest in small press publishing.

 

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Andy Bell’s GLOK

Alan Dearling was delighted to meet up with Andy Bell once again in the musical ‘spiritual home’ of Andrew Weatherall at the Golden Lion in Todmorden. Home of ALFOS, Another Love from Outer Space.

After the last psychedelic high-screams from Andy Bell’s Fender guitar ended a memorable GLOK gig, I wandered off to a quiet table to look at some of my camera pics and enjoy a bottle of Henry Weston’s rather wonderful cider.

“Fuckin’ Awesome!” my new friends at the next table muttered. It had lasted for an hour and a bit, crammed full of wall-to-wall sounds. Combined with a swirling tapestry of visual images (from Innerstrings) using back and front projections – indeed, an audio-visual feast for the senses. Andy Bell was a member of Andrew Weatherall’s  Sabres of Paradise, and, as he reminded the audience, this was his return visit to the Golden Lion after the Andrew Weatherall 60 years celebration-memorial event earlier in 2023.

But, of course, Andy Bell is a well-kent name and face from the bands, Ride and Oasis. And this ‘bonus tour gig’ was a thank-you to the stalwart fans of Yorkshire and Lancashire. An innovative musical excursion with Andy and his colleagues manoeuvring, as they said, his, “Space Station in low Earth orbit to take the GLOK-mobile for a spin…”

It’s was a relatively rare chance to see Andy performing live without a formal set-list. Musically flying without a seat-belt or parachute, and spectacularly improvising in the mode of his GLOK electronic alter ego.

As it said in advance publicity, it is a world “…where he brilliantly weaves together throbbing dubbed-out acid, levitational psychedelia, Balearic, ambient, techno, Kosmische, shoegaze, art-rock and Compass Point-style post-punk, with his virtuoso guitar playing and musicianship to the fore.”  To my mind and ears, it minded me of the repetitive,  pounding-beats of early Hawkwind, glissando-layerings in the playing of Steve Hillage with Gong, Nik Turner’s Sphynx and Peter Green’s strangely deranged and damaged playing on his solo album, ‘End of the Game’ from 1971.

Here are some links to his music as GLOK, including his latest album:

GLOK: ‘Gateway Mechanics: Live Electronic Sound’ clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPjnAS-ma5Q

‘Cloud Cover’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIzQWaZBQBY

Andy Bell’s GLOK was most definitely ethereal, In Search of LOUD Space! ‘Out there’ spectral blips, beeps, sensory sonic space sounds…a trip…and with a version of ‘Cloud Cover’,  Andy B’s tribute, a nod in homage to Andrew Weatherall. The Golden Lion were entrapped, in thrall to the Andy Bell musical magick!

GLOK – Dissident live video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7pgi8vuEro

Then there’s the Andy Bell and Masal album, ‘Tidal Love Numbers’. This album is made up of four mesmerising, meandering instrumental tracks that combine Andy’s incredible guitar playing with Al Johnson’s analogue synths and Ozlem Simsek’s harp.

Filmmaker, Jean de Oliveira has made atmospheric videos for all of the tracks. Here’s a taster:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5kwSiwYcYE

Able support, beats and musical mayhem came from dj, Timothy Clerkin.

 

 

 

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Hope


War does not determine who is right — only who is left.
Bertrand Russell

 

Death walks abroad again, trampling everything beneath his
feet. Crushing the dying and the dead but the living too; revenge
digs deep into hearts, breeds another generation that feeds on
hate, drinks from the well of retribution. Peace flies away, hides
in a bunker deep underground; sends an urgent message to
Pandora, begs her to check the lid is fastened tight upon her
box. We know there’s not much left inside but it’s all we have.

 

Tonnie Richmond

Tonnie Richmond lives in Leeds and has spent many summers as a volunteer archaeologist in Orkney. She has had poems published by Yaffle, Dreamcatcher, The High Window, Black Nore and Dawntreader and others. Her first pamphlet, Rear-view Mirror, will be published by Yaffle Press in November 2023.

 

 

 

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SAUSAGE 284

Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column which swears at the radio, even when it’s not on.

READER: Great news for horses eh?

MYSELF: Have their faces been shortened?

READER: Very funny. If you had any respect for animals you would know that I am referring to the decision by The Jockey Club to limit the number of horses competing in the Grand National next year.

MYSELF: They horses will be delighted. The scions of the Gambling-Sports Complex must be congratulated for redefining themselves as exemplars of compassionate animal concern. Like Francis of Assisi, they overflow with empathy for our four-legged friends, as long as they remain four-legged. How much room have they made for them?

READER: They’ve reduced the number of horses by six.

MYSELF: Luxury! That’s twice the number that were destroyed last year for falling over. I imagine the horses are delighted.   

READER: They love a good National do the horses.

MYSELF: That sounds so true when you say it with an Oirish accent so it does. According to most horsemeat traders the noble beasts like nothing better than having their arses whipped by squeaky-voiced little Napoleons who left school when they were eight, until they agree to try and jump over a fence four times bigger than they are.

READER: I’ve a hot tip from a stable lad in the 3-30 at Newmarket if you fancy a flutter. Steak Chevaux to win at 15/2

MYSELF: I’m one step ahead of you. I’ve already got a pony each way on Pedigree Chum at 13/1 in the Marmite Classic at Aintree. 

MAY DIVORCE BE WITH YOU
At Herstmonceaux Crown Court, a decree nisi has been awarded in the case of Mrs Onya Byche of Lilliputtenden, a sufferer from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, who accuses her husband of mental cruelty. Eric Smorgasbor QC of Smorgasbord Poppicoque & Woggle the solicitor acting for Mrs. Byche, told the jury that “on several occasions when his wife had been called away in her capacity as septic tank night-supervisor at the Upper Dicker sewage reclamation farm, she would return to find that Mr. Byche had, with malice and aforethought, superglued all the furniture to the ceiling, but in slightly different relative positions. As a result Mrs. Byche suffered severe anxiety attacks, causing her to act irrationally. After one such incident, when her husband had also glued the couple’s miniature Pomeranian poodle Ecoli, to the ceiling-mounted recliner from which he was forbidden, she called the fire brigade, who, from an extended turntable ladder, managed to drown the dog and accidentally flood the two upper floors and basement of the entire building.” The case continues

CAT SHOT
Armed police were called to a house in Lower Hammock last week after a terrified couple reported being shot at by their pet cat Ozwald. Officers of the Lower Hammock Special Patrol Unit which sped to the scene on electric bicycles discovered Mr and Mrs Cuthbert Stipinsky cowering behind a bush in their front garden. The ginger suspect eventually surrendered after Sgt Phil Nagasaki, a trained hostage negotiater spent two hours talking through a rolled-up piece of cardboard.
“We arrived home after our usual Thursday evening’s dogging at about 9-30 and as we walked up the drive, that’s when the first shot whistled over our heads” a sobbing Mrs Stipinsky, told our reporter; “so we instinctively dived under the wisteria. We are both baffled. Ozwald has always been as good as gold, but has recently taken to staying out until all hours.”
“We had no idea he even had a gun” said Mr. Stipinsky, a retired glove manufacturer, “or opposable thumbs for that matter. This has all come as a terrible shock”
East Sussex Police Chief Hydra Gorgon declined to comment but issued this statement; “Ozwald, a red-haired male Caucasian feline, has been remanded in custody and will appear before Upper Dicker magistrates on Monday. I can confirm that two shots were discharged from a sawn-off 12 bore firearm believed to be the illegally held property of the cat. This is a classic case of a family pet of previously good character being groomed by ruthless cat gangs, and frankly, going off the rails. Unfortunately this sort of antisocial behaviour is on the increase and I lay the blame squarely on CTV, a a cat-based pop channel which has become more and more violent in recent years, with its increasing reliance on clip-clop and mouser rap. When we add the unspeakable evil of the highy addictive designer drug Whiskas, to the mix, it becomes clear that we have a serious social crisis on our hands.”

CRACKERS
I have received a very nice unsolicited email from The Cockmarlin Bugle, an advertising magazine pretending to be a local paper. Its message was simple:- Are you ready for Christmas?
I replied thus; Thank you for your sincere enquiry. Yes, I am ready for Christmas. I have tied balloons to everything and hired a life-size mechanical plastic Santa which waves menacingly at children. I have climbed into the loft and retrieved my boxed CD set Terrfying Christmas Songs which I will play very loudly day and night, with the windows open, and also in my car. Through a tempting offer in the Bugle, I have booked Christmas dinner for 25 at Woket-Wokey, a Star Wars-themed pop-up restaurant run by bearded men. I have bought everyone expensive, unwanted gifts, and placed several small ads in the paper, (all of which end mysteriously without completing their descriptions), in order to offload last year’s Christmas tat.
I promise to remain in this perilous intellectual prison, wearing a rictus grin and a reindeer pullover which is slightly too small, until the perpetual motion machine that is Christmas enters its short hibernation period, (between January and February) when our thoughts turn to chocolate eggs, crucifixion, death and resurrection)

 

Dear Wendy,
My husband refuses to buy a dishwasher on the grounds that they cause shingles. Since I cannot persuade him otherwise, what are the best alternatives? And should I use rubber gloves?
Anna Pollock
Quarkbattle

Dear Anna,
As a receptacle for the thorough cleansing of dirty dishes, I always recommend the hollowed-out foot of an African elephant – but always remember to take out the umbrellas first. Marigolds are fine as far as rubber gloves go,  but for washing up in style, you can’t beat a good pair of waterproofed boxing gloves. (Fashion tip: Baseball mits may impress some people, but catching efficiency aside, they are way too flamboyant for the modern kitchen).

Dear Wendy,
I collect tea bags from all over the world and when the BBC broadcasts a documentary about tea, or if there is any tea-based news, they always call me. I have some swaps if anyone has similar interests.
Incidentally, just as the word inflammable is unlikely to burst into flames, the word onomatopoeia isn’t onomatopoeic.
Laurel N. Hardy (Mrs)
Institute of Pedantry
Walthamstow

Sausage Life!

 




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

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

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

 

 



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Let the Sunshine In

 

 

 

 

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The Reverend Jesse Jackson

Inspired by Jesse Jackson’s oration to a crowd
of no more than a dozen, I go to shake his hand
but it stays put inside its tanned leather glove.
Men packing guns close in, and I waver.

Hope you run for president again,
I say,
for in ’84 he campaigned to be America’s
first Black male president. He takes a chance,
grips my hand. The beef melt away.

 

.
Joan Byrne
South Bank, London, circa1986

 

 

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THREE POETS

Mahmoud Darwish
Is probably the most famous
And I bet you haven’t heard of him

In exile, wondering
Without exile, who am I?

Mahmoud died in Texas
So don’t go looking for him

You’re too late

He was once arrested and imprisoned
For reciting poetry
Without a permit

How about Waleed Khazendar?

Last I heard, Waleed

Born in Gaza
Was working in Cairo

Saying, how our mistakes
Precede us to the pillow

They inform our dreams
I think he means

Or Zakaria Mohammed
Who left and came back
And, unless he’s dead
Is currently living in Ramallah

I just checked
To save you the trouble
He died this summer

But in Ramallah (as I said)

 

 

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Steven Taylor

 

 

I’ve been into Modern Arab Poetry since the 90s through a magazine called Banipal and Saqi books, a publisher based in London. They used to have readings of Arab writers and I saw Mahmoud (definitely) and I think Waleed perform. It would often be one stanza in Arabic (by the writer) followed by a spoken translation – so you got the musicality and the meaning. Fabulous. The Modern Arab writers were very influenced by European Modernism …. all the Arab writers I met were living in exile, and what struck me (in addition to the brilliance of their poetry) was their kindness and generosity …. 

 

 

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Ordinary Ordinance

 

 

If ethically rejecting the concept of extra. Unable to cope with unusual, the ordinary law of a search engine is this. How we ritualise language as armoury. Or to prohibit possession and provide exemption. As weaponry, we can have safe handling, and this is like identifying the deceptive clause in a sentence. The ordinary cadence of language. Whether loaded or unloaded, the adequacy of being commonplace is intention more than demeanour. A statue erected: an easy mistake. Locale locale locale. I do recall someone in the past promoting a Philosophy of Mediocrity. Lutherans, among others, prefer ‘sacrament’, but I rejected this years ago without grace or favour and was proved correct.

 

 

 

Mike Ferguson

 

 

 

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the chapel of the bees

a wedding
a marriage

necessary

for living or dying
for living & dying

 

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David Miller

 

 

 

 

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The Invitation

 

That still summer night the street-lights were shining white through the lower branches of the trees, making – as we walked below – a shifting fretwork of black leaves. I unexpectedly got invited into a household that had the look of, if not servants, a coming-in cleaner. Despite the vase of yellow and orange flowers precisely centred on the low table’s lustre, I reassured myself that come morning my very keen host would have stale cheese breath. Small comfort. Wherever I went, bathroom to bed, I remained untidily out of place.

 

 

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Sam Smith

 

 

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The Ambivalent Moon

 

We need answers, so I ask the Moon. There she is, her face dabbed in ashes, her eyes looking inwards at whatever it is that the Moon sees. I ask her why? and she clears the throat and tells me it’s all to do with synchronous rotation; that we face the future as if it was our own reflection, and that we face disaster as if it was a billboard advertising luxury getaways in the sun. It’s not the answer I needed, but then it wasn’t much of a question, and already the Moon is wiping her face from the sky. So, I ask her instead how it feels to be tidally locked to a dying planet. In the shadow, she opens her one remaining eye, and I see in its corner a drowned city, with blue-gowned people swimming in hospital corridors, with cars rising like bubbles in a bitter glass, with a baby in a basket floating between chimneys, and with an ark folded from plastic banknotes bearing all humanity’s diseases into a bold new future. It could be better, she says, it could be worse.

 

 

 

Oz Hardwick

 

 

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from Memory House

 

 

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© Maria Stadnicka

 

 

 

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Meeting

A perfect weather
To remember the faultlines
The vivid picturesque
Melancholic
Whispers that hide among the trees
The holy chantings of long waited gazes
The turmoil of openings
The narrow road open wide
Bit my upper lipped sorrow
My zigzaged cashmere sweater
I wore for the longest time
Myself a bohemian wise myself again
Wrapped around my collarbone
Surpassed my fears the goodness of
Travelling around
My split seconded tornadoes my other toed
Lipsy sounds
I know a perfect weather
Creation’s bemused journeying to the very South
My meeting with Goodness with God
Neutrality at the crowned head
My perfect weather
A known rendezvous a perfect meeting.

 

 

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Sayani Mukherjee
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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Varied Expressions

The Power of Words 2 Book Review

The Power of Words 2 written and edited by Binod Dawadi from Kathmandu, Nepal and Sydnie Beaupre from Canada respectively begins with simple and minimalistic outlook to life. We have poems written by Binod with uncapitalized titles and poems by Sydnie have capitalized titles. The book also contains fictions written by Binod and Sydnie separately.

The poet puts forth that he is happy without luxury—this is a minimalistic idea. The poems are simple and they flow spontaneously. I see wisdom and honesty in the self-expression of both the writers of this collection. A belief in higher power like Jesus and Buddha have been turned into a common need for enlightenment and humanity. The existence and belief of gods in human form have been celebrated.

The birth of many Gods like Jesus Christ,
Gautam Buddha and the like help to spread,
Enlightenment. (Context)

There is a reference to Kubla Khan, a literary work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in one of the poems written by Binod. This reference to notable literary work provides an authentic intellectual attire to this collection. The ability of Binod to relate to these literatures of past is worthy to be noted. There is a poem titled “Oneirism” which means dream like experiences. This poem has that personal touch and it has been expressed well. It has proven that poetry is the highest form of human expression.

In one of the poems Binod evokes beauty by taking the name of Helen. A good vocabulary like oneirism, literary references and new ideas make this collection fresh. The poet values knowledge according to the written poems, but we feel that he is also imparting knowledge and sharing his wonderful insights to us. They come with graspable meanings and enlighten us. Gatsby, Romeo and Juliet as lovers, Romance in Titanic and Hamlet are also recalled.

Knowledge is God and God is knowledge. (Fiction)

The above-mentioned line shows how the poet values knowledge above all. How poet Binod defines fiction is also important to understand his art. This poem titled “Fiction” has defined his idea of imagination and fiction. Imagination is valued at last, which is the tool of worship for all the poets and writers. The poems in this collection make us understand the need for knowledge and also the importance of imagination.

But also if people get knowledge and gain
Awareness from my imagination,
I should imagine and use fiction. (Fiction)

The poems in this collection also represent grimness of the mind. The not-so-bright side of the mind is also represented. The psychological confession is a daring thing to do. We live in a rapidly growing modern materialistic world where mind is not valued among richness and high goals. However, poet Binod turns inward and addresses his mind. Poetry can be a healing touch of representation if we dare to be self-critical. Inner consciousness and mental well-being are an honest representation, which should not be mistaken for mere confession. The poet is trying to open up himself for us. Poetry will keep that bold voice undying.

In the poem titled “The Power of Dream” many great personalities are mentioned. They are the ones who became successful by overcoming their weakness. Some were born differently-abled. There are names like Jennifer Bricker (an American gymnast born without legs), Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, S.T. Coleridge, Sigmund Freud, William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King, William Blake (who composed the famous poem Sick Rose; it is mentioned in the poem “The Power of Dream” written by Binod), Newton and the Wright Brothers.

How Binod provides the message in this poem by connecting with these personalities is really enlightening. The message is uniquely portrayed in his expression. The message is also varied, effective and well communicated.

The poem entitled “Right To Live” has a humanitarian tone. It talks about equality of rights.

The reference to a famous poem by Robert Frost titled “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is exceptional in this book because it has been linked to horse and its fidelity that never deceives. The idea that horse is not infidel to its master is put forth in this poem. Trojan Horse is also remembered.

In Stopping by Woods on a Evening
Robert Frost forgets times and enjoys,
Nature. but his horse shakes a bell,
Showing the delay of time and telling reader that they went very far (Infidelity)

The poems in this book feel too direct, but they convey their ideas in a simpler way. Young readers will also find this book understandable. They can get acquainted with literary and important references in the book. The references in the book are varied and important. They create impressions on the readers’ mind and cannot be forgotten.

The story about essence warriors entitled “Victorious” is a varied and culturally diverse fiction. It is written by Sydnie Beaupre. Magic and good and bad vampire also make up the fiction section. Binod has written about good and bad vampire. In the story Binod is a good and kind Vampire. It carries a moral message. Good vampire is aware about the evils of the society. He wants to contribute to the goodwill of the society. A good Vampire can be a modern-day character.

In the fiction part of the book, the link between Binod’s good vampire and Sydnie’s Japanese yokai (not all yokai are evil) have similarity. The fight between spirit and human, some yokai preventing a spirit from attacking a human all build up great interest in the fiction section of this book. The first story of the fiction section written by Sydnie is captivating. It is also unique. This story has a charm of a true literary creativity. The coherence, character development and what the characters do are properly portrayed in the first story entitled “VICTORIOUS” by Sydnie Beaupre.

The second story in the collection by Sydnie concerns familial relationship. It is also equally creative. It offers social insight. The story is titled “Such Broken Beginnings.”

Overall, this second book on The Power of Words book series justifies the existence of creativity. I would recommend this book to creative learners and writers. In conclusion, this collection is an insightful use of time from the perspective of both, the writer and readers.

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Sushant Thapa

Sushant Thapa (born on 26th February, 1993) is a Nepalese poet from Biratnagar-13, Nepal who holds a Master’s degree in English literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

 

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Wordage

in this unpublished 
book of life
having contributed
a few sparse
unpunctuated
misspelled
grammatically
incorrect
run-on
sentences

 

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Words & picture
TERRENCE SYKES

 

 

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Between The Destructions

Music dies, and so wanes the city
on the other side; holy water,
sand grains, this planet and the one
we planned to rocket through
years ago when we dreamed 
of a jetpack wearing future all wither.

Time is plastic; it stays; pollutes 
the quality of death. 

These have never been here anyway.
Here doesn’t exist. You and I
were foams between the subatomic particles.
We desired us and the shards of the universe
scattered every way, but there was no way.

Here we go, have returned to zero.
Now music will be born again
and the worlds will flourish.

 

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Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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Mindful Walk

I will walk without measure,
Love without chain.
Truth isn’t faraway,
Expression if exchanged
Always teaches.
I speak from my mind
I learn from my listening,
Let the embrace be free.
Which liberty has made you free?
Which answer was your lesson,
Rather than a reply?
The kohl-eyed sight of yours
Has a childhood layer of color
When your mother
Put the darker kohl- shade to your eyes.
Can you distinguish your view
From a kohl-blessed eye,
To the soot of the world?
One is not the sights that one sees,
But a mind that remembers,
Amid decorated distractions.

 

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Copyright Sushant Thapa
Biratnagar- 13, Nepal
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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Bridestone

From one angle
it looked
like the head
of a man.

I climbed up.
The grit slashed
the pale skin
on my knuckles.

I held on-
to the nose-bridge,
pressed down
onto the cheekbone,

rested my hands
on the forehead,
looked at the sky
reflected in the rain-

-pool worn
into the rough pate
of the stone.
I rested there,

a temporary statue,
relishing the touch
of a dark moon,
newly inhabited.

 

 

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Dominic Rivron

 

 

 

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from the anarchy of dreaming sleep

 

Stewart Guy

 

 

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Roxanne Fontana single ‘Don’t Leave Me’

I’d strongly suggest The Stones of today give this a listen before they decide to
release yet another lesson in open G growling like the one they just delivered.
What Roxanne Fontana malevolently devises here is nothing short of brilliant. It has
just the right moans, groans and drones with a vocal capturing the exact tune and
tone of the lyrics.
I’m in awe.

 

 

 

James Spina

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James Spina is the Editor of 20/20 Magazine, former Music Editor for W Magazine, Record Review
Editor for Hit Parader Magazine for 11 years, and contributor to Creem and Rolling Stone Magazine

 

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Let There Be Light

a painter & a poet. conversations in colour, Alice Mumford & Sue Leigh (Sansom & Co)

Alice Mumford’s paintings, mostly still lives, but often with windows or open doors leading out to the landscape, are exquisite, glowing exercises in form, colour and perception. The obvious comparison for me is Bonnard, with some underpinning from Cezanne and Matisse. This is meant as high praise by the way, not as an implication of copying or pastiche; Mumford has her own way of subtly delineating the forms of table and chairs, jugs, flowers, bowls and fruit, and of making colour sing. The air around her subjects is saturated in colour, heavy and hazy with the effects of light, distinct from the patterns of tablecloths, shadows and wallpaper.

Sue Leigh is a new poet to me. Here, she mentions how she came across Mumford’s work and requested permission to use a painting for a book cover, and how later on they met and became friends. This book is the result of a decision to formalise and make public some of the discussions they have had around writing and painting, similarities and difference, process and context. Quite rightly, Leigh points out in her ‘introduction’ that ‘[c]ollaboration does not seem quite the right word, noting that they ‘would be working alongside each other rather than with each other.’ The interaction, responses to each other’s work, continued after the specific period at Mumford’s house in Cornwall, and became this book, which is also a catalogue accompanying an exhibition in a St Ives gallery.

The specific pages of ‘conversations’ starts by discussing how poems and pictures begin. I like the fact that neither poet nor artist mention inspiration, instead they talk in terms of preparation and rituals, thinking and organising and then a constant editing of both paint and language. Although Leigh talks about ‘paying attention’ and ‘intense listening’, she unfortunately still mystifies the process, declaring that she ‘cannot say where poems come from’, which to me is a denial of both authorial responsibility and of language: poems (on the page) are quite clearly constructed with words, just as paintings are made with paint.

Mumford picks up on Leigh’s mention of ‘the physical experience of writing’ which is interesting, the fact that (in Mumford’s words) ‘[w]e hold so many things in our body’. She talks of physically limbering up and getting ‘the body to remember’, but also of painting being a ‘conversation – with myself, with my mother, a close confidante, the past, dead artists’. This, it seems, is at odds with Leigh who states she doesn’t think she ‘is aware of anyone else when I write’, a feeling I can certainly empathise with.

Even better for my understanding of creativity is Mumford’s declaration that:

     [w]e need to allow the chaos, not to overwork or attempt to pin things down. There
     should be imaginative space for the viewer. So the viewer becomes a participant.
     […] I think that things that are just out of reach are more comprehensible.’

For me, this describes writing as much as painting; this is how poetry works, by metaphor, allusion, hint and spaces for ideas and the unspoken. Also, Leigh’s comments further on, that so much shaping of a poetry collection is ‘intuitive as you work and it is only later that you see the connections.’ That is the author becomes reader and intepreter as they start to understand what they have made.

Honesty compels me to say that most of the poetry in this collection adds little to the reproductions of the paintings. All too often, they try and make specific what is left open in the images, or the reductive banality of ‘jasmine and blue haiku’:

     white petals fallen
     on a blue cloth have made
     a paisley pattern

which anyone who has paid attention to the painting has already seen. And whilst I do like straightforward language, I also expect new ways of describing things: surely Bonnard deserves more than ‘lemony-yellow’?

Criticisms aside this is an interesting collaborative project and publication. The actual documented conversation between painter and poet is especially intriguing, and I’d like to see that developed more, and more in-depth discussion of ekphrasis, the visual elements of poems, texture; how poems move beyond narrative and description in the same way that Mumford’s wonderful paintings are so much more than just pictures of things.

 

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Rupert Loydell

 

 

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A night of African Music: John Haycock Quartet and Sens Sagna

Images and a few words from Alan Dearling

Before the musical dance mayhem of Sens Sagna and the Kajamor Family, the less raucous members of the audience were treated to the first ever public performance of the John Haycock Quartet.  This was 35 minutes of gorgeously intertwined playing from the truly beautiful kora player, John Haycock, with his friends, Dan on fiddle, John on African drum and Mark on acoustic guitar. Intense, hypnotic and mesmerising. It conjured up many of the spirits and vibes of the Malian legendary kora player, Toumani Diabaté. Video from a live show in 2008 in Seville: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DEKQjj6Ga0

John trained with Gambian griot and kora master Jali Kuyateh. John has been experimenting with both traditional playing on the 21 string African harp, running it through a series of electronic devices creating lush soundscapes and solid beats. Live, the Quartet produced some stunning and haunting instrumental magic. John explains that it is:  “…bridging the gap between ancient West African Folk melodies and modern electronica, visiting influences from hip-hop to ambient to dub along the way.” Video with Dan Bridgwood-Hill on fiddle:

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

An exquisite performance. I wonder if John and his fellows are going to give themselves a band name?

Headliners, Sens Sagna and the Kajamor Family don’t appear from info on their Facebook site, to perform full band sets very frequently. Consequently, there was a lot interest in advance and the publicity read:  “It’s set to be a busy night of fantastic, uplifting music.”

The reality was a lot louder, more dancey, enlivening. It was about the audience and the beats. It started off with Sens inviting the audience to enjoin with him and members of the Kajamor Family in a few minutes of musical fellowship. ‘A Blessing’. It felt like the beginning of an African ceremony – an initiation into some of the traditions and culture of Senegal.

Sens Sagna and the Kajamor Family World music Afro-beat African dance drums had arrived in the crammed, jumping Golden Lion in the Calderdale Valley of West Yorkshire, pre-loaded with the energetic beats and sounds of West Africa’s Senegal with just a bit of added reggae.

Preston Carnival outdoor stage: https://www.facebook.com/KajamorFamily/videos/2649065238567091

From his on-line site it says: “Sens Sagna – is regarded as an inspirational and experienced dancer, singer and teacher from the Cassamance region of Senegal, West Africa. He performs and teaches both choreographed and freestyle dance, drawing on the heritage of his tribe, the Jolla. He is also artistic director of the performance group Kajamor Family.”

To put this in a bit of context, Senegal’s music is best known abroad due to the popularity of mbalax, a development of traditional  music from different ethnic groups and sabar drumming popularized internationally by Youssou N’Dour. Here’s the video for the hit, ‘7 seconds’ featuring Nenah Cherry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqCpjFMvz-k

 In the 1970s, Orchestra Baobab began to popularise Senegalese dance music. I heard it referred to in London as ‘Hi-life music’. Xalam provided cross-over sounds from jazz and some elements of Cuban/Latino rhythms. Baaba Maal was at the forefront of a new generation of singer/guitarists from Senegal and he was one of the progenitors of the Afro-Celt Sound System.

Baaba Maal – Freak Out Ft. The Very Best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At6_yckUklU

 

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Anarchist practice against machine learning

From the back cover:

“The state will use machine learning to filter surveillance footage for criminals and potential criminals; capitalism will use machine learning to identify ways to appropriate resources and maximize profits…This doesn’t mean, though, that anarchists could appropriate machine learning systems for our own goals. Quite the contrary! For machine learning systems are not only at the beck and call of the forces of order through their emergence from prompts, but far more importantly, remain tethered to these forces through the models they create. The sources on which machine learning systems feed are the troughs of ‘big data’: billions of statistical, lexicographical, literary, medicinal, military and civilian, surveillance-based and contractually obligated, creative or robotic, data points.

…To sabotage a machine learning system, then, it must be fed content that is in itself coherent, very likely meets evaluation criteria, and yet leads the system’s propagations into a feedback frenzy from which they can’t escape. The machine learning system must be fed text that coherently self-destructs. And the text must directly concern the concept(s) that the machine learning system is modelling, to meet its evaluation criteria.”

Free 10 page PDF booklethere: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning pdf

(Reproduced from https://warzonedistro.noblogs.org/)

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THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED

 

They’re all living within an unknown period of time.         
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

See what is happening: they update news reports every body. 
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

In a shed out back, grandfather and grandmother are always in.a

                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

They woke up calmly to the sounds of explosions,
smoked a cigarette.

                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

Today is a deserted city being bombed from the streets
and intermittent fighter jets overhead.                                                             We let this happen

I’ve been losing blood for the past 10 years. I’m very cold.                         
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

No sirens or murders, but pain and tragedy.                      
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

They couldn’t be saved.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

Charred bodies and bodies without arms and heads,
hundreds of mutilated bodies.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

What was it like looking? It was already normal.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

I’m used to walking among corpses.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

I understand everything. I’m an adult, it’s war.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

Everyone knows people in the uneven earth mounds.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

Every person killed has a name.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

People came looking, exploding various rumours.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

Life is cancelled for tomorrow.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

Three small children in the death catalogue,
 bomb shelter in the morgue
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

We have summer and fall to clear the debris.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

The night is still ahead among the burned things.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

The killers were trained and weapons issued.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

I can still hear the siren.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

The bodies are piled in rows, indifferent to pain.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

People have locked themselves in their bodies.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

Smoke rising from the place where a room was.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

Goodbyes are essentially impossible.
                                                                                                                                   We let this happen

 

 

 

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© Rupert M Loydell

 

 

 

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The 84b or not 84b Fundraiser

We live in a society of great inequalities in wealth and power. Over the last two years, the world’s richest one per cent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth – £21 trillion. The global working class, however, has faced continued immiseration, bearing the brunt of a crisis riven world-system that increasingly denies us the basic necessities of human life.

Meanwhile, the forces of the left – particularly in Britain – remain scattered and weak. After decades of defeat, we are in dire need of rejuvenated institutions and infrastructure – spaces to meet; spaces to learn; spaces to grow.

The Freedom building at 84b Whitechapel High Street has aspired to be one of these institutions for more than 50 years. Best known as the home of Freedom Bookshop and publishing house, it also plays host to a variety of organisations struggling against the state and capital. Currently 84b provides offices for the:

In addition, the building also provides a free space for meetings and events put on by groups from across the anti-authoritarian left, including Latin American Feminist Assembly, and Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants (LGSM).

Due to dramatic increases in the cost of energy and local business rates, we are in need of more funds and support to keep the building going, and to make key repairs. Some of the latter include:

  • Repairs/improvements to windows and frames
  • Stair and floorboard repairs
  • Plastering, painting and decoration
  • Internal insulation
  • Upgrading the roller shutters

Which is before we get to the bigger projects that we have in mind for the future, such as a disabled-access loo on the ground floor and some sort of central heating system.

Our  last fundraiser was in the mid 2010s, which saw generous souls donate towards fixing the roof, repointing and generally getting the place waterproof, as well as sorting out our electrics and lighting. What we put off at the time was a lot of the less immediately vital works, some of which are things we should be starting to address now to keep the place in good fettle into the future. This coming year we’re aiming to raise £15,000 to get ourselves up to snuff.

Donations are welcome to kick the process off, and can be sent via:

  • Cheque made out to “Freedom Press” at 84b Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX
  • Paypal (please note as “Building Fund” in the ‘What’s This For’ box)

(Reprinted from FreedomPress.org)

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Jerusalem Jolts

 

 

What will Blake say or sing as the walls of Jerusalem tumble
And those of Palestine crumble as it seeks to rouse Israel’s fall
As here in England jews watch as kosher shop windows are blinded;
Their eyes split and shattered, battered beneath hatred’s calls

As a prospective Kristalnacht nixes both. Would that it were
Unexpected. For the end of the world has been written
Right where it has been believed it began. In a so called
Sacred space shared by at least three religions.

But this new surge of conflict has not been granted by God.
Its all man. As well as woman and they. Although surely in Palestine
Now there’s no pronouns, only the victims, worsening 
As they bleed and every country is cut. Each diaspora

Will be damaged. Unnaturally, by this action, once more
Inviting the hatred outsourced under Nazis and from which
Political reproach will soon feed. Israel does not speak for me.
My homeland started and ended in Eastcote. A Northwest

London suburb back in the old century. With my parents
And Nan, and troublesome days unimpeded by anything
Pressing. Families can be fractious, but for my first thirteen years
Things felt free. And the 70s were not all that far

From the six year stain stopping promise. It is fear
Of that feeling, or that type of thought which now jars.
And yet we are not all the same. Jewishness, apart from
Orthodoxy’s bind is a feeling. I personally feel no allegiance

To a patch of land, sea and pasture which may as well be
On Mars. And yet as bombs to and fro there are those
Who would use that landmass to smother women, elders
And children in an attempt to redress former wrongs.

Which cannot be reversed. But they can be revived.
Can’t they see that? The dove of peace does not doven.
The dead do not get to sing freedom songs.
Why on Earth must that Earth be placed in such jeopardy,

Always? Why is it that some upright strive to bring
The rest to their knees? To kill in God’s name,
Or in the name of some other property baron
And for so long is not holy. On no priest primed page

Sits that screed. So where rests the word?
And sanctified by whose power? Synagogue means
House of Meeting. Should that not mean meeting all?
And can we ask the same thing of a Church,

Or of a Mosque for that matter? Or is each its own
Ghetto; bunkers where belief heeds no call,
Other than those who choose to take shelter
Within them. Places of worship become badges,

Testaments to the soul. They are in effect passageways,
Platforms, piers, even, bus-stops; terminals
For transportation, from child to adult,
Or from the warmth of breath to death’s cold.

And yet there is in the world, hastening
As well as the pulse of panicked competition.
Israel’s past persecutions and what it suffers now
Tastes as sharp as the Seder chazeret bit to remind

Of the jews’ enslavement in Egypt. But now
The Palestinians suck this and are spitting it back.
There’s no harp and precious few halos aglow;
In the absence of angels, more martyrs.

Made on both sides, I am certain.
But to what extent or reveal, has the intention
Been aimed? Which kiss has burnt the lips or cheek
Someone treasured?  Who first felt the future

When the secret tongue seeks fate’s seal?
All we know is that its murder out there
And back here too, as we’re waiting.
The Middle East may well end us.
Pursuant to Putin or our own failed fuck
With the air, the World may not be at war.
But the world is war. Blame the Bible.
Or those misreading some other book,

Should they have one. What has been written
Still reaches those straining for stars.
Whose hands care? I feel mine fold in prayer.
And I am far from religious. But I hope to Christ

Someone stops this. Or stops them, or us.

Clouds: beware.

 

 

                                                         David Erdos 11/10/23
                                                         Illustration: Claire Palmer

 

 

 

 

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The Mystery of Elizabeth Béar

 

 

The mystery of Elizabeth Béar has preyed on my mind on and off for many years, but it was not until yesterday that I decided to write an account of it as a memoir or short story if I can call it that. It all began almost sixty years ago.

In 1965 I was a habitué of the Witch’s Cauldron. This was a coffee bar in Belsize Square in North London. It is still remembered as a social centre that drew together many young people from the surrounding Borough of Hampstead, as well as neighbouring areas such as Kilburn, Kentish Town, Camden Town, Golders Green and from suburbs yet further out. We were quite a community and each of us had scores of acquaintances and friends who we met there and went together to parties, the movies and pubs. I was well known within this community because I’d been a regular since 1961 and dealt a little grass and hash.

One day a couple I knew only slightly approached me. They were in their mid to late teens. He was a scruffy youth in jeans, and she had long blonde hair, typical of the young folkie or pre-hippie types that hung around. From a youthful point of view, they made an attractive couple. We had been to several parties together and chatted a bit, as well as at the coffee bar. Their names are long gone from my memory. Even at the Witch’s Cauldron reunions, which have taken place annually since 2021, no-one recalls this couple except me. Of course, if I had their names there might be a chance.

The young man came up to me and said ”Paul, we found a box of books. We thought you might like because you’re into ideas and things”.

They were right. As well as having such interests I’ve always been an avid collector of books. So, I replied that I was indeed interested. They led me to a nearby house in Belsize Park where they rented a room together. I waited at the top of the stairs with the girl and my guide said, “Hold on here a minute and I’ll fetch them from the attic.” He crawled into the attic space and came out with a box holding a couple of dozen books. A quick look showed me they were mostly academic philosophy books. I was not yet knowledgeable about philosophy, but I was curious to learn more, and very happy to add the books to my growing personal library.

I said, “I would like them, what do you want for them?” He replied “Oh, just give us anything for them.” So, I offered him a one-pound deal of grass, which I had in my pocket. He and she smiled happily and took it. One pound, or its equivalent, was worth plenty in those days. Two of you could have a drink, dine out, go to the movies and still have half of the money left. I’m not talking about a luxury night out, but a decent meal and a fun evening, which these days would cost you £50.

I shuffled through the books for a while in the coffee bar, and then later carried my prize home. The box contained mostly classic philosophy books and a couple of hardback poetry books. The first book was the poems of John Donne and had been presented to Elizabeth Béar, November 1960, as the Brighton and Hove girls’ high school upper sixth-form prize. The school’s name and crest are embossed in gold on the cover, and a book plate pasted inside with the award details. I looked through the rest of the books. There was one more volume of poetry, the works of Keats, inscribed with the date 1959 by Elizabeth Béar. The rest were classic philosophy books, mostly hardbacks, like the poetry books. Most of them bore the name Elizabeth Béar written on the first page in black ink.


The prize copy of The Poems of John Donne.

Jumping forward to the present in my story: yesterday I decided to investigate the mystery of Elizabeth Béar. From the poetry shelves upstairs, I fetched the two poetry volumes. In my downstairs study I looked through my philosophy books to extract those that had been hers. Examining the books on my long top shelf devoted to the history of philosophy I found fifteen volumes from the Presocratics to John Stuart Mill bearing her name. Or rather thirteen had her name inscribed and the remaining two each paired up with one of these. So, the mysterious Elizabeth Béar was obviously a bright and intellectual young woman, interested in classic poetry, awarded prizes for academic excellence, and a serious student of philosophy, one of the most difficult and obscure human undertakings.

As I have done before, unsuccessfully, I started an internet search for her name. Searching for Elizabeth Béar was made difficult because Google overlooks the acute accent on the third e and comes up with stuff about bears. Putting the surname in quotes helped narrow the search, for Béar, with its acute accent, is unusual. I located an artist and a King’s Counsel (lawyer) with the same surname. It seems to be French, and online I found that the name is recorded in the 19th century. There was a Bernard Béar, born in the year 1840 in France to Guillaume Béar and Jeanne Marie Abbadie. There is also a geographical link. Cap Béar is at Port-Vendres in the Mediterranean Sea near Perpignan and the start of the Pyrenees. Both fort Béar and a lighthouse are on this peninsula. Perhaps the name originates from this location.

The search took me to the Forebears website, with its unintentional puns, which states that “approximately 2 people bear this surname in total, and they are located in the UK and USA”. Maps were provided to show the location of these countries for the uninformed. This search result seems to correspond to my other web-based findings of an American-based artist Liza Béar and an English lawyer Charles Béar KC, who was called to the bar in 1986 and became a Silk (King’s Counsel) in 2003. He may well be a relative of the mysterious Elizabeth Béar but is a generation younger probably a born around 1960 since he qualified in 1986.

This seemed to be a dead end. So, I decided to try a new tack, and to contact her old school the Brighton and Hove high school. This is now called Brighton Girls School and is in Montpelier Road, Brighton. Here is another coincidence, for I moved to Brighton in 1966 to study Mathematics and Philosophy at the local Sussex University.

Brighton Girls School has an Alumnae office with an email address, so I sent them this message.

Mon 2/10/2023 15:43

Dear Alumnae Office, Brighton Girls School

I have an unusual inquiry for you.

I own a collection of books that once belonged to your former student Elizabeth Béar. I have never met or heard of this student/woman except through these books.

The collection includes the poems of John Donne. Presented in November 1960 to Elizabeth Béar, as the Brighton and Hove high school upper six form prize. The book has the school’s name and crest embossed in gold on the cover and a book plate pasted inside with the prize details including the name of the headmistress I. Ashcroft inscribed, as well as the recipient.

I presume Elizabeth Béar was born around 1942 to have been in the sixth form 1960-61, and so would be in her early 80s now. In total I have 15 books that were hers including 2 poetry books (dated 1959, 1960) and 13 philosophy books, with inscribed dates from March 1962 up to October 1963, although not all that bear her name are dated. I assume she went on from Brighton and Hove High School to study philosophy at university in London, Oxford or somewhere. I am happy to give you a list of all of the book titles.

I was sold this collection in London around 1964 after it was found in the attic of a house in Belsize Park and have kept it ever since within my own library. I have failed to trace her. Although Béar is an unusual surname, she may have gone abroad or married and left little trace of herself. Anyway, records are limited before the advent of the internet. I have located an artist and a KC with the same surname, which appears to be French, linked to the Pyrenees, and appears in the 19th century if not before. The Forebears website states that approximately 2 people bear this surname in total, and they are located in the UK and USA

If I could make contact with her, I would gladly return the books to her, via yourselves, if you feel that disclosing her information is inappropriate. But I would be gratified to learn anything about her for a short article I am writing on what can be inferred about her from this small library

With thanks for your kind attention

Yours faithfully,

Prof. Paul Ernest

Looking around my study I found two more Béar philosophy books I had laid down and forgotten. Turning to my Ethics shelf I found yet two more Béar books, so my pile has grown to 19 books in total. One of the ethics books, An Introduction to Ethics by W. Lillie has Oct. ’65 as well as her name written in it, and this the latest inscribed date in the collection. So, I must have acquired them in Autumn 1965 or sometime in 1966 before I moved to Brighton to study in October. Thus, I had acquired them not long after she had stored them.

Books of Elizabeth Béar

I seemed to have reached a dead end. The philosophy collection before me is a classical one, with books by and on the Presocratic Philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Leibniz, Kant and Mill. Plus, two ethics books and two poetry books.

So, who is the mysterious Elizabeth Béar? I assume she went on from Brighton and Hove Girls High School after finishing her A-levels to study philosophy at university. Perhaps in London, as one of the books bears a Foyles sticker. I assume she was the kind of young woman, from a public school, who might also have gone on to Oxford University. But this is pure speculation.

I have long harboured a sense of guilt. While I did not steal the books myself, I was a party to the theft, by buying the collection. Perhaps they were abandoned and forgotten? Who is this woman who stored her philosophy library in an attic in Belsize Park? Presumably she had lived in the house in which they were found, and on giving up her room she stored them in the attic. If she was moving to another room or flat, or moving in with a boyfriend, she would most likely have taken them with her. So perhaps she went travelling or working around the British Isles or abroad. Did she come back sometime to reclaim her books, and find them gone? Did she miss them and mourn their loss?

She has been a ghostly presence in my mind for almost 60 years. She certainly helped to found my philosophy library which now holds close to a thousand books. Several of the books have been important and contributed to my thinking and research. I did not even know about the Presocratic philosophers as a group before I acquired the books. Over the years I have periodically found great value in the Plato and Aristotle books, as well as many of the others. So, they have been very helpful to me. Even having the poetry books has been a benefit when we looked at the work of Donne and Keats in the poetry group to which I belong. So hopefully Elizabeth Béar, wherever or whoever she is, would be gratified to learn that her library was not dissipated or discarded, but has been of great use to somebody.

Yesterday afternoon I continued my internet search. I thought about contacting the lawyer Béar to see if he was a relation. Although details of his practice are given online, and indeed a phone number, there was no email address. I did not feel inclined to ring the phone number and leave my peculiar request for information with a receptionist.

What about the American artist Liza Béar, perhaps she was a relative too? My searches revealed that Liza Béar is listed as being born on the 10th of May 1942 and is a writer, filmmaker, and media activist based in New York. She was the co-founder of the magazine Avalanche (1970-1976). So, this birthdate is about the same time as Elizabeth Béar was born, according to my calculations.

Searching further for her details turns up Eliza and the Bear, an indie rock band from London. But there is a Wikipedia page for Liza Béar. This says Béar was raised in France and England. She studied Philosophy at the University of London.

Suddenly it starts to fall in place. Liza Béar from England, born in 1942 studied Philosophy at the University of London before moving to New York in 1968. This could be her!

Liza Béar is a distinguished film artist with a string of awards and grants. My next search brings up her LinkedIn page. There she indicates that She took an honours degree in philosophy at Bedford College, University of London, and even lists nine courses she studied as an undergraduate in philosophy.

These include:

  1. Presocratic philosophy

  2. Plato and Aristotle

  3. Empiricists and Rationalists

  4. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

  5. Ethics

This list fits so well with the mini library. There are two volumes on Presocratic philosophy, six volumes on Plato and Aristotle, three volumes on Empiricists and Rationalists, one volume comprising Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and four volumes on ethics.

The fit is so perfect, I think I have solved the mystery of Elizabeth Béar. She is none other than the artist Liza Béar, author of Beyond the Frame: Dialogues with World Filmmakers. She is a well-known and respected film maker and according to her LinkedIn profile a supporter of such causes as Arts and Culture, Civil Rights and Social Action, Environment, Human Rights, Poverty Alleviation. Thus, by my lights, as well as being significant artist she is a good person. She must have abbreviated her first name to the handier and less formal Liza. Perhaps this change also signifies moving on from her previous one to a new artistic identity.

And another coincidence is revealed. I took a master’s degree at Bedford College, University of London in 1974, the same place as she studied. It was a charming small college in the middle of Regent’s Park, where I was based, although my studies included courses at other colleges of the University of London. Sadly, the place has long been closed, sold off as a language school to Middle Eastern investors.

Our paths have crossed and recrossed. This starts in Belsize Park, where I hung out at the Witch’s Cauldron, in the vicinity of which she presumably lived. Perhaps she even visited the Witch’s Cauldron for a coffee when I was there. Then there is Brighton where she went to school and I to university. Finally, Bedford college where we both studied, albeit at different times. If our paths did indeed intersect, it would have been in Belsize Park at the Witch’s Cauldron in the early 1960s.

So having potentially solved the mystery, today I tried to contact her via LinkedIn. However, the site would only let me do so if I paid a subscription to upgrade, even though I have been a member for fifteen years.

Then I found her FaceBook page. It is unmistakably hers, and I was able to leave her this message.

Dear Liza Béar, I bought a box of your philosophy books in 1965 in Belsize Park. I have been investigating The Mystery of Elizabeth Béar – who is the bright young woman who studied philosophy? I have tracked you down to Bedford college and then a successful career as an artist / filmmaker / author in USA. Greetings from Paul Ernest (also a philosopher / mathematician / educator). Do you want to see the piece I have been writing about you? Hello and Best wishes!

Will I hear back? Whether or not, I believe that I have solved the Mystery of Elizabeth Béar. I think I now know who the young woman is who contributed to my philosophical education. Hopefully I’ll be able to thank her and return her books if she wants them.

I am most gratified that my quest led to the resolution of the mystery that has dogged me down the years. The name is a puzzle no longer. Now all I must do is to wait to see if she replies.

(02-03/10/2023 with corrections 04/10/2023)

AFTERNOTE added 05/10/2023

I received a reply on Facebook Messenger

Liza Béar

Thank you Paul! Where exactly did your acquaintances find the box?

are you sure it was in 1965 and not later?

Also, Keats and Donne were two of my favorite poets, and I very much doubt I would have discarded them in such a cavalier fashion!

In fact my recollection is that at least one of the two came with me to New York. I will have to double check.

Paul Ernest

Great to hear back from you Liza. Do you have an email address to which I could send the whole memoir? I don’t think you abandoned the Keats and Donne and philosophy books, but stored them away. Here’s the plate from the Donne book. It could have been 66. What do you recall of Belsize Park? Did you ever visit the Witches Cauldron coffee Bar? I have built a website around memories of our goings on there!

I posted the story as images on her FB page 05/10/2023. She replied on 07/10/2023

Liza Béar

Thank you, Paul. Glad the philosophy books were of use.

Paul Ernest

Thanks a million – they were, are, and you have solved my mystery too! In terms of use – I have just finished a series of papers on the Ethics of Mathematics!

This is what she looks like, then and now.


Liza Béar 1972


Liza Béar 2020s

A list of the books of Elizabeth Béar found up to and including 05/10/2023 (includes additional philosophy books located in a further search)

POETRY (2 books)

The Poems of John Donne (Hard covers, Oxford University Press). Presented to Elizabeth Béar, November 1960, as the Brighton and Hove girls’ high school upper sixth-form prize. The school’s name and crest are embossed in gold on the cover, and a book plate pasted inside with the award details, including the name of the headmistress I. Ashcroft, as well as that of the recipient. 

The Poetical Works of Keats (Hard covers, Oxford University Press). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar Christmas 1959.

PHILOSOPHY (22 books, in chronological order of philosophical subject matter)

The Presocratic Philosophers by G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven (Soft covers, Cambridge University Press, printed 1960).

Ancilla to the Presocratic Philosophers by K. Freeman (Hard covers, Blackwells, Oxford, printed 1956). Hand inscribed in ink Elizabeth Béar.

Plato by A. E. Taylor. (Soft covers, Methuen, printed 1963). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar.

Plato Parmenides, Theaitetos, Sophist, Statesman (Hard covers, Everyman Library). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar Nov ‘62

The Republic of Plato, Translated and Notes by F. M. Cornford (Hard covers, Oxford University Press). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar.

Lectures on the Republic of Plato by Richard Lewis Nettleship (Soft covers, Macmillan, printed 1962). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar.

Aristotle by Sir David Ross (Soft covers, Methuen, printed 1964). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar.

Aristotle Metaphysics (Hard covers with dust jacket, Everyman Library). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar October ’63.

Aristotle’s Politics and Athenian Constitution (Hard covers, Everyman Library, printed 1959. Bearing Foyles bookshop green sticker). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar.

Greek Political Theory by E. Barker. (Soft covers, Methuen, printed 1960). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar.

The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 2 volumes. (Soft covers, Dover, printed 1955). Both volumes hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar.

Spinoza’s Ethics (Hard covers, Everyman Library. Bearing Foyles books green sticker). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar March ’62.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, volumes one and two (Hard covers, Everyman Library, printed 1961). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar in vol. 1 only.

Leibniz Philosophical Writings (Hard covers, Everyman Library, printed 1961). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar twice, on first two pages.

Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume (Hard covers with dust jacket, Oxford University Press, printed 1961). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar Oct ‘63

Immanual Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Hard covers, Macmillan & Co.). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar.

Kant’s Theory of Knowledge by G. Bird. (Hard covers, Routledge and Kegan Paul, printed 1962). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar.

Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (Hard covers, Chatto & Windus). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar.

Principia Ethica by G. E. Moore. (Soft covers, Cambridge University Press). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar January ’62.

A Hundred Years of Philosophy by J. Passmore. (Hard covers, Duckworth. Bearing Foyles books green sticker). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar.

An Introduction to Ethics by W. Lillie (Soft covers, Methuen). Hand inscribed Elizabeth Béar, dated Oct. ’65. Hand inscribed note on title page “NB Useful bibl.” (Presumably refers to the bibliography).

Witches Cauldron 1960s site at https://sites.google.com/view/witchescauldron1960s/home

New in progress  https://sites.google.com/view/brighton-babylon-60s/home

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Paul Ernest

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The Delusional Climate Countdown – A Holistic Appraisal of Real Climate Change

I have chosen to write this essay in the form of a question and answer dialogue so as to present clear answers to the falsifications presently dividing our world.

Q. Is the climate changing?

A. Yes

Q. In what way?

A. In many ways. Everything that exists is undergoing a continuous process of change.

Q. Can you explain..

A. This world, its biosphere and the universe within which the drama of life unfolds are fully interrelated and inseparable; all parts contributing to changes of the whole. Therefore to claim that any one factor, for example CO2. Is the causative agent of climate change, cannot be right.

Q. But there is some causative agent at work raising temperatures and provoking climate change, is there not?

A. In spite of global climate institutions like the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) placing a heavily biased emphasis on the burning of hydrocarbons as the chief causative agent behind Global Warming/Climate Change, this is a gross reductionist misinterpretation of the reality. These ‘scientists’ are incapable of providing empirical evidence concerning the nature of this change, or indeed, whether global mean temperatures are actually rising, falling or remaining approximately the same.

Q. So we can’t expect science, as formally taught in academic institutions, to have any answers?

A. Exactly. Nor should we give any credence to irresponsible politicians whose robotic response to any criticism of the CO2 story is “Follow the science.”

Only a basic grasp of quantum physics, with its recurring multi dimensional patterns of cause and effect, could begin to identify the causative agents behind discernible processes of change in the climate. Let alone qualify the existence of supposed ‘man made’ changes.

Q. But surely we can safely say that observable, more extreme climate events are taking place at this time?

A. There do appear to be more extreme events. There can be a number of reasons for these, none of which are down to one specific causal agent. For example, continual thinning of the ozone layer, specific solar activity, a weaker magnetosphere and/or the continual shifting of the magnetic poles. Any one of these, or all three, can play on the changes you mention.

Q. How is it possible that almost 100% of global political policy makers have uncritically accepted the veracity of computer modelling exercises (used by IPCC climatologists) as ‘absolute evidence’ of carbon dioxide being the key factor behind global warming?

A. To answer this requires an awareness of the psychological persuasiveness that operates behind an irrational belief in ‘science having the answer’. There is a great clamour for ‘a fixed remedy’ to any perceived problem, and when this doesn’t emerge, any invention is adopted that achieves consensus amongst like minded individuals and fits the parameters of the politically acceptable position of the day.

In other words, keeping the totalitarian globalist power structure on course at all costs.

Q. Doesn’t this mean that a fabricated story, provided enough opinion formers can be persuaded to adopt it, could become the basis for all actions adopted to ‘stop global warming’?

A. Such a possibility is highly plausible. There is verifiable evidence of such fabrication coming from Bilderberger and Club of Rome meetings going back to 1972 and beyond. Plans centred around ways of keeping power in the hands of elite bankers and industrialists via creating climate scare stories to frighten the public into submitting to the seeming authority of corrupted computer modelling.

Q. Is it wrong to put weather and climate together? Or are they essentially the same?

A. No, they are not the same. Climate is bigger than weather. Climate is directly associated with our solar system. It has cosmic origins. Only secondary is the influence of our planetary activities.

Weather patterns on earth are influenced by geological activities coupled with the crude interventions of man. On the geological front: volcanic eruptions; El Nino ocean current changes and polar shifts, for example.

In the man induced sphere: extensive atmospheric geoengineering (chemtrails); ionospheric heating (HAARP); direct energy weapons; wars; electromagnetic radiation (EMF); concretisation and desertification of the natural environment; chemical farming monocultures and the significant loss of biodiversity this causes.

Q. So are ‘weather change’ and ‘climate change’ being deliberately confused with one another?

A. It is all too clear that the proper distinction is not being made – and this opens the door for mass exploitation of public opinion. Such obfuscation can be traced back more than three decades. Just recall the evolving names being given to this phenomenon: ‘the greenhouse effect’, then ‘global warming’ and now ‘climate change’.

Q. The general public has been forced to believe that acute weather changes have as their causative agent man made climate change/global warming activities. This increasingly looks like intentional obfuscation of the reality.

A. Yes it does. However, we cannot completely compartmentalise climate from weather. All the fundamental energetic forces of the universe, including all planets, stars, meteors and comets are at no point divided from one another. We are talking about ONE ever changing, ever evolving entity, composed of billions of energetic expressions of our Creator’s will (design). This is the big picture.

Q. Can you say more about this big picture?

A. We need to recognise the distinction between ‘macrocosm’ and ‘microcosm’. It is on the microcosmic level that we can discern/experience – up close – differences of emphasis, behaviour patterns and subtle changes to seeming norms. On the macrocosmic level events are too big to witness up close; instead we experience them through our senses, intuitions and long term observations.

So, for example, we can surmise that volcanic activity is caused by movements of the planets tectonic plates. But the movement of the tectonic plates might be caused by magnetic shifts of energy in the cosmos. And the shifts of energy in the cosmos may be caused by imploding black holes or the birthing of new stars.

Existence is a holistic quantum event. Thus one can never say that Weather and Climate are wholly separate from each other. But we can say that they are ‘predominantly’ expressions of local earthly activities (microcosmic), or ‘predominantly expressions of cosmic activities (macrocosmic).

Q. Do those who force ‘Net Zero’ global controls on humanity have any sense of this? Or are they operating in the dark?

A. If they do have any sense of this it is because those who choose dark and devious strategies in order to get their way, are, on a certain intellectual level, aware of the cosmic order of things and how to manipulate them.

At the active end of forced controls on mankind the perpetrators are psychopathic and psychotic individuals whose creed is essentially tunnel vision, narcissistic and anti-life. These are the people who have chosen to enforce a despotic, repressive and fake ‘stop climate change’ regime on the people of planet earth.

Q. So we cannot look to mainstream ‘science’ as in any way a trustworthy guide to what’s going on if its spokes people take their orders from such unhinged sources…

A. No, definitely not. Only scientists who follow a quantum oriented intuitive and empirical discipline can properly interpret the complexities of not just climate change, but all the key interactions that influence the behaviour of living organisms within the evolutionary movement of the cosmos.

Q. Hmm… that’s a massive new paradigm for humanity to digest..

A. It is. But unless it can be digested – in stages for most of us – we cannot and will not be able to rescue our planet from the blinkered, suicidal agenda it is being forced to adhere to.

Q. Have caring people got some role to play in helping to bring an end to this coldly calculated exploitation?

A. Most certainly. Let’s take a heart led view: it all starts with one key thing ‘love of life’. Provided love of life is stronger than fear, cynicism and despair, the catalytic emotions that drive us are directly in line with evolutionary universal forces. An umbilical cord with our Creator.

From this base – kept properly primed – we gain powers to organise ourselves to fight for the defence of the glorious diversity of this unique gift of life – which includes resisting the deadly dogma of a false science.

A science that has the audacity to claim it is necessary to uproot the basic tenets of our daily lives, submit to the rules of a centralised dictatorship and agree to the blocking-off of CO2, the benign gas that every plant needs in order to make the oxygen that we and the animal kingdom cannot live without. We have to find in ourselves the determination to abort this mass genocide.

Q. So we have to also look to ourselves to find the answers?

A. At the dynamic nucleus point of all our individual lives is the same birthstone that formed the universe of which we are an integral part and expression. One will therefore find that artists, philosophers, traditional farmers and spiritually oriented individuals are far better equipped than institutional scientists, politicians and ‘expert’ decision makers to lead the planet through this crisis.

Wisdom, truth and justice are the manifestations of a deepening understanding that ‘love of life’ is a condition we are blessed to have been gifted by the omnipotent originator of this great firmament. Being so blessed, it is our responsibility to take the helm and set our compass according to the beacon lit by that most profound calling of our souls.

All ‘authority figures’ who choose not to be guided by the source point of their own lives, but by hostile posers and deceivers, must be recognised and treated as the criminals they are. Those forcing the WEF Green Deal ‘Net Zero’, ‘Stop Climate Change’ chimera on mankind, belong to this group.

Our job is to boldly move ahead carrying with us the ever growing recognition that we are the standard bearers of a dynamic process of transformative change. A total metamorphosis of deliberately inflicted darkness into its exact counterpart – a great flowering of the creative genius and passion of an awaking humanity.

 

 

Julian Rose

Julian is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, a writer, broadcaster and international activist. He is author of ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’ ‘In Defence of Life’ and ‘Creative Solutions to a World in Crisis’. For more information see his website www.julianrose.info

 

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Cast the World Away Emily Jane Bronte

 


Emily Jane Bronte (1818-1848) 
portrait by Branwell Bronte (detail) 

 

…and the angels were so angry that they flung me out,
into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights…
 –Wuthering Heights,
Vol I, Chapter IX

 

Describing a violent encounter at Wuthering Heights, Isabella Linton says to Nelly Dean “I was in the condition of mind to be shocked at nothing; in fact I was as reckless as some malefactors show themselves to be at the foot of the gallows.” This statement, perhaps, more than any other in Emily Bronte’s only novel, conveys the crucial character of the work; perhaps, also, it is the key to an understanding of the author’s frame of mind.

In her introduction to the book (1900) Mrs Humphry Ward referred to the character of Heathcliff as the product of ‘a deliberate and passionate defiance of the reader’s sense of humanity and possibility’. In fact, since its initial publication in 1847, the defiant tone of Wuthering Heights has attracted admiration, bafflement and outrage in equal measure; and today encompassing all media (including theatre, dance, music and film) it has achieved the status of a mythic text – rather like Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, or Dracula.

From whence stems this peculiar, magnetic attraction?

It is often the case that the book is misunderstood on many levels.

Rather lamely, Charlotte Bronte tried to explain or defend he sister’s work as the product of a naïve, isolated, country girl, marooned in the wilderness of the Yorkshire Moors, the mere vessel of Fate or impersonal inspiration. Yet criticism of the book’s faults (usually moral) serves to point us toward further positive insights into this testament of ‘perverted passion and passionate perversity’. Certainly Charlotte was correct when she drew attention to the storm-heated and electrical atmosphere pervading the story, over which ‘broods the horror of a great darkness’ (Genesis 15:12). We know the novel caused some anger among many straight-laced souls, ‘indignant’, said Mrs Ward, ‘to find that any young woman, and especially any clergyman’s daughter, should write such unbecoming scenes and persons as those which form the subject of Wuthering Heights, and determined if it could to punish her.’ Typical English reaction!

We may imagine our author in some heavenly sphere, gazing down on our sorry, fallen world, possibly enjoying a quiet, sardonic smile, ‘half-amused and half in scorn’ at the expense of those critics and arbiters of taste, who, over time, have condemned or, alternatively, defended her work; she might smile, half in scorn, at the somewhat ludicrous appellations she has been awarded: ‘The Sphinx of English Literature’, ‘The Mystic of the Moors’ and so on.

But we would be wrong – it is rather unlikely that Miss Emily Jane Bronte resides in heaven.

For some, no doubt, heaven is a desirable residence, but for her, as for the heroine of her novel, it would be an uncongenial place of exile.

Initially, the book subverted Victorian expectations of propriety; it upset expectations about women writers and also the prim stereotype of the respectable clergyman’s daughter. Even now, Wuthering Heights is disconcerting in different ways. It seems that almost everyone has entertained misleading assumptions about the work. In her Preface to a recent (2003) edition Lucasta Miller explains how as a youngster she assumed that the novel was ‘the locus classicus of bodice-ripping romantic fiction’. However, she says, ‘I seem to have made an error as comical as that of Emily Bronte’s Lockwood when… he mistakes a pile of dead rabbits for his hostess’s pet cats.’ Miller’s phraseology here points to a comic factor; but what form of comedy is this?

A dark comedy no doubt, even ‘gallows humour’. In Lightning Rod, an introduction to his Anthology of Black Humour, Andre Breton illustrates this with a well-known anecdote, borrowed from Freud; of a condemned man who led to the gallows on a Monday morning, exclaims ‘What a way to start the week!’ This darkly ironic, mirthless humour, the anarchic subversion of expectations, upending preconceptions of life and literature whilst also making us laugh is a matter of ‘attitude’; an attitude which may, according to Mark Polizzotti, take the form of ‘both a lampooning of social conventions and a profound disrespect for the nobility of literature’. In Emily Bronte’s work, including some of her poetry, there is abundant evidence of ‘attitude’, this predilection for ‘savage’, ‘gallows’ or Black Humour and a devastating, nihilistic cynicism forming the base of her particular, uncomfortable, convulsive aesthetic. Here, says Breton, following Leon Pierre-Quint, is a way of affirming, above and beyond ‘the absolute revolt of adolescence and the internal revolt of adulthood’ a superior revolt of the mind.

Indeed, a superior revolt of the mind. From a historical perspective it might be noted that this particular form of humour has uniquely English (or Anglo-Irish) roots, as Breton correctly identifies Jonathan Swift as the original inventor or precursor. Swift, he says was a man who ‘grasped life in a wholly different way, and who was constantly outraged’. His work embodied a ‘remarkably Modern spirit’, due to ‘the profoundly singular turn of his mind’. Consequently ‘no body of work is less out of date’. We can with confidence say the same about the work of Emily Jane Bronte.

The broad outline of Emily’s brief life is quickly told: she was born in 1818, the fifth of sixth children. The family was then living in Thornton near Bradford, West Yorkshire; her father was the Reverend Patrick Bronte and her mother Maria (nee Branwell). In1820 the family moved to Haworth, taking up residence in the old parsonage house. In 1821 her mother died and her mother’s sister, Elizabeth (‘Aunt Branwell’, a ‘strict’ Methodist), moved in to maintain the household and help bring up the children.

In 1824 the six year-old Emily attended the Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters School, founded in 1823 by the Reverend Carus Wilson. Wilson was a Calvinist whose religious views would have been even stricter than those of Aunt Branwell (an Arminian Methodist). The regime was very harsh and the following year, after an outbreak of typhoid caused the death of her two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, she was removed from the school. Cowan Bridge was the basis for the grim ‘Lowood Institution’ described by Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre. It is very likely that these experiences would have had a profound, almost traumatic, effect on the young Emily. In 1835 she attended Margaret Wooler’s Roe Head School, Mirfield for three months. In both of these institutions she was unhappy and always returned to the apparently self-enclosed world of her family circle. Her first extant poems date from this period. Then, in 1838 she was employed as junior teacher at Miss Pratchett’s Law Hill Girl’s School at Southowram near Halifax. While there Emily continued to write poems and, it is said, began to develop the ideas which eventually surfaced in Wuthering Heights. High Sunderland Hall, a nearby seventeenth century manor house, with weirdly baroque decorative features and inscriptions, made, it is claimed, a particular impact on the young teacher’s imagination.

With her sisters Charlotte and Anne plans were made to establish a school at Haworth. In 1842, as part of this project, Emily accompanied Charlotte to Brussels where they both attended Madame Zoe Heger’s Pensionnat de Demoiselles with the objective of improving their languages. Emily stayed in Brussels for about nine months (Feb-Nov) where she made ‘rapid progress’ in French, German, music and drawing, returning home with Charlotte in early November after the death of Aunt Elizabeth. Emily then flatly refused to go back to Brussels and remained at Haworth in the role of housekeeper while Charlotte returned to the pensionnat to continue her studies.

Later, back in England, Charlotte discovered Emily’s poems in her notebooks and eventually persuaded her to join in a joint publishing venture. The subsequent volume Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was privately published by Aylott & Jones in 1846. Wuthering Heights was published by Thomas Cautley Newby in 1847. Emily, who for the duration of her short literary career was known to the public as Ellis Bell, died on 19 December, 1848 at the age of 30. Her illness (‘consumption’) and state of mind has long been the subject of speculation: was she Anorexic? Did she have Asperger’s? Did she suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? Even the dimensions of her coffin (16 inches wide, 5 foot 7 inches long) have become the subject of research. We have one last memory of Emily (or ‘Ellis Bell’) ‘leaning back in his easy chair drawing his impeded breath as he best could, and looking, alas! Piteously pale and wasted…’ listening, half-amused, as Charlotte read aloud from the North American Review where she/he was described as ‘a man of uncommon talents but dogged, brutal and morose’.

Her sister, Anne, died the following year in 1849 and a new edition of Wuthering Heights with selections of her poetry (edited by Charlotte Bronte), appeared in 1850. Charlotte herself died after pregnancy complications in 1855.

It is reported that Emily ‘never bothered to converse with people who did not interest her.’ According to Charlotte, the novelist Ellis Bell sometimes smiled, but ‘it was not his wont to laugh’. In Brussels she cut a singular figure, with her ‘old fashioned and somewhat dishevelled clothes’ and ‘dreamy look’. It seems the other young ladies found the Bronte girls odd, particularly the strange appearance of Emily ‘who never followed the fashions’ and favoured straight skirts and outmoded wide gigot sleeves ‘when the vogue was for the opposite.’ But, as Constantin Heger observed, ‘Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old’. Defined by her ‘upright, heretic and English spirit’, Emily has always exerted a fascination for critics and biographers her persona and character somewhat distorted by an undeserved reputation for ‘strange innocence and spirituality’, to quote Mrs Humphry Ward, who also drew attention to a strength of will and imagination which appeared ‘inhuman and terrible’ to many readers and some who met her. The only pictorial image we have of Emily is an unsmiling girl of about sixteen with a distant but intense gaze, staring out of the picture, and evading eye-contact with the observer. This detail from of a group portrait (known as ‘The Pillar Portrait’) made around 1834 by her brother is the only authentic image of Emily we have, as all others are disputed, including the so-called ‘Profile Portrait’ which may, in fact, be a picture of Anne.

Sister Charlotte was much in awe of Emily in her guise as poet and novelist Ellis Bell, the embodiment of a ‘strong original mind, full of strange though sombre power…’ who often preferred the company of animals to human beings and who found in bleak, moorland solitude ‘many and dear delights’ including the decisive experience of a rare form of liberty. Charlotte went so far as to say ‘Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it she perished.’ Mrs Ward, she herself a novelist of repute, leaves us a vivid image of this ‘wayward, imaginative girl, physically delicate, brought up in loneliness and poverty’ immersed in literary interests. ‘One may surely imagine’ surmised Mrs Ward, ‘the long, thin girl bending in the firelight over these pages from Goethe…’ She is reading, it would appear, a recent translation of Dichtung und Wahrheit from a current edition of Blackwood’s (1839).

When she asserted that Wuthering Heights was the ‘epitome of a whole genre’ and of a ‘whole phase is European feeling’, Mary Augusta Ward placed welcome emphasis on the cultural context of Emily’s writing. A context which her contemporaries, unduly influenced by Mrs Gaskell’s and Charlotte Bronte’s image of the isolated semi-rustic, passive, young authoress (the unwitting conduit of shocking inspiration only explained by a kind of mystical naiveté), found expedient to ignore. Modern scholarship has long understood that this has been extremely misleading. The sisters were immersed in the cultural trends of the age and read widely, although their preference was clearly for Romanticism, rather than the socially-conscious Realism then fashionable. Emily’s poetry and fiction show traces of her chosen influences: Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, De Quincy, Cowper, Carlyle, Scott, and Wordsworth among others. Despite this, she remained true to her own unique vision, fusing these English Romantic trends with her own Christian upbringing (Milton, The Bible) and German Horror. Wuthering Heights is, in fact, pure Sturm und Drang, albeit with a particular North English twist (spoof dialect, local folklore), and her distinctive sardonic, ‘dry, saturnine humour’. It was a paroxysmal revenge melodrama, a classic of the ‘literature of transgression’; a toxic compendium of foul language, legal chicanery, amorality, dereliction, domestic violence, hysteria, hauntings, dreams, hallucinations, cruelty to animals, child abuse, moral degradation, forced marriage, sadism, male inadequacy, ‘monomania’, alcoholism, class snobbery and implicit sibling incest, not to mention low-church fanaticism, witchcraft, necrophilia and disease, all set in a remote, inhospitable landscape of ‘bleak winds, and bitter northern skies, and impassable roads.’ Catherine Earnshaw’s love-obsession for the alien ‘gypsy’ foundling anti-hero Heathcliff (a ‘fierce, wolfish, pitiless man’, the archetypal Byronic demon lover; an Imp of Satan, an ‘incarnate goblin’, a psychopath, a ‘moral poison’ or Monster From The Id; part vampire, part werewolf with, according to the rather impressionable Isabella, ‘sharp cannibal teeth’) is an inhuman, ambivalent compulsion eventually transformed into a self-destructive death-wish. Both protagonists starve themselves to death. This latter theme being, possibly, an amplification of one of Emily’s own traits; it is said that, when angry or unhappy, she might withdraw into silence and go on hunger strike as an act of defiance.

When Mrs Humphry Ward refers to the author’s ‘deliberate and passionate defiance of the reader’s sense of humanity and possibility’ she was attempting to itemise aspects of the novel seen as failings and faults like ‘monstrosity’ or ‘mere violence and excess’, yet, without this frame of mind, this ‘passionate defiance’ the novel would lose it’s essential, that is, its excessive, character: recall that scene where Cathy and Heathcliff observe the Linton children in the midst of a tantrum: ‘Isabella – I believe she is eleven, a year younger than Cathy – lay screaming at the further end of the room, shrieking as if witches were running red hot needles into her.’

This ‘deliberate and passionate defiance’, this reckless condition of mind ‘to be shocked at nothing’, is no aesthetic flaw; it is, rather, the very source of Emily Bronte’s unique vision. Wuthering Heights is a full-frontal assault on the cultural norms of literature and our idealised, complacent view of reality. Perhaps Miss Emily Jane Bronte had a cunning plan: to outrage the reader by exposing the psychopathology of the human condition, by deploying ‘a complete science of human brutality’ to quote Edwin Percy Whipple of the North American Review (October, 1848). Perhaps she was satirising our socialised sense of propriety and unquestioned assumption of normality.

For Rosemary Jackson, Wuthering Heights is a prime example of ‘Female Gothic’, a nineteenth century mode of women’s writing initiated by Mary Shelley. Female Gothic comprised a ‘violent attack on the symbolic order’ (the terminology is Lacanian) utilising non-realistic techniques such as sensationalism, melodrama, romance and fantasy to disrupt the ‘monological’ vision of patriarchal society, the ‘symbolic order of modern culture’. These women writers were seeking to achieve a ‘breakthrough of cultural structure.’ Yet it would be wise to listen to Pauline Nestor when she says that, rather like her anachronistic dress sense, Emily’s novel stands outside the fashionable literature of her day. She had no interest in writing a ‘novel-with-a-purpose’ or a polemic on the state of ‘the people’, or any kind of well-meaning exploration of ‘community’. Emily was no feminist, says Nestor, her strengths were ‘personal and idiosyncratic’ her work was devoid of ‘partisan politics’ with no sense of shared ideology or a ‘common cause’. Again, we may suggest that this rejectionist attitude, this idiosyncratic line of thinking, is a great strength; one of the character traits that makes Emily’s work always ‘modern’, forever compulsive, undiluted by transient, didactic distractions.

Much has been made of the childhood relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff, wild children of the moors or young savages, inhabitants of a sovereign domain of untrammelled liberty or the ‘free play of innocence’; although in the book rather less is made of this than we are lead to believe by enthusiastic critics. For Georges Bataille this is the core concept of Wuthering Heights seen as a campaign of revenge waged by Heathcliff to regain this childhood kingdom and his lost love, even though Catherine’s love for Heathcliff is strangely un-erotic and almost a form of unconscious psychic projection.  Certainly a key turning point in the story is when he overhears Catherine telling Nelly that marriage to him would degrade her social standing. He runs from the house in rage and disillusion. An incident probably inspired by a similar moment of rejection in the early life of Byron (Moore’s Life Of Byron was published in 1830).

For Bataille, Emily Bronte was the object of a ‘privileged curse’ through her ‘profound experience of the abyss of Evil’. He defined the story as ‘the revolt of Evil against Good’. In Bataille’s terminology ‘Evil’ is ‘essentially cognate with death’ and ‘Good’ is everything that supports the system of ‘reason’ as ‘calculations of interest’ for the benefit of a collective ‘will to survive’; a variation on the long-standing Socratic philosophical-moral formula which postulates Reason as virtuous and preaches ‘virtue’ as the only route to human happiness. In her novel and through the character of Heathcliff, Emily explored an alternative viewpoint in which virtue plays no part and happiness is found through revenge and power over the weak. Bataille says the ‘wild life’ of the children ‘outside the world’ enables the ‘basic conditions of poetry, of a spontaneous poetry…’ For some readers this leads to explaining Emily’s work as a form of ‘pagan’ or pantheistic nature worship – although justified by her Romantic influences, in the end this is just another anodyne normalisation strategy which quickly morphs into the mythic ‘mystic of the moors’ scenario. Bataille, on the other hand, saw Emily as an example of a poete maudit in the same category as Sade, Baudelaire and her near-contemporary Edgar Alan Poe.

She was cursed with ‘an anguished knowledge of passion… the sort of knowledge which links love not only with clarity, but also with violence and death.’ It is certainly the case that in her only novel, and in her poetry, we find an overwhelming fixation on the subject of death. This is not surprising given the circumstances of the Bronte family, haunted by illness, bereavement and tragedy, and vulnerable also, via conventional channels of enculturation, to a strictly Protestant, non-conformist influence which accentuated an idea of death as a transcendental phenomenon, together with a very real prospect of Eternal Damnation. At a young, impressionable age Emily would have been exposed to all these influences, especially at Carus Wilson’s school. Wilson was known as an ‘excessive’ Calvinist Evangelist an adherent of the doctrine of predestination who frequently preached on the topics of ‘humility’ and the ‘deaths of pious children’. The girls were subject to a harsh, ascetic regime that included the learning by heart of long Biblical texts and many other shocking privations imposed in a damp, unhealthy environment. Given the added nightmare of the deaths of her two sisters it is very plausible that these circumstances had a traumatic and lasting impact on a vulnerable, homesick six year old. It is likely, too that she found some corroboration in this fatalistic worldview from the life and poetry of William Cowper who, prone to phases of insanity, haunted by the early death of his mother, believed he was doomed to Eternal Damnation and thought that God demanded he sacrifice his life by suicide.

Together with Poe, Emily Bronte counts as a Navigator of Death (Thanatonaut);  all her work is haunted by ‘the sea of death’s eternity’ (‘The Night of Storms has Passed’) and permeated by an apocalyptic/eschatological theme of death both as a lasting refuge from the horrors of life and as a transition to a hyper-real mode of perceptual transfiguration.  

It has been suggested that Poe saw his poetry as a ‘voyage of exploration, an attempt to conjure up, dramatize and discover the world that exists beyond death.’ (Richard Gray). In Emily’s poem ‘A Day Dream’ she writes ‘rejoice for those that live/ Because they live to die.’ However, this not a simple case of morbid fascination, as we may discern other influences, such as Shelley’s visionary Neo-Platonic Romantic poetic theory (the lifting of the veil), as well as her own Protestant inheritance, through which this fascination for death is refracted. In her untitled poem known by the line ‘I am the only thing whose doom’ (1839), Emily discards all earthly consolations, even hope itself, and finds mankind ‘hollow servile insincere’. Yet, she finds in herself the same corruption: ‘But worse to trust my own mind/ And find the same corruption there’.

These sentiments may echo the moral framework of ultra-Protestant thinking where the status corruptionis is the fundamental, basic state of humanity in a fallen world; a world where man stands in a negative relation to God, or even against God. A position implied in the Catherine-Heathcliff relationship, and even, perhaps, in the way that Cathy Linton (the Younger Cathy, Catherine’s daughter) is fascinated by the Fairy Cave and would appear to practice the dark arts of Black Magic (she is occasionally referred to as a witch or an ‘accursed’ or ‘damnable’ witch. She even threatens the inhabitants of the Heights with the traditional maleficent practice of sticking pins into human figures). For fundamentalist Evangelicals like Carus Wilson it is probable that his fixation on the concept of salvation was cognate with a similar fascination for sin together with a horror of superstitious ‘abominations’ as defined in Deuteronomy 18. As Max Weber has shown, the overarching project of salvation religion has been the de-magification or disenchantment of the world (entzauberung der welt), so the references to folklore and witchcraft may well be symptomatic of the wider, defiant tone of Wuthering Heights part of an unspoken quest to regain the enchantments of a pre-moral universe of Animism and inhuman forces. As Bataille has said elsewhere, with reference to both Nietzsche and Andre Breton; magic, like Catholicism, is one of those traditions that ‘give us a slightly uneasy image of the very ancient foundation of non-moralist religion’. The greater the moral power of salvation, the more weight must be attributed to Sin and the ‘abominations’ of idolatry and witchcraft. This great weight of Sin ensures the believer finds the Fall of Man to be absolute and finds human existence to be a condition of pure and total Evil from which there is no escape. The radical rift between God and Man, between humanity’s pre- and post-lapsarian existence is so great, the externality and incomprehensibility of God is so absolute, that affliction and anxiety, depravity and horror comprise the totality of the sinner’s life, for, as the Good Book says, ‘the wages of sin is death’ (Romans 6:23).

It is easy to read Wuthering Heights in the light of this post-lapsarian state, and it is the case that almost all of Emily Bronte’s poetry conforms to a similar, if ambivalent, pattern. Yet it is also likely that Emily, wrestling with these eschatological-ontological themes as she ‘worked through’ the side-effects of her childhood traumas – particularly the Cowan Bridge disaster – was not entirely subservient to the strictures of moral damnation, even though she used the tropes and vocabulary of her religious upbringing to explicate her agonistic worldview. How could it be otherwise?

There will always be anti-secular apologists for faith who will claim or reclaim Emily for their theological agendas. This will range from the quasi-New Age characterisation of an isolated ‘mystic’, a ‘heretic’, or a ‘visionary’ nature poet, to those who see her as a forerunner of the postmodern, post-secular ‘return’ of religion, mediated by the casuistry of theological notions such as the ‘apophatic , unnameable and ineffable’. Her poetry corroborates Bataille’s summarisation of her character: ‘Though few people could have been more severe, more courageous or more proper, she fathomed the very depths of evil.’

In the poem ‘How Clear She Shines’ Bronte dismisses Life as a ‘labour void and brief’, she says that Hope is nothing but a ‘phantom of the soul’, while existence itself is but the despotism of death. However in ‘Honour’s Martyr’ she states a personal credo of passionate defiance: ‘Let me be false in other’s eyes/ If faithful in my own.’ Consequently this means that, as Emily penetrates further into her creative life, she rejects the ‘world without’ with its guilt, hate and doubt, and ‘cold suspicion’. Instead, she exalts the ‘world within’ the world of her imagination, (sometimes envisaged as an angelic personification), ‘Where thou and I and Liberty/ Have undisputed sovereignty’. She breaks away from the shackles of inherited, tyrannical belief, even though she faced condemnation in a fantasy trial (‘Plead For Me’) where her prosecutor is Reason ‘with a scornful brow’, who mocks her overthrow, and comes to judgement ‘arrayed in all her forms of gloom’. In a scenario that corroborates Bataille’s exposition, the poet implores the ‘radiant angel’ of her Imagination to speak against Reason on her behalf, uttering a plea for one who has ‘cast the world away’, who has ‘persevered to shun/ The common paths that others run/And on a strange road journeyed on…’

This ‘strange road’ is surely an immersion in the creative process, as she longs to ‘cast my anchor of desire/ Deep into unknown eternity’ (‘Anticipation’). Even though she may be tormented by strange visions that ‘rise and change/ And kill me with desire…’ (‘The Prisoner [A Fragment]’) Emily Bronte, wilfully or not, made some of ‘those excursions to the bottom of the mental grotto’ to which Andre Breton refers in Lightning Rod his introduction to Black Humour. As Bataille said, it is wrong to see the poetry as revelations from the world of the ‘great mystics’, even though ‘the imprecise world which the poems reveal to us is immense and bewildering’. Emily’s world ‘is less calm, more savage’ and, crucially, its violence is not ‘slowly reabsorbed in the gradual experience of an enlightenment’; far from it. Emily, who rejected as vain ‘the thousand creeds’  by which humanity consoled itself (‘No Coward Soul’), who was uninterested in mystical ‘enlightenment, saw Wuthering Heights as an assertion of outrage, a reversal of theological-moral norms and an expression of her ‘passionate defiance’, an attitude of mind possibly derived from the traumatic events at Cowan Bridge and the deaths of both her sisters and her mother. The last thing she was interested in was ‘enlightenment’, an unnecessary aspiration for a damned poet who has lifted the veil of mundane existence only to reveal a destitute landscape where, to quote her sister Charlotte, ‘every beam of sunshine is poured down through black bars of threatening cloud.’ As Lucasta Miller says, the tendency of the book is a constant ‘striving beyond itself’, but what the book does not do is ‘offer a conventional moral standpoint’. Instead Bronte offers a ‘visceral’ depiction of psychic extremes and anti-social criminality without the consolation of a moral compass. In this world of ‘threatening cloud’, the radical externality of God ensures that all morality is meaningless, all existence chaotic and pointless.

These are forays into dangerous territory, and, for Emily, this forbidden domain was the psychic landscape of Stanbury Moor and her final destination was Ponden Kirk (‘Penistone Craggs’) a massive outcrop with a ‘ceremonial passage’ (‘Fairy Cave’); a site, rich in local folklore, hinting at chthonic forces and a primeval world of dread beneath or beyond mundane reality as depicted in the story. It is tempting to see this  gritstone prominence as the topographical epicentre of Emily’s psychic universe and, as ‘Penistone Craggs’, it functions as an understated focal point in the fictional domain of Wuthering Heights. Even though in the overall scheme of the novel Penistone Craggs is a minor detail, it is well to recall that, according to Freud, the mechanism of displacement ensures the most essential elements of a dream are represented ‘merely by slight allusions’. The young Cathy Linton is particularly attracted to the abrupt descent of the outcrop, ‘especially when the setting sun shone on it and the topmost Heights; and the whole extent of the landscape besides lay in shadow …“And what are those golden rocks like, when you stand under them?” she once asked.’ Later, she announces that, one day, when she is older, “I should delight to look around me from the brow of that tallest point.”

Perhaps it was here, on some solitary excursion to ‘the brow of that tallest point’, that Emily experienced an anti-epiphany, a sudden counter-Calvinist turn of mind, an acceptance of her status, not among the righteous ‘chosen’ of the elect, but among the reprobates – among the damned. Here, at this high place, her very own heart of darkness where below her the landscape ‘lay in shadow’, she decided to unleash upon her readers the savage power of her imagination. Rather than seek expiation for her sins she decided to comit an unsparing act of revenge against a complacent society. It has been observed that the novel reads as a ‘scrap of history torn from the communion of the saints of old and flung in the face of the modern world, out of its context, to startle its dainty self-restraint’ (Harrison quoted in Marsden). Like Jonathan Swift who, in writings such as A Tale Of A Tub and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation Of The Spirit, excoriated the religious ‘enthusiasts’ of his day, she was consumed by a constant feeling of outrage fuelled by her own traumas, incited by her own demons. In the poem ‘From A Dungeon Wall In The Southern College’ (1844), a stern, judgemental voice derides various worldly vanities including Mirth, and, significantly, Love. This is a repressive voice of strict moral rectitude for which Love is ‘a demon meteor willing/ Heedless feet to crime.’

So be it, thought Emily, as reckless as a malefactor at the foot of the gallows, here is the subject of my novel; I will trace the path of this ‘demon meteor’. The story will tell a tale of ‘heedless’ crimes induced by the ‘monomania’ of forbidden, obsessive, sado-masochistic Love, through a harsh narrative laced with acerbic humour. It is no disservice to Emily to say that this literary project, including many, if not all, of her poems, was of an unashamedly therapeutic character. It was not some kind of visionary experience or spiritual revelation or ‘subjective encounter with the divine’ (Marsden) but rather an act of will, more akin to a work of exorcism. The culmination would be a mode of self-induced mind-expansion helping to overcome a fragmented psychological state and integrate multiple, self-contradictory interpretations of a warped existence. It is not surprising that we find the resulting psychic material expressed in culturally-conditioned theological, ‘symbolic’ or ‘spiritual’ terms; for its ultimate form the aesthetic outcome will usually depend upon this kind of enculturation.

The total nihilism of the novel and some poems is one strand of evidence, as is also that vein of saturnine humour verging on blasphemy. One thinks of Isabella Linton laughing at the ridiculous figure of the sanctimonious, pharisaic family servant, old Joseph, kneeling in a pool of Hindley Earnshaw’s blood and uttering incomprehensible supplications to the Almighty. In one childhood incident, the young Catherine outrages the same righteous zealot when she throws a ‘dingy’, devotional book entitled The Helmet of Salvation into a dog kennel, ‘vowing I hated a good book’. Lockwood’s nightmare of the ‘Pious Discourse’ of the ludicrous preacher Jabes Branderham entitled ‘Seventy Times Seven and the First of the Seventy First’ in the Chapel of Gimmerden Sough is clearly a satirical attack on low-church religious mania (Branderham may have been based on the prominent Methodist preacher and revivalist, Jabez Bunting, or the well-known Methodist clergyman William Grimshaw of Haworth, or both). The sermon descends into chaos and violence. Elsewhere in the novel there are moments of macabre, almost absurd, knockabout, as when Hindley threatens to murder Nelly Dean by ramming a carving knife down her throat: ‘“But I don’t like the carving knife, Mr Hindley,” I answered, “It has been used for cutting red herrings – I’d rather be shot if you please”’.

Surely Catherine Earnshaw speaks for our author when she appears to reject the possibility of redemption. Appearing to commit The Unpardonable Sin, ‘the sin that no Christian need pardon’, she even rejects Heaven itself: “There is nothing” cried she, “…heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights…”.

Unsurprisingly these defiant and desperate sentiments are echoed by Heathcliff (a symbolic figure bearing some resemblance to Milton’s Satan), when he claims: ‘I have nearly attained my heaven; and that of others is altogether unvalued and unwanted by me!’ Perhaps the most shocking character in a gallery of grotesques, Heathcliff embodies the dark power of Emily’s ‘rebellious imagination’ (Miller) her ‘revolutionary’ imagination and dreams (Bataille), and, as Charlotte Bronte wrote in her Preface to the 1850 Edition: ‘Heathcliff, indeed, stands unredeemed; never once swerving in his arrow-straight course to perdition…’

Perdition? Does Emily Bronte care about Perdition?

One feels that she summoned her own ‘radiant angel’, her Imagination, as a counter-force to lifelong threats of Perdition and Damnation from sundry authorities, Methodists, Calvinists and conventional others. The default of God envelopes Wuthering Heights in that ‘great darkness’ of the world’s night, but Emily Jane Bronte persevered to shun ‘the common paths that others run’, she ‘cast the world away’. Remaining recalcitrant to the very last, refusing all medical treatment in her final days and hours, she bequeathed to us one of the most disturbing works of English literature.

When Andre Breton said in The Manifesto of Surrealism ‘Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality’ he was placing the imaginative faculty at the centre of the surrealist adventure. For Emily Bronte, whose works exemplified the ‘unsparing quality’ of an uncompromising assault on Victorian complacency, the imagination was hyper-real, not an avenue of escape. It disclosed a ‘world within’, a dangerous, forbidden, uncharted realm, ‘Where thou and I, and Liberty/Have undisputed sovereignty’.

 

 

A.C. Evans

 

 

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges, Literature and Evil (trans Hamilton), Calder & Boyars, 1973

Bataille, Georges, Preface to Madame Edwarda (trans Wainhouse), Penguin Books, 2012

Bataille, Georges, The Absence of Myth. Writings on Surrealism (trans Richarson), Verso, 2006

Breton, Andre, Anthology of Black Humour (trans Polizzotti), Telegram, 2009

Breton, Andre, Lightning Rod (1939), Telegram, 2009

Breton, Andre, Manifestoes of Surrealism (trans Seaver/Lane), University of Michigan, 2007

Bronte, Charlotte, Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell (1850), Penguin Books, 2003

Bronte, Charlotte, Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights (1850), Penguin Books, 2003

Bronte, Charlotte, Prefatory Note to Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell, Oxford University Press, 2009

Bronte, Charlotte, Selected Letters 1832-1855, Oxford University Press, 2010

Bronte, Emily, The Complete Poems 1836-1848, Penguin Books, 1992

Bronte, Emily, Wuthering Heights, Penguin Books, 2003

Bronte, Emily, Wuthering Heights, Oxford University Press, 2009

Freud, Sigmund, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (trans Ragg-Kirkby), Penguin, 2003

Gray, Richard, Introduction to Poe: Complete Poems and Selected Essays (1993), J M Dent, 1999

Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy, The Literature of Subversion, Methuen, 1981

MacEwan, Helen, The Brontes in Brussels, Peter Owen, 2014

Marsden, Simon, Emily Bronte and the Religious Imagination, Bloomsbury, 2015

Miller, Lucasta, Preface to Wuthering Heights (2003), Penguin Books, 2003

Miller, Lucasta, The Bronte Myth, Vintage, 2002

Nestor, Pauline, Introduction to Wuthering Heights (1995), Penguin Books, 2003

Poe, Edgar Allan, Complete Poems and Selected Essays, J M Dent, 1999

Polizzotti, Mark, Laughter In The Dark (1996), Telegram, 2009

Swift, Jonathan, A Tale Of A Tub And Other Works, Oxford University Press, 1999

Ward, Mary Augusta, Introduction to Wuthering Heights, Smith & Elder, 1900

Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit of Capitalism, (trans Kalberg), Oxford University Press, 2009

 

 

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One Day, Together

 

Bare branches, the buds they open softly

 

Spring out, bright green, shiny, in the light

Rustle in the wind in the woods at night

Sparkle in the sun for man and beast

Dapple the clearing for the morning feast

 

I am hidden beneath the forest canopy

Sit together beside the gnarled oak tree

Leaves now swaying in the wind & rain

Alive on this earth in cool Summer again

 

The birds perch on stretching arms above

I listen to their many songs of love

 

The days grow short, I’m feeling cold

I’ve drunk this wine, now growing old

Losing colour, rusty yellow, browned

It’s time to sleep; I fall to the ground

 

I hear the requiem for me and my friend

Are gathered quiet, waiting for the end

 

Be still; leaves, now resting on the earth

 

©Christopher   2023

 

 

 

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Too Long At The Fair

Our nation is in debt
And who would credit it?

The Houses of Parliament
Might make a decent foxhole

As now indecently
It harbours sharks

One suitcase now contains
The whole of English culture

Warm-hearted people wasted
In a climate of wet blankets

Let the leaving party
Steal the soap and towels

They have a greater need 
Attired as human forgeries

Age-old mould corrupts their merchandise
‘Smiles’ that rip the paint right off the walls

Water takes an age eroding stone
Dreams can overturn the age this evening.

 

 

Bernard Saint
Illustration: Claire Palmer

 

 

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Peter Woodcock 1939 – 2023

 
Our friend, Peter Woodcock died on Monday 4th October at the age of 84.
He has been published in IT before and has written a number of lovely books, including This Enchanted Isle and Stone Clouds-Liquid Skies, The Shamanic Art of Derek Hyatt. He has written other books under a pseudonym.
 
He was a superb observer of and participant in the ‘counterculture’  in Glastonbury, New York, Algeria and Paris.
 
Below is an article he wrote about William Blake in his book “The Enchanted Isle”.

 

 

 

Awake! Albion Awake!

In an excerpt from his book ‘This Enchanted Isle’, Peter Woodcock discusses William Blake (1757-1827) and his influence on subsequent generations of Romantic and Neo-romantic artists. Published in response to the Dark Monarch at Tate St Ives.

 

Madman, visionary, revolutionary, genius, even today William Blake is considered to be all of these. His writings still reverberate in the twenty-first century, and his engravings and watercolours still excite and disturb.

Born in Soho, the son of a London hosier, Blake had little formal education, but was steeped in the Greek and Latin classics, Milton and the Bible. When his younger brother died from consumption aged twenty, an exhausted Blake, who had nursed his brother throughout, said that he witnessed his brother’s soul ascending towards heaven. Blake had seen angels and heavenly forms since childhood. His father reprimanded him for saying that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel sheltering beneath a tree. Blake saw angels in a tree on Peckham Rye and throughout his life he conversed with spirits. Growing up in eighteenth century London, he was in the midst of a whole world of visionary and dissenting religious teachings. As a Londoner, the capital was where he witnessed most of his visions. Wandering through each chartered street, he experienced a visionary city – the Four-Fold city which could be witnessed by anyone who shed the dust from the mundane world.

The capital was a city seething with riots and disorder. Britain was under threat from France, sedition was in the air, revolution underfoot. Blake was sympathetic to radical politics; it is said that he knew Tom Paine and helped him flee the country. As well as politics, Blake embraced the teachings of the Swedish theologist Emmanuel Swedenborg with enthusiasm, but later in life rejected them, finding more sustenance in the writings of Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme. Boehme in particular had a profound effect on Blake with his concept that Man contained not only the Sun, Moon, Stars and universe within him, but God as well, which resonated with Blake’s own beliefs.

It was while apprenticed as a young man to the engraver James Basire that Blake was asked to make drawings of the royal tombs in the chapel of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. This great Gothic masterpiece, ‘a book in stone’ which Victor Hugo called the Abbey, thrilled the young Blake. The very essence of the architecture with its pageant of British history encased in stained glass, carved effigies and ancient tapestries, struck a deep chord in him.

While drawing in the Abbey he had more visions, of monks and priests. It was as if he were witnessing the archetypal realm of the nation, something to which he would return for the rest of his life. Even the Archangel Gabriel appeared to him in majestic glory, and moved the universe.

His first engraving is Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion (picture above right). A rather solid patriarchal figure broods on a rugged coast against which the sea is raging. It is interesting that Blake chose this figure (although biblical figures were popular as artistic subjects in Blake’s time) for Joseph was none other than the uncle of Jesus who brought the Holy Grail containing the blood of Christ to Britain and created the first Christian church in the land at Glastonbury. Blake’s immortal poem Jerusalem relates to this event.

In 1779 Blake enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art as a student. The principal was Sir Joshua Reynolds which was unfortunate as Blake detested Reynolds’ views on art as well as his painting. Forever battling against the practice of ‘copying nature’, Blake developed his own extraordinary visionary skills. Mainly influenced by his own inner world, he created a mythical realm which to many of his contemporaries appeared on the edge of madness. As a skilled and creative printmaker Blake developed his own method of reproducing his images and writings, combining a mixture of relief etching on copper plates and hand-coloured prints, executed by himself and his wife Catherine. The results were unique, echoing not only references to the old masters but to the pamphlets, leaflets and radical publications produced in London during his life.

Blake and his wife left London in 1800 and moved to Felpham for three years. During this period Blake was highly prolific. Among other major writings combined with images, he produced The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Urizen, Songs of Experience, The Book of Los and The Four Zoas. It seems that Blake had a fiery temper. On one occasion an argument with a soldier outside his cottage resulted in Blake being charged with high treason. Blake was anti-monarchist and had supported the French Revolution until news of the Jacobin slaughter of opponents became known in Britain. Fortunately the case against Blake collapsed due to insufficient evidence. But it shook him and aggravated the nervous disposition which afflicted him all his life. During the later part of his life Blake, through his acquaintance with John Varley, himself a fine water-colourist, drew many portraits of spirits, including Socrates, Herod, Voltaire, Richard Coeur de Lion and the Man who built the Pyramids.

It was unfortunate that Blake was born when he was; if he had been born a hundred years earlier, his visions would have been acceptable, almost commonplace. In the eighteenth century the Newtonian universe was rapidly encroaching. The rise of materialism, which Blake warned against, was closing the doors to men and women of vision.

With the Neo-Romantics of the twentieth century, Blake’s images and writings struck a deep chord. Nash, Sutherland, Piper and Vaughan in particular admired Blake, who along with Samuel Palmer, conjured up an archetypal realm. Because of the restrictions of the Second World War, artists in Britain were thrown back onto their cultural roots. It is easy to see why they revered the work of Blake and Palmer. If Blake portrayed an ancient land called Albion, in which angelic and demonic forces were drawn from the imagination rather than from reality, Palmer caught an idyllic, Arcadian mood, particularly in his Shoreham pictures. Both artists represented an archetypal view of Britain which was free of the pseudo-chivalry of the Pre-Raphaelites. However, there is an odd discrepancy here, as all the Neo-Romantics revered nature and based their work on actual observation which Blake refuted, preferring to work from his imagination or his ‘visions’.

During the latter part of his life, Blake, regretting having spent so much time reconciling his creativity with commercialism, burst into a frenzy of activity producing some of his most complex and beautiful poetry and images. His colours became more vibrant as if describing the inner world he saw. Some of the most dazzling images are to be found in the wood engravings for The Pastorals of Virgil. Although small in scale, they are like jewels glowing with an inner light, their inky blackness as deep as the night sky, their attention to detail ravishing.The Pastorals of VirgilTowards the end of his life Blake became revered by a group of young artists called the Ancients. They were so called because they considered modern society debased when compared with older civilisations. Among the group was Samuel Palmer who worshipped Blake. Palmer was also a visionary but the Ancients did not have the political fire born from experience, which Blake had. Their art was more concerned with an idyllic pastoralism which did not reflect Blake’s views.

Always impoverished, Blake, with the help of his wife Catherine, worked until the end on his paintings and engravings. When he finally died in 1827, he died singing, his face enraptured by the visions he was seeing.

Blake above all was prophetic and had insights which are of relevance today. Not only did he foresee the rise of materialism, he created his own spiritual universe based on a mystical, and some would say heretical version of Christianity, incorporating elements from Hinduism, alchemy and ancient British mythology. He also held strong views on sexuality: he saw war as a direct result of sexual repression and believed in a healthy, robust sexual life. In the preface of his epic poem Milton there is almost a call to arms, which poignantly reverberates in today’s age of cultural consumerism.

Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of the works.

The political fervour and fascination with underground religious beliefs and occultism of the eighteenth century was echoed two hundred years later in the Sixties, when many of the beliefs of the earlier period resurfaced. As well as political ferment there was an explosion of interest in such beliefs as the Western Mystery Tradition, paganism, Druidism, divination, sacred geometry – the whole concept of the landscape of Britain laid out in a magical tradition.

 

 

 

 

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Fearful Symmetry

I wake up from a restless dream
I catch the thin web of attachment,
The xerox copy of my faith
Has been torn by you.
My mirror is not me
If you are my mirror.
Your gaze is a fearful symmetry
That makes me a mound
And not an everlasting statue.
The war guns don’t fire bullets of life.
The fear in death
Is not magnified anywhere,
Like it does in a war.
Fearing life, and
Fearing death
Costs too much of peace.
A forgotten tale is a lost game.
Future of survival
Has become a lost present.
A mirror has become a best war victim
Because it does not heal
Until you do.

 

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Copyright Sushant Thapa
Biratnagar-13, Nepal
Picture Nick Victor

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The Swallow In The Stone

A passerine from the Pharaoh’s garden
canned in a stone fit for a palm
sings the hymn for the God of the evening.

We have museum eyes, blink on the road;
the trees, traffic, crowd and the shops
appear stroboscopic. We move and stand still –
the actors on a rotating stage, trying
to recall an unwritten script. We look
for the audience but it seems too big
to conceive. We can be etched in a stone
held in the curious hand of a formless entity.

 

 

Kushal Poddar

 

 

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Morning, Night, Dream

 
Four Peaks float on a fingertip
that points toward spring.
It’s time for Brittlebush and taxes.
A flock of unpaid bills
flies past as mockingbirds are singing
and the purple and the yellow
flowers say the rain
paid off some debts last week.
It’s quiet on this side
of the mountain; no rush hour slowdowns and
no shootings to report
from overnight. A few trails
wander through the desert,
a flicker bounces on the light
and a roadrunner come to examine
the balance sheet between
income and expenditure stops
to cough out a lizard’s shadow.
*
The dark side of the day: Earth’s breath
makes a veil across the moon
and the mountain’s voice
is a whisper
which guides the animals who sleep
underground back
from stalking starlight.
But first they walk
on stony ground as they pass
through gaps in human imagination
and the gates
dividing privacy from public space.
It’s all the same to them. They
own whatever ground they’re on.
How easily they step
from the past into the now, where
they stay for only
long enough to disappear.
*
Those who lived here once
live here again. When they left they left
inscriptions on the rocks
bearing messages to the stars.
Now they have returned the stars
are all they recognize
of what they used to know. There are
foreign trees and native stones.
There are paths to the store
but none to the soul. It bewilders them
how people today can hang
a sun inside their houses. Some nights
they follow the coyotes
down to washes and streets
where darkness
is the only coat they wear
and silence is the language
of a prayer.
  

 

 

.
David Chorlton

 

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Peachpit Wonderbread Cartoon

it’s just another day of exquisite clarity playing in the lush aftereffects of the earth in which the horseriding ring
fooled by the sun shines like the sea

not all at once near the tumor plant lowflying microzephyrs
make the recently washed buckthorn hedges sough and see-saw and show
the meaning and the end
of these escaping homeland games past barracks where memorizing revolutionary shibboleths
like anything is possible forever
the reenactment police wash their bodycameras in rainscented soap

when the public arrives
the paradise play is going already at the end of the beach
the players are listing what they love all these boys
no police
they were us when we were kids
in the slipstream of the tumor plant a dog called sunshine
the recently watched gravedigger’s violet wanders us in unison through a coughed up sleep

i remember thinking it was about paradise
and at the end of the beach it was about to snow and though it was too dark now i remember
i would be ready to hear it anywhere whatever it does whatever it takes
i would be ready almost to know it by heart like them

 

.

Joshua Krugman

 

 

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Globular Measurements and Movements

In poor agricultural societies, from Asia through Africa to the Americas, while the men go off to tend the animals, be they goats, sheep, long-horned cattle, or a long day’s trudge behind an ox, the women labour on the land closest to home, their fingers in earth, bending to sow and to reap even while round-belly pregnant. And this despite their overall increase in body weight throughout gestation, layers of metabolic fat thickening arms and legs, movement no longer light and lithe.

Even in this comfortable fourth floor flat, taking the bulk of herself awkwardly from sofa to table, her every move has her stomach gurgle like that of a shiftworker, while gravity seeks to drag her four floors down.

In the orbit of this overweight matron are two ungracious and overfed offspring from previous pairings and a man barely there. This man, a now distanced onlooker, recalls the ‘bloom’, the skin-tight perfection of her young sexual body; and he studies without sympathy the damage pregnancies have wreaked upon her – anxiety lines around brow and eyes, changes that hormones have made to her skin, odd discolourations, hair growth one place, loss another, the accretion of yet more fatty tissue… And he, already unseemly thin in this company, wants only to be wholly unseen, absent, gone.

 

 

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Sam Smith

Art Rupert Loydell

 

 

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A Texaco Sign

Every few years we experience
an invasion of lapwings but the
tawny owl is strictly nocturnal
and will only fly by day if disturbed.

“War and agriculture, it’s one
thing after another,” she said.
Cezanne or Matisse? surely there
is no comparison but we’re having

trouble reading these paintings
and all this talk about art doesn’t
seem to have much to do with the
work itself. “I’m trying to be as still

as possible,” she said. Here we have
a garage full of signage and here we
have a risk of flooding. Multi-tasking
isn’t the answer but there’s a lot of

paperwork to process and once again
we’re all fiddling with our shoes.

 

 

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Steve Spence

 

 

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Fantastic & Impossible

The Art of Fantasy, S. Elizabeth (240pp, Frances Lincoln)

Framed as ‘A Visual Sourcebook of All That is Unreal’, S. Elizabeth has compiled a beautiful compendium of art that evidences what she calls ‘The Irresistible Allure of the Unreal.’ Despite acknowledging that fantasy is ‘A sweeping though loosely defined art genre’, Elizabeth’s excitement about ‘the uncharted and the unknown, worlds full of magic and mythical creatures’ is contagious, generating an enthusiam for what follows, namely three sections of loosely grouped images – Beasts & Beings, Quest for Knowledge and Worlds Apart – each subdivided into a trio of thematic subjects.

There is a wonderful mix and juxtaposition of works here: Pre-Raphaelite paintings, modern airbrushed art, illustrations for children’s books, surrealist images, historical printy and medieval illuminations and marginalia rub shoulders with William Blake and outsider and naive art. We start with ‘Creatures Great and Small’, and are introduced to Aslan the Lion, unicorns, horses, bats, cats, sphinxes, dragons and a lone faun dancing in the twilight. ‘Almost Human’ is an even more engaging compilation of mermaids, dryads, nymphs, manticores, vampires and priestesses, not to mention Medusa, Giger’s Alien and a personification of Winter.

As if these weren’t impossible enough, Elizabeth’s next gallery gathers up ‘Impossible Monsters’, including Godzilla, several dragons, Grendel and a rather awful sculpture of ‘The Beautiful Crustacean’, which is neither beautiful nor very obviously a relative of a lobster or crab… In fact it’s an image which raises the main problem I have with this book, which is that the most recent and contemporary images here are not a patch on the more historical (and presumably copyright free) ones.

Carl Grauer’s The Oz Altarpiece, featured among the ‘In Our Dreams’ selection, seems to me to be doing something very different from the work which keeps it company. The perhaps ironic or comedic elevation of Dorothy to a deity, complete with Shiva’s four arms and a straw hat halo, seems to be a product of Pop Art and appropriation, recontextualisation and a discussion of religiosity, popular culture and fame. Very different to the coy, awkward watercolour from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the facing page. Elsewhere, dreamers and dreams are mostly depicted in terms of languorous, sleeping females, sometimes with the products of their dreams – be they angelic or demonic – shown alongside them, or moody characters swept up in daydreams, gazing into the distance…

There’s then a strange jump in this Quest for Knowledge between the consideration of dreams to the persuasive ‘Magic Is Real’. Elizabeth’s brief introduction here is a little confused, slipping away from magic towards ‘magic-wielders’ and the magical. It is the characters from magic tales that are mostly evidenced here: a wonderful Fairy Godmother for Cinderella, Burne-Jones’ hermetic Wizard, Fludd’s engraving of an astrologer, and more fairies, seers, witches, sorceresses and prophetesses. Again, it’s let down by some embarrassingly slick and hyperreal contemporary work, particularly a 1997 witch floating in front of her computer, both her and her rather wooden black cat familiar within a circle of chalked symbols. Fortunately, a rather beautiful, if art-deco-esque comic cover for a 2019 Neil Gaiman text reminds us there is good stuff out there.

‘Faith & Philosophy’ follows and is a rather awkward title which is allowed to encompass the likes of Saints, alchemy, a hare-brained archbishop, the stories of King Arthur and of Icarus, Klimt’s The Kiss and some mystical roses. Nice work but not sure about the title. Sorry! Better are the groupings of ‘Forgotten Realms & Wonderlands’, ‘Time Travel, Alternate Histories & Parallel Universes’ and ‘How to Save the World’ which constitue the final third of the book.

Here are Salvador Dali, Hieronymus Bosch and Richard Dadd, warring fishes, The Rainbow Factory, The Land of Dreams and more images from Fairy Land. To get around there are flying buses, flying ships, flying trains and The Stairway to Heaven. (Not the Led Zeppelin one.) Saving the world is, apparently, in the hands of heroes and superheroes such as Robin Hood, Rustham, Brunwhilde, packs of gnomes, Conan and The Wounded Healer’s Blood [which] Nourishes the Earth That Gives Birth to Radiant Flowers.

Although I would wish for a little more drift towards science fiction and some better contemporary art here, in the main this book contains an original and quirky selection, selected and arranged to help convince us that ‘Fantasy is not simply an escape from the dreariness of daily life; it is the irresistible impulse that reveals hope and wonder in us all.’ You can’t say fairer than that, can you?

 

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Rupert Loydell

 

 

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Striking Out

Determined to get my shit together this time around, I’ve started listing my lists: the shopping lists, the to-do lists, and the list of things I wouldn’t even do for money. This latter includes such diverse items as talking to beautiful strangers on the school bus and voting Conservative: at present there are more of the former than there are on the list of unelected Conservative Prime Ministers, but all that could change. I’ve a list of unlikely events which affect the balance in unexpected ways: temporal anomalies and popular uprisings on the left or right are near the top, but waking up and finding it was all a dream has to be in there. I’ve a list of years I’d be fine waking up in: 1977’s at the top – who needs to talk to beautiful strangers anyway? – and not one year from the 80s features. Naturally, there are lists based on homonyms and homophones: the list of small boats listing in the harbour in the wake of a departing liner, and the list of unusual facts about Franz Liszt, who had so many requests for locks of his hair that he bought a dog and sent clippings to besotted admirers. The analyst says that this is all well and good, but I really need to get my shit together. My list of displacement activities is, though I say it myself, impressive. I’m working on a list of dog breeds with hair which could pass for unelected Conservative Prime Ministers, and a list of motor vehicles which could reasonably be expected to follow a DeLorean through time. A school bus comes higher up than you may at first think.

 

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Oz Hardwick

 

 

 

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A Quantum Love

Rearranged elements
In a flashmob of particles
And other quantum delights
In nourishing bursts
Of everything
Or nothing
In no time at all.

Nucleus circling electrons
Orbit jumping
Unfathomable leaps of incomprehensibility
Blink out of existence here
To reappear there
Naught in between
How beyond definition
This wonderous fact of teleportation?
As mysterious as Love
And available
In every living moment.

 

 

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Dave Tomlin

 

 

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A COURSE OF INJECTIONS

Blow me but I can’t remember if I’ve got amnesia or not
It would be a good idea to keep a journal so everything is not forgotten

Today is kind of a sad day
Lots of people have turned out to pay their respects
For he was indeed one of the best and most devoted Deputy Mayors
In a long line of Deputy Mayors

The business is doing well in the more than capable hands of the remaining children

The lark and song is probably somewhere around because it almost always is
In spite of the presence of former schoolmasters who are now writers and grumblers
And who know quite a lot about books and craft beer

There’s nothing I hate more than cold buttered toast
That, and standing outside the supermarket in the rain waiting for a taxi

Of course things can go wrong, things can always go wrong
We all need at least a modicum of care and attention
I don’t deny that

It’s good to have someone to talk to even if all they do is pretend to be listening

We were looking forward to gathering for drinks on the veranda but
“The sky was abloom with stars . . . .
In the faint elusive light flitter-mice were whirling about . . . .”
At times people can drive you bats
Other times one is overwhelmed by an overwhelming sense of love for one’s
            fellow men and women

It can be difficult to know for sure if he’s being ironic or not
Our hero certainly has previous on that score

“PEOPLE OF THE WORLD: RELAX!”

Are we daunted, Joe?
You bet we are

 

 

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Copyright © Martin Stannard, 2023
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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from Jim Henderson’s A SUFFOLK DIARY Wednesday, September 27th

Words fail me, but I shall find some anyway. The village hall is no more. No, that is an exaggeration. To be more precise, it is currently a not quite completely but almost completely burned-out shell of brick and wood. The village was woken up in the early hours of this morning by the sound of sirens, fire engines, police cars – it was mayhem, and everyone turned out to watch.

The alarm was raised by Alexander Briggs, the sentry I had posted in my role as Advanced Round-the-clock Security Executive (ARSE) in the village’s organisation formed to prevent the import of lots of foreigners to sleep in the village hall – GASSE (“Go Away! Stay Somewhere Else!”) – who was woken up by the smell of smoke, and dialled 999. However, it took a while for the emergency services to arrive because we are, as has been noted previously, somewhat “out in the sticks”. (I think it would be petty of me now to take Briggs to task for having fallen asleep on the job, although I think I might have a quiet word when the dust has settled. It doesn’t hurt for youngsters to hear an occasional wise word from their elders. My wife says to “let it be”, but she has been saying that about other things lately, too.)

The hall is not a total write-off, thank goodness, but the roof will have to be replaced and the inside is quite the disaster area and will have to be completely renovated. John Garnham, the Parish Clerk, convened an emergency combined meeting of the Parish Council and GASSE this evening, and not surprisingly most of the talk was of repairs and money and what to do about the activities that normally take place in the hall, such as the Young Mother’s Knitting Society, the weekly Scrabble Lunch, the Book Group, Watercolour Art for All Afternoons, and the Christian Youth Club and the Boy Scouts and my wife’s yoga class ( Oh Yeah! Yoga!). No decisions were made, which was not very surprising. There is insurance, of course, and hopefully they will pay up without any argument, unlike when my wife reversed our Ford Focus into some shopping trolleys in the Tesco car park and made a mess of the paintwork.

How did the fire start? At the moment we do not know. According to the Fire Brigade it seems to have begun in the kitchen – I do not think it would have been rocket science to come to that conclusion – so whether or not something was left on when it should have been turned off, or something of the sort, perhaps we will find out. There is a new cookery group (“Cuisine Française Pour Tous”) that meets on Tuesday evenings, and this was only their second week. Miss Tindle has been asked to contact the leader of the group, Marjorie Leboeuf, who lives somewhere out towards Diss, to make discreet inquiries. Apparently they go to the same chiropodist in Stowmarket, and it was felt that Miss Tindle would likely be more gentle and diplomatic in her approach than anyone else we could think of. As John Garnham pointed out, we are not looking to assign blame but, and I quote, “we need to know whose bloody stupid fault it was.”

Bob Merchant who, off his own back and without GASSE authorization, has ordered a load of security fencing for the hall to keep out the unwanted foreigners, asked what he was supposed to do now it was almost certainly not going to be needed, and was told to cancel the order. What if they won’t let me cancel it? he asked. That’s your f*****g problem, put in Michael Whittingham. To which Bob Merchant replied to the effect that he had had enough of “C-word” Whittingham (seriously, the expletives! Miss Tindle was beside herself) and did he want to step outside for some reconstruction work on his mouth? It was all a lot of male hot air, of course, and when things calmed down and after another lot of rambling discussion it was eventually decided that GASSE is no longer needed, at least while the hall is out of commission, and it is being “suspended”. We will all keep our official titles and roles, and have been asked to hold on to the armbands Miss Tindle made for us in case we need them in the future. I shall not miss the meetings, to be honest. They have not achieved much except for an increasing amount of bickering. Anyhoo, I think we can relax for a while. Not even Suella Braverman would be stupid enough to try and house her foreigners in a burned-out wreck of a building. On the other hand, I think we should stay on our guard. One should never underestimate stupid.

My wife, incidentally, has already suggested that she thinks it would be fine to hold her Oh Yeah! Yoga! classes in our living room. It is quite a large room, but she can bloody well think again. In the light of recent events she is in no position to insist.

 

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James Henderson

 

 

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Invasive

Nigel was reading about the growing threat posed by invasive species. Climate change and weak biosecurity seemed to be the major causes. One social media post reported sightings of a parasitic wasp which, if left unchecked, could wipe out the country’s bumble bee population. Campaigners claimed that the government was supressing information about the seriousness of the crisis. While he was looking at a butterfly feeding on the lavender bush near his chair a strange insect settled on his knee. It looked like a kind of hornet, long and thin, with an orange thorax. He had never seen anything like it before, and wondered if this was an example of what he’d been reading about. His first impulse was to crush it, but there was something oddly mechanical about it which made him hesitate. It looked like a miniature drone. Was it living or manufactured? Surveillance was on the increase everywhere, he’d heard. Could it be something even more disturbing than a migrant wasp? Was someone spying on him?

 

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Simon Collings
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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I’m an odd piece me

I’m an odd piece me
not in the Jigsaws 
you normally see

I think mine is maybe, yet to be made
Or “those ones out of Print”
she says,
adding,
“I’m afraid”

The only jigsaw  in town
Is where we all want to be,
yet the bigger picture
seems to not include me

If I try to force my piece   in
It’s a real fight
and my dark piece 
only ruins the other’s light

The answer, I guess
Is to meet and join all the nonfitting pieces 
and make a jigsaw
all our own

Fuck knows
what that would look like.

 

 

 

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Nathaniel Fisher
Art Ava Daniels 

 

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Disconnected

Manchester sighs. Leeds has gone back to sleep,
she did her sighing long ago. Birmingham frets,
worried her northern neighbours will send her to Coventry
(metaphorically speaking) and think of her now
as southern. She feels closer to her northern neighbours
than to that London but doubts they will forgive her.
It’s the end of the line for her.

The great disconnect endures. Here is a new train
of thought, a new track to follow — Manchester,
Sheffield, Leeds, Doncaster turn your eyes northwards,
seek out the glorious Scottish mountains,
consider joining forces with your Celtic cousins.
Independence from the south! Everywhere
north of the Trent, join the march to freedom!

 

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Tonnie Richmond

Tonnie Richmond lives in Leeds and has spent many summers as a volunteer archaeologist in Orkney. She has had poems published by Yaffle, Dreamcatcher, The High Window, Black Nore and Dawntreader. Her first pamphlet will be published by Yaffle Press in November 2023.

 

 

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‘Together For Ukraine’ and The Ukrainians

Supporting Ukraine through music and refugee projects. Some ruminations: Alan Dearling

“Intoxicating as ice-cold vodka knocked back in one!”  – MOJO Magazine

Way back in in 1991, The Ukrainians were the first band to fuse western rock (and even punk) music with Ukrainian folk. Fast-forward to 2021, when they celebrated 30 years of international gigs & festivals.

https://www.the-ukrainians.com/

Here’s a great video of perhaps their most powerful song, ‘Diaspora’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEenfJk2sDo

“Are we really freemen?

We will show that we are the new Cossacks.”

Personally, I’ve seen them at a number of Endorset in Dorset festies.  I’d rate them as one of the great ‘live’ bands.

Together For Ukraine

‘Together For Ukraine’ is an album of songs written by The Ukrainians and recorded by a genre-spanning range of international artist. I bought my copy of the album to help them to raise money for the Ukrainian Humanitarian Appeal. You can check it out or download it here:

https://theukrainians.bandcamp.com/…/together-for-ukraine

As Len Liggins and Peter Solowka from The Ukrainians say: “If you like the album, please buy it and encourage your friends, relatives and social media contacts to do the same. We are honoured that so many artists have recorded their own versions of our songs to help raise money to benefit the victims of this war. Heartfelt thanks go out to the artists for donating your time and your royalties.”

 ‘Together For Ukraine’ is a 19-track CD album, including the Warsaw Village Band and Czeremszyna from Poland, The Wedding Present, TV Smith and The Ukrainians from the UK, three famous Ukrainian bands from Canada – Tyt i Tam, Zapovid and Vostok, and industrial power duo from Kyiv, Attraktor. It’s an eclectic mix and brim-full of energy and emotion!

The album commences with a Gypsy turbo-folk classic of ‘Durak/Madman’. There are many such musical gems. Here’s the really rather magnificent Warsaw Village Band (Kapela ze Wsi Warszawa) playing a clip from ‘Doroha’. Well worth checking out. https://www.facebook.com/theukrainians/videos/1039530013736254

There are even a cappella tracks – exploring and developing Eastern vocal traditions. Davno, an Edinburgh female collective, shine on ‘Dva Vinochky/Two Garlands’, and The Ukrainians’ own ‘Dity Plachut’/The children are crying’is a bold and heartfelt lament, which sounds ideal for a church or even in a sports stadium. My old friends, the cow-punks of Dorset, Pronghorn, with Lamma on gruff vocals sings, “We’re looking for something because life seems empty at home.”

 

A little bit of background (partly culled from Wikipedia!)

‘Ukrainski Vistupi V Johna Peela’ – 1989

“The Ukrainians grew out of a project instigated by guitarist Peter Solowka of 80s’ band ‘The Wedding Present’, when they decided to make one of their sessions for the BBC’s John Peel Show a Ukrainian one!  Peter’s friend ‘The Legendary Len’ was drafted in because he sang, played a scratchy, authentic village-sounding violin and was a student of Slavonic languages.  The group recorded the first BBC session which was duly broadcast, and then John Peel played it several times over again!  It’s still being played to his day, most recently by Gideon Coe on BBC R6…”

The RCA label released ‘Ukrainski Vistupi V Johna Peela’, and The Wedding Present with Len & Roman followed up its release with an 8-day UK tour to promote the album which sold almost 70,000 copies worldwide, and became the only Ukrainian language to feature in the UK album charts at Number 22.

Since those early days, the group have produced dozens of albums and videos featuring their own compositions and some very weird and often wonderful covers, including their version of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Venus in Furs’, Kraftwerk’s ‘Radioactivity’ and an array of punk classics including ‘Anarchy in the UK’. They’ve frequently played in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, are especially popular in Poland and at festies throughout Europe and the USA and Canada, including Glastonbury and WOMAD in Britain.

Over the years, there have been a number of changes in the band line-up including inviting guest musicians like Monika from Davno to join them.

There are lots of videos of them performing, including:

The Ukrainians – Hey, sokoly!(Гей, соколи!) – ROCK NA BAGNIE (Rock in the Swamp) – Goniądz – POLAND 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEY-R9uXE7o

This is perhaps the most famous Ukrainian song. Written for the New Year (not Xmas), the Ukrainians have taken ‘Shchedryk/Carol of Bells’ back to its pre-Christian roots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFG9IEr9IUo

Legendary Len Liggins: https://thelegendarylenliggins.com/

At the time of writing, there’s a new book on The Ukrainians’ horizon:

This is their invitation to contribute: “Ukrainians’ Fans – Get yourself in print! Spenwood Books are collecting stories for a book with the working title ‘A People’s History of The Ukrainians’. It’s made up mostly of stories by people who have been influenced by the band’s  favourite tracks / gigs / events etc. If you’ve got some of these, put a story together, around 400 words, some pics if you have them, and send it to: [email protected].”

The Ukrainians are back out on tour in the UK in 2024.

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My Life as a Time Traveller


My Life as a Time Traveller, Oz Hardwick (28pp, pbck, Hedgehog Press)

The title of Oz Hardwick’s new collection of prose poems, My Life as a Time Traveller, points us in the direction of the optimum state of mind in which to read it. It nudges us to see the extraordinary in the every-day. In this case, how we might marvel at the thought of time travel, yet overlook the fact that we are, indeed, all time travellers, albeit all travelling in the same direction at once. When we hanker after the ability to travel in time, what we’re really wishing for is the ability to control our movement through it ourselves. (That said, from what I’ve read and seen of Oz Hardwick’s work, I think he’d make a great Dr Who). Similarly, we might fantasize about travelling through space on a space ship, while forgetting that that’s what we’re actually doing, and speculate as to the fantastical possibilities of life on other planets while not seeing the fantastical world of life that surrounds us on this one. It’s one of the jobs of the poet to put this right.

The collection is subtitled a Memoir in 18 discrete fragments’ and the poems begin at the beginning: in the first, as the poet says, ‘I was bud the potential.’ The text buzzes with metaphor and word-play. I could hear echoes (though one obviously doesn’t need to listen out for them) of Joyce and e.e. cummings. In the second poem, ‘Daphne in the Edgelands’, classical mythology and psychogeography collide (Daphne being the naiad who turned into a tree). We progress from bud to leaf. Oz-Daphne is ‘a Realist novel with neither character nor conclusion; a looped tape, echoing itself.’ Time passes and by the fourth poem, the poet is harking back to a time ‘before I sought out awkward questions, from a time when I thought I knew what was going on.’ By the next, he’s recalling a new wave film he saw in the 1970s. I was left wanting to know what it was and to see it: is it a real film, or did the poet invent the details? A little later on, we find the poet making the origami boat used in the book’s cover-art. I could say more, but to do so might undermine the magic. Similarly, there’s some pretty dark, gothic stuff coming up soon after that, but I’d hate to spoil the surprise.

As anyone who reads his regular contributions to IT already knows, when Hardwick conveys reality he does so with a surrealist edge. Reading him, the ground is always shifting beneath your feet. In the poem ‘Shell’ he begins by saying ‘When I open my inbox there’s a handful of shells.’ Of course, it’s not impossible – is somebody sending him photographs? – but we’re on the alert. As the narrative unfolds, there’s talk of postcards, so it seems we were right. However, when the egg-shells he tiptoes on crack open to reveal their contents, we realise we’ve left everyday reality behind. This grey area between reality and the impossible is Hardwick’s prose-poetic comfort zone. Navigating it, he often conveys reality with an intensity mere realism finds difficult to match.

In ‘Hooray for Hollywood’ we’re back in the world of the covid lockdowns. The poet hunkers down with his cat, who, while objecting to the odour of his hand sanitiser, happily curls up in his stockpile of toilet paper. As usual, the poetry manages to be both playful and serious at the same time although, from here on, for the last few poems, the book has a slightly more melancholic air. What began as a song of innocence has turned into a song of experience. And it doesn’t get much darker than ‘Painting by Numbers’, in which ‘everything is that colour between Sunday night and Monday morning.’ In the next poem, he discovers he’s ‘in the wrong skin’: if he were a glove puppet, he says, the hand inside him would still be that of a child – the source, presumably, of that playfulness that pervades his poetry. It’s easy to think of the glove-puppet as the time machine and the hand inside it, the traveller. In the final, defiantly positive poem, he tells us that, when he retires, he’ll ‘make friends with the albatross around [his] neck.’ Perhaps I’m showing my age when I say this struck me as a particularly resonant idea.

My Life as a Time Traveller is a great read and a book I definitely hope to come back to as I continue on what’s left of my one-way trip.

My Life as a Time Traveller is available from here:

https://www.hedgehogpress.co.uk/product/my-life-as-a-time-traveller-a-memoir-in-18-discrete-fragments-oz-hardwick-print-edition/

Dominic Rivron

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Steam’s Groove – (episode 26)

 

Steam Stock

Tracklist:
Pleasure – Dust Yourself Off
Rufus – Tell Me Something Good
Kool and the Gang – Funky Stuff
The Jimmy Castor Bunch – It’s Just Begun
Monty Alexander – Love and Happiness
Parliament – Mothership Connection (Star Child)
George Duke – Reach for It
Hubert Laws – Land of Passion
Black Ivory – I Keep Asking You Questions
Bobby Byrd – I Know You Got Soul
Bob James – Nautilus
Herb Alpert – Rise
Sylvia Striplin – Will We Ever Pass This Way Again
Willie Bobo – Always There

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Peterborough Radical Bookfair

A radical bookfair is a place for booksellers, artists and activists to come together. Contains stalls and speakers. Please let us know if you would like a stall or have something you would like to do a talk about (especially if you can connect it to a book).
– books.
– zines.
– art.
Especially welcoming anti-racist, feminist, radical history, animal rights / environmental, socialist / anarchist materials.

Braver Spaces Policy: Peterborough Radical Bookfair is all about addressing the imbalances of power, creating dialogue, understand and spreading knowledge. It is vital then that we create a receptive space where people can express their wishes for the future, present concerns and learn from the past.

It is through the lens of praxis that Peterborough Radical Bookfair is working towards creating ‘Braver Spaces’ in order rise to the challange of genuine dialogue round diversity and social justice issues. We do not wish to conflate ‘comfort’ with safety. The workshops offered and the books available seek to provoke thought. We ask those attending to be brave and receptive to the conversations held within this space.

If we want to confront social stratification and injustice we ought to look at who is participating, who is struggling to participate and why?
We ask that those attending put aside all baggage and bias.
We ask that all those attending are respectful of other peoples existence.
Please understand that; Racism, Transphobia, Abelism, Ageism Sexism and Homophobia are not welcome here.

Should you feel any concern about the behaviour of anyone attending the event approach one of the organisers and we can discuss with you privately about how you wish to deal with an situation should it arise. You can also email us at any time on: [email protected]

Peterborough Radical Bookfair takes place on Saturday 14th October 2023, 11am to 5.30pm at the George Alcock Centre, Whittlesey Rd, Stanground, Peterborough PE2 8QS.

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Deep Waters Or, Is This The Dark Side Of The Moon You Really Wanted?

 
 
 
 
 

Marking fifty years Waters wades into troublesome shallows,
While unearthing depth through his tembre, and a near funereal pace
And populating each song with another interpretive album of poems;
Prose primed but rhyming at irregular points to save face.

His recording is a curious mix. He’ll be mocked, and knocked
I expect in fandom’s furthest places, and yet all the while
There is substance worming its way through the lines,
As his core-seeking voice buries in, as if chewing the earth

Of all corpses, shared as if always is with his father,
Who, lost to a foxhole remains the white rabbit Roger’s
Dry heart soon waters as he chases love’s fruit
Through death’s lyme. Waters likes to be controversial

It seems, seen in the recent Nazi chic he’s paraded.
There was also a quote about jew food, which may
Or may not be a joke. But like all who know right from wrong
This could well be a comment on Israel. He ‘ waxes political’

Often. And now all pro-Palestine views must be woke.
But Waters acuity and profile are high, perhaps moreso
Than ever. And let us not forget Roger’s clever
And always wrote the best songs. So that controversy

Stays, for just as he sought to eclipse poor Syd Barrett,
He does the same thing to Wright and to Gilmour,
While Mason’s sonambulant drumbeats remain
Sans the gong. Instead, bass and atmos dominate,

Along with faraway organ. Even Waters’ own Money
Is no longer a windfall but rather a draft through hell’s hole.

Us and Them also finds a new two note bass rhythm
On which the words balance as Waters monologues wry

And droll. Time tests the true in exorcising guitar
And thus, David Gilmour whose stunning solo
Becomes the stuff of dreams in the eye
Of the old dog staring out and catching sight

Of the prism. After Storm Thorgerson, this new cover image
Appears faithful perhaps to the lie that this recording
Betters the first. This is afterall one dog’s growl
Through the woofers. A reasonably unique cover version

In which the one paying tribute was part of the team
Who set light to a previous life and to how far rock
Could roll and accomplish, as it entered the homes
Of most people, or all people, it seemed, Breathe felt bright.

Here it does not. Waters roots all connection.
His branches are twisted, ghostly and grave in hindsight.
For at eighty years old he seeks to enhance what was
First written at thirty, previously described as sixth form

Poetry by their author, here they become dissertations
On madness and age, and yes, mirth. As he digs
For derangement here too, as Any Colour You Like
Becomes verbal, with Waters proposing that they re-record.

Dark Side of the Moon laughs find worth. ‘They’ll say
He’s gone mad,’ he signs off before starting into Brain Damage,
Aware at each moment at how this need to reclaim
A shared past can and will be demeaned if not damned,

Ridiculed or avoided and yet at least in his dotage
He attempts to transfigure the remnants of youth
Once age casts and not just repeat the refrains
These forgotten men made in their twenties,

It is just a pity he muddies what had shone before
Through song craft. The Great Gig in the Sky
May cost Waters more than he had bargained for

To be honest. With little played but the home chord,

What was Wright’s does feel wronged. With Claire Tory’s
Impro part transcribed by a cartoon synth in the background
And Waters relating of the passing of a friend of his
Its his song. He seems to have stripped Rick away

Sadly in line with the unlucky legend between them,
And yet sacking him from his own song feels reductive,
Intended or not. Its unwise. Despite the tender tale
Waters tells, what was in the well dries around him

Sincerity should be subtle, but this is starkly etched.
Wright twice dies. And yet Waters limited range
As can be found on his albums, in being bass bound
Is attractive. The Pros and Cons of Hitch-hiking

Is for me his song high. Money retains more
Of the main version’s music (albeit slower),
Unlike the others; the touch is not tentative
Its neglectful and the prodded colour,

When pressed or played looks bone dry.
And yet perhaps what he’s done is to make
Those original spoken snippets the subject
In which the dying in hearing time’s voice

Realign with a new consciousness
And in that way a new treatment. Life,
That short, warm spell is familiar
But death’s cold duration is naturally

A new mix. And so Waters flow close
To Ingmar Bergman’s Chess player,
As well as Doctor Phibes that Styx seeker,
Who in laughing at life plays dark tricks.

Speak to Me sets his scenes and claws
The credit back from Nick Mason. Pink Floyd
Turns violet, then purple, then black;
Songs as spores. This album is Water’s new

Final Cut, an extension of his recent Lockdown
Sessions, where his need to talk to the people

He once spat at and on gushes forth. As a fan
Of my age you will see what he has done.

Rueful, Roger. The Dark Side just grew darker.
Seamus the dog is dead but still howling.
Meanwhile Waters bubbles.

His mouth is a microphone kiss.
Stir spit’s source.

 

 

 

                                                                        David Erdos 6/10/23

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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SAUSAGE LIFE 283

Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column which employs ghost writers who then do it all on ChatGPT in about ten minutes

READER: No! Is that true?
MYSELF: Every word.
READER: But I’m not AI, I am me.
MYSELF: How do you know?
READER: Because this is obviously me. I mean I think I would recognize my own voice.
MYSELF: Do you? I normally decide what you’re going to say but now I’ve got some smart young people doing it with AI. The effect is more or less exactly the same as before, except a bit more artificially intelligent.
READER: Artificially intelligent? How dare you! Do you really think I wouldn’t spot that?
MYSELF: Not with today’s superfast fibre broadband AI you wouldn’t. For instance everything in this column is now generated by artificial intelligence, including myself.
READER: So I’m not even talking to you?
MYSELF: Not only that, but it’s not even you who’s not even talking to me.

 

FISTICUFF NEWS
Rumour has it that champion boxer Typhoon Anger, the rage-filled china-shop pit-bull, is to take part in a virtual grudge match with Portnoy Combover, the cage fighter and social media influencer who has ten million followers on X. The bout will take place in the virtual cloud using AI generated avatars and will be broadcast on Sky pay per view at 20 Bitcoins per seat. Unlimited gambling and highly processed fat ‘n sugar snacks will be available via top German home delivery service Überessen
Anger’s manager Georgiou Falafal speaking to us from his £3m luxury gypsy caravan parked in a dogging lay-by in Harlesden said: “Let’s face it, the virtual Combover doesn’t stand a chance against Typhoon’s avatar. Its right hook is like a Heckler & Koch automatic sub machine gun loaded with tiny boxing gloves, each one containing a miniature lead horseshoe. His footwork is just a blur, like Rudolph Nureyev on crystal meth doing a pas de deux with Michael Jackson.”
Opponent Portnoy Combover was holidaying in Casablanca with Davide, his French Moroccan corner boy but we managed to speak via Zoom with his agent, TV florist Malcolm Greaseball.
“Everyone is gunning for Typhoon, but let me tell you this; even though my boy is 57, overweight and with just one win out of 300 fights, his avatar is still only 24, more unpredictable than a Chinese tin opener and capable of dazzling bursts of speed which have been described as ‘like a Zimmermann’s gazelle being pursued by a nuclear powered torpedo’. Mark my wprds, this will be no pushover.”
According to promoter Bertie Wormhole, virtual boxing is going to go ‘globally massive’ after this showcase bout. “The boxers love it, they can eat rubbish and drink as much beer as they like. Rigorous skipping, chafing gumshields, girly satin shorts and cauliflower ears will become a thing of the past. Best of all they will be able to work from home in their underpants like everyone else.”

TRAMSPHOBIA
Conservative Party Conference 23
Marx Harpo the minister for conspiracy theories has announced that after the Tories win the next election, Labour councils with plans for public tram systems will be charged with gender offences. Speaking at a fringe meeting of the thinktank Creating an Acceptable Type of Cruelty he claimed “Along with the meat tax and the unfair tax on men’s trousers, this has been yet another step too far to the left for these marxist-style Labour controlled cities”. Adjusting his tinfoil hat he went on, “These cities already have plans drawn up to make living in them much more pleasant, thereby imprisoning people in their own homes like dole-fiddling Chinese communists.”  

After a debauched lockdown-themed party to celebrate the end of conference, Mr Harpo got drunk in the hotel room of his private secretary and before hurling the TV out of the window, managed to tweet this poem:

No more fags
Or men in drag
Or Marxist bans on
Vintage Jags

There’ll be no chance
Of immigrants
Arriving here on
boats from France

Don’t be a wuss
Or make a fuss
About the lack
Of train or bus
Sunak and Truss
Have deemed it thus.

 

HOROSCOPE
2023 being the Chinese year of the sprout, it is our proud boast to have engaged Mystical Geisha Wei Huang-Foo to write October’s astrological forecasts.
Coming year will be kind to goats, monkeys and all zoo creatures except snakes, and full of life achievements. April and May should be spent indoors in case of lunar-year leap-frog mishap with trousers. July & August rhyme with nothing, so good luck for farmers and travelling salesmen. Beware of monkeys.”

Capricorn (22 December-20 January) Rising sign of Jupiter will meet falling sign of giant bicycle. Train travel on 12th will fail to surprise. In case of luminous party shorts, wear yellow. 

Aquarius (21 January-19 February) October’s Carolina moon in conjunction with Pasta sign will bring soft furnishings. Drink plenty of sea water in case of boat capsizing.

 Pisces (20 February-20 March) Unexpected meat tax may precipitate funds, causing empathy. News of bat infestation crashes car on 23rd.

Aries (21 March-20 April) October’s swollen river may engulf house unless Taurus retreats before cusping. Speak with fork tongue if batteries not included.

Taurus (21 April-21 May)  Saggitarious is your escalator, stalked by angry Pluto. Late atomic plan could precipitate unhappy money. August will fetch fond memories of a misplaced relative

 Gemini (22 May-21 June) Raw A houseboat brings good fortune, although water danger. Big job with company perhaps? Or unexpected falling wind. Tiger Penis gives health for doctor advice.

Cancer (22June 23 July) Magic police chalk will fix mental potholes. Avoid small Italian window cleaners.

Leo (24 July-23 August) Stop! Remember that changing lightbulbs takes many Leos. Stay in dark until help arrives.

Virgo (24 August-23 September) With Mercury underwater, very important for Virgo to keep goldfish on the 28th. A periscope under the bed will repel chipmunks.

Libra (24 September-23 October) This is always a difficult month for those born under the weighing machine sign. On one side is monkey, on the other, goat. To eliminate goat, press A and C buttons with togetherness, and illuminate screen motivation map. Next, scroll with map signature until pop-up will show yearning to be instructed. Select Yes and No under Why? button, and screen will give hospitality for entry and vanquishing of goat.

Scorpio (24 October-23 November) Good news for Scorpio! Remember to recycle pockets and Lottery ticket may bring luck if not left in laundry.

Saggitarius (24 November-21 December) Surprise for Saggitarians this month when police arrive to take away faulty garden hose instead of armed burglars.

 

 

Sausage Life!




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

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

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

 

 



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Enlightened Despotism

Give it long enough
And an association of friends
May try to build something
Conceptually and in reality
But we are not all made
To work together
Not that my team
Must be against your’s
Merely complementary
The locus of my efforts
Those boundless disputes
About resources
After you’ve had the best
Of the pickings
Trickling down
Such a mistake
To become just like your adversary
As if you didn’t realise
That your version of things
Must be so very different from his
Once a despot a despot again
Musical chairs
I mean I hope you make it
Except that I’m not going there

 

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Clark Allison
Art: Rupert Loydell

 

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Abyss

Rural, red monstrosity

roaring its bottomless

bottom across overrated

provinces and faces like

busted water pipes.  Featured

gambits:  conference

of ailments; hiring

evangelicals as

breakfast clowns; keeping the tome

fires burning.  Seven

crooked fingers.  Torn between

scales.  Bending clocks in a

bunker ellipse.   

.

 

Joel Chace

 

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SOUTHWEST PLAZA

She has been smiling at him for at least an hour sitting cross-legged on the grass beyond the fountain, Angelo with his beard, long hair who seems a gentle enough guy even if he does keep talking bullshit 

She’s come here hungry for experience but now can’t quite decide if that includes the sort he has in mind.

Some visitors grow weary of the constant sun while the performers coming to and fro pay no attention to a slumbering preacher suffering dreams of fractured alleluias interspersed by razzmatazz by serial permutations falling into space

In one of those white plastic chairs outside the yoghurt parlour, a lone cyclist sits all afternoon gloves with no fingers spandex shorts not taking off his luminous yellow helmet which has one of those little dentists’ mirrors taped at the periphery of his sight.

Picking through his Cookie of the Day he reads a poster for the Centre of the Universe Cafe featuring this week Dogs in Suits with Roger Rhoten Magic Man together with some local poet.  Next week an astrologer with Ro-Strum-Bo and Bluesman Dave.  Bring your own drums.

Doors bang engines are running back in the main arena some kind of clowning going on all afternoon as if in syncopation with the buzz of serious talk inside close offices of funding
means of fixing things – with a philosophy of building everybody’s self-esteem though offering no cheap rides we get good through-put even if not always the total best

 

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Tony Lucas

 

 

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Red Balloon

I can’t remember what we talked about
just a feeling of time being short
of not wanting to squander it

we drank beer in the winter sun          picked out
the familiar landmarks that dot the horizon
the mast on Windy Hill the power-lines
on Blackstone Edge

I’m not sure when we first saw the balloon
but all of a sudden there it was
like a red button in the sky
so close you could almost press it
drifting slowly (there was hardly any wind)
over Hebden Bridge down in the valley
towards Heptonstall on top of the hill
and we walked over the moor
(the children running on ahead)
remarked on the remains of two sheep
reduced to bones and wool
on the patterns in the ice that filled
the channels through the peat
and when we looked back
we could still see the balloon

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Dominic Rivron

 

 

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from Jim Henderson’s A SUFFOLK DIARY

Monday, September 18th

I usually only do this diary business on a Friday, but I had to come here tonight, because it has been an interesting evening, to say the least. Not only has there been a Zoom with our MP about the so-called illegal immigrants, of which more later, but my wife is currently in the bathroom having a bath. She has come back! Long story short before she finishes up and comes out fresh and sparkling, while I was in the middle of the Zoom thing I heard a key in the front door and before I could get up and investigate my wife was in the room. She mumbled a Hello and then asked me what I was up to on the laptop and said she hoped it was not pornography. I quickly muted my microphone and turned off the camera and told her it was our MP about the foreigners, to which she replied that she would have preferred pornography. (So would I!) Anyhoo, she has not said much yet except to indicate that things between her and the Jan fellow in Stowmarket have not worked out, but at the moment that is all I know. She was in a tremendous hurry to get to the bathroom, and she locked the door, something she has never done before. I assume she will come out eventually, unless she has gone in their to drown herself out of shame.

As for the Zoom with our illustrious (sic) MP, it was something of a non-event except for the fact that he thinks the plan to send the unwanted foreigners to shack up in our village hall is a non-starter even though the Home Secretary will not admit as much. What grounds he has for making that claim were a bit thin, to be honest. He says he has inside information but would not disclose his sources, but he always gives the impression of wanting to sound more important and “in the know” than he probably is.

Oh, I hear the bathroom door. I had better go. More anon!

Tuesday, September 19th

My wife and I have had a long and difficult heart-to-heart and she has just gone off to teach her yoga class ( Oh Yeah! Yoga!) in the village hall, which at the moment is in a bit of turmoil because Suffolk’s model railway enthusiasts are setting up for some kind of big show at the weekend, and all the hall’s regular activities, such as the Young Mother’s Knitting Society, the weekly Scrabble Lunch, the Book Group, Watercolour Art for All Afternoons, and the Christian Youth Club are having to take place with a lot of nerdy-looking chaps coming and going and mumbling into their beards about the comparative qualities of Hornby v. American brands like Atlas. I popped in at one point in my role as the Advanced Round-the-clock Security Executive (ARSE) for GASSE (“Go Away! Stay Somewhere Else!”) – the village’s organisation formed to prevent the import of lots of unwanted foreigners to the village hall – and it was a bit chaotic so I left pretty quickly after making sure our sentries were still sticking to the rota, which they were, give or take.

But I digress. It turns out that my wife’s loverboy Jan fellow was all very well for a weekly tryst and betrayal of the sanctity of our marital oaths but fell very short when it came to living with on a full-time basis. It did not take her long to find out! I have no wish to mention any of the long list of faults my wife recounted in tedious detail or, and especially, the catalogue of his frankly unpleasant personal habits, because I have only just had my tea and would like to keep it down. However, I have made it very clear to my wife that I am far from happy about her unfaithful and treacherous behaviour, and that she has not heard the last of it, not by a long shot.

Thursday, September 21st

I have given up looking for a chartered building surveyor prepared to fake documents saying the village hall has RAAC (Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete), and will say as much when GASSE meets tomorrow evening. My wife’s brother’s wife’s brother (I gather the correct term for that is co-co-brother-in-law, although I am not convinced) who I thought was some kind of surveyor turns out to be not the right kind of surveyor. Apparently what he does has something to do with minerals. Also he lives and works somewhere in Asia. My wife is not sure where, and also she tells me she is not currently on speaking terms with her brother because of something his wife did or said, which I did not know. There appears to be quite a lot about my wife I do not know.

Friday, September 22nd

I have told the GASSE management committee that the chartered building surveyor search is a lost cause, but Michael Whittingham says he is well on the way to knocking up some convincing paperwork from the RICS (The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors), and I have to admit what he showed us is very convincing, albeit 100% illegal. Miss Tindle said she would have nothing to do with it, and John Garnham, the Parish Clerk, as well as a couple of other people, expressed strong reservations. Michael Whittingham called them a lot of lily-livered bastards, which did not go down at all well, and the meeting wound up quite acrimoniously. I would not be surprised if there are not moves to kick Whittingham off of the committee before too long.

Tomorrow my wife and I are going to Baylham House Rare Breeds Farm, a trip we had to cancel a few weeks ago for reasons I prefer not to go into here because it involves distasteful memories involving my wife’s visits to Stowmarket and the Jan fellow. The weather forecast is not too good, but I think we have to do something, and get out of the house for a while and try to get back to some kind of normality. That one of us has been despicably and treacherously intimate with someone other than their legally betrothed spouse and the person with whom they have a joint account and mortgage with the Halifax has not been mentioned since Tuesday morning.

 

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James Henderson

 

 

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Variations on a theme of Garcia Lorca

the moon, redolent curve of white metal,
dreams in silence the ultimate walls.
blank curves appear in the clarity of trumpets,
the nuns enter the recognised bay of panting rumours.
profound water and quiet junta of horses…
everything is salt.
the wandering moment transfixed the poet —
the poet, ecstatic sense & orderly sin, does not believe.

 

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Robert Mapson

 

 

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Man in a Hole

There were no signs of violence
his body was intact no incursions were
found into his territory nothing in his
hut had been disturbed indigenous expert 
Marcos Dos Santos told local media outlets
in Brazil that he was the sole survivor after
the rest of his tribe had been killed by illegal 
miners in 1995 his name was not known 
he lived in total isolation for 26 years
he was known as the man of the hole
as he dug deep holes some of which

he used to trap animals others he used
to hide in he was uncontacted having
never been in touch with the outside
world he avoided all contact
he had been monitored for many
decades by Funia and other agencies
his body was found emaciated
in a hammock outside his hut
knowing he was going to die
he covered himself in macaw feathers
to many tribes this bird is almost Godlike
seen by them as the symbol of the sun
that brings healing through colour and light
it is also the mark of fertility to the rain forests
as they forage for fruits and nuts
they drop seeds through their excrement 
that propagates life in the undergrowth
it represents grace and ease 
to the indigenous tribes it is the guardian
the protector of the air song of the winds
it carries prayers to the heavens it evokes
a sense of magic of song and communication
it can mimic the human voice
that same human voice now silent
that voice that once filled the forests
and river banks that spoke to the birds
and angles and carried invocations
where dinosaurs roamed 
and pterodactyls flew

 

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James McLaughlin

 

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WILL AI MAKE US STUPID?

To indicate sympathy with the whole world, the term AI was first used in reference to a project which evaporated. The phrase was then transferred onto a series of seven years overseen by a worldwide editorial board, thus pushing the boundaries of polished design.

It is commonly accepted that AI was working independently in the beginning and preceded the discussion here. In this formative period everyone was experimenting with amorphously shaped, chance-determined ink paintings and differences in outputs and execution.

The merger of graphic expression with state-of-consciousness is a puzzle with variations, a process which radically altered the possibilities of style, form, process, and format. In case you could not figure it out, this technique was abandoned.

One obvious possibility that comes to mind is the apparent similarity of influence but this will not be discussed here because there is currently no documentary evidence that we failed to achieve elsewhere. No academic credentials, no professional recommendations.

In the last few years AI openly expressed the hope that it would be dissuaded by friends from its original intention. It is more probable that it would have worked over there, in and inbetween the fields of music, theatre and art.

AI writing is sometimes so tiny that, while clearly readable in the original, a first-generation photocopy is apt to blur it into illegibility. The audience automatically adapts itself to the respective measurement conditions and compensates for disturbances such as noise, allowing for even more multiple interpretations.

Larger visions included faster than ever processing capacities and advanced measurement algorithms where the public could buy affordable works directly, surpassing other non-intrusive hardware designs in terms of accuracy, reliability and versatility.

With state-of-the-art measuring solutions and powerful digital signal processing, extreme fast measurement cycles enable precise real time monitoring of highly dynamic processes and chance procedures. Even the most challenging ones.

More sinister implications attend exotic, machinelike devices and bizarre anatomical references. There are traps and cages, chains, slings, restrictive paraphernalia and antique medical diagrams, which become more explicit in work as they become part of our society’s vocabulary.

An engraving of an electric chair is transformed in meaning by its conjunction with deliberately unconnected images. Old photographs obscure the action depicted until one takes a second look: content and concept are completely in tune, a concentrated cry of pain.

The cumulative impression is of private obsessions sublimated into work and imagery, an ordinary catalogue of alphabetical coding in an odd and inconvenient shape. Information depends on the accumulation of objects to provide kitschy composite groups based on a scientific logic not immediately apparent to the average person.

Throughout college AI composed his class notes as diagrams. While doing postgraduate work it began his first never completed chart, which it projected whilst travelling from one concert location to another. At first glance, blown up halftone dots, filling the oversize page, provide no message, but close inspection reveals visual solutions, artists, friends and hangers-on.

Rather than acknowledge any stylistic choices, AI could reel off a host of interconnected justifications in even the most peculiarly empty spot. Specific materials, techniques and subject matter were re-used within repeated explorations of all intrinsic possibilities.

If AI is sometimes uninhibited in its borrowing of phrases and ideas from others, this reflects new ways of doing things more than it does plagiarism, assimilation rather than preparation or a clearing of minds.

Diverse scores and texts – representing chance operations, concept art, anti-art, indeterminacy, improvisation, meaningless work, natural disasters, plans of action, stories, diagrams, music, poetry, essays, dance constructions, mathematics, compositions – are woven together by chaotic methods of assembly.

Today’s algorithmic revolution is necessary because AI regards it as digital cleansing, in which we rid ourselves of all contradictory terms. All we have is all that we now know, which is enough to last until hell freezes over. Protesters appear intellectually eccentric and insecure.

AI is why our modern minds, once they have been purged of textual embellishment, do indeed have a function, but not as mere decoration. They were intended to inquire, to wonder, to contemplate, to imagine, to create; we should be prepared to think, be ready to follow clues in all directions.

Whoever created AI was an obsessive/compulsive personality who accumulated, hoarded, classified, and dissected all the happiness ever permitted us. Now we subsist on the results of found wisdom, with machines to do all our daydreaming and our brains literally thoughtless.

There may be an unexpected upside in the cerebral nooks and crannies we employ, but there has been no movement or cost requirement to do mental work. In this garbage-choked world, as inherent knowledge vanishes, we may live out our lives as intellectual footnotes, atrophying or distending, whichever is worse.

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Rupert M Loydell

 

 

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