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THE DIARY OF A GENTLEMAN-POET

Monday, August 5th

Reading Herodotus this afternoon, and there’s this about some tribe or other:

“Among their customs, it is said that when a man falls sick, his closest companions kill him, because as they put it, their meat would be spoilt if he were allowed to waste away with disease. The invalid, in these circumstances, protests that there is nothing the matter with him – but to no purpose. His friends refuse to accept his protestations, kill him and hold a banquet. Should the sufferer be a woman, her woman friends deal with her in the same way. If anyone is lucky enough to live to an advanced age, he is offered in sacrifice before the banquet – this, however, rarely happens, because most of them will have had some disease or other before they get old, and will consequently have been killed by their friends.”

What larks!

It looks as if we shall either have to start selling eggs, or give them away. I’m going to go for the former. I’m not a charity. Our hens are very productive, and we probably have too many of them, but Jethro says having a lot is good because they’re sociable creatures. I don’t know how he would know. It’s of little consequence.

Melissa telephoned. She said she had been reading one of my old books of poetry, poems I wrote when we were together. Thank goodness she was speaking to Cook, and not to me.

Tuesday, August 6th

I had a letter from an old friend and in it he tells me that “poetry is not where it’s at”, although I’m unclear about where it’s at is. I’m pretty sure it’s of bugger all consequence, and I’m a very long way beyond worrying about what other people think.

Melissa telephoned, and told Cook she’s signed up for “keep fit” classes. Cook says she might go with her. Seriously? If she does, I hope they have a paramedic within easy reach.

A nice little piece in Herodotus where a northern country was described by travelling strangers as a place where the air was full of feathers, so much so that one could not see where one was going. The feathers were snow.

Wednesday, August 7th

Awake early (at 6.30) but felt alright, and even did a little bit of early writing. Some days in the morning I feel really lousy, and can’t get going. I don’t really understand those days, because I can feel almost unhealthily out of it, but usually by the time the evening comes I’m alright. Then the next day, like today, I feel good. Is it just days where I’m missing some essential ingredient? Am I getting old?

I mentioned this to Cook, and she thinks I should eat more fruit. I already eat quite a bit of fruit, so that wasn’t especially helpful. Perhaps I should have more sex. I could go for that . . . but it’s of little consequence, and never mind more sex: any sex of any kind is not at all easy to arrange.

Melissa telephoned. I stopped thinking about sex at that point.

Jethro has suggested we turn the South Paddock, which is quite large, into somewhere youngsters can ride ponies and practice some show jumping. He says we could make a fortune. Jethro is a bit of a would-be entrepreneur on the quiet. But I don’t need to make a fortune. I already have one, and I don’t relish having lots of children running around the place, or even vaguely near the place. Having them in the same county country is bad enough.

Thursday, August 8th

Cook says she’s decided against going to keep fit class on account of her hip and also she doesn’t really have the time. I think it’s really because she couldn’t find a leotard to fit her. It’s of no consequence – not to me, anyway – and I wish there was something more interesting to say about today.

Friday, August 9th

Awoke just before 6 from a very tiring dream, the details of which I recall clearly but will not transcribe here, because they’re distasteful. Wide awake, I got up, and by 8 I had done two crosswords, written a poem, listened to some Mahler, showered, had a half hour walk with Winnie, and read some Herodotus. That was almost a full day – before breakfast! In deference to Cook, I had fruit, although I had already had a bucket load of coffee.

By 9 I was tired enough to go back to bed, but in that direction ruin lay, so I battled against the overwhelming desire for a lie down.

An email from “a fan” says I should be out and about more, peddling my poetic wares. I told them that my wares-peddling days are over, and it’s enough for me now to bask in the small glory of occasional publication and adulation from a select few. It’s of little consequence, but it’s enough.

Melissa telephoned. Cook was under instruction to inform all callers that I was in conference.

Saturday, August 10th

Continuing with Herodotus: men with eyes in their chests, dog-headed men, and a couple of interesting marriage rituals: one, where a girl about to be married is taken to the king and if he fancies her she leaves him “no longer a maiden”, and another where after the wedding a party is thrown, and each of the male guests enjoy the bride. I wonder if old Herodotus made some of this stuff up for fun . . . I suppose it’s of not much consequence, not now, anyway. Those maidens, if what he said ’twere true, would almost certainly have disagreed.

Melissa telephoned. All thoughts of weddings flew from my mind.

Wandering around the vegetable garden this evening I noted that the new potatoes are ready for picking and the lettuce is in flower. The redcurrants and raspberries will soon be ready for digging up: I could see the leaves were turning brown, which is a sure sign the fruit is ripening. Was tempted to pluck a banana from the bush, but figured it would spoil my dinner, which was waiting for me when I got back indoors: steak, well-marinated in garlic and soy sauce, just the way I like it, with heaps of chips and a bottle of red plonk.

 

 

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James Henderson (Gentleman)

 

 

 

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BIBLE STORY


If you’ve read your Bible
You’ll know that Jesus
Loved John more than anyone

More than Mary
More than Martha

More than Peter’s mother-in-law
Or Joanna

John was extra special
 
 
 
 
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Steven Taylor
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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An Arts Education for Classless Society

 

We’re waving flags and burning police cars, breaking records and shop windows. We’re breaking news and we’re breaking the fourth wall: are you? Are you breaking a sweat, concerned about the breakages, both material and spiritual, not to mention metaphorical? Are you willing to break all familial ties and links to the old school tie? The old school breaks beats, beats on outstretched, trembling hands until they break like choirboys’ voices at the close of short careers. Them’s the breaks. Explosions break the silence, break the tenuous connections, and we take our places at the broken table for a final breakfast of champignons, fried over static from broken radios and burning shops. The glass ceiling remains unbreakable, but we’ll see if we can broker some sort of arrangement.

 

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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

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Out of Place

          


Seeing Further
, Esther Kinsky (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
The Edge of the Alphabet, Janet Frame (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Although, according to various surveys of readers, it is not common practice, I have always had favourite publishers whose books I kept an eye out for. First it was the green Modern Penguin Classics, then it was Picador – which was easy because in the 80s and 90s they had their own book spinners in bookshops. More recently my go to publishers have been Charco Press, Open Letter (mostly on the back of Rodrigo Fresán’s books) and Fitzcarraldo editions. (And Other Stories are about to join the list.)

Ever since I bought Clare Louise Bennett’s Pond and the first of Agustin Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla trilogy I have kept an eye out for Fitzcarraldo’s sparse blue (fiction) and white (non-fiction) book covers. Two of these new books I’m reviewing are by authors – Esther Kinsy and Olga Tokarczuk – who Fitzcarraldo helped introduce to English speaking audiences and garner critical and popular acclaim, not to mention literary prizes.

Of course, I haven’t enjoyed – or indeed read – everything they’ve produced. Recently they’ve taken to publishing swathes of Jon Fosse and Annie Ernaux, both of whom I find incredibly dull; and sometimes it’s hard to see why a book has been designated its blue or white cover: Isn’t Ian Penman’s book about Fassbinder as much about him and his response to the latter’s films, which is a kind of storytelling? And aren’t diaries always fictional constructs, especially when rearranged alphabetically and edited/selected by the Sheila Heti?

I don’t say that to be difficult. Kinsky’s Seeing Further comes wrapped in white but is a story, albeit perhaps a true story, about her buying and trying to resurrect an abandoned cinema in Hungary. Sprinkled with photographs, it is about a love affair with the flicker of projected images and an attempt to capture the cinematic experience. Like Kinsky’s novels, it is a quiet, intriguing book, full of unexpected characters and the web of relationships between them. There is no big storyline or plot, no dramatic ending, simply an unassuming tale of the narrator deciding, almost on a whim it seems, to buy a semi-derelict cinema in a small town in Hungary, then following through by leaving Budapest and moving there.

It is a wonderful exploration about light and dark, memory and illusion, town versus city, communities changing and adapting. And it is about coping with the past and with failure:

     Why doesn’t anyone come to the cinema? I asked Jószi
     after the film? He could not have been the only one who
     still had memories connected to this film, the laughter of
     another time, mixed with dreams and hopes still in his
     mind.
          Jószi shurugged his shoulders. Maybe people want to
     be alone with eveyrhting they miss. They sit at home,
     thinking about what they don’t have. We used to have this
     cinema, it was here, it was a complete place. All around it
     many things were lacking but the cinema was there.

Jószi goes on to suggest that the ‘fairy tales’ that were conjured up in films made audiences cry and laugh together, but that ‘Returning to the cinema here is like taking a look around in that fairy tale.’ He suggests that ‘Maybe they’d rather forget.’

There are things that cannot be forgotten, too, in Tokarczuk’s The Emposium, a bizarre and meandering novel that is subtitled ‘A Health Resort Horror Story’. Confusingly, the proof review copy comes wrapped in white, not the blue it will be formally published in, and the blurb suggests it is a return to the territory of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

I know nothing about Mann or his writing. To me The Emposium is a weird combination of Katherine Mansfield, The Wicker Man and Rudolf Steiner. I confess I found it an effort to get through, though it does quicken its pace for the final third, after a slow start. Of course, our society knows little about health resorts in the mountain, let alone the idea of curing Tuberculosis by breathing mountain air and taking gentle walks and icy baths. Nowadays, the idea of a spa has become a luxury break, attached to self-indulgence and pampering; a far remove from the early 20th Century depicted here.

It is hard to know what the real horror is meant to be here: the spirits who at times narrating the book or the patriarchal male attitudes expressed by the male characters who have been sent to the spa, busy debating why women aren’t equal, and what they are for. Sexism, licentiousness, drunkenness and pontification are the order of the day here, ignorance and attitude. There is little to shock readers here because if one is paying attention it is clear what is going to happen from very early on, and at times the satire is rather heavy-handed. A note explains that ‘All the misogynistic views on the topic of women and their place in the world are paraphrased by actual authors’ but – recognising that I am male – it can all seem a little clumsy and didactic.

Tokarczuk seems to have abandoned her engaging genre subversions in favour of moralistic stories. Whilst The Emposium is nowhere as tedious or po-faced as The Books of Jacob – an overlong and over-serious historical novel about an 18th Century heretical preacher, that no-one I know has managed to finish reading – it lacks pace and tension for much of its duration. If I was being generous I would suggest it is a comedy of manners and societal expectation, with a pantheistic or occult twist.

I’ve read a couple of Janet Frame books previously and enjoyed them, but they have both gone back to the charity shop from whence they came. She is a serious and slightly dour New Zealand author very much concerned with post-colonialism and existentialist dilemma. This 1962 novel reads very much  as a 1960s novel, tight and controlled but somewhat out of place in the 21st Century.

 

 

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Rupert Loydell  

 

 

 

 

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Atman

 

 

A lone figure sitting outdoors and wearing a Hannya mask is seen from different angles in a succession of crash zooms and encircling jump cuts.

 

 

Directed by Toshio Matsuma

Music by Toshi Ichiyanagi

 

 

 

 

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Counteracting Cult Imposed Chaos

 

We are only manipulated to the degree to which we allow ourselves to be. Pull back a few paces from the insanity and you can find yourself in a quiet reflective place having absolutely nothing to do with the relentless razzamataz of the globalist construct.

At this point of time, in particular, it is really important to take such a step on a daily basis. Because the chaos being imposed by the central control system is directly absorbed by our three dimensional five senses, and at that moment is taken to be the sum total of all that is.

But when one draws back and quietens the mind, the centre of attention shifts to the inner heart zone. From here one is able to calmly and rationally assess whatever it is that is troubling one.

Only in this way can one discern the difference between the superficial/fake and the true.

Within today’s highly volatile information field the brain is loaded with a thousand different – and largely contradictory – streams of information which it is incapable of discerning or ordering without first putting them through the filter of an always discerning heart centred awareness. All meditation practices follow the same principle.

This is not what the chaos imposers want us to do, of course. They want us to suffer endless bouts of agitation, stress, fear, anger and ultimately despair. They want to overload our brain cells to the point where our attempt to make sense of what is designed to make no sense, drives large segments of the population to drink, drugs, pharmaceutical sedatives and a lingering form of depression.

This mass sedated state of mankind is worth billions of dollars to Big Pharma and Big Alcohol – and quite obviously supports the general dumbing-down agenda of the deep state.

But there is more to it than this.

The desire to confuse, corrupt and kill-off mankind does not have its origins within the fundamental evolutionary process of sentient and empathic human beings. It should not be confused with the mix of typical ‘hard knocks’ we all have to contend with in the struggle to keep moving ahead.

No, these malevolent actions are essential components of once covert, but now overt, satanic practices based upon an anti-life precept closely related to that of psychopaths and those we call megalomaniacs.

As we go about our daily business struggling to maintain some form of basic equilibrium, it does not occur to most that this nefarious torture regime has its roots in the work of a small but powerful cult which basically despises sentient mankind.

If we clearly understood this, we would realise that trying to use rational thought procedures to explain the deliberately imposed irrational and chaotic, is a worse than useless task.

Their chaos is deliberate and designed to elicit panicked public calls for ‘order’; the imposition of which will be uncompromising. ‘Order Out of Chaos’ leads to totalitarian lockdown.

Those ‘only half’ human, or non-human dictators who we witness today manifesting their seemingly infinite need to torture, control and destroy, are getting their dark energies from what Robert Monroe, the late US researcher involved in the study of human consciousness, termed ‘loosh’.

What is loosh?

Loosh is that form of vibratory energy manifest by emotional expressions, both positive and negative. Both emotionally expressed love and hate will give off loosh.

But in the context of this article I refer to the vibrations given-off by fear, anxiety, anger and despair as providing a form of emotional food for the anti-life forces that show no emotion, no empathy and no interest in the victims of their vampiric full spectrum dominance agenda.

It is profoundly shocking to suddenly recognise that the deeply sick satanic behaviour patterns that emanate from the exponents of loosh mining, have been adopted by very public icons at the top end of the music business, professional sport, global banking and related corporate empires, scientific institutions, politics, religion and increasingly psychotic multi billionaires seeking to exert their domination over all aspects of planetary life.

Within the many thousands of secret society founded Masonic lodges that proliferate North America and Europe, the leading figureheads ritually worship demonic overlords who in turn appear to bestow upon them a form of dark Astral power.

This crosses over with paedophiles, child sacrificers and traffickers. It is no longer simply a source of speculation that deeply evil acts of utter degradation are performed by those who seek highest office in the top suite of New World Order pyramid. And from there, down the ladder to aspiring young leaders of the Schwab ‘sell your soul school for future fascists’.

It is a big – but entirely necessary brain stretch – to grasp the fact that these are the forces setting the agenda of almost all types of planetary activities, right down to the seemingly superficial details of everyday life.

Here’s an example of what I mean. When you hear that your telephone landline is going to be phased out in 2025 and that only a digital connection will then be available, you might think “Damn! These companies are at it again, always cost cutting the quality and giving us the cheaper version so as to increase their profits.”

But while such an explanation touches on a perennial superficial truth, the real reason hides in the shadows, manipulated by the anti-life cult’s overriding ambitions to wrest control over our ability to electronically communicate with some degree of privacy – and to thereby steal reams of personal data at the ping of a ‘smart’ EMF button. Data that can then be used to trap one into complying with the increasingly nefarious demands of the surveillance state.

The sequence goes further: loss of landline means ‘must go digital and Wi-Fi’. Going digital and Wi-Fi instantly connects one up with the global microwave radiation transmission tower and satellite emitting EMF frequency bands that operate through mobile and smart phones at 3,4 and 5G power outputs.

An increasingly vast labyrinth of intersecting wireless wave-forms create ‘electro smog’ which interrupt the natural circadian rhythms of the atmosphere and magnetosphere – as well as distorting the 7.83 hertz Schumann Resonance – known as ‘the earth’s heart beat’.

This is the resonance field which keeps balance within the earth’s electromagnetic low vibratory energy field, tapped into by bees, insects, birds and plants, and indeed, by our own instinct of natural inner and outer balance.

Human health is not unaffected. On goes the cell phone – and immediately pulses of non-ironising radiation are activated which pass through the human temple and into the soft brain tissue, with potentially lasting consequences according to British radiation expert Barry Trower and other leading EMF specialist researchers.

All the while, those manning the digital and cybernetic control centres of the planet are alert to orders coming down from secret service operatives, to put an algorithmic tab on the communications made by ‘too effective’ dissidents, so their ‘offensive’ material can be traced and expunged.

If this fails to elicit the desired silencing, they have the option of setting up a reverse messaging system which, unbeknown to the receiver, sends a digital electronic message directly into the neocortex of the supposed renegade, with the tacit objective of destabilising his/her thoughts and emotions. This can, of course, be done to anyone – and no doubt is.

A vast ‘hive mind’ is thus brought into being, where carefully chosen thought and nervous system controlling pulses can be directed from a central digital control hub to wherever deemed necessary, to block the rise of creative and spiritual energies essential for a sane society and the greater positive evolution of mankind.

Such pulses will not do the desired job to those who are spiritually aware. Such individuals remain immune.

5G/6G have the capacity to carry such mass invasiveness even further. To establish a virtual reality high-tech ‘smart’ environment which overlays the natural world which is our home. This is where the vastly popular digital Wi-Fi ‘convenience culture’ ultimately takes us.

So, how is this explained by your friendly regional telecommunications corporation?

“Hello, we are making a few small changes that will help you achieve higher quality tele-communications and save on old landline rental charges. We care about our customers and want to offer the best possible convenience advantages available today. Thank you for your attention”
Sincerely, Teledeception plc.

Unthinkingly accepting what are sold as ‘convenient improvements’ to one’s daily life – can have big consequences. So next time you nonchalantly reach into your back pocket to pull out your mobile phone, know who it is you are supporting and what it is that you are killing-off.

 

Counteracting Chaos

One of the first steps to take in countering cult imposed chaos, is to check one’s taken for granted unquestioned habits, in order to see if they may be a contributory factor.

Disruption by chaos, as I said at the beginning, can be eradicated by stepping back into a quiet space, to which I will now add – and reviewing one’s contribution to further supporting the source of disruption.

“Still shopping at the hypermarket?” Yes, I support corporate agribusiness.

“Still watching television?” Yes, I support mainstream fake news, the streaming of political dogma and general entertainment shows.

“Still playing with your EMF gismos and laptop?” Yes, I support crap soap opera movies, Net Flix distractions and war game apps.

“Still proud to troll around the multifarious features of your latest smartphone?” Yes, I support all smartphone technology that is taking over my life.

“Still searching for the highest interest rates at your chosen global banking institution?” Yes, of course, need to get the best rate going, even though I realise I may be supporting the global vampiring of the earth’s resources and profits of the war and weapons industry.

“Still going against the call of your soul by trying to ignore your addiction to the convenience culture slavery agenda?” Err, well, never thought about that. But it’s a soulless world and I need to operate in it in order to bring in sufficient income to maintain my life style.

You get it, of course. How many of these fundamental hurdles have you actually crossed? Only one or two – maybe none? Be honest.

Do you consider yourself to be fighting injustice or supporting it?
Are you true to yourself – your real self – or are you still essentially embracing the chaos that provides a fertile base for the hypocritical life so ubiquitously manifesting today?

These are the admittedly brutal ‘in the mirror’ questions that we must ask ourselves and demand answers to. Answers in the form of actions that will end any further support of the chaos – and turn into a commitment to illuminate and live by truth.

There is no other way of supporting the deep change that must be brought about. It all starts with us, and we need to act bravely and conscientiously and to lead by example.

If one is not able to set the necessary example, how can one expect others to?

Words unattached to actions have become empty and ultimately meaningless. Yet much of social media chat and smart-messaging is just that – an empty shell, and echo chamber that distracts from facing-up to reality and making a solid stand for the emancipation and regeneration of Life.

The crisis now at our door presents the best and most meaningful challenge that mankind has ever faced. It quite simply drives us to dig deep and unlock that hidden power within.

Dark manifestations are not just the domain of a satanic cult. They also emanate from our own seemingly locked-in behaviour patters and are a reflection of the long term accumulated repression of our deeper instincts. It is well known that energetic natural and creative instincts not given expression, turn into their opposites and subsequently manifest as destructive powers.

The insentient anti-life power play will only be stopped in its tracks by an awakened mankind, able and willing to give full expression to the call of heart and soul.

By repressing or ignoring the voice of soul/ heart wisdom, we enter the same territory as that of our dark-side oppressors. We too become loosh to fuel their malevolent attacks on human kind.

The longer we leave this battle ground uncontested, the longer the satanists will prevail and the longer will we suffer the repercussions of our passivity – which is, in fact, a form of soul suicide.

No, dear friends, dare not entertain such a concept. Let us draw our symbolic golden swords and turn to face our oppressors head-on.

At this highly auspicious moment, a previously latent power will rise up in us that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. That turns the timid silent witness into courageous spiritual warrior.

It is such heroic acts that will finally defeat our oppressors and render ‘we the people’ victorious.

We all have it in us to render such a service to humanityand to thus honour that Supreme Consciousness which entrusted us to take responsibility for perpetuating the momentum of creation.

 

 

Julian Rose

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

 

 

 

 

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The Edge

right now
            in my head
                        the spaces
                                    between words
are full of the sea

& my thoughts keep coming back
            to the road
                        that runs over the hill
                                    & down to the coast
so much so

that
            at any moment
                        I might set aside
                                    whatever it is I’m doing
& just go

for no reason other than
            I want to stand
                        on the shingle
                                    & watch the water running up
the sand almost up

to my feet
            then falling back
                        each time getting closer
                                    as the moon
moves

on its way
            & by so doing
                        perhaps discover
                                    the reason
for my being there

 

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Dominic Rivron
Photo Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

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Piano

The faint piano desk at my back
The church prayers of oblong hault
Numerous passengers thronged through
It came a virtuous glance
The rain smelled of Picadelly
The London traffic, the Paris rainbow
All imbued on a harmonic tribe
I came and saw the victorious mansions
The fairy tale chiaroscuro of uncharted lamps
It is a place of folly of penmanship and a little trinket
I perched on the jammed trampoline
The loneliness ever growing on
As the peace was costlier than love

 

 

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Sayani Mukherjee
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

 

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BEDTIME READING

A hardback about mystics and
a guidebook to Hell share space
on the carpet beside my bed.
Poetry books are all around,
my favourite writers revisited,

new ones investigated, discarded
or ignored. Words don’t go away
and somehow I must make sense
of them: sculptural manifestos,
songs of love, despair, dubious

lyrics and reports from war zones
we’ve forgotten, blurred together.
Information waits to be excavated:
bookmarks in what I want to read,
have made a start on or piled up.

There is no map of Hell, it is just
a collection of stories about what
goes on there, in contrast to the
delights of being human, watching
dust and language drift and settle.

 

 

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© Rupert M Loydell

 

 

 

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Bippety and Boppety Talk a While

– It’s been a while.
– Time is of the essence.
– I’ve had a birthday.
– You don’t look a day older.
– I went to the doctor for my annual service and she says I’m in peak condition.
– That’s good.
– Apart, she says, from a couple of things.
– Anything important?
– She says my toleration level is lower than it should be. I’m under 3 on the NHS scale now.
– Oh, they recommend you stay above 3.
– What are you?
– Last time they checked I was 3.2.
– I’m 2.9. She said I have to go back in 3 months, and if it’s still below 3 then I’ll have to go on a course.
– You don’t want that. Those courses are intolerable, apparently. What was the other thing?
– She said I’d looked at the receptionist the wrong way.
– The receptionist who looks like a man?
– Turns out it is a man.
– Well, they ought to make that clear. It’s an easy mistake to make.
– It certainly is an easy mistake to make.

 

 

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Martin Stannard

 

 

 

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A poem about a holiday

He, who is violent yet attentive to
his mistress. The ocean’s mouth a constant

confusion of desire. The owl’s
eye near candlelight almost shocks

me into needing you. No – just a
streetlight. As I fold a hundred soft

blue towels inside a hive of the sun’s
workers, I remember how within

your gaze stood a haggard deer
waiting and trembling

while my car sped along
windows down and singing.

 

 

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Blossom Hibbert

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hygienic Poem

Sometimes I’m ON and sometimes I’m OFF and sometimes
it can be difficult to know which way is UP and which way is DOWN
My boyfriend gets a little frustrated sometimes but that’s
what boyfriends always do Also they never have decent hygiene
My boyfriend can’t spell DEODORANT and I don’t think he understands
what it’s for Tomorrow I have an appointment with a specialist
I forget what kind of specialist but anyway I’ll definitely have a nice bath
before I go I like to make a good first impression Wish me well

 

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C.J. Driscoll

 

 

 

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Compañera  (for Joan Jara)

 

In the confusion, the poet has lost his notebook (Gaza related) …or the paper survives the murder. They have taken Victor Jara to the stadium. Sing now, if you can, you bastard. He did, and they beat him, broke his wrists. Tortured / shot / six bodies in a row. The last poem smuggled out of the mayhem. The British Embassy closed / barred against refugees. Dot, dot, dot recurring. The (fascist) regime recognised – ditto, Compañera Joan. Wicked or stupid, George? 50th anniversary just passed, barely noticed. As has Joan. Iniquity (Tory, John Pilger remarked). The shuffle, like a chain gang, of protest march(es), she remembered. Radio Magallanes broadcast to the last, hymned by Daniele, Ibrahim.

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© Stephen C. Middleton

 

 

 

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Spirit Place Time Space

 

Spirit

 

Flying in my dream
A child above, somewhere
Yet I seem down below
Looking through the rainbow
Free just for a moment
While my eyes are closed

 

Place

 

A feast at the table
Set for me and fable
A green hill far away
I reach out to you now
Before you let me go
This peace is forever

 

Time

 

Why now?  Why me?
Am I not to be?
That is the question
There is no answer
Waiting for anyone
It won’t wait for me

 

Space

 

There’s a space for us
This is no place for a fuss
We are sun and moon
Wind and fire and rain
We are all together
And will always be free

 

 

© Christopher 2024   

 

 

 

 

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Abecedarian for What Comes After

After we have divided and divided
bounty after bounty, disassembled beauty,
cast aside notions of spirit,
disregarded feeling and faith in favor of
entropy, watched the planets and stars
fall away from the house of meaning—
gathering our precious material belongings,
hoping to retain this life without scruples,
into the dark we’ll ride—encumbered wagons down
jagged roads through self-fulfilled apocalypse,
karma-heavy, battered by rain and
lightning, wind and water rising. Still, we
mount our failed convictions like an unwilling lover,
nurse like infants on the sour milk of ego,
orphans to the cosmos—ragged children
pretending to be lawyers and clergymen,
quaking with unwavering dogma, ignorance our
religion, canonized into rituals of cannibalism, bellies
swollen with everything we’ve swallowed:
trees, tribes, truth and tenderness. Atrocities
unfurling from our fingertips generate the
vortex of our own doom. What then—
when the last gasp of our
xenophobic fear escapes through cracked lips into
yawning eternity? Will the green return?
Zinnias, azaleas, acacia trees—a garden to obscure our sins.

 

 

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Al Fournier

Painting: Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch

 

 

 

 

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One Tire Burst Away From The Chaos.

A tire bursts, the gully holds 
the edge of its last brick
and watches. The road hardens
it flesh. The wind rushes,
and goosebumps, the trees feel.

Even a loud hush can trigger a riot.

They removed the remains, took
her away, and what remains 
moans aloud, out of the hearing’s reach,
writhes and then settles down until 
that tire bursts. It stands at the crossroads 
with a candlestick and a dynamite.

 

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Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor

 

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

 

 

 

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Clothes of Happiness

Never have I ever
Lied to myself.
My sadness beams,
And I still get up
For my morning tea.
I won’t let a sad pond
Be just a pool of water.
I will create waves
Or appreciate my waiting
Beside that pond.
I am appreciating,
Let this word hit you.
Words are so alive
Like my happiness—
After I express only
An ounce of sadness.
Only as I spell sadness
I get a relief from it,
Writing makes me
A believer,
The game of sadness
Becomes a thin clothesline
With clean clothes of happiness.
Worn out jeans is a fashion
And my sadness is an outfit.

 

 

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© Sushant Thapa
Biratnagar-13, Nepal
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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Popular Scientific Recreations (1883 edition)

 
 
 
 
 

If the experience of wonder can lead to either a suspension of rational thought or toward a form of curiosity that fuels the search for knowledge, it is, without question, the second path that French scientist and balloonist Gaston Tissandier espouses in his Les Récréations Scientifiques. This comprehensive, 800-page textbook covers everything from the basic laws of motion and spectroscopy to botany and new forms of transit. Throughout, Tissandier weaves personal anecdotes and DIY experiments together with explanations of natural phenomena to infuse pleasure and amusement into the process of scientific learning.

 
 

Wary of “ingenious deceptions, intended to disguise the true mode of operation” and stressing the subservience of amusement to the pursuit of knowledge and truth, Tissandier epitomizes the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for scientific discovery in his desire to battle ignorance and make science accessible to amateurs of all ages at home. The reader is guided by precise illustrations, some of which were initially published in Tissandier’s science magazine, La Nature. One can learn to feel the spark of electricity using a ring of keys, revel in the fallibility of the eye by creating a thaumatrope with paper and string, and turn water into an entertaining fountain that juggles cork balls beneath a glass shade.

 
 

Popular Scientific Recreations serves not only as a practical textbook outlining countless experiments, but also as a history of scientific thought and invention. In the chapter on aeronautics, the human desire to fly is traced back to both ancient myth and history, as when Tissandier invokes the aerial ambitions of Daedalus and Icarus to discuss the earliest known “flying machine” invented by Archytas of Tarentum in 400 BCE. Archytas believed, after creating a wooden bird that could suspend in the air for a few minutes before falling to the ground, that his creation was endowed with an “aura spirit”. What was once thought to be supernatural is what Tissandier now understands, with the aid of his scientific method, to be a law of nature. This scientific rewriting of the supernatural narrative returns in “Chapter XIV: Spectral Illusions”, where Tissandier debunks popular ghost sightings and methodically concludes that “apparitions are spectres emanating from within the brain”.

 
 

Given this dialogue between science and magic, it is perhaps not surprising that Harry Houdini held a copy of Tissandier’s book in his personal collection of works on magic, now housed in the Library of Congress. A master of mechanical illusionism, Houdini wrote a book himself titled A Magician Among the Spirits, an exposé that sought to debunk what he viewed as the fraudulent spiritualist practices of his time. While the stage magician, unlike the scientist, was in the business of sustained illusion, both intended to strip the supernatural away from what, in their eyes, was purely natural.

 
 

Several different translations of Les Récréations Scientifiques appeared in English, including: Scientific Amusements(1890), Half Hours of Scientific Amusement (1890), and Popular Scientific Recreations (ca. 1883), featured here.

 
 

 

 

 

 

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Darkness and Light: Freedom and Conflict

A weekend visit to Manchester with Alan Dearling

Towards arrival time into Manchester Victoria Rail Station, it’s just after 11 a.m.  And a lady next to me in the crowded, hot and humid train, started to receive messages and images on her phone from her sister in the city centre. She was told that fighting was currently taking place in Piccadilly Gardens in the centre. She showed me and others around her some photos on her phone of police and rioters. The images looked very worrisome. She looked pretty panicky as she made an announcement to the people in the packed train carriage:  “There’s riots and protest demos going on…fighting in Piccadilly Gardens…Take care and consider going home.”

Personally, I was uncertain as to what to do. I was scheduled to meet two friends at 2 p.m. in the Northern Quarter. They were travelling in from Macclesfield by train into Piccadilly station. Exiting from Victoria Station, it seemed eerily quiet. Then, some sounds of sirens in the distance.  I entered into the nearby Manchester Cathedral. It offered a place for some quiet contemplation amongst the splendours of its magnificent modern stained glass windows and the organ towering over each end of the nave.

After some respite and peace in Manchester Cathedral, I moved towards the city centre. I walked through the streets towards the war memorial, the Cenotaph in St Peter’s Square, where large numbers of demonstrators were being escorted by mounted and foot police. These were not from far-right or EDL groups, they were pro-Palestinian protestors being funnelled down past the tram platform, and directly alongside another smaller, but vociferous, protest group on the city war memorial. They were demonstrating support against the recent, probably rigged election in Venezuela, ostensibly won by President Nicolas Maduro . The pro-Gaza and pro-Venezuelan democracy demonstrators loudly applauded each other.

This was only a few hundred yards distant from Piccadilly Gardens, which serves as a central focal space for the city of Manchester. There, a cordon of police with riot helmets at the ready, had ring-fenced using their police bodies and a few horses, what appeared to be EDL or similar supporters. I would estimate there were only about 100 of them when I arrived at about 11.45/12 noon. They were mostly looking a bit bored and waiting for something to kick off. Many carried St George’s Cross flags and Union Jacks. The predominant demographic was 35-50 year-olds, mostly male, many bald or with cropped hair, many of a pretty hefty build.

There were also small groups of youngsters, some in balaclavas around the edge of the older groups. The youngsters looked keen on engaging in some action. But, even during the stand-off, there was much milling about, and many locals were just going about their normal business. Only one arrest took place in the 20 minutes or so that I was there, and that was of a middle-aged black man draped in a St George’s flag. A somewhat surreal sight!

For the rest of the afternoon, I was with the old friends, who I had arranged to meet in the city. I had messaged them earlier in the morning about the potential  riots and disturbances, but they chose to still venture into Manchester for our meet up. As we had a few drinks and a wander between hostelries, the atmosphere was distinctly edgy and conversations could be overheard, about street demonstrations, violence and the spread of riots and mayhem across the country.

In all, this was a different, nervous, Manchester: A city on a knife-edge. Scared and scary.  On the streets, a sense of Fear and Loathing. Light and Darkness. Here is a brief extract from news reportage from the day.

Manchester Evening News, 3rd August 2024

“Fights broke out, a supermarket closed and public transport was at a standstill in Manchester following a day of protests. Hundreds of people descended on the city centre as a number of demonstrations were held on Saturday (August 3).

In the morning, close to 150 people joined one protest marching under the banner ‘Stand Up For Your Country: Enough is Enough’. They were met with a counter rally which featured around 350 demonstrators.

Greater Manchester Police soon issued a dispersal order for the whole of Manchester city centre until 7pm which gave them extra powers to deal with anyone taking part in or causing anti-social behaviour.

Metal fences hurled while punches were thrown by a number of people in the melee. A large number of police officers could be seen attempting to keep order and dispersing people from the area.”

“When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.”      Isaac Asimov

 

 

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Fire in the Wire (episode eighteen)

Steam Stock

Tracklist:
Johnny Clarke – Declaration of Rights
Jah Stitch – African People
The Skatalites – (Music is) My Occupation
Junior Reid – Boom-Shack-A-Lack
Ini Kamoze – World A Music
Judy Mowatt and the Gaytones – I Shall Sing!
Gregory Isaacs – Love is Overdue
Freddie McGregor – Big Ship
Bob Marley and the Wailers – Zimbabwe
Johnny and the Attractions – Coming on the Scene
The Ethiopians – Everything Crash
Dobby Dobson – Loving Pauper
Triston Palmer – Entertainment
The Cyclones – Meditation
Misty in Roots – Man Kind (live)
Lester Sterling – Afrkaan Beat
Toots and the Maytals – Bam Bam
Sister Nancy – Bam Bam
Pliers – Bam Bam
Chaka Demus and Pliers – Murder She Wrote
The Eternals – Let’s Start Again

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A Man, A Soldier.

I’ve blacked my face 
And camouflaged my fears
Driven my frightened heart in a
Muddy truck 
To the entrance of Hell
Where I’ve sung to you 
In forgotten languages 
Of a callous love sprung from the 
Life sack.
Flown from the birth sheet.
When only the ticking of unseen birds
Betrays the silence.
And a combat of trees bleeds green..

 

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M. Paul
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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The Biggar Picture

There is a painting in the National Gallery of Scotland by
Alexander Moffat called The Poet’s Pub. It was made in
1980 and features Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, Ian
Crichton Smith, Huge MacDiarmid, George Mackay Brown,
Edwin Morgan, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Robert Garioch.
A grand constellation of Scotland’s poetic stars at the time.
It’s possible, if you fancy breathing the air around some of
the landscapes which were important to the characters in
this painting, to use it as a travel guide through some of the
most fascinating places in Scotland.
If you’re looking at the painting you’re in Edinburgh where
Sydney Goodsir Smith lived after his family moved from
New Zealand and it was here that Robert Garioch was born.
A short hop east and you’re in Glasgow with Edwin Morgan.
If you head north and reach Orkney you can spend time
with George Mackay Brown before heading south to visit
Norman MacCaig in Assynt and Sorley MacLean around
Skye.
You might call in on Ian Crichton Smith who lived in Oban
for a while before reaching the centre of the painting. Here,
in the middle, Alexander Moffat places Hugh MacDiarmid
as the fixed point around which the other poets circulate
and Hugh MacDiarmid can be found in Biggar.
A warning should be applied to any travel based on
romantic notions from the past, however. It might still be
possible to enjoy history and heritage by visiting castles
and gardens, but when it comes to exploring what it was in
the landscape that energised poets to write about it, things
get a little more tricky. And when it comes to politics, as it
so often did for MacDiarmid, the social landscape might be
changed beyond recognition.
Of all the poets gathered in Alexander Moffat’s painting
perhaps only George Mackay Brown might still be smiling in
the 21st Century. His love was the story of Orkney, the
saints, the Vikings, the tradition and the continuity.
Those things are an industry now but they are being
explored in great detail and Mackay Brown would probably
be fascinated. Their power and mystery are being enjoyed
by thousands every year. The stories he told of his home
place can be touched now and wondered at.
He might even have enjoyed listening to the tales of some
of the tourists who stream from the cruise ships which
lumber into Scapa Flow and clog the arteries of Kirkwall
and Stromness.

He liked to listen to people over a pint but he would have to
organise himself around the difficulty that his bar of choice,
The Flattie, at the side of the Stromness Hotel, is closed and
used now as a storage place for drones which might, one
day, deliver goods from island to island across the
archipelago. He would also have to come to terms with the
fact that The Stromness Hotel is dry again despite his
campaign in 1945 to introduce pubs into what was then a dry
town.
What he might find more troubling is the popularity of Hoy.
The ferry to the island is booked days in advance and the
onetime solitude of Rackwick is largely gone.
Mackay Brown and his friends, the painter Sylvia Wishart and
the composer, Peter Maxwell-Davis, had a particular love for
Rackwick. Maxwell Davis lived there because of its solitude.
Solitude and mass tourism are bad bedfellows.
The same phenomenon exists as you travel south along the
west coast of mainland Scotland to Assynt with the poems of
Norman MacCaig in your hand.
MacCaig holidayed in Assynt with his family and was
enthralled by it. Before he began to stay at Inverkirkaig,
MacCaig spent summers in Achmelvich which is reached
down a steep single track road terminating at a beautiful
white sanded crescent beach. A hut used by children as a big
nature table full of drawings and shells and rocks once stood
in front of the beach on an open space of grass.
Today, people play volley ball and light fires on that beach
and the children’s shed is gone.
There has been a campsite at Alchmelvich for some time but
it has expanded and has become much more popular. The
problems with drainage in such a remote area are apparent
here and there.
The land which runs down to the beach is a building site just
now. The infrastructure of a very large car park, along with
another campsite to join those which are already there and
the North Coast 500 Pods which service travellers along that
ever more busy route, is under construction. The scars of
building work will heal over time but what remains will
welcome more and more people. The access is still steep and
single track.

In 1967 MacCaig wrote, in ‘A Man In Assynt’;
‘Who possesses this landscape?-
The man who bought it or
I who am possessed by it?’
The question is, now, much more difficult to answer. The man
who bought it has developed it and thousands of people,
every year, will find beauty in it, but not all of them are likely to
have the same emotional connection MacCaig experienced.
It’s difficult to deny that tourism has, to a large extent,
adversely affected the intrinsic lure of these remote places.
MacCaig was a city man, working and writing in Edinburgh,
who visited a place which was so remarkable to him that it
possessed him. Sorley MacLean lived and worked inside the
landscape which possessed him. Born on Rassay and living in
Skye and Plockton, he knew the landscape intimately.
His poetry, written in Gaelic, penetrates deep into what was
once an isolated place over which he laid international
concerns.
The bridge connecting Skye to the mainland consigned that
isolation to history and, like Hallaig, MacLean’s famous
deserted Rassay village, the old was swept away.
There may be a stark economic truth in the argument that
without the income generated by tourism the northwest of
Scotland would die. Young people would leave through lack of
work and decay would be inevitable. Progress is built into
survival and environmental compromise is the price.
So far the poets from Alexander Moffat’s painting might
lament that what possessed them and enlivened their writing
has been damaged by too much attention. It’s only when you
get to Biggar that your heart is saddened by the
consequences of too little attention.
Until the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020 Hugh
MacDiarmid’s Brownshill cottage in South Lanarkshire was
ticking over as a fitting reminder of this important writer.
Furniture and memorabilia left after the death of the poet and
the later death of his wife, Valda, were still in place and a
series of important writers’ residencies had taken place in the
building. Since Covid, and the drying up of appropriate
financing, Brownsbank has slid into decay and decline.

A fine and energetic charity, MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank, has
struggled to preserve the building and fund its resurrection.
For some reason this task has proved to be a steep uphill
struggle.
If you stand by the little blue gate in front of Brownsbank it
might be interesting to reflect on why there might be a
celebratory George Mackay Brown trail in Stromness which
speaks of his work and points out every feature in the town
with any connection to the poet. You could also smile at the
pub in Plockton which has turned Sorley MacLean’s house
into a B and B but, nevertheless, has placed a proud sign,
‘Sorley’s House’ above the front door. You might scratch your
head and wonder why Brownsbank, this major reference to
Alexander Moffat’s central figure, is slowly disappearing.
MacDiarmid was hugely important to what became known as
the Scottish Renaissance which sought to imbue modernism
with a particularly Scottish cultural flavour. It celebrated
traditional influences and addressed Scotlands declining use
of regional languages.
Under his given name, Christopher Murray Grieve, he began
an exploration into a language form known as Synthetic
Scots, or Lallans, built from regional languages together with
words culled from Jameson’s Dictionary of the Scottish
Language from 1808. Norman MacCaig was fond of saying
that Chris Grieve plunged into Jameson’s dictionary and Hugh
MacDiarmid came out of the other end
MacDiarmid became a major player on the international stage
and visitors to Brownsbank ranged from Seamus Heaney to
Alan Ginsberg. Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited with his girlfriend
and MacDiarmid met and compared missions with
Shostakovich.
By any standards he was an important artist. To many he was
a Titan who was the most important Scottish poet of the 20th
Century. In fact he is widely seen as the most important
Scottish poet since Burns.
But – he was outstandingly difficult as a political thinker and
he did think about politics a lot.
That he wrote not one but three long poems entitled ‘Hymn to
Lenin’ indicates that he was never going to inhabit safe
middle ground.

He had a brief flirtation with Fascism which, until the rise of
Mussolini, he felt had considerable left wing potential. He had
an unfortunate record of saying that a German victory in the
war might not be as bad for Scotland as continued English
dominance. He, at various times, championed Communism
and Nationalism. He was co-founder of the National Party of
Scotland from which he was expelled because of his
Communist sympathies and he was a member of the
Communist Party for whom he stood as Parliamentary
candidate against Conservative Prime Minister Alec Douglas-
Home in Kinross and Western Perthshire during the 1964
election. He was expelled from the Communist Party because
of his nationalist sympathies.
Following his political thoughts is like riding a rollercoaster but
at every twist and turn they are imbued with a deep and
revolutionary humanity which challenges everyone to try
harder to make the most civil, and proudest, civil society
possible.
Burns too, a not too distant neighbour in Dumfriesshire,
penned lines which navigate towards a better way of being.
When he looked toward a time when … ‘Man to Man the
warld o’er shall brithers be for a’that…’ his sentiments were
taken to hart, chipped into stone and memorialised alongside
the carefully preserved places where he was born, farmed and
died. There are statues to be found in odd places where he
might have stopped to think and there might, one day, even
be a route to the site where he disturbed a mouse.
When you get to Biggar, you might take some lines from
MacDiarmid’s ‘Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle’ from 1926
with you…
‘And let the lesson be – to be yersel’s,
Ye needna fash if it’s to be ocht else.
To be yersel’s – and mak’ that worth being’
No harder job to mortals has been gi’en.’
There is an irony to be found these days in Alexander Moffat’s
painting. The artists in The Poet’s Pub who circle that central
figure are, by and large remembered and celebrated whilst a
fitting memorial to the centre of the painting decays.
The atmosphere around Brownsbank radiates a quiet
forgetfulness whilst the landscapes which some of the other
poets drew upon have changed beyond recognition.
For some too much attention, for others, not enough
attention. Dinna fash yersel ower much, but the whole
clanjamfrie’s worth the thocht. (It’s worth looking up.)

 

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Fred Chance

 

 

 

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URGENT APPEAL TO SAVE WILLIAM BLAKE’S COTTAGE

Help us save William Blake’s cottage

 

Blake’s Cottage is in urgent need of repair

Blake’s Cottage, in the village of Felpham on the West Sussex coast, is one of the most important buildings in English literary history, but this key part of our national heritage is in real danger of being lost forever. The poet, writer, artist, printer and visionary William Blake lived here, with his wife Catherine, when he wrote the poem that provides the words for the much-loved anthem: Jerusalem.

 

The Blake Cottage Trust is working to save this listed building and create a centre celebrating William & Catherine Blake

A new board of trustees was appointed in early 2024 to take the project forward.  Our plan has three stages:

The trust is working hard to secure grants and donations to make this possible and create a beautiful and inspirational location that celebrates the lives and works of William and Catherine and their enduring influence.

 

Securing the cottage for the nation and for future generations

Any donation will be put to immediate use to restore Blake’s Cottage and then to realise our long-term vision.  You can give by clicking on the button below or contact the Trust directly.

Thank you!

You can help save William Blake’s Cottage
 
 

Achieving our goals

The immediate need is for the funds to replace the thatched roof and restore the structural integrity of the building.  The cost estimate for this is £125,000.  In the longer term we need to raise up to £3 million to realise the vision of a vibrant Blake Centre open to everyone.

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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Ronald Mugabe

 

In this interview I speak with artist Ronald Mugabe.

His work is installed in the East Wing, at Somerset House, London, til 29th September 2024. He is a promising artist from Uganda.

CAROUSEL
Ronald Mugabe

MASTERPIECE III: AN ODE TO OKWUI ENWEZOR
Mutual Art

MY RUNWAY GROUP
somersethouse.whats-on

 

What art materials do you work with?
Canvas, Acrylic paint, brush and a Pallet knife mostly.

Are you experimental in exploring different art materials with your work?
Currently I am not experimenting or trying to explore other art materials apart from what I’ve been using, but hopefully in the near future I may try some other materials that will suit my creativity at the time. 

Describe the layout of your art studio?
I do not have an art studio, neither am I renting one. My home is my art studio, I do all my works at home. So my layout is simple; the compound space gives me a great ambiance to work.

Describe how you work within the space?
Within my compound, I only need to set up my canvas on the painting board, in a place I find comfortable within the compound. Preferably in the backyard, behind my house.

For focus some artists have bodily/spiritual practices to assist them with their work; some might exercise, some might drink coffee, water, alcohol, or juice? Some might eat specific foods, and some not eat anything at all when involved in their work. Some chain smoke to stay alert, and some might not sleep, or have very structured or unstructured sleeping patterns. Do you have any practices in the production of your work?
Well I do not have a specific practice or thing that I do, but I would say, I eat normally; breakfast, lunch and supper. I play music; I choose the kind of music that matches my mood and the vibe of the painting, but there is no specific routine practice though I play lots of music in the process.

What does your daily diet consist of?
Its mainly local food. Matooke, Rice, Beans. These are the main local dishes. Also Chai (black tea), Peanuts, and this keeps changing according to what is available.

I read that you used to carry a notebook to make sketches. Is this still part of your process?
Back then mostly when I was still a student, and in my maiden year after graduation, I used to carry a notebook to make sketches, but as my skills develop, the less I carried the notebook. So at the moment I don’t carry it. But I used to.

Can you explain the working stages – inspiration to the conception of a completed piece of art?
Most of my art work is self inspired. It is my past experience, my story, and those like me in the community I grew up in. I may not remember everything ‘to detail’, but the community still suffers the same circumstances that I went through as a child. Well there could be some improvement but the memory remains. So sometimes I take pictures as I walk through the community that I align with based on a theme I am working on or an idea I want to explore, or sometimes I think of a past situation that matches what I would like to paint. If I do not find a perfect picture on camera, I have friends I could use as models to pose for the moment. This helps me to come up with sketches from those pictures I have taken. I set up my canvas, sketch on the canvas the developed idea, and then I paint and later then I think of what name to give it; which normally takes some days to think of a perfect name.

Kojo, who is actually installing your work at Somerset House in London, and Raphael Dapaah who is your art manager and agent and is very important in connecting your work with various spaces and mediums – you have team of people working with you. Can you explain how these channels function?
Well being a painter in Uganda where my type of art is not well embraced commercially, it is a big opportunity, because they have introduced me to an international scene, especially with London. I may not have become that famous and popular, but at least my work has reached some places where art is being appreciated for its worth and well interpreted. So they have connected me to a larger base to widen my reach and development, it gives me a challenge to think more and create more, to advance with the trends worldwide and to diversify the current trends of art. In one way I get to learn how the international art business works also.

What books do you read?
Books! I am not so much of a reader, and I do not really look out for specific writers to read, no. But I so much look out for trends on social networks, mostly Instagram and X, or make research of certain topics that I need much information about, otherwise the book I read most, is the Bible.

What subjects and topics are you interested in?
It all revolves around my past experience, the current social affairs and what I would term as the political injustice in my country. When you look at most of my art pieces, they fall within my past experience, the current social affairs, my cultural and heritage, and political injustices here in Uganda.

rorschachpublication
rorschach.building.photos

 

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By Joshua Phillip

 

 

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Update on William Blake’s Cottage, Felpham, West Sussex

 

As a resident of Felpham, it has been very depressing to see the deterioration of Blake’s beautiful little cottage by the sea, where he lived with his wife Catherine from 1800 – 1803. In the past few years, every time one walks past, there was more decay, until it looked like the roof, and possibly the whole building. was going to collapse. The thatch became almost non-existent.

The cottage used to be in private ownership, however, enough money was raised to buy it for The Blake Cottage Trust, which was great. In addition to the purchase, the Trust put in props to save the interior from falling down. Sadly, nothing else has been done. There have been some poetry readings by various “Blakefest” poets, notably by the late Niall McDevitt, plus Stephen Micalef and others from William Blake Congregation, who both also re-enacted the skirmish with the soldier that led to Blake’s arrest for sedition. There has been little other activity at the cottage.

Stop Press: there is now a new Chair of the Trust. Congratulations to Doug Nicholls, a writer and poet, formerly General Secretary of the Community and Youth Workers’ Union (1987/2011) and then the General Federation of Trade Unions (2012/2023). He has really impressed with his ideas, hard work, and enthusiasm. He has organised a substantial cover for the roof and building, until finance can be raised for a new roof and the considerable planned restorations. He is drawing in people to help as “Ambassadors”, with various contacts and skills, including literary, artistic, engineering, historical buildings, film making and fund raising. The art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon has visited, and was delighted with the cottage. There are many schemes, projects and works being thought out and prepared. A public meeting is planned, with the new Board of Trustees in attendance, at Felpham Community College, 6.00pm on 19th September 2024.

For further details and latest news please see

https://www.blakecottage.org/

 

 

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Claire Lewis Victor

Picture: William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 1, Frontispiece, 1804 to 1820

 

 

 

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The Kids are No Longer Alright

 

The headlines bellow my hometown, skin stripped to its raw nerves, draped in signs separated from all familiar contexts. I remember red, white and blue, rippling from sandcastles in endless summer, fluttering on strings at church bazaars; The Who draped in pop art adrenalin, smashing sleep into so many pieces it would never be the same again; Scouts and Guides saluting the sunset in serious rows, and colours cutting through the black and white TV before nights of perfect silence. I recall that the broader diagonal band of white is uppermost in the hoist, the narrower in the fly, and I know that, although vexillologists assert the validity of both Union Flag and Union Jack as appropriate designations, some old sailors still experience the proprietary urge concerning the latter, the legacy of its naval coinage in the late seventeenth century. My dad told me this, as he patted down golden battlements on a coastline that stretched for miles and miles. And aftewards, he fell asleep with a newspaper covering his face, perhaps dreaming how, once upon a lifetime ago, he had flown that flag across fearful waves to beat the Fascists from the door. But now this stolen sign signals nothing but Us and Them, shorn of inconvenient specifics, and I’m glad he’s spared these poorly daubed flags on angry faces. I’m glad he’s sleeping beneath miles and miles of sand, and not here to read these headlines.

 

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Oz Hardwick
Picture Rupert Mallin

 

 

 

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In My Neighborhood 

One young man climbs 
on the summit, on 
the slippery arc of the sweat beads, 
on others, holds the flag, feels its heft,
and that waving a flag takes 
more than, lets say, a million muscles, 
bodies’ strength. 

He wasn’t selected for this job.
The process was natural. 
Rain meets the fire; we hear the hiss. 
They are not mortal enemies, 
mere a coexistence, clashing 
because it falls within 
their job descriptions. 
They both live, meet again, again.

 

 

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Kushal Poddar

 

 

 

 

 

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

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THE DIARY OF A GENTLEMAN-POET

Monday, July 29th

Had a visit today from Alec Timmins, who I have not seen for more than a long time owing to his living somewhere other than convenient. We had coffee and then walked with Winnie, surveying my extensive landowning and venturing as far as The Leafy Bottom Inn, in the village of Leafy Bottom, where the barmaids are all over 60 and slow, and the beer is rather fine, and the lunches basic but enjoyably filling. Alec is a good writer, and we exchanged grammar gossip and news about different kinds of ink. Not much time for anything else today, since the visit took up a few hours in the meat of the day.

Speaking of meat, Cook served cold chicken and salad for dinner, which was simple and tasty. She said it was leftover chicken, but I don’t recall having the hot version of it. I suppose it’s of no consequence. Or is it?

Mrs. Jennings was in the house today, making everything sparkle. Even things that don’t naturally sparkle take on a sparkly aspect once she’s had a word with them. She doesn’t seem overjoyed by the presence of kittens, however.

Melissa telephoned. I was out, or Cook said I was.

Tuesday, July 30th

One of the hottest days of the year. Jethro decided to upheaval the stables, if upheaval is a verb, and there has been something of a commotion and turmoil outside for hours. I found myself dragged in to keep the horses company, and to help them cope with the trauma of having their homes turned upside down while a madman cleaned out and rearranged the furniture and put their books and magazines in order. Fortunately, horses are calm and understanding creatures, not like people, and they were alright most of the time. I think they particularly enjoyed being strolled down to the stream with Winnie, and drinking from Mother Nature’s natural water supply instead of from a trough. Horses and dog splashed around like children splashing around.

All of that work and stuff meant I was outside a lot of the time with the animals for company. Good. I can’t stand all the hubbub people get up to, most of which is annoying and of very little consequence. The sun was pretty hot, but I always use copious amounts of sun cream, even when I’m indoors. I like the smell.

By the time evening came I was exhausted from all the work Jethro had been doing, and after a pleasant something or other from Cook and most of a bottle of red, the last few hours of the day were spent in my favourite armchair with Herodotus and his Histories.

Melissa telephoned. At least, I assume she did. Cook must have dealt with her.

Wednesday, July 31st

Awoke at 4.30, quite hot, slept again until 7.30, during which time I had a most peculiar and rather exhausting dream which, bewilderingly, featured Donald Trump hiding in a box. Don’t ask me . . . I often wish there was a pill we could take that would make dreaming impossible. I mean, sleep is supposed to be relaxing and restorative, not tiring.

Received in the post a new slim volume of poetry from someone I almost know. It’s alright, but far too literary: it’s aimed at a bookish, knowledgeable, intellectual, “in-the-know” audience, and while it will surely enjoy success in that arena I’m not at all sure it’s an arena of consequence. In fact, it’s of bugger all consequence, unless one is concerned about that kind of success.

Melissa telephoned. She wanted to know if I wanted a baby goat. I don’t.

Thursday, August 1st

August!  Still hot, but not quite as hot as yesterday, and even a little shower of summery Jesus’s tears at breakfast time. And thunderstorms predicted! But it’s alright, I like thunderstorms, and it brightened up as the morning progressed and it was fine for a wander to The Frisky Farmhand and a pub lunch, with Winnie as company. She had some cheese and onion crisps, her favourite.

Melissa telephoned, and Cook was deep in conversation with her when I got home from my walk. I think they were talking about rabbits. It’s surely of no consequence.

An email from  . . . Oh, who cares? Why do people think I’m interested in attending conferences for a load of academics with whom I have nothing in common. I know there’s money involved, but I already have money and I’m not desperate to get any more if it means doing something tedious. I think if those conferences were still all about getting drunk and having carefree sex with someone you may never see again then perhaps I’d give it a go, but this is not the 1960s, and all academics do these days is complain about the amount of work they have to do outside of the classroom. I know. I have friends who exactly fit that description.

Torrential rain during the evening, but not the expected thunderstorm, which was a disappointment.

Friday, August 2nd

I’ve had a letter from a vague acquaintance, a poet I shall not name here, who says he’s applying to be poet-in-residence at his local football club, and could I please give him a reference. I wish it was a joke, but it isn’t. I’m declining the request as politely as possible, even though a football stadium is not a bad place for his poems to be. They deserve to be kicked around or obscenely abused by drunken louts. It’s of no consequence. No consequence at all.

Melissa telephoned. Yes, the kittens are fine. Thanks for asking.

Saturday, August 3rd

Sleep has been a bit tricky this week, owing to the overly warm nights, and I’m feeling a bit the worse for wear. I suppose it’s of not much consequence. Consequently, I determined to have a quiet day today reading and doing the Prize crossword, a decision facilitated by it being cloudy and occasionally raining. The crossword turned out to be ultra-difficult, and will still be around tomorrow.

Melissa telephoned. Cook was under instruction to take all calls and say I was away for the weekend. I said she could decide upon the exact untrue location, but to make it at least vaguely plausible.
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James Henderson (Gentleman)

 

 

 

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In defense of anarchism: what kind of peace does government provide?

 

In an earlier post, Ladd Everitt posed a provocative question: “Can peace be obtained through anarchy?” He answered: Maybe someday in the distant future when humanity becomes perfect, but not anytime soon because society needs protection from neo-Nazis. Wait, what?

If government is such a great protection against Nazis, then why did the Nazi Party pose its greatest threat to humanity when it was democratically elected into control of a national government? Democracy birthed the Nazi menace; it didn’t prevent it. In fact, anarchists would say that it’s exactly this kind of centralized political structure, with citizens willing to follow the commands of whoever wins power, that creates the opportunity for aspiring authoritarians to seize control and do their worst.

But Everitt isn’t the first to raise this specter of ‘ultimate evil’ to justify government and its inherent abuses. It’s a common scare tactic regularly deployed by politicians to legitimize all sorts of loathsome policies. Most recently, in his Nobel Prize lecture, President Obama sounded the Hitlerian alarm in a shameful attempt to justify his expansion of war in Afghanistan. Obama’s predecessors, Bush and Cheney, were also quite fond of this brand of rhetorical fearmongering, attempting to legitimize the “War on Terror” and the imminent threat of the “Axis of Evil.”

Nevertheless, humanity may always be faced with destructive or greedy opportunists who aim to harm others for their own personal gain. The anarchist solution is, quite simply: Don’t put them in charge. Better yet, don’t put anyone in charge, because history has demonstrated, over and over again, that power corrupts. Even the most well-intentioned peacenik will either be transformed into a scheming, power-hoarding monster by the political process, or will never gain a position of power in the first place. With such widespread support for powerful leaders, it’s easy to see why the most destructive people on the planet are running amok, wielding governmental and corporate power, and controlling entire regions of the globe. The results speak for themselves, none of which would be possible without millions of acquiescent adults enabling their leaders, eager to follow their every command.

But how could an anarchist society resist power-seekers who want to dominate and control others? There is only one way:  more anarchists. There is strength in numbers, and the more the better. Perhaps Everitt misses this possibility because he makes the common mistake of imagining anarchy without anarchists. That is, his hypothetical scenario of an anarchist society doesn’t seem to have many anarchists in it. Instead, it’s full of roving fascists (which seems more appropriate for a hypothetical society of roving fascism, no?).

To be fair, the confusion may lie in the difference between the terms anarchy and anarchism. The first, anarchy, describes a societal condition where no government is present, but it doesn’t tell us much else. For example, is it a permanent, sustainable anarchy? Is it only a temporary anarchy? Did government disappear against the wishes of the society, only to be re-formed again? Or, was the government intentionally disbanded by a community of anarchists?

Anarchism seeks a very specific kind of anarchy:  free societies based on the principles of mutual aid and free participation that reject all forms of political and economic exploitation. It’s a proactive form of social organization that involves much more than the mere absence of government, and is quite different from the way the media uses the term anarchy. The media uses anarchy to mean chaos, especially when governmental power or police presence momentarily disappears. For example, the anarchy on the streets of L.A. during the Rodney King riots, or the anarchy in a third world country when the central government loses control, giving way to gang warfare, etc. Both instances could technically be called anarchy (no government), but they’re certainly not the same anarchy that results from anarchism.

When government suddenly disappears from a society whose citizens still approve of the principles of governance, it’s not surprising that violence, chaos, and violent gang warfare often ensue. But that’s not an indictment of anarchism, it’s an indictment of the principles of governance:  class hierarchy, armed enforcement, violent punishment, vicious competition, militarism, and economic exploitation. In the U.S., for example, most Americans gladly exchange freedoms for the relative security and order that results from the institutionalized violence of government. If their government were suddenly removed, chaos would likely result, especially if Americans continued to act upon the logic of domination and exploitation. Without a fundamental change in principles, this kind of temporary anarchy could precipitate a violent struggle for domination, until one group beats all others into submission, restoring relative peace and order under a new government.

But is that really peace? If governments provide peace, then it’s a rotten kind of peace. It’s a peace that’s forged through fear and violent domination. Governments are consistently and predictably abusive because they maintain order through punishing violence. Social order and peace on the surface hide the dirty business of threats, punishment, and exploitation underneath.

Under a particularly nasty government, it’s common to expect constant wars, torture, surveillance, secret prisons, corporatism, corruption, environmental destruction, and the perpetual risk of nuclear annihilation. But even under the most benign government, policy is still influenced by only a portion of society (usually a tiny, wealthy minority), regardless of dissenters; taxation is mandated to fund all policies, whether one abhors them or not; the acceptance of the rule of law is assumed at birth, without consent; and any meaningful opposition to the established order of things (more than simply voting every few years for one of two similar candidates, or protesting within ‘free speech’ zones) is greeted with fines, imprisonment or worse. This is the kind of peace that results from all forms of government, regardless of whether conservatives or progressives dictate policy: do what you’re told, or else.

For those at the bottom of the system, it’s even worse. The logic of any hierarchy demands that some people are at the top and some people are at the bottom. When a society is organized according to political and economic hierarchies, the result is a privileged class of owners and rulers that benefit from a lower class of the most heavily abused and exploited. Ironically, even many proponents of nonviolence support this arrangement, enjoying the relative comfort, security, and wealth that the systemic exploitation of the poor provides. They may protest wars abroad with slogans like “There is no way to peace; peace is the way,” disagree with their government’s most obvious excesses, or advocate reforms, but most still continue to fund, support, and participate in their political system of systemic violence.

There are alternatives, of course. Peace without government may seem difficult to imagine, and even harder to achieve, but it’s not without precedent. There are many examples of anarchist societies that have existed in the past, so it’s inaccurate to claim that civilization needs to be perfect before anarchist societies can exist. Still, how can new anarchist societies be sustained? Anarchism is different from other political movements in that it can’t be imposed on a population by a small group of rebels through violent revolution, nor can it be implemented through governmental reforms. Government will only be replaced by free societies when enough people in a community affirm that it’s unacceptable to be ruled, or to rule others, and organize themselves into a large enough group to withstand those seeking to rule them. They would have to agree that it’s no longer acceptable to benefit from the pain and suffering caused by the exploitation and domination of others. This doesn’t require people to become perfect or morally enlightened, but to make a different set of choices, based on a different set of principles, and to back them up with action. If anarchist principles are to ever become popular enough to make this a widespread reality, a more honest portrayal of anarchism seems like an essential prerequisite.

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Jason Laning

 

 

(This article was originally published on Waging Nonviolence.)

 

 

 

 

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Allen Fisher Flaxus reduced

Press Link below to play
Allen Fisher Flaxus reduced

 

 

 

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From looking like winter illegibly read

                    I shot the ALBATROSS  (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner  (line 82))

 

 

a scream in which it blooms

still on the street

and distorted by which course of action

and make sure at the time of my death

clod of earth

corner is the last corner of the corner

delayed deployment

everything from its close expressed in lumps

and where is

generation is

complete this misshape

I found no satisfaction guaranteed among the archives

it says is story

it was in range

look at my face

loss

newly married

mouth first

on the brink of the storm sighing in inconsistency

or in the late open grid

photos of the prominent almost need to be stupid

the heart is confused who in what he is talking about

the invasion that’s having fun here saved it from

to be free

trust each other like a lack of trust

which happens

was persuaded

was

vacation

the timeless rains don’t freeze

the observations

the fulfilment of a look

ours

 

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movement

new masters

natural nature

liquid stationary q.v.

lie and lie

less rain fled

its time was persuaded that the observations were

it was like music that was newly enfranchised

in its fresh natural ease 

holiness was

hell will reward the minors

had content

concern held by

assisted

and with the spirit

and hell

and did not make a union

a person’s behaviour makes it possible to review

 

  •  

 

and says that most often 

and the land that is the book

can you cruelty

like during the republic of experience

in justice

for an experienced musician to look

I don’t know how it’s going to go up

imaginatory in this time 

it joined 

its perpetuation is hardly of any kind more than 100 000

years of self-sustaining on the graph of modern space

others to apply

player on an incline

procurement state

superficial

the leaves are converted into the most state

the things that things feel

more training for recently completed leader

versions of the age

which ones you do not need to draw

words like that with this behind

 

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the gods visited

two speeds

tonal disorders the way of life

the red shutters of the constitution

the making of that’s how powerful it is

speed limits that have not yet been used

pointed in advance

persuaded to openness

its blue spine

heart foundation

numeracy now

multiple guidelines

less effective

red recovery its favourite

it has managed to symbolize

eternal in the vison of the mouth of these facts

I found the poor full of war 

earthquake 

diet creates an impression

I am the roar of every statement

of blocked around the talent it plays

 

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Patricia Farrell

 

 

 

 

 

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Small Utopias

Poor Artists, Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammed (aka The White Pube), (Particular Books)
Tactics for the Tightrope: Creative Resilience for Creative Communities, Mark Robinson (Future Arts Centres)

Poor Artists is a rambling, digressionary, funny, ridiculous, opinionated and sometimes fictional engagement which explores the authors’ belief that ‘working as a professional artist is an unattainable luxury’ but goes on to question ‘why so many artists try anyway’? Part of the book (the fiction) follows the activities and financial success of Quest Talukdar, a non-existent artist and their commercial work invented by a real artist, who becomes despondent about the work she makes that is selling but doesn’t feel like part of any genuine artistic practice.

Intertwined throughout the 300 pages are lots of encounters with other artists, gallery owners, art and cultural critics, movers and shakers, wide boys, financiers, art students, friends and those more concerned with fashion, fame and bank balances than the art itself. Many of these characters, according to the back cover, speak using ‘anonymised interviews with real people’, often within scenes set within actual galleries and art events, such as the Venice Biennale.

It’s an entertaining read, and gets better as the book goes on, although in the end I think it fails to note that the idea of the self-expressive artist is a fairly recent one and that before that artists were craftspeople and that in more recent times those who have worked as a professional artist are likely to have included running workshops, selling prints and editions of work, and lecturing or teaching art as part of their practice. Although the lure of big money for art still exists, it feels like the market & fashion end of things, something which most if not all fields within the arts have, is always in sharp contrast to the realities of life further down the foodchain.

As a poet I’ve known for decades that writing has cultural value but little commercial value. Accepting that and supporting myself since the 1980s, running writing workshops, giving readings, selling books, writing reviews and other journalism, along with successfully applying for grants and later teaching creative writing to university students, seems a perfectly reasonable way to survive within the current capitalist system we seem to be trapped within. The music industry is still coming to terms with something similar, the result of a lot of music becoming digital and available through the ether, its audience mostly now disinterested in owning ‘musical product’. Those who have survived are either so big they make money touring and – if they own the rights on merch, or have become genuinely indie cottage industries, recording, distributing and managing themselves.

So yes, the art world is bizarre and nasty, corrupt and basically a business, but no more so than any other business that deal in making money. The thing is artists don’t have to engage with that, they can work outside it, they can challenge it, circumnavigate it, subvert it, or try and ignore it. The White Pube knows this, because their book and a lot of their previous writing challenges and engages with the problems it discusses, but I feel there’s a lot of time spend in Poor Artists moaning about how unfair it is that artists are poor and ignored by the established art world. Boo hoo. Get over it and devise methods of resistance and change.

In Andy Merrifield’s book about John Berger, in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series, which I have just read, Merrifield paraphrases Berger, stating that ‘commodification is real enough, but it has not overwhelmed everything, can never overwhelm everything’. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, especially when the news reports million-dollar sales and the queues for blockbuster exhibitiions stretch round the block and are sold out for months ahead, but art is, indeed the arts plural are, happening elsewhere, both despite and because of this.

Mark Robinson has been at the heart of both establishment and alternative arts scenes. He founded the poetry magazine Scratch and its associated publishing imprint back in the 1980s, became a vegetarian chef and then moved into arts management in the form of the Arts Council, Northern Arts, Cleveland Arts and The Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Durham, before setting up Thinking Practice, which coaches, advises and facilitates across the cultural sector.

Robinson is a pragmatic and encouraging writer, who has worked for access, fair pay, equality, dignity, participation and support across the creative sector. His years of working within the system have stood him good stead to write this book, a measured, engaging and challenging set of discussions and observations aimed at facilitating good practice in running arts ‘businesses’ (which doesn’t mean establishment ones or big ones). Robinson is mostly concerned with communities, creative communities, built to help their constituents and built to last. If occasionally there are buzzwords bandied about here – such as empathy, trust and connection – they become practical terms when discussed in the main text.

Everything is up for question, debate and change. Stability does not mean stale, it means a kind of security, be that a studio within a studio block, a radical publisher finding or creating their readers, perhaps simply formally grouping together for financial or cultural survival. Robinson knows failures happen but turns even that possibility in to a chance to reflect, reconsider and recover; he also knows that communities consist of individuals, and challenges us to make individual, communal and creative change.

These two books will appeal to different types of readers, to those who think intuitively or rationally, those who are practical or idealistic, yet both have much to offer everyone. The White Pube end their text by suggesting that ‘Maybe it isn’t about the whole world, or the art world, but about this place right now. Sheila’s studio, mine. Our small utopia.’ It’s a good place to start, but utopia needs to be bigger than that, and Robinson’s ideas might just help it happen.

 

 

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Rupert Loydell

Tactics for the Tightrope is available as a free download here.
There’s an interesting 2021 interview with Mark Robinson at Creative United.

 

 

 

 

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The Magic We Need, The End We Dream

Evening in a caterpillar garden,
garth, the clouds’ chrysalis
entombs our conversations.
The conclusions we reach
reverse themselves when the rain
reaches for the ground.
The words wet the dirt, and a few
syllables recoils, leaves the meanings.

Nothing ends. We can talk again,
about peace, inciting a revolt,
guiding our daughters and sons,
about dying, but nothing ends;
not the sleep-coil friend burning
from both ends on a magic mushroom,
not the one I call only when
I need an ending, but he doesn’t have it.
It wasn’t even manufactured.

We wait in the cocoon, dream about
the way a girl may shout and giggle
when our flight may stub and startled her.
She will rush into the middle of a flower bed at the unspoilt part of a city erased.

This slumber may be the longest part
we live but flaring before we vanish
is what we like.

 

 

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Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

 

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SKIP SPENCE: AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE

 

 

Book Review of:
‘WEIGHTED DOWN:
THE COMPLICATED LIFE OF SKIP SPENCE’
by CAM COBB
(Omnibus Press) www.omnibuspress.com
ISBN 978-1-9131-7218-3, Hardback, 374pp+8 colour plates

Another broken hero, another beautiful loser. We know the fractured outline, from orbiting early Quicksilver Messenger Service, to drumming on Jefferson Airplane’s pre-Grace Slick first album… then on into Moby Grape. A troubled talent with mental health issues accelerated by narcotic indulgences. On its first release, Alexander Lee Spence’s 1969 solo album Oar, sold only 700 copies, but was later reclaimed as a classic of psychedelic oddness. There’s a story he was incarcerated in the prison ward of New York City’s Bellevue psychiatric hospital after attacking two other Moby Grape members (Don Stevenson and Jerry Miller) with a fire-axe, and that as soon as he was released, he got on his motorcycle still wearing pyjamas, and roared Easy Rider-style all the way south to Nashville to do the album entirely solo.

His father, Jock Spence, was a semi-pro pianist who wrote his own romantic ballads. The family zigzagged down from Windsor, Ontario to arrive by a circuitous route at the warmer climes of the Evergreen Trailer-Park in Phoenix, Arizona by 1953. Born 18 April 1946, Alex – already known as ‘Skip’ was ten when his itinerant family rolled into California, and eventually to San José. By which time Skip and younger sister Sherry were already caught up in the Rock ‘n’ Roll insurrection. He was gifted a guitar by his parents and learned how to play, developing a flat-picking style as the Folk-music rival washed around San José.

Father Jock was a musician, who’d also been a World War II air-ace hero. Maybe it was on that principle that teenage Skip got involved with the Peacenik Folk scene, but also falsified his birthdate so he could sign on for the US Naval Reserves? He also got girlfriend Patricia May Howard pregnant and marries her 15 March 1964. It was a time that Jorma Kaukonen called the ‘break out of that post-Eisenhower mould.’ The Ground Zero for hip.

Caught up in the post-Beat Generation pre-counterculture South Bay Beatnik-Folk scene, he played as a duo with Billy Dean Andrus – later of Weird Herald, at venues such as the small fifty-seat Offstage Folk Music Theatre where they sold marijuana from under the bar, it was a hoot with open mic accessibility frequented by Jorma Kaukonen, David Crosby, David Freiberg and Paul Kantner who would call around to jam – as Cam Cobb writes, it was a burgeoning focus for those ‘on the verge of stardom, notoriety, or even tragedy – sometimes all three.’ Skip took LSD while it was still legal (it was not criminalised until 6 October 1966), with Geoff Levin as his ‘guide’ – according to Timothy Leary’s ‘How To’ trip manual. It was the happening thing. Instant satori on a sugar-cube. All the cool folks were doing it. And for Skip, it was the first of hundreds of trips! (Levin was later a member of People!, who had a no.14 hit May 1968 with Zombies-cover ‘I Love You’, Capitol 2078, then the Celestial Navigations project.)

If acid was a catalyst, electric Dylan was another as Skip transitioned into a harder-edged group called the Manes. Then, briefly, the Other Side. Meanwhile, Marty Balin – who had previously fronted Folk fourpiece the Town Criers, was going through the same evolution. As quarter-owner of the Fillmore Street ‘The Matrix’ club, he pacted with Paul Kantner, singer Signe Toly (later) Anderson and Kaukonen to become the club’s house-band, and first Jefferson Airplane line-up. ‘The Matrix’ was more than just that, it was also a community hub. The Great Society played there, from which the burgeoning Airplane took Grace Slick. And when Skip played there with David Freiberg and guitarist John Cipollina – the roots of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Balin headhunted him too. The Airplane needed a drummer… so Skip took a week’s rehearsal time to learn drums. By September 1965 he was in, as psychedelia was defining the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury Sound.

Skip drummed with the Airplane at ‘The Matrix’ with the Charlatans, and with Blues legend Lightnin’ Hopkins. He played with them at an anti-censorship benefit at the ‘Calliope Warehouse’ with the Fugs and ‘romantic anarchist’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti – who had himself faced prosecution for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, then he played with them at Bill Graham’s new ‘Fillmore Auditorium’ (10 December 1965) with the Mystery Trend and Great Society.

Skip’s earliest recorded work eventually surfaced on Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Early Flight’ compilation (Grunt CYL1-0437, 1974) with ‘High Flying Bird’, ‘Runnin’ Round This World’ – the B-side of debut single ‘It’s No Secret’ (RCA 8679), plus Skip’s composition ‘JPP McStep B Blues’ and his co-write with Paul Kanter ‘It’s Alright’ which all date from rejected sessions at RCA’s Sunset Boulevard studios in LA, 16-18 December. But the first to be released was on ‘Jefferson Airplane Takes Off’ (USA RCA 3584, August 1966), which included two co-writes with Marty Balin, ‘Blues From An Airplane’ and ‘Don’t Slip Away’ as well as John D Loudermilk’s ‘Tobacco Road’ and Chet (Dino Valenti) Powers anthemic ‘Let’s Get Together’ already a hit for the Youngbloods and We Five. This was a folksier sound than we normally associate with the Airplane, and although Signe has clean clear moments of vocal energy, her singing style is more conventional than Grace Slick’s would be.

The problem was that Skip was a sparkplug, and the Airplane was already brimming with guitarists and songwriters. He’d never intended being a drummer, but he was stuck behind the drumkit. There are stories about how he quit… or was fired from the band, the tales contradict or collude depending on who’s telling it, but the general shape is that he took off for an impromptu break in Mexico, missed rehearsals, and was replaced by Spencer Dryden, who debuted with the Airplane 4 July 1966 at the Berkeley Folk Festival. Signe Anderson was soon to follow. Yet ‘Skippy’ sat in on sessions, and one of his beguilingly Folky songs, ‘My Best Friend’ survived onto ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ (February 1967, RCA Victor LPM 3766)… while undaunted, he went on to form Moby Grape.

The complex ins-&-outs of the Grape family tree are meticulously charted, almost gig-by-gig by Cam Cobb, with brushes and encounters with bands of near-mythic stature, the Misfits, the Vejtables, Sons Of Champlin, Peter & The Wolves. Through what he terms ‘the real summer love’ in the creative ferment of 1966, until the line-up condensed out as Peter Lewis (rhythm guitar), Jerry Miller (lead guitar), Bob Mosley (bass), Don Stevenson (drums), with Skip doubling on rhythm guitar and all writing and contributing vocals. They were a fully-formed band who’d all worked their way up through rough-gigging in various combinations, and brought an airtight range of skills to the Grape. As ‘Crawdaddy’ (June 1967) magazine editor Paul Williams pointed out, Moby Grape had ‘five vocalists, five songwriters, and about twelve distinct personalities (Skip Spence alone accounts for five of them)’. Songs were worked sitting in a acoustic circle. ‘Omaha’ at Skip’s house – ‘listen my friends, listen my friends,’ or at a venue called ‘The Ark’. Or ‘Someday’ which was reworked from a number Miller & Stevenson had written and recorded as part of the Frantics in the summer of 1966.

Jerry Garcia, Buffalo Springfield and the Holding Company dropped around to check them out. They played ‘The Avalon’ with Thirteenth Floor Elevators, from Austin, Texas. There were bad vibes between the two bands. Cobb draws intersecting lines between Skip and the Elevators’ Roky Erickson, both were on the brink of ground-breaking albums, both would be institutionalised soon after.

On the brink of fame and fortune – as well as tight pants, they opened for Love at ‘The Fillmore’, both Elektra and Atlantic were putting out feelers. But they signed with US Columbia – the label home of Bob Dylan and the Byrds. After being withdrawn to edit out the offending finger that Don was flipping on Jim Marshalls’ cover-photo, ‘Moby Grape’ (June 1967, Columbia CL 2698) was also issued as a controversial five singles, a move that confused radio station playlists and resulted in none of them becoming a major hit, ‘Omaha’ stalled at no.88. To Rock historian Lillian Roxon ‘there were no stars or featured performers; everything was very equal and level’ (1971, ‘Rock Encyclopedia’). Yet flourishing the fluency and magic of three interweaving guitars – a three-way guitar crosstalk, with ‘8.05’ which ‘clearly foreshadows Crosby Stills & Nash’ (Phil Hardy & Dave Laing ‘The Encyclopedia Of Rock Vol.2’). The album peaked at a Billboard no.24. It was a potentially great band, sabotaged by the underhand dealings of former-Airplane manager Matthew Katz, and by over-enthusiastic record label strategies! Meanwhile, they played the ‘Monterey Festival’, which ‘has to be my favourite memory of playing live with Moby Grape’ according to Mosley. Then there was a fractious and ill-advised tour supporting the Mamas & Papas, and the Buckinghams.

For the first album, thirteen tracks had been recorded across just six tight weeks. For the second – a double-album issued optionally as two separate albums, night-time sessions dragged on indeterminately, frequently working in different combinations, seldom with all five members in the studio at the same time, and complicated by an ongoing trial for possession and contributing to the delinquency of minors – which referred to three eager seventeen-year-old fans. ‘Murder In My Heart For The Judge’ indeed. Also by now ex-manager Katz marketing his own rival ‘Fake Grape’. ‘Wow/ Grape Jam’ (April 1968, Columbia CS 9613), includes ‘Black Currant Jam’ as part of its ‘Grape Jam’ sequence, augmented by organist Al Kooper (borrowed from Blood Sweat & Tears), plus Mike Bloomfield (from Electric Flag) on the 14:05-minute ‘Marmalade’. Mosley’s slow smoky Blues ‘Never’ has been seen as a root source for Led Zeppelin’s ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’. The choogling Miller-Stevenson track ‘Can’t Be So Bad’ with its complex horn-arrangements and brief acapella passage, was included on the UK budget-price sampler ‘The Rock Machine Turns You On’ (1968, CBS PR22), alongside Spirit, the Byrds, Peanut Butter Conspiracy, Tim Rose and others. On a personal note, it was by buying this compilation that I first heard Moby Grape, and was mesmerised! Spence’s spoof honkytonk ‘Funky-Tunk’ with its helium-voice passages, follows his sound-effect-laden spoof-biker anthem ‘Motorcycle Irene’. Another of Skip’s songs – ‘Just Like Gene Autry: A Foxtrot’, was confusingly included as a track to be played at 78rpm! This old-timey ‘celestial melody’ features TV-host Arthur Godfrey on ukulele and voice-over introduction. This time the album reached no.20 on the LP chart.

Yet one of Skip’s most intense songs, ‘Seeing’ survived from the ‘Wow’-sessions onto the by-then fourpiece band’s third album ‘Moby Grape ’69’ (January 1969, CBS CS 9696). To Cobb it is a ‘revelation, seeing through dreams and deceit, boring through our personal walls to see things as they truly are,’ crying ‘save me’ as it builds to a breathy acid-climax. ‘That oscillation was all over the roadmap of Skip’s life and art’ Cobb says, ‘introspection stood side by side with silliness. Joy with sadness. Genius walked hand in hand with folly.’ As with Peter Green – original Fleetwood Mac leader, there had been a fissure of mental instability which drugs simply opened up. During June New York recording sessions at the CBS West Fifty-Seventh Street studios, Peter Lewis lit out back for California, while Skip met Groupie self-styled witch Joanna Wells, and flipped. This is the scary fire-axe Manhattan breakdown that resulted in his arrest, and prolonged six-month incarceration. Jorma Kaukonen visited him at Bellevue and found him ‘inhabiting more than one universe at the same time.’

By the time of his November 1968 release, Skip – now preferring to be known by his given name, Alexander, had accumulated a reservoir of new songs, even though the enduring myth of his motorcycle ride to Nashville seems to have been apocryphal. And he built the album that was to become Oar (May 1969, US Columbia CS9831) – his magnum opus, layer by layer, overdubbing himself on a three-track machine, with only engineer Mike Figlio assisting. ‘Little Hands’ is a sentimental acoustic hymn to his children, with near-falsetto line-endings, to the genuinely strange ghost-voice ‘War In Peace’, which closes with Cream’s ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ riff. ‘Weighted Down (The Prison Song)’ is a deep-voice country ballad that teeters of the edge of parody, ‘whose socks were you darning, darling, while I been gone so long.’ There’s a touch of ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ from Dylan’s own Nashville phase.

Skip was reunited with wife Pat – who was pregnant with their fourth child, but he was also shooting heroin. When Mosley quit before the album’s release – to join the Marines!, the remaining trio went to Nashville to record the disappointing ‘Truly Fine Citizen’ (July 1969, US Columbia CS9912) with local bassman Bob Moore standing in, Bob Johnston producing, and a plaintive country-tinged Miller-Skip Spence ‘Tongue-Tied’. Various subsequent break-ups and reformations did little to salvage their once-promising reputation. After a lengthy hiatus the full original line-up reconvened to record a one-off album for Reprise, ‘20 Granite Creek’ (September 1971, Reprise K44152/RS6460), named after a big old house in which they rehearsed. It includes Skip’s experiment with the Japanese stringed zither-like koto, called ‘Chinese Song’, although the recording sessions were disrupted by Skip’s unpredictably erratic behaviour, including locking himself in his room for days on end. After a riot at the ‘Fillmore West’s closing concerts 18-19 June 1971, they admitted defeat, Skip disintegrated, and the reunion fizzled out.

Skip’s wife and kids were gone, he was couch-surfing a nudge away from unhinged, struggling with cross-addiction to smack and speed, then he was sleeping under bridges with the homeless people. There’s a 1973 story that he OD-ed, but woke in the morgue. Bob Mosley was also in straitened circumstances, and had fallen on hard times. Yet Skip had an enduring gift for friendship, even when he was panhandling outside the liquor store. There was a constellation of associates on his side, if sporadically, in recurring formations. Peter Lewis took him to a Monastery to exorcise his demons. And Grape wasn’t Grape without his input. Another expanded but failed reunion, Live Grape (Escape Records ESAIA, April 1978), has his intermittent and unpredictable presence, including his song ‘Must Be Goin’ Now, Dear’, and another – ‘All My Life’ which he’d demo’d with a pick-up band called the Yankees as early as 1972. Then after decades of litigation, Katz was back for Moby Grape ’84 (San Francisco Sound SFS04830). Skip was absent for the old-style rocking single ‘Too Old To Boogie’, but co-wrote ‘Better Days’ with Mosley.

The Doobie Brothers gifted Skip a Fender Stratocaster. He traded it for coke. He was never ‘weighted down by possessions.’ But reissues – through the specialist Sundazed label, and re-evaluations were rehabilitating his reputation. Lost tracks were added to CD editions as the psychedelic nostalgia industry flashed-back to. Better Days. A tribute album, More Oar, A Tribute To The Skip Spence Album (1999, Birdman BMR-023, UK Jericho CHOCD603) includes luminaries of the calibre of Robert Plant (‘Little Hands’), Robyn Hitchcock (‘Broken Heart’), Beck (‘Halo Of Gold’), Tom Waits (‘Book Of Moses’) and others. The last number that Skip ever recorded – ‘Land Of The Sun’, was added as a bonus track. Commissioned – then rejected, for an X-Files themed album called ‘Songs In The Key Of X’, there’s chuckling laughter, tabla, and semi-spoken vocals. He had a new partner in Terry Lewis. But his body was into terminal collapse. He died on Friday, 16 April 1999, just two days before his fifty-third birthday.

For Skip – says Cobb, ‘his life was his art.’ ‘Spence was like the trickster gods of myth, or the wise fool paradox from literature. He noticed things others missed. He gazed upon what others could not, or would not, see. He juxtaposed words and meanings in unexpected ways. Things came together brilliantly for fleeting moments, before they fell apart. Ultimately, he would look too deeply into his own darkness.’ The rest is a chaos of false starts. Cam Cobb scrupulously documents the zigzag life of this broken hero, this beautiful loser, with exhaustively detailed bonus sessionography and gig listings.

 

 

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BY ANDREW DARLINGTON

 

 

 

 

 

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Such Love

Let the life be an easy drive,
Let the wind sing
The soulful song.
Let the breath teach you
A distinction of life.
A thirst to materiality
Let it dust away
The fragrances of remains.
A golden sun
Is a merry sight
Just born out of love.
A kissing wind
Blowing upon
The request of Petrichor
Softens the earth
For you to tread on.
One barren heart
Seeks even a teardrop
Of love.
Out of teardrop,
A nearest shoulder
Consoles.

 

 

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© Sushant Thapa
Biratnagar-13, Nepal
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

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Vanishing Trick

all that was left of him
was his clothes his
spectacles false teeth
the stuff he had
in his pockets
at the time
(an address written
on a page torn
from a notebook
a box of matches
a mobile phone)
not to mention
all the things
he’d left unsaid

for days afterwards
we heard whispered lines
of poetry
coming from
behind the half-
-open doors
of empty rooms
the cupboard
underneath the stairs
even
            at one point
from a hole
in the ground

we tried to remember them,
to write them down,
but somehow there was
never quite enough
to make a poem
let alone cement
a posthumous reputation

 

 

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Dominic Rivron
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

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MOTORIK PSYCHED-UP KRAUTROCK

 

In review from Alan Dearling

A Dark Matter Promotions live gig. Three contrasting bands. All really fairly frenetic in their own ways. Headliners, Kombynat Robotron, from Kiel in Germany. Kraut-ronica, head-banging, loud, fast and furious.

S W I M were more nuanced, lots of swirling synth sounds, the drummer sings…described as ‘complex, layered, subtly menacing pop’. Well, sort of…   

And The Mushroom Club joined us at the Golden Lion in West Yorkshire from Glasgow, Scotland offering, tribal, thundering drumming, amidst a mildly addictive melange of hypnotic noise. They were travelling in the company with Robotron to play at Kozfest this weekend down in Devon.  

Together with my words, here is a mix of images that perhaps capture the flavour, if not the sounds, of a motorik night…but there are a few links too…

This was billed as a special pre-Kozfest warm-up show for two of the bands.

Kombynat Robotron

The three, tall German guys arrived on stage in white lab coats. It all felt very much akin to Three Medical Wardens arriving at lock-up time for a real-time performance of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’! Musically it was, at times, reminiscent of Hawkwind’s  ‘In Search of Space’ – but louder and more aggressively feral. Pounding drums and bass, swirling synths. Apocalyptic, indeed!

They really are purveyors of Sonic Boom and Doom. Heart-thudding, thundering, shuddering B-A-S-S. Robotronik music from the deepest subterranean realms of Hades…setting the controls not so much for the heart of the sun, but somewhere darker, a place where Thor’s mighty anvil is struck propulsively, arc-welding, showering sounds and sparks into the firmament with ear-shredding force.

They say that, “The three members were (and still are) playing in other bands before they met for a jam in April 2018. After a few jams we decided to form a band, but instead of writing songs, we’ve decided to stick to improvising which makes our live shows a unique experience.”

Visually, Kombynat Robotron brought head-banging, hair-shaking to spectacular pinnacle. A feast to be shared with the head-bangers, shakers and groovers in the crowd.

Kombynat Robotron tells us: “The robotronic music is based on repetitive patterns but features a wide range of influences due to the different sonic backgrounds of the musicians. Krautrock-grooves that smoothly evolve, from cosmic spheres into psychedelic fields and back to Krautrock. In 2018, the band started to work with several prolific labels like Tonzonen, Cruel Nature, Drone Rock Records, Misophonia, The Weird Beard, Little Cloud Records, Acid Test Recordings, Cardinal Fuzz and Clostridium Records. We’ve released 12 albums and splits on vinyl, CD and tape, plus a handful of digital albums.”

This is a sample from Kombynat Robotron live at Desertfest, Berlin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_jB742OLvc

Here’s what was said after a jam at Devon’s Kozfest:

“Kozfest in Devon is a special place…

This kind of thing wouldn’t happen anywhere else.

German Krautrockers Kombynat Robotron were introduced to the excellent Scottish Psych band The Cosmic Dead for the first time and minutes later they were on stage in a tipi tent doing the most mind-blowing jam together!”

 

Support came from

S W I M: who are self-described as producing: “Fairground horror space rock.”

Their music includes some catchy ear-worm moments, especially where the distinctive synth kicks in. The main singing duties are managed by the drummer. According to their local website, ‘Glossop Creates’:  They, “…draw on personal musical, art and film influences to create something that doesn’t want to be put in a box. The band comprises singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Gary Phethean, Max Elliott on funky bass and bass synth, Clare de Lune on lead synth and floaty vocals and writer and producer Paul O’Brien, who delivers spacey guitar riffs and synth.”

Their publicity announces that: “The S W I M sound feels big – cinematic, even. Seeing them live brings to mind an eclectic array of influences. Imagine John Carpenter taking The Flaming Lips, The Duffer Brothers, Duran Duran and David Lynch for a coffee (a damn fine coffee) – think synth-led, complex, frenetic, layered, subtly menacing pop.”

‘Supernatural Love’ is their latest single, and features the band’s signature, spacey, synth vibes and experimental beats, complemented by dreamy harmonies and a dark, dramatic edge. We are told that the single has also been made into a Bulletproof remix, a dance version which is guaranteed to get you up on your feet!

‘Supernatural Love’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMmPybxtnYY&list=OLAK5uy_k8ZdGOtGYP-nu0P1oGsuxTYopOIA1Jg20&index=1

 

The Mushroom Club

They were billed as an Ayrshire/Glasgow based Psychedelic Shoegaze Garage Rock & Roll Band.  But this rock ‘n’ roll comes with a fair degree of psychotic menace. And by their finale, it was a thunderous noisome freak-out. More motorik music with a Scottish edginess, typified by the manic stares from the singer/guitarist, who obviously has perfected the Glaswegian ‘hard-man’ look!


This is a very old video from The Mushroom Club  – ‘Dreams (Demo’s from outer space )’, but it definitely doesn’t really represent their current sound, which features guttural vocals, a wall of often hypnotic sound and repetitive sonic  drone attacks. They also managed to provide some inventive passages of bass and doomy keys interplay.

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

 

 

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Yoko Ono’s Refugee Boat

 

 

While the soul searching about the week’s far right riots in Britain grinds on, responses play themselves out via the various outlets of ‘legacy’ and social media. An article by Zarah Sultana in the Guardian this morning (Friday 9th August) points out that racism, xenophobia and Islamaphobia are not a ground-up swelling of fear and resentment from those who have been groomed by the Daily Mail, Nigel Farage or ‘Tommy Robinson’, directing their operations from the safety of 5-star hotels or million-pound hideaways from the turbulence on the streets. The steady drip of racism and hostility towards refugees in present-day Britain has come over the last ten years from the political establishment. This means you David Cameron, Priti Patel, Ed Balls, Suella Braverman, Rishi Sunak – the list of high-profile agents provocateur wielding power over the lives of those fighting for their freedom and basic human dignity is both alarming and depressing. It’s not the people in the small boats who are the real threat, it’s those in their private jets.

 

55 years ago a Japanese artist named Yoko Ono became the most reviled woman in Britain. Through her relationship with John Lennon she was blamed for the disintegration of the Beatles. Hatred and racism saw her lampooned in mainstream media as ugly, domineering and manipulative or a ‘witch’. Yet now, in 2024, she is the subject of an 8-month retrospective of her extraordinary legacy as artist and political activist at the Tate Modern’s Blavatnik building. 

 

One of the most striking exhibits in her show is the Refugee Room. An impressive push-back against racism and Islamaphobia has been evident on Britain’s streets over the last week, a counter-offensive to the riots fomented by far right populist agitation. Fear and loathing ina Babylon indeed. Ono’s response to the crisis surrounding the ‘small boats’ carrying economic and political refugees from persecution and repression to putative safety in Europe has been to place a small wooden boat in the centre of a room in which everything – the walls, ceiling, floor, the boat itself was painted John-and-Yoko white. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to collaborate in the work by decorating the space with drawings and graffiti, using predominantly blue felt and acrylic pens, that express their sentiments regarding the ‘migrant crisis’. The result is an outpouring of solidarity expressed through art. While confrontations on the streets are potentially taking the game to the far-right fuckwits’ home territory, art is something far more subtle and mercurial. Institutional philistinism is one of the central tenets of the right, both near and far, going all the way back to Hitler’s ‘degenerate art’ of the mid-late 1930s, and finding expression in the UK through the gradual erosion of the arts in schools and the denigration of ‘mickey mouse’ degrees – ie, in the arts and humanities – by the ignorance and hostility of recent Tory administrations. 

 

The arts have been a powerful force against reactionary and repressive regimes in this country throughout most of the 71 years of my lifetime. The art and continuing activism of a woman once described as the most hated woman in Britain carries on in that tradition. 

 

Yoko Ono’s show Music of the Mind continues at Tate Modern till September 1st

 

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Keith Rodway

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MISS ARTICHOKE, 1947 {has been found dead}

I’m watching two men tinker with a car, the bonnet raised
On the street, their hands darkened with grease and at least
One forehead marked when a thought needed to be scratched.

Well, says the man I know best, if it’s not that, it’s that.

Indicating something hidden, twisted within the shadows.

The second man nods, seeing no obvious alternative.
It’s either Labour or Conservative. Things are loosened,
Tightened. The engine is turned with a key, the motor
Chugs and stutters to another defeat.

Dad’s not going to buy it.

Eventually, he’ll surrender to a garage, the experts
Who work under the railway arches before the road
To Manchester, facing the Navigation. A Free House.

They even have a pit for looking at the undersides.
Although there’s nothing wrong with her belly.

When they do that, it’s an admission

A nurse calling in the doctor
The doctor calling in the surgeon
Telling the young woman to undress, slowly.

When all she’s got is a sore throat.

It used to happen all the time to Marilyn Monroe

Miss Artichoke, 1947
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Steven Taylor

 

 

 

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Savage Litanies – A Synthetic Revolt -Albion burns

 

Part 1 

A toxic slurry of shiny bullshit from raw pink savage mouths
Give us our country back! They scream  
A fuck head with a pole vaults to the front of the mob and hurls a green chair at the fuzz.
A band of pig-buttocked minds /yes, their minds resemble the arses of oinky oinks /are trying to set fire to the Holiday Inn where feathers of light barricade themselves in kitchens and listen to the bastard howl of HATE
Outside they spread racist graffiti on walls and smash windows their hearts guttered by the calloused laughter of prejudice preening in the squalor of ignorance their cheap half bites of tweeted misinformation smoking -smouldering long and hot on England’s green and pleasant land
England till I die!
Chant the pubic pus -eyed 
Hysteria!
A stain of bulldogs ram their way into Vape Vape Shoe Zone Lush and Gregs the Bakers
They torch two cars arms piled high withLOOT and hiss Save Our Kids as they burn the LIBRARY down
The volcanic gush of vitriol -the beatings – the arson all live streamed for everyone to see in high-res cinematic colour The Sunday Wrap for news isn’t a PROTEST it’s a bum slurp of violence orchestrated by a snarling -panting -foaming cut of naked fascists who say they want their jobs back.
What jobs? 3 D jobs you know the ones that the trad workforce shy away from 3 D jobs those dirty- dangerous- difficult jobs No annual pay no  sick leave  no minimum wage Are they going to clean toilets or mop up blood stained faeces from a stoma bag perhaps sit for hours in a nail parlour soaking  off acrylic tips or ride greasy wheels for Deliverooo living on
hollow -eyed dreams and pound store -chips?
Marching through English towns chanting
 Zeig Heil! Death to Paks and Blacks 
Flagging the rutted roads of division
 The circus of fools stayed away from the numbers a curtain of silence on braying tongues 
Look what they’ve done! 
Beware the false messiah sweet talking INCITEMENT -persuading -encouraging instigating -influencing- while they lounge in gold star luxury  
Hold onto that red scream of REALITY 

 

Part 2
We may be skating through the excrement of fascist bile but let us not be blinded by racist eyes let us celebrate with angelic minds the sweetened heat of love across dub- kissed skies let’s feast on the naked carcass of hope 
And scatter the streets with polyethnic glitter
Gleam in the wink of sunny discs of 
p o s i t i ve chi 
“السلام علیکم” (As-salāmu ʿalaykum) Peace be upon you 
The day is too loud to hold onto 
Cracked glass shivers bloodied feet dragging souls thru capitalist doom 
You dream of that perfect England 
But the racist militia have always been there 
to fuckety fuck fuck 
We turn away from the red stump of hate – unite  and warm ourselves with the music of the sun .

 

 

 

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Saira Viola
8th August 2024  
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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Palliation

 

The treadmill of intrapersonal channels
mitigates havoc memory, and
her handmaidens obtrude on us.

I have seen lips ustulating
to slobber over by
mead-laden initiatives.

Ecstasy has an eager face.
In its haste, it forgets
all happiness isn’t favorable.

Its poise vexes unlikely players.
Sooty interiority pleases no one.
Not even the host.

 

 

 

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Sanjeev Sethi
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. He is published in over thirty-five countries. His poems have found a home in more than 500 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. In July 2024, he was Commended in the A Proper Poetry Pamphlet Competition # 02 by the UK-based Hedgehog Poetry Press. He lives in Mumbai, India.

X/ Twitter @sanjeevpoems3 || Instagram sanjeevsethipoems

 

 

 

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from Eric’s Journal

I have been invited to read my poems to some people in Cornwall, but I have said No, because I don’t like going abroad and anyway my passport has expired.

I have been invited to contribute some poems to a magazine called “Unhygienic Genitalia”, but I won’t. I steer clear of things like that.

I have been praised “online” by a famous poet. He’s not famous for his poetry but he has a radio programme he does with poets. 40 years ago (40!) he said he would have me on it. I’ve never been on it, but I was on “Tatting Through the Ages with Mary Beard” and it went quite well.

I have been not sleeping well. Syntax issues have been keeping me awake.

I have been trying my hand at some visual poetry but it hasn’t turned out well. I think it might be because, deep down, I can’t see the point of it.

 

 

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Eric Eric
Picture Rupert Loydell

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‘I know you now as in memory flown’

Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, Martyn Bates (Hive-Arc)

Half-heard transmissions from the other room… Echoes in a distant subway… Someone talking to themselves under their breath…. The radio flickering through channels… Fucked-up folk and pastoral electronica… Self-destructed songs and kamikaze deconstruction… Instinctive songs and whispered memories… Sound addiction and soundproofed thoughts…

Eyeless in Gaza are on hiatus, Martyn Bates has put on his Kodax Strophes outfit and entered the recording studio. His superpower is sound subversion and timewarp ambience. Here he recalls his family’s radio, its slow-warming valves and gentle glow, the distant voices, fragments of tunes and the call-signs of the past.

Here are an eerie version of ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’, piano etudes, fractured songs and juxtaposed tapes. Here are sonic magic and twisted nostalgia. ‘When the world was new – colours were as fortune, set in signs inside of me’ sings Bates, but of course it is not the world that has faded, it is Bates’ perception: the passing of time and human aging makes things expected, everyday and ordinary. It becomes more difficult to deal with changes and disappearances, forgetting and partial recall.

Instead of the fading found photos that Bates’ and Eyeless in Gaza’s music often comes wrapped in, this new limited-edition CD features a detail from the Velázquez painting in London’s National Gallery that the album shares its title with. The detail Bates has chosen is not of the part of the image which features Martha and Mary, who are in a picture within the painting. What we see are two kitchen workers, one comforting or reassuring the other; we are unable to see the Bible story hanging on the wall.

So, we are seeing a partial reproduction of a 15th Century painting set in Spain, which references through a picture within a picture – yet now excludes – a story from 1st Century Palestine, written down in the 3rd. The original painting is concerned with both a depiction of contemporaneous workers and the argument about whether the spiritual or earthly is more important as evidenced by the sisters Martha and Mary when Jesus visits their house. (One cooks and cleans, the other sits and listens.) But Bates doesn’t really want to go there, he is more interested in what he refers to as ‘electromagnetic excitement’, how to resist the threats and bewilderment of the age we live in, how to select and repurpose from all the possibilities of music and experience around us. How to time travel, make music that opens up more music within itself, that references both remembered and fictional pasts and futures; sound pictures within sound pictures within sound pictures, and so ad infinitum. How to embrace the moment, and all possible moments, at once.

Collage, remix and juxtaposition, constructing something new from the old, are well-established processes, as is the use of recording studios as an instrument in themselves. Bates refers to this new album as ‘an attempt to fuse/collage together lots of unconscious dream-like/time bound and/or time-transcending musical and lyrical bits & pieces’, which gives it a more mystical interpretation. This is felt, responsive, music, gathering up and repurposing whatever can be made use of. This is sparkling, original, subversive, gorgeously addictive music.

There are endless self-referents here and many questions. Is that a sample of an Eyeless in Gaza song? Or something that sounds similar? How do that trumpet phrase and that harmonium drone fit together so well? How does the bass energise the song so simply, changing its whole direction and emotional context? How does Bates weave his enigmatic lyrics through these sounds so effortlessly and intuitively, turning them into songs? (Bates, of course, has previous: who else would record two acapella albums of James Joyce’s poetry, or reinvent historical Murder Ballads as extended dronescape laments for a trilogy of songs?)

The beauty of a sharp-edged knife… A broken-tooth smile… Creased skin and hard-of-hearing… Raindrops on the sunshade over the garden table… The end of transmission, the start of the night… The broken promises of today, the possibilities of tomorrow… The carnival is over, all the flowers have gone… Static, noise and interrupted drama… Worry and unease… Misconstrued intuition, misunderstood emotion… Impossible obstacles and futile gestures…

But, sings Bates, ‘it comes to rights somehow – over & over I’m found – ah now, I am found.’ Bates’ musical ambition and willingness to experiment and create, his restless but constant creativity, has produced a career highlight. Although it has precedents in works such as Eyeless in Gaza’s Pale Hands I Loved So Well album, a favourite of mine, this CD is even more surprising and original. He really has reached for the stars, even though he knows that although their radio waves and light are only reaching us now, their physical existence is long gone. Starshine and abstract sounds are all that is left of what once blazed and orbited elsewhere in the universe. This is beguiling and addictive, genuinely new and revelatory music.

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Rupert Loydell

 

 

KODAX STROPHES/MARTYN BATES – Christ In The House Of Martha And Mary.

 

Martyn Bates’ Bandcamp can be found here.

His homepage, for news and updates, is here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Four (from a New York Times sequence)

[They call them firehawks]

               Science Times, February 5, 2018

They call them firehawks, flocks of brown falcons,
black or whistling kites that snap up rodents
flushed by the smoke and sparks of brushfires.

And when the flames sputter, they snatch
lit twigs, fly half-a-mile to start
new fires to resume the hunt.

Or so go the stories, told for years, as yet
unproven by research in the field.

That black kites snatch food from children’s hands
in schoolyards, this is known. And that
in Aboriginal lore, human knowledge of fire

dates to the Dreaming, the time before time,
when the firehawk brought embers
to people on a burning stick.

The Hunger Stone

               New York Times, August 24, 2022

The year was 1616.
If you see me, weep, said the stone
exposed in the riverbed. The Elbe
drained by drought, the crops parched,
the farmers starving.
Did they walk toward the ocean,
too exhausted to carry even
their youngest, left behind
to fend for themselves? Or did they
sit with them by the roadside,
watching a pink sky, drowsing
hungrily before the darkening horizon.



Pluck

                    Science Times, July 18, 2023

The common coot builds nests
with condoms, carnations
made of plastic, discarded rubber

wipers that once swept rain from
Subaru or Chevy windshields;
while magpies, with thin

metal rods, those spikes
on buildings and rooftops meant
to ward off feathered fauna,

erect habitats described
by one observer, in admiration,
as ‘cyberpunk porcupines.’
 
Worldwide, dozens of species
construct with plastic bags, cloth
straps, fishing line, rubber bands

and cigarette butts, whose
nicotine may help deter
parasites (or poison inhabitants).

All of which causes
furrowed brows on some
ornithologists who’d prefer

their Nature Edenic. While others
celebrate these avian collagists who
fabricate from human trash

found on city streets,
without a power drill or plan,
a hearth and home of sorts

in which to make more birds.

Song of the Cosmologist     
     (on the death of the Sun)

                    Science Times, May 9, 2023

There will be a last sentient being,
there will be a last thought.
There will be a last wave, a last bird
taking flight. There will be a last
time to say Hello, a last Goodbye.
A last flash of light at sunset on the horizon,
a last walk down a mountain path,
a last swim in a mountain lake.
There will be a last cruel word
meant to sting. There will be a last
gun fired, a last suicide. And a last
sigh, a last song, a last breath
and heartbeat, a last chance to offer
praise before the litany of death.

 

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Boyer Rickel

 

 

 

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Observation

I don’t think much of the war that’s in the news this week
Those are not places that I’ve been or wish to go

All so embroiled, unmended damage
unhealed hurts, consuming fear 

Hard not to look at pictures taken at such cost
but I don’t want to dream about dead children. 

The refugees demand compassion
yet where on earth can they all go?

Getting involved could make things worse
Staying aloof seems abdication to brutality

What outside interests are fishing in that pool?
and can we be sure about which side is ‘ours’?

Is it the ones proclaiming values we promote
or those well armed with weapons we supplied?

It’s not as if this was the only war around
and is there any good way it can end?

Watching too much you soon feel guilty, helpless
wondering – are they at war so we don’t have to be?

 

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Tony Lucas

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Here is the Weather

The fox by the bins wants a word about the weather, says he’s worried about its accent and its veiled intimations. He’s worried about bacteria in standing water, and about the banned additives that still find their way into the food chain. He’s worried about his wife and their golden, red-eyed children, and, he says, he’s worried about me, about how I work too late at night and how I don’t know what to do when I stop. Are you eating properly? he enquires. Are you keeping hydrated? He dips a dainty paw into a patch of something sticky. Have you listened to the weather lately?

 

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Oz Hardwick
Photo Nick Victor

 

 

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Nic Nic

 

I recently read again Lawrence’s Chrysanthemums, one hand cupped over my left eye and hoping to avoid viewing the despair. Looking through the summer windows – just cleaned of their fly spots – there is a clear view of my neighbour cutting back wisteria that grows up the wall of his house and into the roof’s guttering: it is the sparrow’s nest in that climber I want him to destroy. Today’s front-page diary revelations about an entrepreneur’s politically powerful lover and his seduction shenanigans demonstrate what a knob he was. (Ascending sound) ‘nic nic nic nic’ – eating cannabis chocolate, on Tuesday I revisited Easy Rider, admiring its darkness without crying.

 

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Mike Ferguson

 

 

 

 

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JAZZ OBITUARY

The biographer assumes
You may keenly agree
With many quoted here who say
They had singular misfortune
Ever to know him

He was a flawed and sordid
Deeply unlovely person
Though   –   now I consider    –
All such critics seem to be

American by nation and persuasion
Possessing inalienable right
In assumption of moral outrage
That addiction is not progressive

Illness but expression of malign
Maladjusted degenerate character   –
Needless to say I disagree
Being un-melodramatically English

And his music I say is the sound
Of stillness that defines
The dandy’s unsung attribute   –
Discretion

 

 

 

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Bernard Saint
Illustration: Claire Palmer

 

 

 

 

 

 

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MARREE MEN – MIND THE GAP

 

Gaudi and Alex Paterson collaborate on an incandescent new anthem. Soaring synth strings and percussion move from stately stomp as sounds soar. Mind the Gap takes a tune and teaches it evolution. As each passage charms, we move with it. Their electric dream frees an ocean across dream and dancefloor.

 

Electronica skips as 4 to the floor stamps beside it, as this dub like drama slowly unfolds for the ear, as these Marree Men mix their hidden hearts within music aimed for the soul to start aching while bodies begin their climb and dance swaying, as beats come to claim them and we learn to commune as we hear. With tones from new times and echoes of Giorgio Moroda and Donna Summer, Mind the Gap bridges Disco, Club, Street and Bar, as the themes escalate and the electronica shimmers and we move along, stately, guided in thought, sans vocals, with a semblance perhaps of song’s star. Like Hancock’s Chameleon the style shifts. Its made for a new urban ghetto. The synth theme soars and rises, looking down on street shade. As the insistent beat urges us to rise with it and the echo of skittish but charming percussion colours the air as it fades. Gaudi and Alex Paterson have combined to mix and make dance floor dreamscapes. This yellow Flexi disc vinyl is a magic carpet ride through their sound, which sees these two masters combine to make this concise star-stung anthem. Listen. Ascend. Move your body and watch as your feet leave the ground.

 

David Erdos

 

 

Digital release by Proper Distribution.
Physical release on Suriya recordings
Limited release
August 23rd 2024

 

SURIYA RECORDINGS

 

 

 

 

 

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Sausage Life 303

Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column which asks: If politics is show business for the ugly, and war is legalized murder, is religion organized schizophrenia?

READER (sobbing): The Games are over! I can’t believe I’ll have to wait another four years…
MYSELF: I know, it’s heartbreaking. But I see team GB did well. Didn’t they get a Gold in the 10,000 piece synchronised jigsaw?
READER: Very funny. Very droll. You’re not a fan of the Olympics are you?
MYSELF: Not especially, but my tropical fish enjoy it.
READER: Your fish like it? How can you tell?
MYSELF: I don’t know, they just seem content when it’s on

BUDDHA WOULDN’T MELT
Selfie enthusiasts and dungareed men with beards and small dogs queued for hours to get tickets for the opening of Cockmarlin’s new Brahma Masala Exhibitionist Yoga Centre. Those lucky enough to attend were offered a month’s trial membership, which included a free tanning/yoga mat and the use of a professional body double during group exercises in the glass-fronted Narcissus Room. Exhibitionist Yoga, according head guru Dheepan Crispian Evan, is thought to promote empathy-cleansing and social detachment, as well as encouraging ego nourishment via tantric masturbation. Membership applications are now closed.
READER: Closed? That’s a shame, it sounds right up my street.
MYSELF: Yes it does. Have you tried the Ku Klux Klan?
READER: Is that similar?
MYSELF: Broadly.

DOTTY PROTEST
A protest march took place in Upper Dicker earlier this week which terminated at the East Sussex Spiritualist Institute (formerly The Cat’s Pyjama night club), where a 100-strong banner-waving crowd assembled to object to the appearance there of Psychotic Doris, the famously litigious cold-reading mumbo-jumbo lady. Many of the banners were blank, and through a megaphone, the holder of one shouted sarcastically “See if you can guess what I’m protesting about!”
Inside the auditorium the atmosphere was tense as the packed audience waited for Doris to appear. At last, 35 minutes late, she was pushed onstage in a wheelchair by four black-suited security guards wearing mirrored sunglasses and earpieces. After a brief introduction, Doris leapt out of her chair to wild applause and went into a psychic trance in order to contact her Native American spirit guide Chief Malcolm Fourcandles, whereupon the following exchange took place:
PSYCHOTIC DORIS: I’m getting a Bob or a Henry, or maybe a Claudia…something to do with tea…. or biscuits.
HECKLER:  You are a fraud and a charlatan!
PSYCHOTIC DORIS (nodding to heckler and making throat-cutting gesture to her security guards): Has anyone lost a beloved pet recently? Or a very old relative? Or a costly libel action?
As Doris started speaking in tongues, we were ushered out of an emergency exit by staff and having refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement, were given express instructions not to return.

WENDY WRITES
A selection from our agony aunt’s recurring postbag of angst

Dear Wendy,
Since my mirror broke down, I can’t tell whether I’m here or not.
Can you help?
Maureen Nosferatu (Miss)
Lower Primate 
Kent

Dear Ms Nosferatu,
I sympathise. One of my ex-husbands was a professional vampire who had constant trouble shaving in the morning, for all sorts of reasons! But seriously, the loss of a mirror can be severely traumatic. Try using a window instead, which is exactly like a mirror except with other people in it.

Dear Wendy,
My boyfriend Geoff wants me to have plastic surgery. He is only four foot six whereas I am six foot three, and he feels that my face would be better re-situated on my stomach, so that we could have face to face conversations without him having to stand on a box. Attractive though that may seem, I cannot help thinking that the subsequent lack of features on my head would attract undue attention. What should I do? 
Catherine Wierl 
Warburton cum Twandly 


Dear Catherine
My first husband was an Innuit eskimo. He was no good in bed, but boy could he skin seals! That however is neither here nor there. I appreciate your boyfriend’s concern, but if God had meant us to have faces on our stomachs, he would have said so in the bible. Have you considered partial lower leg amputation? 

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DER FUHRERGATOR
Saturn, an octogenarian alligator from Mississippi who is believed to have belonged to Adolf Hitler, has died in a Moscow zoo. Hitler was known to be a huge animal lover who owned a variety of pets including hamsters, bats, poisonous spiders and his beloved cockatoo Beryl, who could recite Shakespeare and play accomplished soprano saxophone. The zoo noted that Saturn, like his alleged former owner, was a picky eater who would often refuse prunes. (Hitler would often leave peas on the side of his plate or shovel saurkraut into a potted plant when he thought no-one was looking. After his suicide in a Berlin bunker, investigators discovered a cache of food items secreted by the führer during mealtimes and concealed under his mattress; these included artichoke hearts, pork bladders and oddly, moisturising lotion).
The dinosaur-like reptile also loved, according to zoo records, a ‘brush massage’. Precisely what that entailed is not absolutely clear, but Walter Wichser, his one-armed, one-legged keeper told us: “Saturn liked to have a vigorous brush massage at precisely 2:30 every afternoon, and even though he did not wear a watch, he was a stickler for punctuality. If something was not to his liking he would bite it in half, which is what he did to Rolf his previous keeper.”
A tiny tear trickled down Walter’s scarred cheek as he added, “He was like an 83-year-old son to me, only with enormous flesh-tearing teeth. Many visitors to the zoo were terrified of his evil gaze, but apart from the odd tiff, he and I got along famously.”

 

 

Sausage Life!

 

 

 

ATTENZIONE!
‘Watching Paint Die’ EP by Girl Bites Dog is out now and available wherever you rip off your music.
Made entirely without the assistance of AI, each listen is guaranteed to eliminate hair loss, cure gluten intolerance and stop your cat from pissing in next door’s garden.
Photo credit: Alice’s Dad (circa 2000)




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

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

 

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

CHEMTRAILS ON MY MIND
MORT J SPOONBENDER

On September 11th 1958, José Popacatapetl, a retired tree psychologist who’s father was head gardener for the CIA during the cold war, was hitchiking through the Alberqueque desert when he was picked up by a black sedan driven by J Edgar Hoover’s ex-boyfriend André Pfaff head of FBI underhand operations and extra-terrestrial banking who once worked as a quantum mechanic for the KGB under the direct orders of the zombie reincarnation of Josef Stalin whose mummified corpse was kept in a secret underhand bunker in the basement of the Vatican.

 



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SUPERCALIFUCKINGFRAGIFUCKINGLISTICEXPIALIFUCKINGDOCIOUS

 

 

By Colin Gibson

 

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Lenny Helsing & The Thanes

Musical Musings between Alan Dearling with Scottish musician, Lenny Helsing

Lenny Helsing and I share quite a lot of history. Or, even, histories! So, when he contacted me very recently while working on material for his band, The Thanes’ new album, I was more than happy to receive the advance ‘EP’ and give it a spin or two in my studio at Robinwood Mill in the Calderdale Valley in Yorkshire. Here’s what Lenny told me:

“Sound wise I would say it’s about the best we’ve done and is part of our newest material that, when we get it finished, will also result in a brand new, all original compositions LP. But this time around we’ve gone with two originals and two covers of mid-sixties favourites of ours.”

 

Alan: The blurb for the EP on the ‘Rogue’ records site does a pretty good summing up of The Thanes’ back-story:  “The Thanes originate from Edinburgh, Scotland and have been playing as a group now for some 36 years. In that time they have made 23 singles and released eight albums.

The Thanes’ world is fuelled by ‘60s beat and R&B, garage, punk and psychedelic pop-rock plus a wide range of other sounds including progressive and hard rock, folk and jazz.

For their new EP on Rogue Records they decided on including two new original recordings, ‘For What Reward?’ and ‘Heed The Warning’ which they have been honing in their rehearsal room and on various live dates they’ve been playing since coming out of Covid-induced lockdowns. They also recorded a cover of ‘You’ll Never Do It Baby’, a song best known by the Pretty Things, as well as a version of the great, ‘It’s Dark’, by the Australian sixties group the Twilights.”

Alan: As I listened to the tracks on the EP, I had a number of thoughts flitting through my head. It’s a lovely pressing to start with. And offers in ‘For what reward?’, catchy rolling organ, a mix of grungy guitar riffs, gruffly sung words: ‘Join the Rat Race – but for what reward? GONG ROUND THE BEND.’ 

The Pretty Things’ song offers more swirling organ breaks, frenetic drumming, psyched-out guitars and drawling vocals. ‘You tell me that you love me – but it’s just not true’. The Twilights’ ‘It’s Dark’ has an almost Eastern influence, scorched guitars, oddly, a kind-of ballad, but with whirling Wurlitzer sounds.

And, the final EP track, ‘Heed the Warning’ is Acid-Pop, a little reminiscent of the Great Society with recessed vocals, clanging cymbals and yet more energetic fuzzed guitar.  Overall, a kind of selection box of joyous, jangling garage pop from a different time-zone, circa the late ‘60s.

Alan: So, Lenny, we last did an interview/article together for ‘Gonzo’ magazine in 2016. More water as well as pandemics under the proverbial bridge since then. To recap just a tiny bit from that earlier ‘conversation’ – we first met in Longniddry in 1978. I’d been running youth clubs in London and had been heavily involved in the punk and reggae scene, especially around Acton and Ealing. You were pretty much the one and only punk on the scene in the fairly sleepy East Lothian village. You’d already been in some school and local community covers bands, Highway, Mr Bojangles. Then came your punk phase as singer with the locally infamous Edinburgh-outfit, The Belsen Horrors.  

Lenny: Alas, the debut live appearance of the Belsen Horrors had to be postponed, due to the temporary incarceration of the group’s singer. (I got 3 months detention for ermm,  breaking into shops and the school we were at and stealing things, what can I say, it wasn’t big, nor clever, learnt my lesson…most of the folks there said, see ye in 6 months! But I said, aye riiiiiiiiight!).

We are left to right in photo: Mark Patrizio – bass (later to The Exploited), Lenny Helsing – vocals, Keith Wilson – drums (later in The Visitors) and Steve Fraser – guitar (later depped for John Mackie in Scars, and joined up with Mike Scott in post-Another Pretty Face, pre-Waterboys groups).

Alan: I really got to know you and some of your mates through your involvement in a much more psychedelic musical outfit, The Green Telescope. I don’t want to go over the exact same ground as my early interview with you, but give me a brief potted history of your early ’80s musical journey…and here’s one of my pics of you in that early, Lenny Helsing, psychedelic-mode!

Lenny: Bruce (McConville) Lyall and I formed The Great Green Telescopic View Of The World after leaving the group I joined that he was in with his pal Kenny Davidson. That band was called Snake Whippit and the Parrot Farts who didn’t seem to be doing much of anything, other than the occasional jam out session. This was the tail-end of 1980. So, as you know, after a few all night, stoned-out jam sessions our mutual friend from the Longniddry days, Steve Monaghan, joined us to play guitar. But after a few months Bruce and I began forging ahead on our own, although we remained good friends with Steve. Around this time Colin Blakey came into our orbit. He played bass and also flute and we soon began taking further, more bolder steps with the music.

We were obsessed with sixties psychedelia and seemed to want to be the early Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett, Love, the Byrds, the Pretty Things, Tomorrow, Jefferson Airplane and the Incredible String Band all rolled into one. Then more obscure U.S. groups like the 13th Floor Elevators, the Seeds, the United States Of America and the Blues Magoos came into our lives, followed swiftly by a million other garage punk groups from compilation LPs like ‘Pebbles’ and ‘Chocolate Soup For Diabetics’, as well as groups like the Outsiders and Q65 from the Dutch scene… it was endless. After Colin left we asked our new pal Alan McLean to join us on bass as he was just as obsessed with the kind of sounds we were into, and he was already much deeper into groups like the Sonics, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Chocolate Watchband and many more

Alan: You’ve always probably dreamed of being a full-time muso, I’d guess…

Lenny: Oh yeah since the days of marvelling at Alice Cooper, Slade, the Sweet, Roxy Music, Cockney Rebel etc when they appeared on television and in pop magazines when I was about 9 or 10 years old. But I still hate that term muso, I prefer music-maker!

Alan: Apologies about ‘muso’! So, over more than five decades you’ve been the singer, guitarist, bass-player and drummer in a succession of bands…what are the most amazing memories both live and in recording?

Lenny: Oh man, that’s a tough one as there have been so many incredible memories to cram into my brain down the years. However, here’s a few that really stand out. The Green Telescope closing the night at our ‘Wipe Out’ gig in Edinburgh in the early summer of 1984 was such a momentous occasion for all who were there, and just the absolute headiness of it all – the lights and the people and the crazy sounds happening throughout the evening. The Thanes getting to open for The Sonics at the New York ‘Cavestomp’ event in Brooklyn, NYC, in 2007, was yet another memorable highlight, especially as the group at that point still had a few original members, including lead screamer and organist Gerry Roslie.

And, similarly, a decade or so earlier when we got to open for the mighty ? & the Mysterians in London at the ‘Wild Weekend’. Rudy (? himself) even dedicating a song to us and saying, “…this one’s for the Thanes who tore it up tonight”. And at our soundcheck their guitarist Bobby Balderamma liked the sound of my Vox Tonebender fuzz-box so much that he asked if he could borrow it for the show. What an honour! And in 2004 who could’ve believed that Sky Saxon  – iconic frontman of L.A. ’66 punk deities The Seeds – would make it over to the U.K. and even up to Scotland with an updated version of the group.

The Aberdeen group for which I was playing in at the time, the Downroads, were scheduled to open for them there but noise complaints etc put the dampeners on that one and we didn’t end up playing. But I did meet Mr Saxon a few hours earlier and had a nice relaxing time with him, and a long chat about what a magical time it must’ve been for the Seeds in their 1966-68 heyday. And Sky signed this Seeds’ poster for me.

On the next night they played in Glasgow and – as befits a group who were heavily influenced by all things Seeds since our days as the Green Telescope – it was the Thanes who opened for them. The first and only time we played King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut venue. Playing drums for one of my favourite groups ever, the Television Personalities, on a promotional tour across the U.S. east coast in the summer of 1993, and again the following spring in Japan also count highly in the very best things I’ve done in my musical life. That was a total dream come true for me. The NYC part of it was organised as part of the New York New Music Seminar, and at the city’s Wetlands venue, Kurt Cobain was nonchalantly sitting on the edge of the stage watching us play. Another cool highlight was the first time that the Wildebeests (I play drums in the group) played with Mudhoney (we’ve done it now a few times over the years) at Glasgow Q.M.U. venue, with just our tiny wee PA hooked up through their much bigger sound rig, and the younger kids who were there perplexed but delighted by this mad, raw garage beat punk sound coming out of a local-ish band that they’d never heard before, ha ha.

The Poets: George, Fraser and Lenny, BBC Radio Scotland studios, Glasgow, Oct 2011

 

And how could I not mention the couple of years between 2010-2012 when the Thanes joined forces with former members of Glasgow’s mid-sixties beat legends, The Poets, namely the late great George Gallacher (vocals) and Fraser Watson (guitar) to once again play as The Poets. We only did a few gigs including Glasgow, London’s prestigious ‘Le Beat Bespoke’ weekend and ‘Festival Beat’ in Salsomaggiore, Italy – both of these took place in spring/summer 2012, plus we did a live radio session for Vic Galloway on BBC Radio Scotland in October 2011. We’ve long been fans of The Poets so it was another monumental happening for me. I’ve interviewed both George and Fraser as a writer/chronicler of such things for various fanzines down the years, but playing Poets’ songs in the same room with them for hours at a time and drawing ever closer to them as friends is hard to beat and was a real joy. Needless to say it was such a sad day when George died suddenly in August 2012 and that particular dream had to end!

And to close this particular thread, I have to say that one of the most momentous occasions of my whole life was getting the chance to be lead singer for a couple of hours straight with Amsterdam’s sixties heroes the Outsiders. The group’s original singer Wally Tax had sadly died a couple of years before – and although friends had met and befriended him, I never did. But the group’s other original members Ronnie Splinter (guitar) who I became great friends with until his passing in 2013, plus Appie Rammers (bass) and Buzz (drums) were still playing on this day in June 2008 when me and Dave Andriese picked them up for an afternoon rehearsal, ahead of that evening’s show at Dave’s  ‘Primitive’ festival event in Rotterdam where, amid a plethora of other vocalists from the world’s sixties loving, modern garage and beat scene groups, I took the stage to sing and blow some harmonica with them on four songs: 1966 single sides ‘You Mistreat Me’ and ‘Felt Like I Wanted To Cry’, 1967 ‘Outsiders’ LP cut ‘I Would Love You’ (which we also recorded with the Thanes for an Italian compilation LP) and the wild and crazy ‘Daddy Died On Saturday’ from the group’s 1968 conceptual ‘CQ’ LP. I also clambered on stage that night with one of my favourite singers of all time, Jeff Conolly from Boston’s Lyres group where we shared vocals on one of the Outsiders’ greatest singles, ‘Lying All The Time’.

Alan: I’m a good friend of Aja Waalwijk, brother of Ben from the Outsiders. Very recently Ben died and Aja helped organise an Outsiders’ tribute album in memory of Wally Tax and Ben, who played organ on eight tracks …Anyway, hey Lenny, back to your musical tour!

Lenny on stage with the Outsiders (drummer Buzz) Rotterdam ‘Primitive Festival’ 2008

 

Alan: You have continued to play more in Europe than in England…is that out of choice?

Lenny: Not really, but sometimes it was just easier to get gigs that didn’t leave us out of pocket – and playing one or two gigs over a weekend in Spain, Italy or Germany can sometimes be more rewarding than slogging it out in London or wherever and not getting much more than expenses – not that we always made money from playing gigs overseas. However, we’ve also gone through various upheavals and personnel changes over the years but have now settled in the last almost ten years now with the current line-up of Angus McPake, organ, guitar Gordon Brady, drums and backing vocals, but played bass when he first joined us, Colin Morris, bass and backing vocals and myself on lead vocals and guitar.

Alan: What about your favourite recordings?

Lenny: In the world of the phonograph I have literally thousands of favourite recordings, but on 45 rpm, today, let’s go with ‘Rosalyn’ by the Pretty Things, ‘Candy And A Currant Bun’ by the Pink Floyd, ‘From Above’ by Q65, ‘Johnny Won’t Get To Heaven’ by the Killjoys, ‘I Love Her Still’ and ‘Some Things I Can’t Forget’ by The Poets, ‘Adult/ery’ and ‘Horrorshow’ by Scars, ‘Teenage Treats’ by the Wasps, ‘Tomorrow’ by the Strawberry Alarm Clock, ‘Zerox’ by Adam & the Ants, ‘The One I Want’ by Green Day and ‘Painting By Numbers’ by the Gifted Children … and on 33 rpm we’ll go with ‘Buddy Holly’ by Buddy Holly and the Crickets (even though it’s only BH mentioned on the sleeve and label), ‘Parachute’ by the Pretty Things, ‘Revolution’ by Q65, ‘Easter Everywhere’ by the 13th Floor Elevators, ‘And Everybody Else Smiled Back’ by Bears In Trees, ‘Damned, Damned, Damned’ by the Damned, ‘And Don’t The Kids Just Love It’ by Television Personalities, ‘Just Ear-rings’ by the Golden Earring, ‘We All Together’ by We All Together, ‘Memories Have Faces’ by the Loons and ‘Wee Tam & The Big Huge’ by the Incredible String Band… and, of course, there are so many more…

Alan: We haven’t managed to meet up since I travelled up to see you in Stonehaven before Covid struck…fill in some gaps…and here’s my last pic of you…looking very professorial!

Lenny: Well, like I said, not long before the pandemic happened we were just getting back into the swing of gigging and rehearsing and writing and doing some recording and then, as it was for so many, things went a bit deathly quiet for a while, and we didn’t go down the path of rehearsals by zoom or acapella or any of the electronic or internet-based platforms. But then after coming out of the various Covid-induced lockdowns, we’ve been getting back into it with a passion, playing down in England a lot more. We also released a special German ‘live’ LP, ‘Roh Und Lebendig >Nicht< In Koln’ for the record label Soundflat’s  ‘Last Minute Ballroom Bash’ birthday weekend, which we were initially supposed to play at in December 2021. But the event got postponed due to increased Covid instances in Germany and was then successfully re-scheduled to the last weekend September-into-October 2022.

We’ve also been busier than ever at home with recent gigs happening in Newcastle, London, Bristol, Liverpool, Leicester, Rochester, plus the usual bunch of gigs in Glasgow and Edinburgh – where we also opened for Jowe Head’s recently re-constituted Swell Maps (C21) and also the Television Personalities (alas without original mainstay Dan Treacy who, sadly, has been in care since 2011). That’s as well as gigs in Gateshead, Stockton-On-Tees and even Shipley.

Alan: And what of your future musical plans?

Lenny: As stated earlier The Thanes have been working on a new album of all original compositions which is a first for us as we’ve always done a few covers on each of our albums. So we are really excited to get that finished, but because we don’t all live near each other anymore there’s the logistics of all of that, plus some of us play in a number of other groups, as well as keeping busy with various day jobs etc.

So, as I say, it’s not been all that easy to maintain a recording schedule. However, I’d say we have around three-quarters of the initial work completed, plus various different ideas and songs that should see us have all the groundwork prepared so that sometime in the early part of 2025 we should have the album recorded and readied for release. We don’t have a confirmed label who will put it out yet. We also have a few other recordings almost completed that we can use for various single releases. And our current French label EP, which you’ve talked about earlier, ‘Les Thanes’ has sold out its first pressing and we are awaiting the new edition of that very soon. Other plans are to go back out on a few more dates around England and Scotland. Then, after the album comes out, we’ll see if we can get another overseas trip organised.

Alan: You have always had an exploratory approach to music and musicians. I guess that hasn’t changed. For example just recently you wrote to me:  “Going back down to Glasgow tomorrow on my own to see Aussie drone folk-psych wonder, Trappist  Afterland … Have  you heard him/them?

TA also does stuff under his own name of Adam Geoffrey Cole… not everyone’s cuppa tea but I’ve a feeling you’ll dig.”

Who or what else would you suggest that we, the great music public, should be seeking out? Is it more styles of music, or, specific types of musician who you most enjoy?

Lenny: As a dedicated music fan I’ve never limited myself to only liking one style; even though I’ve become more synonymous across the decades with the whole sixties garage, beat and psychedelic realm. So currently I’m digging stuff like ukulele dirtboy punk band, Bears In Trees, from Croydon, garage-psychsters, the Loons from San Diego and the Sences from Thessaloniki in Greece. Then there’s London LGBTQ+ champions, the Oozes – think a raging modern-day Slits-meets-Raincoats, but on their own terms. Also in their own world are oddities like Glasgow originals, Bin Juice, also the Phar-i-sees who we’ve invited onto gigs with us over the past few years and London veteran beat/R&B/psych motivators, the Beatpack.

I also love stuff as varied in style as Cavetown and Noah Ffince, weird folk protaganists such as the afore-mentioned Trappist Afterland from Australia and those much-maligned (even by yours truly in the past without ever having heard them) Californian pop-punksters, Green Day – I don’t care what anyone says I’ve seen them live now a couple of times in the last few years and they’re great fun, and really inclusive, as well tons of their songs being much more memorable than a lot of what went down by the old guard …  

Alan: As ever, good to catch up with…onwards, sideways, maybe even upwards…Luv ‘n Respect.

Lenny: Yeah, well who knows eh. It’s always good to catch up, and hear what’s going down with you and your various goings on too. Here’s hoping we can get down your way to play before long too, that’d be exciting, cheers and lotsa love back!

Here are two links from Lenny:

The Thanes — Please Don’t Cry (Helsing)

1988 recording for Italian ‘Lost Trails’ magazine free 7”

https://youtu.be/Q4UuzlRDllE

 

The Thanes — Gone Away Girl (Lyall)

This is the film of us recording the song at Chamber Studio, Edinburgh in 1991. One of the tracks on our 1992 12” EP, ‘Learning Greek Mythology With The Thanes’ on Satyr Records, Greece

https://youtu.be/iI8OmXXNHR0

Debut LP ‘The Thanes Of Cawdor’ 1987

 

A more recent shot of the Thanes: L-R Angus, Lenny, Colin, Gordon (Photo by Danny Carr)

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THE WHITE GATES

Where my forehead will rest
Drunk against the cold white tiles

Above the Duchamp urinal

Not the original
But a copy of a copy
 
 
 
 
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Steven Taylor
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THE UNNAMED

“Who are these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?” — Woody Guthrie

 

  1. On June 8, 2024, Israeli forces raided the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza to rescue four hostages, incidentally killing two hundred Palestinians and wounding four hundred, afterward blocking ambulances from transporting victims to the one over-taxed hospital still in operation.  Body bags in the streets laid a white river, another tributary to the sea of rage.  American media reported the names of the four hostages, though none of the Palestinians.

 

  1. Woody Guthrie wrote one of his last great songs, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” after the New York Times published the names of four Americans killed when their plane went down in Los Gatos Canyon in January, 1948, but left unidentified the twenty-eight braceros, migrant farm workers, mostly Mexican, who also perished in the crash.  A writer named Tim Z. Hernandez researched the names and on Labor Day 2013 a memorial headstone was placed at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno for those workers who never lived to “pay all their money to wade back again.”  It’s hard to imagine it happening, you’ll agree, without Woody’s righteous anger.

 

  1. Shall we lie to ourselves and pretend that race and class had no part in these injustices, one group of lives valued more than the other, one group “more like us” than the other?  Where is the monument to those cut down at Nuseirat, almost as surely with our American tax dollars as those bracerosdeported after harvesting our peaches and oranges?  When do you think the New York Times will get around to reporting their names?  Who will be their Woody Guthrie, and how shall we remember those we cannot name?

 

 

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Thomas R. Smith
Art Rupert Loydell

 

 

 

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Yesterday On The Beach

The magician forgot to feed 
his rabbit. The new trick revealed
a kaleidoscope of butterflies
unleashed when the magician 
took off his hat to hail the newborn old.

Since we partied on yesterday’s beach,
today’s ocean washed boulders,
the butterflies fluttered to disappear 
as soon as possible, and we, thinking 
it as a part of the show, applauded.

The magician cried. His happiness 
had the depth of the death. A friend 
of the family, amateur, he stood there
on the flat rock. We thought he was
a joker now, paradigm shift in tricks.
Waves rose, washed out made up faces.

 

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Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor

 

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

 

 

 

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The Snail Logic

The snail, a few paces old, 
snacks on the dawn-light. 
The red dirt darkened by 
the almost-deluge of previous night 
glows too. The Sun of the moment 
snails toward mid morning. 
The snail sucks the ticks, licks the tocks.
Everything seems almost now.
The creature, as the rays pass
through its housing, becomes 
an almost snail, blurred beyond 
the tight compartment of a definition.
I am almost myself at this jiffy,
a boat amidst the crimson earth
rowing to grow, not aging
as the progress is as far as the spot
it has been moored since its origin.

 

 

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Kushal Poddar
Words and Picture

 

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

 

 

 

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Under the Counterculture: An Interview with Leon Horton

 

By Michael Limnios 

Leon Horton is a UK-based countercultural writer, editor, and interviewer. He is the editor of the widely acclaimed Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet (Roadside Press, 2024), and recently completed an extensive interview with author Victor Bockris for the forthcoming publication, The Burroughs-Warhol Connection (Beatdom Books). He is a regular contributor to International Times and the literary journal Beatdom, and has been published by Beat Scene, Empty Mirror, Literary Heist, and Erotic Review.

How has underground literature and the counterculture influenced your views of the world?
For me, it all started when a friend lent me a copy of Naked Lunch, sometime back in 1991/92. I’d never even heard of William Burroughs or the Beat Generation at that time. I read Naked Lunch in one sitting, coming down from an acid trip, and I couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t believe what I was reading, let alone that it was written in the 1950s. I haven’t looked at the world in the same way since.
How did the idea for Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet come about?
It was on a trip to Athens. I was standing on the Acropolis, staring out across the city, lost in some sort of spiritual moment, when it dawned on me that I was standing where Gregory himself once stood. I determined there and then I was going to write something about his adventures in Greece. That essay, ‘Where Marble Stood and Fell: Gregory Corso in Greece’, which is included in Ten Times a Poet, was subsequently published in the literary journal Beatdom in 2022. Shortly after that, I made a throwaway comment on Twitter to a publisher about doing a Chapbook in celebration of Corso. The publisher (who shall remain nameless) was very keen but turned out to be a complete crook and the whole thing collapsed. Luckily, Michele McDannold at Roadside Press was interested and wanted to develop the project into a full-length book. It’s down to her hard work, diligence, and patience with me that the book has been published. It’s taken a long time, with more and more incredible writers, photographers, and artists coming on board: Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, Gerald Nicosia, Neeli Cherkovski, Chris Felver… I think the result is a testament to Corso’s legacy.
What was it about Gregory’s life and work that touched you?
It’s curious, but I was quite dismissive of Gregory when I first read about him in the biographies of the other Beats or saw him in documentaries. I thought he was just a bitter hangover. It wasn’t until I started to read his poetry and learn about the trauma he faced in childhood and beyond that I realized what a remarkable survivor, what an incredible poet he was; capable of great humour and beautiful insight into the human condition. He could be a nightmare to deal with, I know, but the outpouring of love for Gregory in Ten Times a Poet from those who knew, worked and lived with him just astounded me. Allen Ginsberg said Gregory was a better poet than himself. He was damn right.  
Why do you think the Beat Generation continues to generate such a devoted following?
Well, we all love a rebel, don’t we? On some fundamental level, we need voices of dissent – especially in these shit-storm days we are currently living through. I don’t know; this is actually a difficult question to answer. I guess much of what the Beats said and did and wrote about in their time remains as pertinent, as true today, as it was back then – that need and willingness to cry out, ‘No, I won’t do as you say, go fuck yourself!’
How important is music to you? Does music affect your mood and inspiration?
Music has been hugely important throughout my entire life. My mother was (and still is) a huge fan of The Rolling Stones – I was listening to them in the womb. Growing up, I got to hear mum’s favourites: Rock ’N’ Roll, Motown, Soul, Blues… When I moved to Manchester in the late 1980s, I became friends with a lot of people, many of them musicians, who introduced me to so many different kinds of music and just opened up my world. Does music affect my mood and inspiration? Even though I know nothing about it, I sometimes have jazz playing on the radio when I’m working. There’s something in those (wordless) beats and rhythms that I find conducive to writing.
What has been the most interesting period in your life?
Well, moving to Manchester in 1989 was precipitous – just in time to experience the so-called “Madchester” scene. It was like an explosion, with the legendary Factory Records and bands such as The Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, and – my all time personal favourite – The Fall. There was no other band like The Fall. And two or three times a week we’d be popping pills and dancing our nuts off in the Hacienda. For a while there, albeit briefly, the Hacienda was the most famous nightclub on the planet and Manchester seemed like the centre of the universe. I didn’t see it at the time, of course, but when I think about it now I realise we were living through cultural history.
Do you have a dream project you’d most like to accomplish?
Oh, yes. I’m working on a book about the 1965 International Poetry Incarnation that took place at the Royal Albert Hall. Seventeen poets performed that night, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso – but it was more than just a ‘Beats in Britain’ thing. It was the event that is widely regarded as kick-starting the whole countercultural scene in the UK. Just before he passed away in 2023, I was lucky enough to interview poet and musician Pete Brown, who performed that night. Pete, as I’m sure you know, started out as a jazz poet and went on to write the lyrics for Cream’s “I Feel Free” and “White Room”. He was a remarkable man and a brilliant raconteur.  
What socio-cultural impact does literature have today?
Where would we be without it? Literature helps us to understand the world, to see and feel and empathise with other cultural values, other points of view. It stimulates our thinking and, on a very basic level, entertains us. The mediums and the modes have changed with the rise of social media and other platforms – but that isn’t always a bad thing. I tend to look at it as similar to the mimeograph revolution and all the ‘little magazines’ of the 1950s/60s that helped democratise literature and give new writing a voice.   
What meetings/interviews have been the most important to you? Are there any memories you’d like to share?
Writing for International Times and Beatdom, I’ve had the honour and great fortune to interview some important names in Beat studies: Bill Morgan (author of The Typewriter is Holy and I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg), Gerald Nicosia (author of the superb Kerouac biography Memory Babe). The one that stands out for me, however, is an interview with Victor Bockris for his forthcoming book, The Burroughs-Warhol Connection. Victor is an interviewer’s wet dream. The stories he told me, of the incredible artists he has either interviewed or written about: William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry… Pure gold! The dinner party he threw for Burroughs, Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol was nothing short of a disaster. I was crying with laughter when he told me about it.      
Let’s take a trip in a time machine. Where and when would you like to go? And what memorabilia/music would you take with you?
Oh, that’s easy. I’d go back to five minutes before Elton John’s parents were about to get down to it, with a copy of his greatest hits, and I’d say, ‘Oi! You two! No!’ And then I’d play them the album and show them what the future will be if they don’t just stop what they’re doing.

Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet (Roadside Press, 2024) is available now from Amazon. 

The Burroughs-Warhol Connection (Beatdom Books) will be published in late 2024.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE DIARY OF A GENTLEMAN-POET

Tuesday, July 23rd

I had to go to the doctor today for a blood test. It’s of not much consequence – I hope). I don’t like needles being stuck into me, or anything else for that matter, but the nurse was very nice, and she only needed 3 stabs at my arm before she found a way in. I’m not going to say what the test was for, because I prefer to remain anonymous.

On the way home I passed Bumpy Wainright, who appeared to be asleep under a tree by the side of the road. I think he’s been drinking too much of late. At least, I think that’s what it is. Of course, he might have been dead, but let’s hope not.

Melissa telephoned. She says she’ s got kittens that need a home, and do I want one or perhaps two? I’m tempted, and said I’d think about it. I like fluffy things.

Wednesday, July 24th

Bumpy is still alive, as evidenced by the fact that he dropped in today and asked if he could borrow Jethro to trim his hedge. I made no mention of seeing him comatose yesterday. I think that’s the best way of dealing with most things: just don’t talk about them. Most things are of little or no consequence, or so it usually seems.

Browsing my bookshelves this morning – they are extensive, and contain many more books than ever I have read – my eye fell upon the poems of John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester – and I haven’t read him for ages. So I betook him to an armchair for a while. He’s so readable:

            Fair Cloris in a pigsty lay,
                Her tender herd lay be her.
            She slept; in murmuring gruntlings they,
            Complaining of the scorching day,
                Her slumbers thus inspire.

            She dreamed . . .

This may not strike the casual reader as being up to much, but read on and fair Cloris dreams of being assailed (well, rather more than assailed . . . ) by a swain (“he pursues her to the cave / And throws himself upon her”) and she wakes up frightened, but very much in need of being physically satisfied, probably because the swain didn’t get to finish what he’d started, or he did finish but it was only a dream. Whichever it was, I shall say no more, other than that I fully understand how sometimes one has to do things for oneself. I have said enough.

Rochester is mainly thought of today as being lewd and sweary, but he’s much more than that. For instance,  “Upon Nothing” is a really cool and interesting poem. It’s about Nothing.

Melissa telephoned. She asked me again if I wanted a kitten or two. I said Yes. Why the hell not? But I don’t want to go to get them, and I don’t want her coming here. I shall send Cook, or Jethro. Or both of them.

Thursday, July 25th

I have taken delivery of kittens. Two. One male, one female, in the interests of balance and gender equality. Winnie, the sweetheart, sniffed them a bit, gave them both a lick, and then sauntered off to her bed for a nap. They are currently unnamed. I’ve been thinking about it: I considered calling the male Jeoffrey, after Christopher Smart:

            For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey
            For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him (etc.)

but I’m not so sure. As Tom Eliot said, “The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter.” I’m giving serious time and thought to Jerrie and Teazer, after Eliot’s Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, but I’m going to sleep on it. I have my best ideas when I’m asleep. It’s of no little consequence.

Melissa telephoned to ask if the kittens are OK.

Friday, July 26th

Cook says the kittens are an absolute delight, but she’s having trouble keeping them off her kitchen work surfaces. I’m sure she can train them if she puts her mind to it.

Melissa telephoned to ask if the kittens are OK. Yes, they are. Don’t keep bloody asking.

Jethro has been to Bumpy’s to trim his hedge. Needless to say, it’s of no consequence, and less interest.

The kittens have been named Rumple and Teazer. I couldn’t go with the Mungojerrie thing because of that awful song from history about the summertime.

Cook asked if she could serve dinner early this evening because she wants to watch the opening of the Olympics on the TV in her room and it starts at around 6 and apparently goes on until late. I don’t mind, as long as the sport doesn’t come anywhere near me – even though dining before 6 will be more like a late lunch, or tea.

Napped in the hammock under the tree this afternoon. Thoroughly pleasant weather.

Saturday, July 27th

Turned on the wireless after breakfast and was forced to tune into Radio 3 to get away from the endless sporting chatter. Actually I like Radio 3, but I also like the chatter on Radio 4 – at least, I like it when it’s interesting. Heard some very pleasing piano by I have no idea who, which is a shame because it was good, and I would like to hear it again. I should have been paying more attention.

Not much is happening in this diary, is it? It’s of little or no consequence. My not much is more interesting than most people’s lots, at least that’s how it seems inside my head box. And who knows? Perhaps before too long I may find myself bewitched by a lady of the female gender, because that’s when things have been known to get out of hand, for me if not for you, Dear Reader of The Future.

Melissa telephoned. Whatever.

Sunday, July 28th

I have to say the old place is sparklingly clean since the advent of Mrs. Jennings. In fact, I’m so keen to keep it like this that the evening before she comes I go around making a bit of a mess so she feels needed and that she’s doing some good in the world. People like to think they are doing good in the world – at least, people like Mrs. Jennings do. Personally I couldn’t give a damn. Anyway, now on a Sunday before I go to bed I’m going to make sure she’s got something to do tomorrow. I’ve left cigar ash liberally sprinkled around, and earlier I made sure my boots left their mark after today’s walk with Winnie. It don’t take long, and is of little consequence. Some people go to church, which is of even less.

Melissa telephoned. She wanted to ask Cook something about sport, so it’s a good job Cook answered the phone. She’s the expert.

 

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James Henderson (Gentleman)

 

 

 

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Bird

a pantoum

today I saw a bird
I’m not sure what sort it was
blue wings white face black around the eyes
it was smaller than I expected

I’m not sure what sort it was
it’s a long time since anyone saw a bird
it was smaller than I expected
from the images I’d seen online

it’s a long time since anyone saw a bird
& there was me sitting in the yard when this one (whatever it was) flew down
I’ll have to check through the images I’ve seen online
to see if I can identify it

I don’t think it saw me sitting in the yard when it flew down
I took out my phone to take a picture
to help me identify it
but the sudden movement disturbed it and it flew away

if I hadn’t taken out my phone to take a picture
it might’ve stayed for longer
as it was my sudden movement disturbed it
as it searched for insects among the weeds growing up between the slabs

okay it might’ve stayed for longer
but at least today I saw a bird
searching for insects among the weeds growing up between the slabs
blue wings white face black around the eyes

 

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Dominic Rivron
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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Out from Behind the Curtain

The Dream We Carry, The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus (9×9 Records) 
 
Rupert Loydell (RL): So Andrew, it turns out we both know the music of RAIJ, in fact you alerted me to their new album, which I knew nothing about. I’m on my fourth play of the CD as I type this, but I confess it hasn’t grabbed me like some of their previous work. I guess that what was once mysterious – the strange mix of Russian Orthodox liturgy, synthesizers, electronic instruments, strings, poetry and improvisation in the studio – is no longer so. In fact some of this album feels almost like a pastiche of themselves. You also admitted to similar feelings to start with, what has particularly struck you with further listening? 
 
Andrew Taylor (AT): At first, I thought the album was a little polite, avoiding the mix that you mention. I’m a firm believer in allowing albums to settle, breathe after the initial encounter. With The Dream We Carry, I’d bought the CD on the Saturday and was hooked by Monday evening after a handful of listens. I think, as with all good music, it has to speak to the listener on more than one level. This album certainly does that. For example, the second track is sung in French (which I have a limited grasp of) yet grabs me, makes me question my responses.  
 
Similarly, I like the diversity of the album. Some of the earlier work, as much as I love it, can feel a little formulaic at times. Of course, this might be intentional. This album feels different.  
 
RL: In the early days RAIJ got compared to all sorts of other bands (and vice versa: one of the bands I was in was compared to them!) such Apocalyptic Folk bands as well as Psychic TV, the latter mostly, I suspect, because of their enigmatic stage presence, their appropriation of musical genres, and also a press hungry to misconstrue their ‘spirituality’ as occult and cultish.  
 
What was your take on their earlier music? When I interviewed them for Punk & Post-Punk journal back in 2020 they were interested in finding ‘reference points to connect and share a common human experience, to celebrate the strength of the human spirit, to work against hostility in the world and to interrupt the powerful and incessant flow of consumerism’, which is quite an aim, as is their statement (from the same interview) that 
 
     we have been inspired by many creative, cultural and spiritual influences  
     and ideas from Eastern orthodox religions, as well as Buddhism, Sufiism  
     and others. So, spirituality is not the defining characteristic of influence  
     on our work, any more that European film or theatre may be. We have a  
     very eclectic approach, a diverse palette, to constructing our aesthetic. 
 
AT: I came to RAIJ through them being a Liverpool band and Liverpool in the 1980s was like a village in terms of music. Everybody knew each other in the musical world. I bought the CD of Mirror from Probe Records (whose label Probe Plus) had released it. It was around the time of the album release that I saw them live. That was certainly an experience! 
 
What I loved about Mirror was the fact that it sounded like nothing I’d heard before. I grew up listening to jangly guitars and all that went with that. What was it that Tony Wilson said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that Liverpool bands had the mystique and coolest record collections and Manchester bands had the coolest guitars. One of Wilson’s final pieces of writing before he passed away was called ‘The Mersey’s Creative Tide.’ He was correct of course about the mystique. I feel that the RAIJ could only have come out of Liverpool at that time. We were a tolerant bunch (as fans) and we followed other bands such as Marshmallow Overcoat who were pushing the boundaries.

With the reference points that the RAIJ mentioned in the interview that you did with them, that was probably over my head at the time, I was probably more concerned with Roger McGuinn’s fringe. Since though, I’ve found the RAIJ aesthetic intriguing and alluring.

When did you first hear the band? And what did you make of them outside of those reference points that you mention?
 
RL: I think I came across them first at the Greenbelt Festival, where they played live, but we lived in Cheshire in from 1982-1987 and often visited Liverpool (including Probe) and Manchester (Picadilly Records) so it is possible I simply saw the album and bought it. We also had a great indie record shops in Crewe where we lived and in Exeter where we moved to. I bought the first album, The Gift of Tears, back then, although I am afraid I only own the CD reissue now as I cashed in on the rarity value of the original album.

What did I make of it? I was intrigued to find something that was in some ways experimental on the fringes of christian rock, intrigued by their mystical and religious titles and reference points, but it wasn’t particularly musically outrageous or experimental. I’m afraid I am someone who listens to lots of improvised music, experimental and contemporary classical, jazz and post-punk, so RAIJ have always felt somewhat accessible and at times almost easy-listening.

I guess I found reference points to the likes of Codona and the Rock In Opposition bands like Etron Fou Leloublan and Absak Maboul, even Can’s ethnic forgeries series of tracks. It was the band’s points of reference were most intriguing, along with their anonymity. They used to play behind curtains and use projections a lot. I’ve always thought that you don’t have to sell music (or anything else in fact) on image or personality or bullshit, so the slowly-growing acclaim of music fans and critics that built up over the years was to their credit.

I’m not sure about the Liverpool connection. To me, Liverpool was the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes and the unjustly neglected It’s Immaterial. Well, if you ignore, as I try to, The Beatles and Cilla Black. (I didn’t know Roger McGuinn’s fringe lived in Liverpool.) It seemed to me that the 1980s were when ideas of spirituality returned to cultural discussion, and music opened up wide again, exploring and hybridising, which is why there were bands such as Eyeless in Gaza (one of my favourites) and Current 93 around, the latter making use of (or deconstructing) occult, gnostic and sacred texts, not to mention the likes of Blackhouse, who were a lo-fi christian industrial band in the States. (They managed to upset other bands with their faith, and the church and christian music industry wit their noise.) There is always new music and new methods of distributing it, but the 1980s saw the rise of cassette and zine culture, swops and trades and alternative distribution networks, facilitated by TEAC 4 and 8 track recorders. I guess all that kind of showed that the music industry was going to have to change although it wasn’t until the invention of MP3s and online downloads that the mainstream music industry took any note.

Anyway, I liked the ambience RAIJ created, their subversion of both sacred and folk music, and – no doubt – liked the fact not many people had heard of them. The band’s name, taken from a Bunuel film was pretentious and knowing too. They ticked all the boxes for me. The second album, Mirror, feels very much in a similar vein to me. Of course they disappeared for decades and then suddenly reappeared recording for an Exeter label. I only found out about that because I reviewed Mark Brend’s book Undercliff and he turned out to also be in a band whose albums were released by the same record company. Do you think the more recent albums are different? I know the line-up has changed and they are less secretive about who they are.

AT: I was referring to the underground experimental scene in Liverpool in the 80s. Yeah, we had the bands you mentioned (and I agree with what you said about It’s Immaterial – great band) but we also had that scene that was DIY which has long been the mainstay of music. I felt that RAIJ came from that. Perhaps it was the Probe connection too.
 
You mentioned the performances behind the curtain. When I saw them at the Flying Picket in Liverpool around the time of Mirror being released, it was an almost surreal experience. A female member of the band walked around the audience with ash and was putting crosses on people’s foreheads. It was more like a happening than a gig. It was fantastic. I’d been used to bands like The La’s playing there and then this quasi-religious event came along. Memorable to say the least. Oh and McGuinn’s fringe is in the hearts and minds of every indie kid from 1980s Liverpool.
 
The mystery of RAIJ, the name and that gig, led to a long fascination with the music. Of course, when they remerged after that long hiatus (we spoke about them at the time, after your interview with the band) I was straight back on to them.
 
I feel that the music has stayed the same, yet somehow has evolved. You can’t get away from the religious aspects, the thread that connects the albums that have been released more recently. The line-up changes are almost moot – some names remain the same and yet others are new to me. But yes, they have come out from behind the curtain and appeared on video and promo photos etc. I guess that was inevitable in the internet age and somewhat has diffused the mystique.
 
I mentioned to you earlier in an email about the new album. I’ve played it a few times again today and as I said, listening to track 6, ‘Object of Desire’, put me in mind of one of my favourite David Lynch quotes: ‘Tenderness can be as abstract as insanity.’ The song is seemingly sweet, yet with the title and the lyrics takes the listener some other place. Perhaps as with all music, it’s a personal thing – circumstances can dictate how the music presents itself too. It’s an album that is speaking to me in many ways at the moment.
 
How are you getting on with the new album now after your initial thoughts?

RL: It’s certainly a grower. For me, it doesn’t really demand attention until track 3, ‘Among the Lost’, which has that weird organ on it, underpinning and interrupting a melancholic piano. It’s obviously a fragment from a gig or rehearsal, because of the casual applause at the end, and then ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ comes in, cello, keyboards and some soaring guitar. It reminds me of the tuneful end of krautrock, or a slowed down Stereloab, but there’s also a sense of what I call ‘ice rink music’, because of what they used to play when I went skating in Richmond as a kid.

Some of the problem, for me, is it is too well-produced. I quite like a bit of lo-fi dirt in the mix, and I definitely long for some rock here. I’ve had enough at the moment of taped voices and declaimed poems over music, too. It’s all a bit earnest and musical, affected even.

Like you, it’s probably down to mood and what’s going on at the moment. The rain in Cornwall and the fact I have put off preparation for teaching in the autumn, hasn’t put me in the best of moods. It also feels like this new RAIJ album has interrupted my own previous musical trajectory, which was moving between 1980s New York (The Dance and Polyrock), The National’s ‘Sad Dads’ music and Yves Tumor’s Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume, which is in its own way also a religiously themed album. It’s full of funk and bright sounds though, carefully curated samples and rhythms. In fact it’s one of the best things I have heard so far this year. I’m not getting any surprises from The Dream We Carry So Far.

I think I’ll leave it to you to big it up for everyone and tell us why you love it so much.

AT: As you point out, the album gets off to a slow start. While appreciating the importance of track selection and ordering, in the case of The Dream We Carry there’s a real sense of the opening couple of tracks setting the tone. ‘Song for Lost Souls’ is an instrumental (a favoured mode used by RAIJ and in this case is accompanied by a voice used to deliver the wordless melody) that begins with pizzicato and cello strings accompanied by a simple piano refrain.

‘Les Fils de Etoiles’ borrows its title from a piece of music by Erik Satie. It’s another case of the mood being set. As I mentioned earlier, the fact that the lyrics are delivered in French, doesn’t distract from the mood. It has the opposite effect.

‘Among the Lost’ has the feel of an outtake from Yann Tiersen’s Amelie soundtrack. A seemingly lighter moment but works as part of the bigger picture.

‘Remnants’ feels as though it could have been lifted from the previous RAIJ albums, ‘Songs of Yearning’ and ‘Nocturnes.’ The production that you mentioned, Rupert, is to the fore here. It is a very clean and polished track, in fact, the whole album has a consistent sound in terms of its production.

Like all good poetry books, good albums have a heart to them – the core if you like. For me, this runs from the aforementioned ‘Objects of Desire’ through to ‘Portrait of a Child.’ These four tracks, though not displaying the immediateness of say, ‘Shadowlands’ from Mirror or ‘I Carry the Sun’ from Nocturnes, encapsulate the essence of the album: thoughtful, tender and beautiful. In the case of ‘Portrait of a Child’ in some ways reminiscent of ‘Prayer’ from Songs of Yearning, the track encapsulates the album.

‘Equinox’ is the most song-like of the tracks in terms of structure, production and certainly a contender (in old money) for a single.

‘Voices’ which I heard recently on Stuart Maconie’s BBC 6 Music show The Freak Zone, with its haunting melody played on keyboard, is underpinned by a vocal that sounds like it’s from a 60s B-movie.

Album closer, ‘Song of the Wandering Aengus’ is W.B. Yeats’ poem set to a suitably repetitive, melancholic melody. The voicing of the poem is rich and particularly suited to the ‘song.’ It’s a favoured mode that seems to be getting on your nerves, Rupert!

Overall, this is an album that will grow on listeners (even if it hit me straightaway) and I suspect that those who might be new to RAIJ will take some time to get to grips with it. While I agree, that there are elements that are (over) familiar to us who already know RAIJ, this feels to me like the album that the band have been destined to make, a summing up of their career to date.

2024 has been a fantastic year for music so far. Albums by Bill Ryder-Jones, Kelly Moran, Beth Gibbons and Epic45 have been real highlights and then we’re blessed with The Dream We Carry. This is an album that is worth repeated listens unless, like me, it hits hard from the off. It’s certainly up there as a contender for album of the year.

Remarkable, mysterious and beautiful.

 

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      Rupert Loydell & Andrew Taylor 

DISCOGRAPHY
The Gift of Tears, 1987
Mirror, 1991
After the End, box set, 2013
Beauty Will Save the World, 2015
Songs of Yearning + Nocturnes, 2020
The Dream We Carry, 2024

 

 

 

 

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Death Walks Beside You

 

The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion, Cory Leadbeter (Fleet)

A few weeks ago, I reviewed a book supposedly about Joni Mitchell and complained that it was all about the author not Mitchell. Cory Leadbeter’s book is also about the author, but clearly flags that up, using his relationship with Joan Didion as a personal assistant, as part of the story (as well as a selling point).

Really, it is a book about family dysfunction, abuse, self-harm and depression. Leadbeter’s father – who spends much of the duration of this book in jail – is aggressive and self-deluded, prone to temper tantrums, lying, self-delusion and beating his kids. Desperate to get out of the situation and New Jersey, Leadbeter does. He rents a rundown apartment, signs up to college (university), is taken under the wing of poet James Fenton, and then gets offered a job working for an unnamed ‘famous author’ which he accepts.

It turns out to be Joan Didion, the witty, cynical, world famous fiction and non-fiction writer, who needs an assistant to help her now she is widowed and rapidly aging. Leadbeter ends up living in her apartment, spending the days ordering their food in, listening to Didion’s choice of music, reading to her, and meeting her – sometimes rude and snotty – friends and associates over dinner. Once she has retired for the night he is free to head to Manhattan’s bars or stay at home to drink Didion’s alcohol and smoke her cigarettes.

It seems he has escaped his family and become something else, joined the creative strata he has always aspired to, but the looming sentencing of his father, who has been running some kind of scam business investing in real estate, which has been revealed due to a drop in the markets, and Leadbeter’s inability to write the novels he wants to, are sending him into obsessive downward spirals of excessive drinking, casual relationships and self-angst. Even his writing has been sabotaged by a character called Billy Silvers, whose destructive and diversionary antics Leadebeter is unable to control, despite being the author.

The Uptown Local isn’t a pretty story, is one without a happy or an almost-happy ending. Leadbeter’s father serves his time but hasn’t really changed, Leadbeter is married and has a child, but along the way his best friend has died, girlfriends have come and gone, he has lost his literary agent, remains unpublished, and his new family are back living in the New Jersey home he grew up with, sharing the house with his parents.

Nine years of working for Joan Didion has in many ways not changed his life. Yes, it opened doors, gave him a good wage and literary contacts, allowed him to live in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but monthly drives to visit his father in prison, constant worrying about his fiction writing, his old friends, his girlfriends, not to mention the ever-more-frail Didion, did little to fend off depression and worry. As the book goes on we are told how suicidal thoughts were constantly with him; how various obsessions – at the time of writing the book obsessive chess games – distract and divert him; how life has always been hard.

At times it feels like over-sharing, particularly towards the end of the book. Why did he not seek professional help for both his mental health and editing his unpublished fiction? Why not save some of the money he earned rather than drink it? Why inflict yourself with your abusive father rather than hold down a job, any job, and find your own place in a cheaper part of town? But it is always easy to sort everyone else’s problems out; we all have allegiances, quirks, memories and relationships to deal with in our own way. And depression is not easy to live with.

Leadbeter cannot, for the moment, escape his parents or his new family, nor abandon his aspiration to be an author. He is an author, a published one, thanks in some ways to Joan Didion. It is her name that will lead readers to this confessional work about struggle, love, depression, class, expectations, aspirations, poverty, creativity and the state of America. It is not a perfect book, has none of the clinical detachment that Didion’s writing was famed for, and is occasionally mawkish, sentimental and self-pitying, but it is moving and engaging, a book of struggle and resistance, of staying alive when one’s instinct is to do otherwise.

 

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Rupert Loydell

 

 

 

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Predestination

I am looking for you
in the white windows
of the future.

I’m peeking
with binoculars.

I checked
in the warehouses of time.
In the energy fusion.
On the roads…
Passing through the devil’s jocular.
Each four-dimensional cell,
any possible mirage,
any primes.

Love has no deadlines.
She is actually voluminous.
So I’ll keep going,
process is important,
total divine.

We’ll meet someday
in some unit of luminous,
in some projection of the past owing,
in the mirror world.

The spatial continuum will bend firmed,
in point one,
and we will find ourselves again
with you
in the beginning.

All roads will bring us together,
in a silver leaning.

 

 

 

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Dessy Tsvetkova
Bulgaria 
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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A. D. Winans #1: Bay bard, poetic survivor

 
 

Bohemian observer par excellence ANTONIO PINEDA has been clocking the streets of San Francisco for more than 60 years, mixing with the great and the good, the dark and the dangerous, the feckless and the fated, and recovering some of his richest memories for the readers of Rock and the Beat Generation.

Today, after recent forays pursuing past gods of the scene like McClure and Morrison, Kesey and Garcia, Anger and Brautigan, Pineda homes in on a wonderful survivor, the 88-year-old A.D. Winans, poet, editor, publisher, essayist, Bay Area bard, North Beach stalwart, since his return to the city of his birth after military service in 1958.

Winans has rubbed shoulders with so many of the Beats and their accomplices becoming an integrated figure in that charmed circle. Furthermore, he befriended and corresponded with Charles Bukowski, an individual rarely recognised as a fully signed up member of the wider writing community.

As usual, Pineda brings his own spin to the profile – informed, personable, sparky – incorporating a broad cast of players and places – performers and venues, poetry and performances, the muses and the music – peppering this latest account with biographical background and anecdotal sidetrack, conversational fragment and even original verse.

But Pineda positions Winans at the core of this two-part feature, celebrating the veteran’s life and achievement and concluding this opening section with a revealing letter to the poet from Bukowski himself.

By Antonio Pineda

IN A 2012 interview, California-based journalist Michael Limnios states: ‘Writers like Colin Wilson, Studs Terkel, James Purdy, Peter Coyote, Herbert Gold, and the late Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski have praised [Winans’] work’. As Limnios also points out, he affectionately refers to Bukowski as Buk.

Allan Davis Winans was born on January 12th, 1936, in the city of San Francisco. He attended Polytechnic High School and was an accomplished athlete when local legend Milt Axt was the football coach. His players went on to star in university teams and also professional football.

However, ‘Al’ was not allowed to play football. He’d been hit by a drunk driver and severely injured, hence the ban. However, he did compete as a runner in the 440 in track and field. 

Further, Winans was an excellent baseball player who continued this trajectory after Polytechnic when he was in the Army stationed in Panama as a military athlete. He is remarkable for being the only native San Francisco graduate of Polytechnic and San Francisco State to be included in the vaunted pantheon of Beat poetry.

 

Pictured above: Poet and North Beach legend A.D. Winans

Raised in Haight Ashbury and Glen Park, when he came back from military duty in the late 1950s North Beach had become the epicenter of Beat culture and he quickly embraced the bohemian lifestyle.

Winans asserts: ‘When I returned to San Francisco in 1958, I witnessed the plight of the Blacks in the Fillmore, the Latinos in the Mission, and the impoverished and downtrodden in the Tenderloin. It touched me deeply and resulted in the political and social issues in my poetry.’

He muses, ‘I discovered North Beach, where I met Bob Kaufman and Ferlinghetti for the first time. I met Ginsberg and Burroughs at City Lights bookstore but had limited experience with them. Other Beat poets I became friends with were Diane di Prima, Herb Gold, Harold Norse and David Meltzer.’

Kaufman published Golden Sardines in 1967, immortalized by City Lights as edition #21 in the iconic Pocket Poets Series, a format that also published Red cats, those Russian immortals Andre Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The Russian poets performed a magic reading I attended at the Fillmore Ballroom. Yevtushenko read his epic signature poem ‘Babi Yar’ and Voznesensky performed in the guise of a rock star poet.

Soldier, athlete, poet Winans is a symbol of the golden age in the arts in the City by the Bay. Greenwich Village was the principal focus of bohemia in the Big Apple, but North Beach, with its cosy bars and alleys, was at the core of the West Coast’s radical expression.

That tradition of free spirits dated back to the Barbary Coast, tracing its literary antecedents to the post-Gold Rush genius of Ambrose Bierce, a self-educated, self-made writer whose short stories about the Wild West foreshadowed the progeny of Beat writers who were to descend on San Francisco in the middle of the twentieth century.

Winans is the 49er born here to pan literary gold, mingle with the greatest minds of his generation and, now a survivor of 88 years, one who lives long to tell the tale. A prolific poet of the Beat Generation, his poetry, short stories, essays and reviews have been published in over 500 anthologies.

He is the author of 60 books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, renowned for his love and inspiration for jazz and the San Francisco-North Beach scene that was such a vital backdrop to the evolution of Beat culture. Poet Jack Micheline referred to Winans as ‘a man in search of his soul.’

Winans was awarded a 2006 PEN Josephine Miles award for his contributions to literature. From 1972 to 1989 he published and edited Second Coming Press which specialized in books and anthologies. In 2009 PEN Oakland granted him a Lifetime Achievement award.

My own experiences mirror Winans’ upbringing. I graduated from Mission High School when Carlos Santana was also enrolled there. I became a habitué of North Beach hanging out at Caffe Trieste, the Coffee Gallery, Gino and Carlo, Enrico’s, Vesuvio, and the Anxious Asp that had the best jukebox in town and a mixed crowd of straights, gays and ethnics all dancing to the groovy sounds of the day. 

Winans reflects on North Beach: ‘Gino and Carlo was my main bar. Charles McCabe, eclectic San Francisco Chronicle columnist, had his own reserved seat there. Journalist Warren Hinckle was a regular. Poet Jack Spicer drank there. A lot of SF history there.’ The Beat revel, rebel and revolt entwined in convivial harmony.

Some little while ago, Winans, Neeli Cherkovski and Todd Swindell formed a panel celebrating the work of Harold Norse, who chronicled the events at the Beat Hotel in Paris. Ferlinghetti commented of the latter’s work: ‘Harold Norse’s poetry was very much expatriate poetry. It was the voice of alienation from modern consumer culture.’

Winans also reminisces on the jazz scene in the city, that is so influential to his oeuvre. ‘I dug Miles Davis at the Blackhawk in 1953. I had the record of the performance but lost it in a fire at my apartment. I usually take people I liaise with, but are first timers to town, to Vesuvio.’ 

The subterraneans who populated bohemian North Beach were to reflect his visions of poetry and prose. The inflections of jazz as Miles blows a ‘All Blues’ on his horn, John Coltrane’s Quartet  grooved on ‘My Favorite Things’ at the Jazz Workshop on Broadway, and Jimbo’s Bop City in the Fillmore hosted the after hours sessions starring Merle Saunders that continued til dawn. All colored the midnight streets of the city as Winans incorporated these elements into his life and poetry.

Pictured above: A.D. Winans (right) with Neeli Cherkovski, publisher Daniel Yaryan, ruth weiss and Jerry Kamstra, a ‘Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts’ event at the Beat Museum in 2014. Image Christopher Felver, courtesy Daniel Yaryan

I matriculated in bohemia in Haight Ashbury during my tenure at the Straight Theater and connected with Carlos Santana himself who by then was already a leading star on the San Francisco music scene.

Carlos frequently performed at the Straight Theater in the first incarnation of-the band called the Santana Blues Band. This scene also brought me to the attention of Beat poet Michael McClure, Richard Brautigan, Lenore Kandel and filmmaker Kenneth Anger. I participated under the aegis of the theater in the production of poetry readings, film screenings and dramatic performances. 

Winans’ poetry spake in tongues. Bukowski was his dear friend and collaborator of San Francisco. Bukowski commented. ‘I have two choices…stay here at the post office and go crazy…or stay out here as a writer and starve. I have decided to starve.’ 

Bukowski’s literary readings were mythic, featuring the drunk, raucous audience clashing with the angry poet. In his youth, the poet had been mocked as Heine, a slur on his German birth, an unpopular ethnicity during World War II and post-war era.

Barfly, a cinematic evocation of Bukowski under the guise of the character Henry Chinowski, directed by Barbet Schroeder and starring Mickey Rourke as the protagonist and Faye Dunaway as the love interest, was a critical and financial success. Bukowski is acclaimed and popular in Germany. In fact, tourists from the Fatherland flock to Los Angeles in package tours to pay homage to the bars and flop houses he frequented.

Bukowski once reflected: ‘I remember a story about this guy they found in the park. He’d been living in a cave there, coming out at night and living off the picnic scraps. They caught him and took him off. I thought there but for the grace of the typewriter go I. The keys are my solitude, my luck, my picnic  scraps. Hate me but buy my books. Read the old philosophers on Solitude. Don’t write me, phone me or write like me. If you ever see me anywhere forget it. It isn’t me.’

In a letter to Al Winans, Bukowski reveals:

Thanks for making me the cover boy on your latest issue. There’s a lot of lively writing in there. Your years were hardly wasted, but I still don’t see how you bear up with the personalities.

Jesus Christ man your handwriting getting worst and worst…so hard to read hope you have not turned into a total drunk. Hope you’re all right. I’m strictly on the wine now and try not to do it every night. I’m dependent on it hard not to write without it. A lot of shit troubles here and I’m trying to straighten them out.

Ok if you’re in town this summer to come by but I hope I don’t have to do the airport trip…you mustn’t think of me as a snob it’s just I’m immersed in my own trivialities.

On the photo you use of me on the cover I don’t know when it was taken. Neeli Chernovski’s old man, Sam took it. I was down on Skid Row a long time ago – 1955 –who knows.

But all in all I hope things are ok with you or getting better.

Sure, Hank

Al Winans adds, ‘We exchanged 83 letters over a 17 year period.’

As philosopher Francis Bacon was wont to say: ‘The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.’

 

 
 

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By Simon Warner

https://simonwarner.substack.com/

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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A New Strategy for Inclusivity

The shareholders’ framework describes what they’ve lost through institutional change: how the swamp has turned to sludge, in step with notional growth. The room sits listening, assured by promises to uphold our heritage on each and every front, not least in all aspects of daily action. Within this context, says the Chairman, all mahogany and cracked leather, we must remain committed to practional change within the frameworking environment of our daily actions. (Applause.) In such a positive working environment, even the biros and blotters achieve self-awareness. Profits at all costs, he says, raising an eyebrow that may or may not be his own, may only be actioned by surfacing the paradigm shift in our day-to-day strivation. (Cheers) There is sludge to the gunwales and all the windows are locked. If we don’t have integrity, he says, armed to his gleaming teeth, at least we – and by that I mean I – have always had self-interest. (Gasps) (Screams) (Silence)

 

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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

 

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I Have Always Been in Love With You 我一直在爱着你 by Mǎ Yongbo

 

I have always been in love, in love with someone
I don’t know you, who you are
I don’t know your name, your face
I don’t know which city you are in
Which country, which planet, which universe
I only vaguely feel you
Always waiting for me, as if in a previous life
I was your amnesiac lover whom you always loved

You wait for me everywhere
Everything has traces of you
In order to love you, I have loved
So many short-lived and perishable things
Sometimes I suddenly stop on the road
feel a breeze brushing my ears
That’s you passing by me, with a sigh
As if you never blamed me for getting lost

Sometimes late into the night, on the radio
A long-forgotten song drifts out
With the cold rhythm of an entire iceberg
Sometimes in the clear of morning, a glimmer of light
on the other side of a thick fog seems like your vague call
Sometimes in the noisy amusement park at noon
A fiery hem of a dress brushes against my knees
A black veil flashes the serious lines at the corners of your mouth
Then swiftly disappears with the abstract waves of the carousel

Who are you, your patience sometimes drives me crazy
Your tolerance makes me ashamed. I sit on the roadside
like a sulking child in a game, I want to test whether
the adults who have walked away will look back to find me
Let me rest my tired head on your lap
But your gentle touch
Suddenly stops in mid-air, changes direction
I finally know, you’ve always been by my side
Just not letting me know, like my lover in my previous life
Patiently waiting for the loyalty of memory to return to my midnight

 

December 24, 2023, Christmas Eve
Translated by Mǎ Yongbo and Helen Pletts

 

 

我一直在爱着你 I Have Always Been in Love With You 马永波

我一直在爱着,爱着一个
我并不认识的你,你是谁
我不识你的名,你的面
我不知道你在哪个城市
哪个国家哪个星球哪个宇宙
我只模糊地感觉到你
一直在等我,仿佛前世
我曾是你一直爱着的失忆的恋人

你在所有的地方等我
万物都是你的痕迹
为了爱你,我曾经爱过
那么多短暂易朽的事物
有时我突然在路上停驻
感觉一阵微风擦过我的耳廓
那是你在经过,带着一声太息
仿佛你从未责备过我的迷途

有时在深夜,收音机里
飘出一段久已忘怀的歌曲
带着整座冰山寒冷的节奏
有时在清晨,浓雾那边的一束微光
像是你若有若无的召唤
有时在正午喧闹的游乐场
一幅裙裾火辣辣地擦过我的腿弯
黑色面纱飘闪出嘴角严肃的线条
又随着旋转木马抽象的波浪,迅疾消逝

你是谁,你的耐心有时让我发狂
你的宽容让我羞愧,坐在路边
像一个游戏中赌气的孩子
想试验一下走远的大人
会不会回头,来把自己寻见
让我把疲倦的头伏在你的膝上
可是啊,你温柔的抚摸
却在半空突然停住,换了方向
我终于知道,你一直在我身边
只是不让我知晓,像我前世的恋人
耐心地等待记忆的忠诚回到我的午夜

 

 

New bio’s

Mǎ Yongbo ⻢永波

Mǎ Yongbo ⻢永波 was born in 1964. Since the age of 27 he has published 7 poetry collections: Red Bird (Hong Kong Wen Guang Publishing House, 1991), Summer Played at Two Speeds (Tangshan Publishing House, Taiwan, 1999), Journey in Words (Huacheng Publishing House, 2015),Geography of the Self (Zhejiang Gongshang University Press, 2018),Untied Boat (China International Broadcasting Press, 2024),A Grateful Ode to Eternity (Long poetry collection, Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, 2024). He is a Chinese scholar focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Williams and Ashbery. He recently published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over half a million copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology.

The Collected Poems of Mǎ Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) comprising 1600 poems, celebrate 40 years of writing poetry.

⻢永波出⽣于1964年。⾃27岁起,他已出版了7本诗集:《红⻦》(⾹港⽂光出版社,1991 年、《以两种速度播放的夏天》(台湾唐⼭出版社,1999年)、《词语中的旅⾏》(花 城出版社,2015年、《⾃我的地理学》(浙江⼯商⼤学出版社,2018年)、《不系之⾈》(中国国际⼴播出版社,2024年)、《致永恒的答谢词》(⻓诗集,四川⽂艺出版社,2024年)。他是⼀位专注于翻译和教授英美诗歌和散⽂的中国学者,包括狄⾦森、惠特 曼、史蒂⽂斯、庞德、威廉斯和阿什⻉利的作品。他最近出版了《⽩鲸》的全译本,销量已 超过50万册。他在南京理⼯⼤学任教。《⻢永波诗歌总集》(四卷本,东⽅出版中⼼, 2024年)共收录1600⾸诗,庆祝他诗学探索40周年。

Helen Pletts

Helen Pletts: (www.helenpletts.com) Currently lives in UK. Shortlisted for Bridport Poetry Prize 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2023, twice longlisted for The Rialto Nature & Place 2018 and 2022, longlisted for the Ginkgo Prize 2019, longlisted for The National Poetry Competition 2022. 2nd prize Plaza Prose Poetry 2022-23. Shortlisted Plaza Prose Poetry 23-24. Working closely with Mǎ Yongbo since Feb 2024. Also published by Ink Sweat and Tears, International Times, Open Shutter Press.

 

 

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The Sea

 

Where masts rock left and right..
Like painted volt needles 
Against a blue sky 
A god below thumps the pillows 
Of a dark green sea 
And through the oil needy cries
He calls for breakfast 
As tiny  shoals of coloured fish
Slighter than a squint 
Change direction and rain against the rocks.

 

 

M Paul
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

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Repristination


 
Nativity marked the cloak of invisibility.
I adhered to it with the fanaticism
of a devotee.  
A series of tableaux vivants
on the Mind’s album
epitomized other images.
The flush of excitement ended
after one bathed in their aura.
 
In the subsequent phase,
the ebb of entanglements
caught me without a bulwark.
I directed myself to dive inwards.
The powerhouse unsealed its lever: I never
had to seek support from another source.
It was like tossing a query to oneself
when the comeback did not matter.

 

 

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Sanjeev Sethi
Picture  Nick Victor

 

 

 

Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. He is published in over thirty-five countries. His poems have found a home in more than 500 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. In July 2024, he was Commended in the A Proper Poetry Pamphlet Competition # 02 by the UK-based Hedgehog Poetry Press.
He lives in Mumbai, India.

X/ Twitter @sanjeevpoems3 || Instagram sanjeevsethipoems

 

 

 

 

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Creative Approaches

 

Eno
Directed by Gary Hustwit, 2024

Brian Eno has often expressed a reluctance to look back at his old work, preferring to focus on what he’s currently working on and thinking about. However, when the form of the conversation might open up new possibilities and insights, Eno seems to welcome the opportunity – Paul Morley’s excellent “The Thing Is … An Interview” from 1992 saw Eno enthusiastically entering into a playful documentary process (find it on YouTube).

The new Eno documentary also takes a distinctive approach to form, with the bulk of the content selected and sequenced anew by algorithm for each screening. This nicely echoes Eno’s own interest in generative processes, which he’s explored repeatedly across multiple music, light and screen projects.

I saw the film at the Picturehouse Central in London on 19/7/24, with the film date stamped on screen. The content at the start and end of the documentary is fixed; what happens in-between changes at each screening. What I experienced was a fast-moving accumulation of ideas and incidents, at times mini-documentaries on an idea or theme, at other times disconnected juxtapositions which might or might not suggest connections.

The footage throughout the film is not date stamped, and it roams over decades – sometimes splicing together clips of Eno talking about the same concept from different time periods. As the documentary content is principally led by ideas, rather than pulling together a narrative arc of Eno’s career or biography, this works well – though if you’re less aware of Eno’s work, you might struggle to keep up at some points.

New interview material with Eno is prominent, and he appears to be willingly and energetically open to the project. Being familiar with Eno’s creative career, I was pleasantly taken aback by how much archival material came up which I hadn’t seen before.

Here are my unedited notes from the screening I attended (as the film moves forward quickly, many of points noted below were dealt with succinctly):

Generative processes.
Early influences.
Environment and nature.
Intellect/mind vs rock music/body: how to combine them.
Portsmouth Sinfonia.
Notebooks.
Clothing, androgyne.
Career pressures.
Why do we like music? (Being synchronised; a sense of belonging.)
Oblique Strategies. (Initially developed after first Roxy Music album with Peter Schmidt; two cards selected by Eno and David Bowie, and kept secret from each other, resulted in “Moss Garden”.)
Eno changes the parameters; Bowie changes the character.
Laurie Anderson selects an Oblique Strategy: “Gardening not Architecture”.
Brits 1994 ceremony: award for Best Producer.
Geography and music.
Fela Kuti’s layers of brass, connecting to Talking Heads’ “cascade of backing vocals” on Remain in Light; U2’s “Moment of Surrender”, developed from a loping beat; Lee Perry’s mixing.
Eno reading statements in a variety of character styles.
Devo’s first album. (The band were “spiky”; they had a large box of demos, and pulled one out saying “that’s the drum sound we want”.)
Cologne Airport, beautifully designed, but playing disco music; resulted in Music for Airports.
Living in NYC. (Listening to radio phone-in shows; My Life in The Bush of Ghosts grew from an interest in not having a singer and “importing another world”.)
Control vs Surrender. (Active strategies for Surrender.)
VCS3 acquired in the early 70s. (The one used to make Discreet Music cost £200; it was later bought at an auction by David Bowie for £16,000; Bowie listened to the album a lot when on cocaine; Discreet Music played at many births.)
Art and the world. (Politics, resources, the environment; we need a new politics.)
Breakfast. (Eno’s first hour of the day used to be about receiving input: food for breakfast, emails, the news; now delaying breakfast etc until noon, and “stuff came up from the inside”, memories/ideas.)
Upcoming live concerts: Eno is “shitting bricks”.
Double pendulum. (Simple input; complex output.)
Omnichord. (Used on Apollo soundtrack.)
What does art do for us? (Feelings; synchronizing; hope for the future.)
Laurie Anderson selects an Oblique Strategy: “Is it Finished?”

There’s potential for a full-length documentary on some of the individual points above, but that’s for another day and another filmmaker – this documentary delights in its form having energy and momentum. In totality, it added up to an enjoyable and complex set of perspectives – or at least it did the day I saw it.

That said, while the film conveyed a large number of creative approaches and projects, it nonetheless didn’t include many other key areas of Eno’s work. Those may be found in other iterations of the film, and I’ve heard that others who have seen the film twice reported significantly different content each time. And as the documentary material being selected from is supposedly still being added to, there’s an open-ended set of possibilities for the long-term life of the film. An online version, also led by algorithm variations, is apparently being planned, though not a physical version. I’m eagerly looking forward to my next viewing.

 

 

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CJ Mitchell

 

 

 

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Endangered

I stole an egg.
Wanted its cool perimeter
where my hand could wander,

never discover start or finish;
both lay safe
inside, almost visible

through a green wall, cupped
in the shield
of its curvature.

Heedless, we took them all
egg after egg
for freckled loveliness,

the weight of what
they held, the gentle flop
when you turn an egg

in your palm.
Little strongrooms,
each one filled

with a viscous sea,
in each a fleck of life
sucking thick yellow light

from its own sun.

 

 

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Alex Josephy

 

 

 

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Hull Radical Bookfair

11am, August 10, 2024
Danish Church
Hull, England

https://www.facebook.com/events/259282350403234/

“The most violent element in society is ignorance.”
     – Emma Goldman

We are pleased to announce that the Radical Bookfair will be returning to Hull in 2024 after the successful inaugural event in 2023.

There will be stalls and other events. Stalls will cost £15 per table and we have limited space to 13 stalls so book early.

STALLS:
1) AnarCom Network – Confirmed:
2) Socialist Party (Hull) – Confirmed:
3) Communist Workers Organisation – Confirmed:
4) Commune in the North – [tbc]
5) Yorkshire CND – [tbc]

Events:

11.45pm to 3.45pm
Talk: A Commune In The North – [tbc]
Spoken Word:
Jack Horner aka Leon the Pig Farmer is a Manchester based Yorkshire beat Poet will be performing his “don’t believe the hype” set. An ex-serviceman who began writing verse to help him deal with a PTSD diagnosis in 2019.
https://www.facebook.com/LeonThePigFarmer/

We ask that all participants and bookfair goers abide by these basic principles!
• We want everyone attending this event to feel safe, comfortable and included. We reject hierarchy and coercion, we do not use or tolerate oppressive language: ableism, homophobia, racism, transphobia, sexism, snobbery or otherwise. We do not make excuses for sexual abuse or authoritarian regimes. We respect each other’s boundaries.
• We may ask people to modify their behaviour or take it elsewhere.
• We also ask you to look after the facilities, and treat the all the facilities with respect.
• Please do not film or photograph anyone without their express permission, preferably, take it outside.

 

 

 

 

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Drawing the Curtain

A quarter added to a very small
figure is still a very small figure.
Let’s think about photography,

for example. “It’s a cliché because
it’s true,” she said. Can we become
gardeners rather than devastators?

There’s a hidden violence in these
landscapes but rubbing up against
the stuff of the world is better than

smoothing it away. “It causes
a kind of resistance,” she said.

 

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Steve Spence

 

 

 

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UK in Grip of Top Down Starvation Policy

 

 

After three months of relentless rain from March to the end of May 2024 covering much of the productive land in the UK, farmers found themselves months behind getting their Spring crops in the soil.

Many of these farms are already suffering a dangerous nutrient deficit; soils depleted after four to five decades of agrichemically dependent monocultural mining operations that have reduced the top six inches of soils – normally alive with microscopic insects and worms – to little more than dead matter entirely dependent on synthetic nitrate fertilisers and toxic pesticides to grow anything other than weeds.

But these chemical inputs are becoming increasingly expensive and coupled with yields that are no longer sufficient to bring in profits, a large proportion of commercial UK arable farmers are on the edge of bankruptcy.

Government subsidies have kept them afloat up till now, but that is changing. Now the payment emphasis is on ‘increasing biodiversity’ by introducing nature friendly schemes on farms largely devoid of such features.

A good thing, you might say, but land taken out of food production means more food has to be imported from somewhere else in the world.

A food security issue is looming. ‘Food security’ means following an agricultural policy which ensures that a nation state is broadly capable of feeding its own people.

The UK was running at 60% self sufficiency home production figure for most of the past two to three decades. It dropped to around 45% five years ago and this year (2024) that figure has fallen to just 32%.

The implications of this are serious indeed. A leading world nation state relying on close to a 70% import position in order to feed a population of some sixty million is a massive no, no.

Add to this some six decades of government backed agribusiness land management policies based on pharmaceutical inputs replacing soil nourishing crop rotations, farm yard manures and diverse mixed cropping regimes – and a huge crisis looms just around the corner.

The foods that appear in the nation’s supermarkets and hypermarkets all come from soil deficient practices, whether home produced or imported. Many also come form hydroponic systems that drip soluble nutrients into vast water containers in which the plants are grown. No soil involved at all.

The modern consumer is therefore ingesting – and attempting to digest – a toxic, vitamin depleted and largely lifeless diet, thus storing up a dangerous cocktail of health problems both now and for the future.

The red lights should be flashing for all those dependent upon such a disastrous food and farming policy to continue to feed themselves and their families.

Denatured, depleted and highly processed foods have become the daily norm for the great majority of convenience corrupted consumers of the British Isles and for much of the post industrial modern world. A regime which has also deeply infiltrated Southern hemisphere countries, undermining their traditional diets and ways of life.

But it’s not just poor quality vitamin deficient foods that are degrading the health and welfare of consumers. Due to various purposefully inflated international conflicts and politically motivated power play using the fake green ‘zero carbon’ agenda to divert resources away from agricultural production, major supermarket chains such as Tesco now hold 60% less reserve food in their systems than they did five years ago.

This translates into no more than a week or two of available food, should a crisis cause supplies to dry up.

You can plainly see the tightening squeeze that both farmers and consumers are facing. Any existing ‘comfort zone’ is rapidly eroding, like the soil on the increasingly barren arable fields.

There is very little time left to act in order to avert a full scale food/farming crisis. As a British farmer put it recently “Is the government going to change the agenda or let us starve?”

Well, that should be the question on the minds of all those still able to think; because the latter choice is not mere fantasy, but an integral part of the global shadow government’s agenda.

The director the Sainsbury supermarket chain seems to have the answer. He is quoted as stating “We will not need any farmers by 2030.”

Sainsbury is simply echoing the Agenda 2030 doctrine of the World Economic Forum (WEF). This central platform of The Great Reset, Green New Deal and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is using the excuse of achieving Net Zero by 2045, to pull the plug on food and farming as we know it, globally.

The WEF, The United Nations and The World Health Organisation plus the great majority of global banking magnates/institutions and global investment companies like Black Rock and Vanguard, are, with the tacit support of billionaires like Bill Gates, Elon Musk and the King of England, in lockstep with the great global warming scam.

They conform with the plan that agricultural production and particularly traditional farm animals – must go. Because they give off methane and CO2 which paid-off government ‘computer modelling scientists’ claim to be causatory agents of global warming/climate change.

In the meantime Bill Gates is buying up precious heritage seed reserves, the only source of non DNA altered/non GMO modified indigenous seeds, only to immediately close them down after purchase. A blatant and repugnant act of ecocide.

Gates is right at the heart of the elite global cult’s drive to starve the majority of humanity out of the picture. He, along with Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harari and their indoctrinated ‘young global leaders’ are working to ensure that an entirely synthetic, GM laboratory based fake food will replace soil grown plants and grass fed animals within the next ten years.

Gates has already purchased vast acreages of US farmland in which to grow experimental DNA altered GM crops and ‘vaccine ready’ ingredients for combatting future plandemics – which he is also involved in planning and instigating.

While around the corner in cyber valley (ex silicon valley) under the title ‘Project 20451’, fifty scientists are working out a strategy for the dystopian ‘development’ of mankind: to transfer human consciousness into an artificial carrier in order to create a man made form of immortality. An AI cybernetic creation called ‘The Transhuman’.

As King Charles announced on launching the most recent phase of the Great Reset in Davos “We have to put ourselves on a war footing.” Yes, by declaring a Davos inspired ‘global emergency plan’ any and all distortions of life can be prescribed as our genocidal medicine to speed-up the coming of the cyborg’s promised land.

This brings me back to the most immediate issue: our one or two year window of opportunity to either get this ship turned around – nation state by nation state most probably – or find a way to join together in building arks of pro-ecological agriculture robust enough to support land based and village/small town communities. An action in which all become involved in mutually supportive efforts to ensure a practical way forward.

All the evidence points to a planned democide – in which we the people are the target zone – already under 24/7 CCTV, digital and satellite surveillance and subject to mind controlling EMF radiation increasingly coupled to the all pervasive electromagnetic computing matrix known as The Cloud.
Additionally we are asphyxiated, almost daily, by the atmospheric geoengineering (chemtrails) program indiscriminately dumping aluminium, barium and strontium nanoparticles on all and sundry. The list goes on, and many of you already know it by now.

As the dark agents of central control assure us ‘this is to prevent global warming/climate change.’ Ha, ha. No. This is to block a rising global awareness and higher spiritual consciousness which will completely undo them and change the course of history.

Subject to this permanent and largely invisible attack on its very foundations, mankind must develop a practical response now, because tomorrow is too late.

As with all things that reach their zenith of opposition to what is real and true, the excessively heavy anti-life paraphernalia which blocks the essential simplicity of common sense based honest action, has to be done away with – in order to get back to something solid, real and supportive of human, animal and environmental life.

It is a stripping away of all excesses to the bare bones of necessity from which to make a fresh start.

So we return to soil, food, water and shelter. This is our bottom line from which to begin again. Soil, food and water all need to regain the characteristic of being ‘living’. And so do we.

To achieve this, the large monocultural, agrichemically dependent commercial farms I cite at the beginning of this article, will need to be broken down into many smaller units, each treated as a pro-ecological project in the making.

One by one the soil diversity of these units will be replenished, using the techniques common to practitioners of organic and pro-ecological farming. Yields will return to their optimal levels and a symbiosis will be achieved between the revival of natural diversity and the cultivation of food crops. To the ecologically attuned, this is common sense.

By necessity, the new energy of a new generation is needed to take up this challenge and recognise that the fresh quality foods they grow on replenished land must find their destiny in the most immediate geographic locations – and no longer be dumped on dying global markets for the mass produced sterile and synthetic foods that line the plastic shelves of soul numbing ‘stupor-markets’.

I describe the re-localisation of food, fibre and fuel requirements in my first book ‘Creative Solutions to a World in Crisis’ under the heading ‘The Proximity Principle’.

Suffice it to say that a whole new dynamic, based around a rejuvenated rural economy and self sufficiency instinct, will ultimately replace the agricultural deserts that have denatured and destroyed our food chain.

A strongly united and consumer supported effort will be essential, as this is completely outside the shadow government agenda, as articulated by the director of Sainsbury’s.

The trend towards taking back control of our destinies is already observable in the steadily growing rejection of the EU Supranational behemoth and in defence of the basic values of nation states. Also increasingly visible is the growing movement for independent sates in North America to free themselves from the central control of Washington DC.

Our future is in our hands, or we the people have no future. It’s time to stop imagining that one will somehow muddle through and come out on dry land. Such an attitude represents a suicidal retreat into a well prepared prison of slavery – and yes, of allowing one’s self to be the victim of a protracted process of starvation.

Life moves forwards, not backwards. At this dramatic confluence of deeply conflicting energies, some remarkable challenges lie immediately ahead, offering us the unique opportunity to express that innate creativity and courage with which we humans have been blessed, yet which many have failed to put into practice.

You don’t have to be a farmer to plant the seeds of that which becomes the source of essential nourishment for body, mind and spirit. But you do need to realise that it is from this level of practical simplicity that the future we want will need to be built.

 

 

Julian Rose

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

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soft core

my back covered in diamonds
on the rippling waves of my bed
laura lofts dipped in ice-cream

the record player spinning psychocandy
dream lilies of dream lilies
opening & opening

my lips on my lips
my tongue gently rolls / my blushing cheeks
it’s good, so good, it’s so good

 

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Laura Lofts

 

 

 

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The Kind of Anarchism I Believe In, and What’s Wrong with Libertarians

photo credit: Oliver Abraham

 

 

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Michael S. Wilson

 

Michael S. Wilson: You are, among many other things, a self-described anarchist — an anarcho-syndicalist, specifically. Most people think of anarchists as disenfranchised punks throwing rocks at store windows, or masked men tossing ball-shaped bombs at fat industrialists. Is this an accurate view? What is anarchy to you?

Noam Chomsky: Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times.

Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular variety of anarchism which was concerned primarily, though not solely, but primarily with control over work, over the work place, over production. It took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, [that] they ought to control the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and … democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society. And then, you know, ideas are worked out about how exactly that should manifest itself, but I think that is the core of anarcho-syndicalist thinking. I mean it’s not at all the general image that you described — people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows — but [anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none.

Wilson: With the apparent ongoing demise of the capitalist state, many people are looking at other ways to be successful, to run their lives, and I’m wondering what you would say anarchy and syndicalism have to offer, things that others ideas — say, for example, state-run socialism — have failed to offer? Why should we choose anarchy, as opposed to, say, libertarianism?

Chomsky: Well what’s called libertarian in the United States, which is a special U. S. phenomenon, it doesn’t really exist anywhere else — a little bit in England — permits a very high level of authority and domination but in the hands of private power: so private power should be unleashed to do whatever it likes. The assumption is that by some kind of magic, concentrated private power will lead to a more free and just society. Actually that has been believed in the past. Adam Smith for example, one of his main arguments for markets was the claim that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality. Well, we don’t have to talk about that! That kind of —

Wilson: It seems to be a continuing contention today …

Chomsky: Yes, and so well that kind of libertarianism, in my view, in the current world, is just a call for some of the worst kinds of tyranny, namely unaccountable private tyranny. Anarchism is quite different from that. It calls for an elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny. Including the kind of tyranny that’s internal to private power concentrations. So why should we prefer it? Well I think because freedom is better than subordination. It’s better to be free than to be a slave. Its’ better to be able to make your own decisions than to have someone else make decisions and force you to observe them. I mean, I don’t think you really need an argument for that. It seems like … transparent.

The thing you need an argument for, and should give an argument for, is, How can we best proceed in that direction? And there are lots of ways within the current society. One way, incidentally, is through use of the state, to the extent that it is democratically controlled. I mean in the long run, anarchists would like to see the state eliminated. But it exists, alongside of private power, and the state is, at least to a certain extent, under public influence and control — could be much more so. And it provides devices to constrain the much more dangerous forces of private power. Rules for safety and health in the workplace for example. Or insuring that people have decent health care, let’s say. Many other things like that. They’re not going to come about through private power. Quite the contrary. But they can come about through the use of the state system under limited democratic control … to carry forward reformist measures. I think those are fine things to do. they should be looking forward to something much more, much beyond, — namely actual, much larger-scale democratization. And that’s possible to not only think about, but to work on. So one of the leading anarchist thinkers, Bakunin in the 19th cent, pointed out that it’s quite possible to build the institutions of a future society within the present one. And he was thinking about far more autocratic societies than ours. And that’s being done. So for example, worker- and community- controlled enterprises are germs of a future society within the present one. And those not only can be developed, but are being developed. There’s some important work on this by Gar Alperovitz who’s involved in the enterprise systems around the Cleveland area which are worker and community controlled. There’s a lot of theoretical discussion of how it might work out, from various sources. Some of the most worked out ideas are in what’s called the “parecon” — participatory economics — literature and discussions. And there are others. These are at the planning and thinking level. And at the practical implementation level, there are steps that can be taken, while also pressing to overcome the worst … the major harms … caused by … concentration of private power through the use of state system, as long as the current system exists. So there’s no shortage of means to pursue.

As for state socialism, depends what one means by the term. If it’s tyranny of the Bolshevik variety (and its descendants), we need not tarry on it. If it’s a more expanded social democratic state, then the comments above apply. If something else, then what? Will it place decision-making in the hands of working people and communities, or in hands of some authority? If the latter, then — once again — freedom is better than subjugation, and the latter carries a very heavy burden of justification.

Wilson: Many people know you because of your and Edward Herman’s development of the Propaganda Model. Could you briefly describe that model and why it might be important to [college] students?

Chomsky: Well first look back a bit — a little historical framework — back in the late 19th-, early 20th century, a good deal of freedom had been won in some societies. At the peak of this were in fact the United States and Britain. By no means free societies, but by comparative standards quite advanced in this respect. In fact so advanced, that power systems — state and private — began to recognize that things were getting to a point where they can’t control the population by force as easily as before, so they are going to have to turn to other means of control. And the other means of control are control of beliefs and attitudes. And out of that grew the public relations industry, which in those days described itself honestly as an industry of propaganda.

The guru of the PR industry, Edward Bernays — incidentally, not a reactionary, but a Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal — the maiden handbook of the PR industry which he wrote back in the 1920s was calledPropaganda. And in it he described, correctly, the goal of the industry. He said our goal is to insure that the “intelligent minority” — and of course anyone who writes about these things is part of that intelligent minority by definition, by stipulation, so we, the intelligent minority, are the only people capable of running things, and there’s that great population out there, the “unwashed masses,” who, if they’re left alone will just get into trouble: so we have to, as he put it, “engineer their consent,” figure out ways to insure they consent to our rule and domination. And that’s the goal of the PR industry. And it works in many ways. It’s primary commitment is commercial advertising. In fact, Bernays made his name right at that time — late 20s — by running an advertising campaign to convince women to smoke cigarettes: women weren’t smoking cigarettes, this big group of people who the tobacco industry isn’t able to kill, so we’ve got to do something about that. And he very successfully ran campaigns that induced women to smoke cigarettes: that would be, in modern terms, the cool thing to do, you know, that’s the way you get to be a modern, liberated woman. It was very successful —

Wilson: Is there a correlation between that campaign and what’s happening with the big oil industry right now and climate change?

Chomsky: These are just a few examples. These are the origins of what became a huge industry of controlling attitudes and opinions. Now the oil industry today, and in fact the business world generally, are engaged in comparable campaigns to try to undermine efforts to deal with a problem that’s even greater than the mass murder that was caused by the tobacco industry; and it was mass murder. We are facing a threat, a serious threat, of catastrophic climate change. And it’s no joke. And [the oil industry is] trying to impede measures to deal with it for their own short-term profit interests. And that includes not only the petroleum industry, but the American Chamber of Commerce — the leading business lobby — and others, who’ve stated quite openly that they’re conducting … they don’t call it propaganda … but what would amount to propaganda campaigns to convince people that there’s no real danger and we shouldn’t really do much about it, and that we should concentrate on really important things like the deficit and economic growth — what they call ‘growth’ — and not worry about the fact that the human species is marching over a cliff which could be something like [human] species destruction; or at least the destruction of the possibility of a decent life for huge numbers of people. And there are many other correlations.

In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices. And so this is only one aspect of the PR industry. What Herman and I were discussing was another aspect of the whole propaganda system that developed roughly at that period, and that’s “manufacture of consent,” as it was called, [consent] to the decisions of our political leaders, or the leaders of the private economy, to try to insure that people have the right beliefs and don’t try to comprehend the way decisions are being made that may not only harm them, but harm many others. That’s propaganda in the normal sense. And so we were talking about mass media, and the intellectual community of the world in general, which is to a large extent dedicated to this. Not that people see themselves as propagandists, but … that they are themselves deeply indoctrinated into the principles of the system, which prevent them from perceiving many things that are really right on the surface, [things] that would be subversive to power if understood. We give plenty of examples there and there’s plenty more you can mention up to the present moment, crucial ones in fact. That’s a large part of a general system of indoctrination and control that runs parallel to controlling attitudes and … consumeristic commitments, and other devices to control people.

You mentioned students before. Well one of the main problems for students today — a huge problem — is sky-rocketing tuitions. Why do we have tuitions that are completely out-of-line with other countries, even with our own history? In the 1950s the United States was a much poorer country than it is today, and yet higher education was … pretty much free, or low fees or no fees for huge numbers of people. There hasn’t been an economic change that’s made it necessary, now, to have very high tuitions, far more than when we were a poor country. And to drive the point home even more clearly, if we look just across the borders, Mexico is a poor country yet has a good educational system with free tuition. There was an effort by the Mexican state to raise tuition, maybe some 15 years ago or so, and there was a national student strike which had a lot of popular support, and the government backed down. Now that’s just happened recently in Quebec, on our other border. Go across the ocean: Germany is a rich country. Free tuition. Finland has the highest-ranked education system in the world. Free … virtually free. So I don’t think you can give an argument that there are economic necessities behind the incredibly high increase in tuition. I think these are social and economic decisions made by the people who set policy. And [these hikes] are part of, in my view, part of a backlash that developed in the 1970s against the liberatory tendencies of the 1960s. Students became much freer, more open, they were pressing for opposition to the war, for civil rights, women’s rights … and the country just got too free. In fact, liberal intellectuals condemned this, called it a “crisis of democracy:” we’ve got to have more moderation of democracy. They called, literally, for more commitment to indoctrination of the young, their phrase … we have to make sure that the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young do their work, so we don’t have all this freedom and independence. And many developments took place after that. I don’t think we have enough direct documentation to prove causal relations, but you can see what happened. One of the things that happened was controlling students — in fact, controlling students for the rest of their lives, by simply trapping them in debt. That’s a very effective technique of control and indoctrination. And I suspect — I can’t prove — but I suspect that that’s a large part of the reason behind [high tuitions]. Many other parallel things happened. The whole economy changed in significant ways to concentrate power, to undermine workers’ rights and freedom. In fact the economist who chaired the Federal Reserve around the Clinton years, Alan Greenspan — St. Alan as he was called then, the great genius of the economics profession who was running the economy, highly honored — he testified proudly before congress that the basis for the great economy that he was running was what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, they won’t do things, like asking for better wages and better benefits. And that’s healthy for the economy from a certain point of view, a point of view that says workers ought to be oppressed and controlled, and that wealth ought to be concentrated in a very few pockets. So yeah, that’s a healthy economy, and we need growing worker insecurity, and we need growing student insecurity, for similar reasons. I think all of these things line up together as part of a general reaction — a bipartisan reaction, incidentally — against liberatory tendencies which manifested themselves in the 60s and have continued since.

Wilson: [Finally, ]I’m wondering if you could [end with some advice for today’s college students].

Chomsky: There are plenty of problems in the world today, and students face a number of them, including the ones I mentioned — the joblessness, insecurity and so on. Yet on the other hand, there has been progress. In a lot of respects things are a lot more free and advanced than they were … not many years ago. So many things that were really matters of struggle, in fact even some barely even mentionable, say, in the 1960s, are now … partially resolved. Things like women’s rights. Gay rights. Opposition to aggression. Concern for the environment — which is nowhere near where it ought to be, but far beyond the 1960s. These victories for freedom didn’t come from gifts from above. They came from people struggling under conditions that are harsher than they are now. There is state repression now. But it doesn’t begin to compare with, say, Cointelpro in the 1960s. People that don’t know about that ought to read and think to find out. And that leaves lots of opportunities. Students, you know, are relatively privileged as compared with the rest of the population. They are also in a period of their lives where they are relatively free. Well that provides for all sorts of opportunities. In the past, such opportunities have been taken by students who have often been in the forefront of progressive change, and they have many more opportunities now. It’s never going to be easy. There’s going to be repression. There’s going to be backlash. But that’s the way society moves forward.

 

(Reproduced from Chomsky.Info)

 

 

 

 

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Gestureship

In a dream, a man said “gestureship”
to me. I didn’t understand the context, if

there had been one. He must’ve seen I looked

puzzled. We were in a small crowd around a
wrestling mat. I was, as I was in high school

and for two years in college, on the wrestling team.

But I wasn’t as young as I was on those teams.
Maybe I was about 30? Instead of my current 73.

The man in charge had said I was going to wrestle

Trump. I liked the idea, although I knew Trump
was about 100 pounds out of my weight class. I thought I’d

take him down and pin him. I knew he was there,

on the other team’s side, though didn’t
look over at him. And this other man, a spectator,

said something with the word “gestureship” in it,
addressing me, and then, about 15 seconds later, said

“Dr. Zhivago,” which I knew─in the dream─meant

he was demonstrating erudition, referring
to Pasternak’s novel, so I’d think he hadn’t

been mistaken or ignorant to say “gestureship.”

 

 

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John Levy

 

 

 

 

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Jim Wants To Borrow Joe’s Air

Joe had some boxes full of air he wasn’t using and had them tucked away in the cupboard in his bedroom. His pal Jim phoned to say he was planning to do some things that would involve a lot of breathing and he needed some extra air and if he wasn’t using those boxes of air he knew Joe had stashed away could he borrow them for maybe a week or so.

Sure, said Joe, because Joe’s a decent chap and the boxes of air were away in the cupboard and the air was not being used and may indeed have been going a trifle stale. A couple of days later Jim phoned to say he was going to be starting to do the things he had mentioned tomorrow and so needed the boxes of air today so he would have them on hand and he said, Joe, why don’t you come over and have a beer, and while you’re at it bring the boxes of air. Thanks.

Joe paused, and considered his options. Then he said, You’ve got to be kidding. I’m here on my own, the wife’s away at her Mum’s, the dog seems to be a bit off-colour, it might be something he ate, I’m not sure, the vet said to keep an eye on him for a day or two and if he don’t get better then take him in for them to look at, but I sure can’t really afford vet’s fees at the moment, and my therapist phoned to say they can’t take listening to people whinging any more and they’re going to go and live in a monastery on an Italian hillside and I’ll have to find someone else to waste an hour a week with, and I have laundry to do because I’m wearing stale underwear. You want the boxes of air? Come and get the fucking boxes of air.

 

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Conrad Titmuss
Picture Rupert Mallin

 

 

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some new newsletter news

 

 

Not much new work this time sorry been havoc with my studio closure!

 

MUSEUM CLOSING PERMANENTLY NEXT MONTH

The permanent closure of the Museum of Neoliberalism, which doubles as my art studio, is rapidly approaching. I need to be fully cleared out by the 1st Oct so will be closing for good on the 15th Sept. Make a booking and come see it before it closes!

I currently don’t know for certain what will happen next. I’m trying to find funding to secure a long-term space in Margate, and reopen an expanded museum there, but am still waiting to find out if that’s possible.

 

The worst case scenario is that I will have to put everything in storage and find a temporary studio space until January. But I’m hoping that won’t be necessary.

If you’re able to help in offering a temporary studio/storage space, getting some of my artwork or merch (email me for a catalogue of my original artwork!), or backing me on Patreon etc, any help at all is massively appreciated.

 

 

LIES BOX

 

While attempting to clear out my studio I found a few left over art boxes from the Werbepause subvertising exhibition I co-curated in Berlin in 2022.

The NUKE box to the left has been on my website shop before, a limited edition of 70. But there were substantially fewer LIES boxes, only enough for an edition of 12 so to make it fair I’m only offering them for sale from 18:00 today. One per person!

 

 

I also found these Nestrip boxes by my friend and co-curator of the Berlin show DoubleYY, which she’s asked me to sell for her. Also available on the same listing, although these are unsigned and not numbered so they’re cheaper.

Order here

 

 

 

HELL BUS X MASSIVE ATTACK

 

I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be bringing the Hell Bus to the all day Massive Attack gig in Clifton Downs, Bristol later this month.

The catalyst for the Hell Bus was actually a Massive Attack gig in Liverpool back in 2021 that had be cancelled in protest at an arms fair taking place in the venue, so I’m really pleased this is coming full circle.

 

 

 

 

NEW STICKER SETS

 

                                      

I’ve had some new stickers printed and am reorganising my sticker sets as I write this! I’m also making a new sticker set of low-cost protest stickers for those who like to do a bit of public stickering (see below). The new sets will be available here as soon as I finish uploading them (a few minutes after sending this newsletter!)

 

GOD WILL NOT SAVE THE T-SHIRTS

 

 

It took a while for me to sort this out but these t-shirts are now back from the printer! If you made a preorder then you’ll be getting your order in the next few days. I ordered a few extra sizes so if you missed the preorder you can still get one here, in white or black. But once they’re gone they’re gone.

 

PATREON

Thanks to everyone who has backed my work on Patreon so far, it’s been a massive help particularly with my studio/museum being demolished in October (hopefully I will have some news about a new location next month – I’m still in purgatory!)

If you’re able to support my work via Patreon I’ll send you a copy of this zine documenting all the work I made last year. This is the only way you can get a copy, it’s not for sale anywhere else.

 

I’ll be making a new zine for 2024 too.

 

 

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.

Thanks for reading!

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Statement: Unite against Tommy Robinson

 

By standuptorac / 2 August 2024

 

Tommy Robinson mobilised over 15,000 in Trafalgar Square on 27th July 2024. Robinson is a fascist who wants to divide us with racism, Islamophobia and religious hatred.

Chants on this demonstration included “We want our country back” and “You can stick your f***ing Islam up your arse.”

Robinson and other far right figures attempted to exploit the horrific knife attack in Southport to stir up Islamophobia and sew division by spreading misinformation about the attacker’s identity. This led to a racist mob rioting and violently attacking the Southport Mosque and police, chanting the same hateful slogans heard on Robinson’s London demonstration.

Racism and Islamophobia in Parliament is leading to racism and Islamophobia on the streets. When Robinson asked at his demonstration who voted for Nigel Farage and Reform UK almost every hand went up. Suella Braverman galvanised and emboldened this latest iteration of fascist mobilisations, with her claims of an “Islamist” threat, policing “double standards” and refugee “invasion” inflammatory rhetoric.

And across Europe we see the rise of far right and fascist forces, from Marine Le Pen in France to the AfD in Germany.

Tommy Robinson is a threat to all decent people

Robinson is a threat to all decent people. The trial of Finsbury Park terrorist Darren Osborne, who murdered Makram Ali, heard that he was radicalised by reading material by Tommy Robinson and others. When Robinson was leader of the English Defence League, it attacked Muslims, trade unions and strike actions.

All those who oppose this must join in a united mass movement powerful enough to drive back this latest fascist street movement. The majority of people in Britain abhor Robinson and his supporters. But his mobilisation of over 15,000 means this majority needs to make its voice heard the next time they take to the streets.

We are the majority, they are the few. Britain has a proud history of defeating fascists and racists. We must defeat them again. We must stand up to racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism. All those that valued democracy, freedom and our multicultural society must unite and mobilise against the far right and fascism.


Signatories include:

  • Weyman Bennett and Sabby Dhalu, Stand Up To Racism co-convenors
  • Peter Hain, House of Lords
  • Mohammed Kozbar, Finsbury Park Mosque Chairman
  • Gideon, Artist, DJ and Bloc 9 Glastonbury curator
  • Michael Rosen, author and poet 
  • Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP
  • Dawn Butler MP
  • Kim Johnson MP
  • Humza Yousaf MSP
  • Jeremy Corbyn MP
  • Shockat Adam MP
  • Daniel Kebede, NEU General Secretary
  • Mick Whelan, ASLEF General Secretary
  • Fran Heathcote, PCS General Secretary
  • Sarah Woolley, BFAWU General Secretary
  • Patrick Roach, NASUWT General Secretary
  • Lindsey German, Stop the War Coalition convenor

For further information please contact:
[email protected] 

 

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Poem



The heat is cooling a little I might
take a walk down the promenade and count

all the green things I see, like me and Zev
used to do on our way home from nursery in

Jerusalem. Quietly, I sit down on the dense
bench and absorb a chess game, my legs

brown as a chocolate button. Some wasp can’t
leave me be. Most of the time I just crouch on

hot pavements in my bathing suit. Summer is
a good time to do nothing and make no money

not even write a novel just visit churches and steal
breakfast for dinner. Accidently finish crime

and punishment. Remember when I was writing
inside that house you were squatting  in. Remember

when you were always cooking or cleaning or not
searching for me. It’s okay – stray cat, I won’t throw

rocks at you. I only want to look. The happy tobacconist
thinks I am a little genius walking round with all my

empty notebooks. When you fall asleep and

I have no idea what you had for dinner or what
county you are in. is when I need you desperately.

June 2024.

 

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Blossom Hibbert

 

 

 

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Bowl

The tiny necklace at my back
The spasmodic rhythm of the divine
At my worst I call a light
It’s divided and careless
Fidgety spinning all around
The globe moves on
It’s an autumn child they called
Few hydrangeas lay at my desk
I call and back to tell the truth
The divine rhythm all around us
To a matchstick it hinges upon
As I knew the summer from autumn
Where lie little fishes in my bowl.

 

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Sayani Mukherjee
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

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Lord of the Rings

The heart cannot stop,
It roams and every drop
Is desired to be drank
From its majestic bonding.
A soothsayer’s shadowy wings
Consoles this doomed
Marvel of heart,
A broken well
Still serves you best.
The water is sweet
By the nightingale’s tune.
The shire is a residing garden.
Young Hobbits are their own
Master.
The ringing and mingling of hearts Invite an army of dawn
To win the conquest
Over dusk.
What survives is a grave
Where love flowers.
The possession of the love ring
Drives one astray
To the beloved’s heart.
The winner of hearts
Becomes the lord of the rings.

 

 

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© Sushant Thapa
Biratnagar-13, Nepal
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

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OLIVER

OLIVER
Book, Music & Lyrics by Lionel Bart
Freely adapted from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist
Reconceived by Matthew Bourne and Cameron Mackintosh
Chichester Festival Theatre – running until Sept 7th 2024.

This newly conceived production of Lionel Bart’s classic musical is due to open at London’s Gielgud Theatre over the Christmas season. Appropriate timing, as this incarnation has all the hallmarks of pantomime. Gone has the dark, gritty, Dickensian musical drama in favour of a family-friendly, even interactive interpretation. Breaking the fourth wall is an admirable art, and Simon Lipkins’ Fagin succeeds in spades, yet sometimes at the expense of the drama.

It is clearly a very talented company but some of the casting and artistic choices leave a lot to be desired. Why is Artful Dodger and some of his cohorts played by young adults? Surely, the fun of Dodger is to see an early adolescent, swamped in adult clothes, trying to be a man. Meanwhile, Fagin’s off-the-cuff gags aimed at Bill Sikes do nothing for either character. Sikes is and should be terrifying; to have him the butt of endless jokes does not help. On the plus side, young Oliver is played in delightful naturalistic style, as is Philip Franks’ Mr Brownlow. Elsewhere, we are treated to melodrama, caricature, vaudeville, even alternative comedy. In short, the show might benefit from a more consistent performance style.

Lionel Bart’s score is full of glorious songs. Full of vitality, melody, and drama. The tempos here seem to suggest the conductor is in a hurry to get to the bar. Singers trying hard to get in the words and little room for interpretation. Nancy, with a powerhouse of a voice, just about manages to overcome the speed train tempos. Even surviving the constant distraction of scene changers wandering around behind her. Then again, only old-time fans of the show will grouse at all this. The audience on the night lapped it up, whooping and cheering throughout. Perhaps, enjoyment was slightly dulled by sitting on the side of the horseshoe auditorium. Most of the show seemed to be directed for proscenium arch. So, the Gielgud will be perfect.

I must say, since writing the above, I have read many 4 and 5 star reviews, which suggests many improvements have been made. Yet, I suspect the pantomime element remains. For all my reservations, if you can get a seat, I highly recommend seeing the show. The cast are brilliant, and it is one of the great bulletproof British Musicals ever. Go see for yourself!

* * *

 

And so…..to the other side of a stolen coin…a low budget Spanish film made in 10 days.

THE COFFEE TABLE
La Mesita Del Comedor
Director: Caye Casas
Writers: Cristina BorobiaCaye Casas
Stars: David ParejaEstefanía de los SantosJosep Maria Riera

Winning countless and well-deserved awards on the festival circuit, The Coffee Table is an unexpected psychological horror like no other of recent times. Jesus and Maria do not have an easy life, but the birth of their child gives them new hope. Then, an argument about the purchase of a coffee table changes their future forever.

It turns out that the Swedish designed table was made in China, and like so many put-it- together-yourself items is missing the final screw. Symbolic of their relationship, perhaps. Then begins the search for stability.

While Maria is out shopping, Jesus experiences a life-changing shock, one which he cannot divulge to anyone. Not to Maria, his brother, and definitely not to the besotted daughter of their next door neighbour. Even when the coffee-table salesman arrives with the missing screw, Jesus remains excruciatingly withdrawn.

The shock Jesus suffers is something no viewer or critic should reveal, suffice to say it provides actor David Pareja with one hell of a challenge. One which he grasps with bloodied hands, giving a performance worthy of an Oscar. All the cast are exceptional, but Mr. Pareja is mesmerising. The film is full of dark humour, tenderness, titillation, and some genuinely mind-numbing moments.

There aren’t many films that make you forget the existence of subtitles, but this one does. It’s the horror in the mind of Jesus that prevails. He’s seen horrors. Horrors that you’ll see. The horror. El horror.

See it on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, or Sky – Now!

 

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Reviews by Kevin Short

02/08/2024

 

 

 

 

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Dream

“Dream” Is an Experimental Film about the surreal works of a dream and how through our rapid thoughts comes abstract meaning. It’s conveyed as one big dream. The film’s meaning also conveys the multidimensional spectrum of contrast that creates equality both in and out of our subconscious minds.

 

 

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Night

I upheld the long haul dream
The topsy turvy menargie
Of broken threaded sweet pearls
That soothe my aching happiness
I dreamt in thee the songs of Paris
When evening comes I love your chestnut
Brown symphonies raging a thousand oceans
The yukelele of national importance
Do i sing heaven’s ceremonies too?
Or when I plunge my needle I sank a little harder
Over little wishes that once carved your niche
Birds have their nests too
The sweet ocean of peripheral promised land
Come over and play your pulses
The smile is same but magnificent
The golden Gate surpassed us today, night.

 

 

 

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Sayani Mukherjee
Photo Nick Victor

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Steam’s Groove – (episode 30)

 

Steam Stock

Tracklist:
Gregory James Edition – Ain’t No Sunshine
Esther Williams – Last Night Changed it All (I Really Had a Ball)
Roger and the Gypsies – Pass the Hatchet
Gary Bartz – Carnival De L’Esprit
Lemuria – Hunk of Heaven
The Blackbyrds – Rock Creek Park
Donald Byrd – Think Twice
Exit 9 – Miss Funky Fox
The Trinikas – Remember Me
Yellow Sunshine – Yellow Sunshine
Bobbi Humphrey – Baby Don’t You Know
Gwen McRae – 90% of Me is You
Eddie Henderson – Inside You
Shuggie Otis – Strawberry Letter 23

 

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In the face of pain and misery

sometimes you are the target.
They ricochet in the temples,
vibrating pricks.
The heart speeds up like a locomotive
uphill…
The barrel is smoking
the pupils dilate rapidly…
To get away
right out of te
you have to go through the looking glass.

 

 

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Dessy Tsvetkova
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

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THE DIARY OF A GENTLEMAN-POET

Monday, July 15th

Melissa telephoned. Apparently the national kickball team had a disappointing time last evening and she wanted to talk about it because she was awfully upset. I didn’t and I wasn’t, because it’s of no consequence as far as I’m concerned.

Cook is also full of the kickball, and I had to politely tell her that, actually, I don’t care for kickball, as a result of childhood trauma – another thing I don’t want to talk about.

Mrs. Jennings debuted today, and the entire house is shining as if it has been sprayed and is fresh out of the box. Everything smells of roses and lilies and another aromatic thing I’m unable to identify. The only place she hasn’t cleaned is the kitchen. That’s Cook’s domain, into which one trespasses on pain of death or insult. Even Jethro has had a thorough clean up, and I gather that the horses didn’t recognise him the first time he went into the stables after the operation.

I made the mistake of turning on the wireless for “The World at One” at lunchtime, and found myself listening to a special dispatch about kickball before I could make it to the OFF switch. There seems to be no escape from this plague. Fled to the woods with Winnie, and stayed there until I felt it safe to return home for dinner, although I approached with trepidation as Cook was bound to bring the whole thing up again. As a precaution, I made out to appear fully absorbed in concentration upon a book as she served, and I got away with it. It was toad in the hole. Lovely!

To bed early. I think I should be safe here.

Tuesday, July 16th

At breakfast, Cook asked if I’m enjoying the eggs. Well, yes, they’re eggs, though I could sometimes wish I had to eat fewer of them.

It’s of little consequence, but keeping a diary every day is sometimes a bit of a challenge, especially on days when nothing really happens, which is most days, to be honest, and some days I simply don’t do it. Or, on the other hand, there might be something on that day I don’t want entered into the record, because I’m no angel. Actually I’m a quiet, self-contained charmer with a fairly limited social life by choice. I know loads of people because of my wealth and land-owning status, but I choose not to mix with most of them because too many people are rather tedious and some are plainly horrible. But when the most exciting thing to happen in a day is cutting your toenails, well, is a diary really warranted? But I shall carry on, I think, because when I’m in the next world people will be eager to know how I got away with it.

 

Melissa telephoned. She does that.

I cut my toenails before going to bed.

Wednesday, July 17th

Read a neat little sonnet sequence by Samuel Daniel – “Beauty, Time, and Love”. He knocks most of today’s poetasters into a cocked hat, which really goes without saying.

Felt a bit erotic this morning so went for a long walk to work off some energy. I’m not sure it worked. A cold shower did the trick on my return, along with Cook having a visitor in for a chat who, I think, was one of the three witches from ‘Macbeth’, or possibly all three stuffed into one. I would much rather not have laid eyes on her. It’s of little consequence. Or is it? I may not sleep tonight.

Melissa telephoned. She said the lumberjacks are lumbering around her place and making lots of sawing noises, with the occasional cry of ‘Timber’.

Thursday, July 18th

Wide awake at 7 and a nice brisk early long walk with Winnie to the top of Hillocky Hill, where a good breeze was blowing. Sun gave way to cloud later.

from Rabelais: “. . .poets, who are under the protection of Apollo, when they are drawing near their latter end do ordinarily become prophets, and by the inspiration of that god sing sweetly in vaticinating things which are to come.” I had to look up “vaticinating”. But it’s good to know I shall one day be something of a prophet. I don’t know when that will be. It’s of little or no consequence, probably.

Melissa telephoned. I thought she might.

Looked through some writing today from 6 or 7 years ago, some published, much unpublished. There’s probably some treasure that could be pulled out from there but really I can’t be bothered. It strikes me as far too much work for too little return. And when I say “too little return” I mean “none”.

Friday, July 19th

It’s very hot. Spent the afternoon in the hammock in the shade under the boughs of the something tree, reading Samuel Daniel when I wasn’t falling asleep, and wondered about writing a series of sonnets. I probably won’t.

Melissa telephoned. This would normally be of absolutely no consequence, but she says she has taken to living au naturelle when indoors and when it’s this hot, and she giggled a lot. I’m trying not to have too many mental images of it, and I’ve also taken some sleeping pills. I’m thankful she told me, and not Cook. I don’t want her getting any ideas. Cook in the nip would be more than I could take.

Sunday, July 21st

I really should write about what happened yesterday but I don’t think I can summon up the courage. That it involved chickens, and Cook and Jethro almost coming to blows, is about as far as I can go with it. The details are too grim to relate. The good news is that somehow or other they patched things up, and demolished a bottle of my sherry between them in the evening. And today Cook has invited Jethro into the kitchen for elevenses – a thing hitherto unheard of, because Cook has always rather frowned upon his personal hygiene, though he’s currently a bit cleaner thanks to Mrs. Jennings, though I think he’s already showing signs of relapsing. I don’t really care, as long as she makes sure he doesn’t go near anything I might eat.

Oh, Melissa telephoned. I wasn’t here. It’s of no consequence.

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James Henderson (Gentleman)

 

 

 

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The Song My Daughter Sung 

Believe me or not my four year old who can barely write came running to me and said, “Dadda, oi, I made a song.” I couldn’t be prouder, and the following is her song as sung to me using, no doubt, the beats and essence of BJ Thomas-

Raindrops keep falling on my nose,
boing! Sun is following us, because
it is a rainy sunny day when
the unicorn rides a rainbow and come
to party with me, but come a little late.

Then I picked it up, made a small ditty for her, but truly she ‘made’ it better

A Poem For My Girl

Raindrops fall on my nose.
Rainbow sneak a peek at me
through the open windows.
A unicorn knocks on the door.
Postman slips in a letter
written by my daughter
but he is on the wrong floor.

 

 

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Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor

 

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

 

 

 

 

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What We Learn On Our First Day

Early morning, a father 
carries the screaming silence 
on his shoulders, the first day
of the prep-school.

He crosses the tramline.
He buys some sweet breads.
He releases his first born 
at the school gate.

Ants usher in the continuity of rain.
On the roadside benches 
mushrooms sprawl their
brief black-teal lives.

We weather, grow, learn 
at the universe’s university,
fit in the present that doesn’t exist.

 

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Kushal Poddar
Picture Nick Victor

 

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

 

 

 

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Nature: A Companion

The sunshine is my friend;
It greets me as I try to wake up
From my dream bed.
The spring decorates
My view from my window.
A lucky charm recollects
The falling drizzle.
I am acquainted
With these belongings,
The fall gives me promises
To rise and bloom again.
Life is never a thought out plan.
Life takes courage
To carry on,
The recollections measure
The lifelong dedication.
Time is a friend
That saves you
When you truly
Dedicate yourself.

 

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© Sushant Thapa
Biratnagar-13, Nepal
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Radio Silence

The transmitters have fallen silent:
all you can hear is the static
as you tune across the band.
You tell yourself there are voices there,
buried in the starlight,
if only you could make them out, but no,

all you can hear is the static,
a smooth surface stripped of all irregularities.
You tell yourself there are voices there,
like words whispered on the edge of sleep
if only you could make them out, but no,
there are neither questions nor answers here,

only a smooth surface stripped of all irregularities
that extends indefinitely in every direction.
Like words whispered on the edge of sleep,
all else that you hear is merely imagined.
There are neither questions nor answers here,
not even the conversation of the machines that outlived us

and all this extends indefinitely in every direction.
The transmitters have fallen silent:
all else that you hear is merely imagined
as you tune across the band.
Even the conversation of the machines that outlived us
is buried in the starlight.

 

Dominic Rivron
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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Capital Offensive

 

Messages don’t load, and I’m left with blank screens and a sense of urgency as the market crashes. It should, of course, have looked where it was going, round hairpin bends on mountains that had learned nothing since they were mere molehills, but it was too tangled up in its red braces and self-congratulation to concern itself with potential impact. It is, after all, a savage world of dog-eat-god, with a daily diet of minor deities, served up raw and roaring; a world in which right and wrong are simply answers on daytime quiz shows, and a moral compass turns up now and then on Bargain Hunt and loses money every time. The market crawls from the wreckage like the villain of a Saturday serial, dusts itself down and twirls its oiled moustache. Money talks, but we all know it’s lying, so we trust to mediums with milky eyes and exaggerated accents. Uncertainty is mounting, and the roaring boys are massaging the available information and cashing in blank cheques. The only thing that’s loaded is the pearl-handled revolver with the hair trigger, nestling under the driver’s seat like a fledgling god.

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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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Science

 

Malcolm Mc Neill

 

 

 

 

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The World We’ve Left Our Children


 
I am saying sorry
for the illusions
I wanted to give you
enchantment
Sea World dolphins
orcas, splashes of blue water
I am sorry for the cruelty
the ugly side of fascination
 
I am saying sorry
for the poisons
we breathe
the bleached corals
the leopards and tigers
elephants and turtles
the species we endanger
 
I am saying sorry
for the violence
the guns
the officer’s knee
the never-ending list
of names
victims of the law
I am sorry for the boundless abuse
 
I am saying sorry
for the slaughter
the “war”
the genocide
the severed limbs of children
bodies beneath the rubble
the hunger and thirst
bombs and missiles
fighter jets
more bombs and missiles
and fighter jets
I am sorry for the wreckage
the assaults on human decency
 
I am saying sorry for the complicity
of “leaders”
in spaces of power
and on university campuses
I am saying sorry
for the lies
that fall from their lips
 
I am saying sorry
over and over
faster and faster
I am saying I love you
I am saying I am proud
of where you stand

 

 

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Roxanne Doty

 

 

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Silenzio

Doriana climbs the hill each Friday
to the fish stall in the market,
her Co-op shopping bag
full of silence.

It came into the house
through the narrow Door of the Dead
the day they carried Sergio
down the stairs.

She thinks she’s transparent,
her outraged heart faltering
in a viscose blouse; surely
everyone sees?

The little glazed Madonna
on the wall is wrapped in blue.
Swifts make empty loops
across a white sky.

Hollow footsteps
on the cobbles; bitter taste
in every sip of coffee.
Surely, everyone reads

the intricate embroidery?
Silenzio, worked in silver thread
on the long black banner
that floats behind her.

 

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Alex Josephy

 

 

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Planet Of The Ultraviolets

 

Atomic Cheesecake Production

A tribe of free-spirited fluorescent people are attacked by an invading flock of ravenous eyeballs that feast on color in this psychedelic short film.

 

 

 

 

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DIVERSITY


 
oldsters don’t understand the young
youngsters are impatient with the old,
women are wary of men
men are wary of women,
gays feel uneasy with breeders
breeders feel uneasy with gays,
the rich scorn the poor
the poor despise the rich,
christians denounce muslims
muslims denounce christians,
the left scares the right
the right impedes the left,
blacks resent whites
whites fear blacks
the french resent the english
the english have issues with the french,
the pro’s hate the anti’s
the anti’s hate the pro’s,
i worry about you
you worry about me,
wake up, we share this planet,
celebrate our diversity…

 

 

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Andrew Darlington

 

 

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RELAPSE SIGNATURE

 

Characterized the cognitive

solving of disputation

change the changed

 

behaviour

crucial active directive

 

change problem of

process by active

prelapse reversal

 

a point juncture

before behaviour

prelapse the circuit

 

short overwhelming

review to reversal

behaviour in process

 

 

 

 

Scott Thurston

 

 

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PLEASURE TO BE GONE

It’s a pleasure to be gone,
swept away in the night
by armed police with dogs
and vans, their weapons out.

Nobody can save me now,
I liked being there but
now I prefer being here,
though I’m not sure where

that is. I am too far away
to be close to you, too
near to what’s happened
to know or understand.

Friends tell me that I’m lost
because I’ve gone missing
but there is no time to lose:
it’s a pleasure to be gone.

 

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© Rupert M Loydell
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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Alan Moore’s views on Anarchy

 

What do you think needs to change in our political system?

Everything. I believe that what’s needed is a radical solution, by which I mean from the roots upwards. Our entire political thinking seems to me to be based upon medieval precepts. These things, they didn’t work particularly well five or six hundred years ago. Their slightly modified forms are not adequate at all for the rapidly changing territory of the 21st Century.

We need to overhaul the way that we think about money, we need to overhaul the way that we think about who’s running the show. As an anarchist, I believe that power should be given to the people, to the people whose lives this is actually affecting. It’s no longer good enough to have a group of people who are controlling our destinies. The only reason they have the power is because they control the currency. They have no moral authority and, indeed, they show the opposite of moral authority.

 

(The text above is a brief excerpt from ‘The Honest Alan Moore Interview’ at The Anarchist Library)

 

 

 

 

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Nymph of the Phrase

Echo, you live in the mountains of Greece.
It’s your favourite spot, you creature of grotto

and rock. Here you come into your own
as you sound and resound in the search

for the weary who follow the path, the deceptive path
on a fiercely hot day and are lost.

Sometimes of course, you thrive in the mist
the Welsh mist of the Brecon hills.

Invisible yourself, you cannot lead
but you have your voice which may not

be much, but at least you are no longer
second best to the moods of gods and men.

Needy girl, romantic girl
what have you learned of love?

Love, you say. Love, love
love of love.

You wore a garland of ivy
but its winter blossoms are fading now.

I should let your white bones blend with soil
continue to root in the strata of myth.

But Echo, there’s a man in America
who needs a voice, an old man struggling

with words and how to use them
so they make sense.

Go on. Help him. Your name means
restore as well as repeat.

Girl of words, nymph of the phrase,
say it is possible, possible.

 

 

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Mandy Pannett

 

 

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Armed Struggle

American Outrage: A Testementary, H.L. Hix (BlazeVOX)

The title piece of this chunky, large format paperback is a 112 page poem consisting of a list of names and brief personal details of around a 1000 victims of shootings in the USA, interspersed with statistics and facts about how and why guns are used and misused. It is a memorial, a litany, a liturgy, a reminder, a representation and a commentary on the addiction to violence many Americans (indeed, many people) have, unable to make the connection between ‘the right to bear arms’ and events such as mass shootings, let alone the death toll of individuals.

It is a provocation too, with an underlying question: Why did the likes of Alvin Haynes, who ‘had a long standing addiction to heroin’ or Olivia Stoffel, who ‘liked to write notes and stories, and wanted to be a writer when she grew up’, die? I was going to write have to die, but there is no have to involved. They are part of mostly nameless statistics which count gunshot wounds, casualties, news stories, accidents, homicides, suicides, sales, productivity levels, domestic violence, etc. etc.

The second part of American Outrage is a critical bibliography entitled ‘Parerga’, a word that seems to reference both a volume of six miscellaneous essays by Arthur Schopenhauer (one volume of his Parerga and Paralipomena) and the term ‘parergon’, which Wikipedia defines as a semiotic term referring to something as supplementary or an embellishment, also noting that the original Greek word refers to ‘an addition to the work’. Both seem pertinent, for Hix’s ‘Parerga’ expands upon his original text, and bears (indirect) witness to Schopenhauer’s philosophical discussions regarding how phenomena (the actual) are the result of irrational assumptions and ideas.

It’s clear that Hix is bewildered by his nation’s love of guns and the deaths which result from this. Not because he directly talks or preaches to the reader but because of the gradual expansive accumulation of quotes and source material which informs and underpins the first piece. So the phrase ‘We would be wise to correlate our fear with what actually threatens us’, turns out be from or a summary of an article about police violence and statistics by Patrick Ball, which Hix quotes from at length in ‘Parerga’:

     America is a land ruled by fear. We fear that our children will be abducted
     by strangers, that crazed gunmen will perpetrate mass killings in our schools
     and theaters, that terrorists will gun us down or blow up our buildings, and
     that serial killers will stalk us on dark streets. All of these risks are real, but
     they are minuscule in probability: taken together, these threats constitute
     less than three per cent of total annual homicides in the US. The numerically
     greater threat to our safety, and the largest single category of strangers who
     threaten us, are the people we have empowered to use deadly force to
     protect us from these less probable threats.

Hix’s point here is about (armed) response to fear, rather than simply blaming the police; it is about the legitimization of using ‘deadly force’. The longer quote offers the original source and context for those interested, extra material for those continuing to explore themes and ideas raised by the long poem, which is about how humans react to shootings, to death, to hardware and victims, in the widest sense. Hix’s mention of ‘Empathy after violence’ expands in ‘Parerga’ to discuss race and American identity, with a quote from Artress Bethan White’s book Survivor’s Guilt:

     [S]ympathy for a gunned-down stranger does not necessarily translate into
     tolerance for the same body alive and in need of civil rights… [E]mpathy for
     those who are different shouldn’t just happen after a body has been
     gunned down and is no longer seen as a political threat.

Politics, fear, violence… I sometimes remember the shock I felt my first time in Manhattan, back in 1980, when two policemen joined me in the lift (sorry, elevator) of the apartment block where I was staying, both holding guns (a rifle and a sub-machine gun) and calmly replying ‘Just a domestic’ when I politely asked if there was something going on. Nowadays we are of course, bombarded with images on TV and online of armed police, cowboys, spies, armies and individuals, and don’t blink at the machine guns and flak jackets of our own UK police.

But we need to be shocked and resist making guns an acceptable norm. American Outrage arrived a few days after a failed assassination attempt on Trump, having been posted a few days before that event. Hix’s prescience and concern with the nature of things is not a surprise: his previous books have included explorations of dialogue, the arts, the political misuse of language, power structures and a gender free retelling of the Gospel stories. All work by juxtaposition and curation of language, texts and ideas; all resist fear of the unknown, be that gender, sexuality, race, culture or simply difference. We need to understand, not threaten and kill, make or have enemies. We need to not be afraid and change society, which – like it or not – we are part of.

The most pertinent and challenging quote in this book, for me, is the contextual quote for the phrase ‘Enemies are not’, which was written by the artist Kurt Schwitters:

     There are no values worth defending. Our enemies are just like us. We
     should not fight them; we should fight our mistakes. The enemy’s right
     to live is greater than your right to kill him.

Hix’s new book is a powerful, disturbing and challenging read, which points to further reading matter and other ways of thinking. ‘The focus’, says Hix, ‘is on the outrageousness of the violence performed’, noting that the word outrage ‘has no connection to the word “rage”.’ More important than feeling is forgiveness and justice, the recognition that (in the words of Jaclyn Schildkraut and H. Jaymi Elsass) ‘Violence is always an attack upon a person’s dignity, sense of selfhood, and future. It is nothing less than the desecration of one’s position in the world.’ By sharing his and many others’ outrage, by encouraging us to be outraged too, Hix encourages us to grieve, think, understand and take action.

 

 

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Rupert Loydell

 

 

 

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The Velvet Underground – Super 8 Films

The Velvet Underground was an American rock band formed in New York City in 1964. It originally comprised singer and guitarist Lou Reed, Welsh multi-instrumentalist John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, and drummer Angus MacLise.

 

 

 

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Alan’s New and Old Music summer 2024 

(Compiled by Alan Dearling)

 

Sean Khan presents The Modern Jazz and Folk Ensemble

Pentangle were arguably one of the first supergroups providing a fusion of folk and jazz. They were fronted by Jacqui McShee. Sean Khan has offered Jacqui and The Modern Jazz and Folk Ensemble an opportunity to revisit, or, re-imagine ‘Light Flight’, one of Pentangle’s best known tunes. I think it was the theme of TV’s ‘Take Three Girls’. It’s classy and cheerful, but sounds rather Old Skool, despite Jacqui’s youthful vocals.  More the sound of 2024 is ‘Parasite’, an exquisite gem from the late, great, Nick Drake, with Kandelan as featured vocalist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQy0ggO5xIA

‘Who knows where the time goes’ is hardly recognisable as the song perhaps most connected with the legacy of Sandy Denny. Overall this album is reverential. An album that will probably provide the backdrop to many middle-class dinner parties. A collision or collusion between the sounds of John Martyn and the MJQ.  London-based saxophonist Sean Khan has curated The Modern Jazz & Folk Ensemble, which is essentially a project  devised to explore the sounds of Britain’s late Sixties-early Seventies folk revival in the context of modern jazz. It’s labelled as ‘Volume 1’, so expect more to come!

Satellite Inn – Satellite Inn

The opening track, ‘Bury the Ashes’ sets the tone: “No-one is innocent now!”  They are described as “…an Italian alternative country band in the US.”  It seems like mellow, melancholic music. ‘Wayfaring Angel’ is full of Stiv Canterell’s guttural, gruff singing which becomes engulfed in a towering inferno of guitar feedback. Stiv has plenty of musical pals including R.E.M., Bob Mould and Richmond Fontaine. Satellite Inn are described in their PR as being, “…outcasts in their own country…sounding like they were delivering their own brand of folk, rock, punk and country, distilled by age and bottled in their native Romagna hills.”

‘Happy to Survive’ offers, perhaps, shades of Springsteen. Much else is doom-laden, especially the finale: ‘One last look and I’m gone’. Earlier, ‘Going to Wilmington’is possibly the most up-beat track, almost a rollicking little ditty complete with some fine banjo-picking. I rather liked the name of one of Stiv’s previous outfits, the probably aptly named, ‘James Dean Hangover’. I imagine them to be Wayfaring Angels pursuing Stiv along the road to perdition! If you like your musical fare, dark, murky, almost muddy, and then darker still, this may be for you!

Satellite Inn on Bandcamp: https://satelliteinn99.bandcamp.com/album/satellite-inn

Mdou Moctar – Funeral for Justice

At first listen, opener, ‘Funeral for Justice’ sounds like desert blues from Tinirawen played at the wrong, much too fast speed! Add heavy-metal, prog rock and the first track leaves a searing raucous rumble across the consciousness. The next track ‘Imouhar’ then appears to have been recorded at half the volume, or, maybe in a field half a mile distant! Then after 1 minute 24 seconds, the volume returns to the blistering…

Mahamadou ‘Mdou Moctar’ Souleymane is a Toureg, based in Agadez, Niger. Adept at blistering guitar breaks and splintering shards of bluesy guitar rock, Mdou Moctar is reminiscent of speed guitar freaks, particularly Eddie Van Halen’s pyrotechnics. Elsewhere,’Takoba’ provides a more measured call and response style  and is much gentler and soulful, with djembe talking drums, traditional chants.  ’Sousoume Tamacheq’ returns to the musical offensive. There’s also political content, with ‘Oh France’ and ‘Modern Slaves’. It’s a strange mix of the frenetic and the subtleties of Desert blues. Vast amounts of light and shade. Definitely a weird melange, but one that is gathering many plaudits and rave reviews!

‘Funeral for Justice’ live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwRgJ66ylpU

Kilbey Kennedy – Premonition K

Very, very Floyd-like. And, in this case that’s really rather good. Pomp and Prog. A vast smorgasbord of sound.  Spoken word over-lapping with an enveloping blanket of sound right from the off-get on ‘Breaking the Fourth World’. ‘Premonition K’ is apparently the final chapter in a trilogy of albums from Steven Kilbey and Martin Kennedy.  (Parts One and Two are ‘Jupiter 13’ (2021) and ‘The Strange Life of Persephone Nimbus (2022).  It is quite correctly described as, “…a sumptuous and organic sonic landscape.” Kennedy is fabulous at creating total musical immersion. A sonic bath-tub to jump into!

‘My Better Half’ features the vocals of Leona Gray. And throughout, a sense of foreboding and longing: “I lie in the darkness…half-way in an afterlife.”  This ethereal and corporeal umbilical cord takes the listener to the ominous, ‘Ouija Board’, “Try to contact the dead…it was doing in my head.” Then there’s the elegiac ‘Menace in the Past’. It all feels like entering into a separate reality, a personal illusion, yet it also feels strangely familiar. At its considerable best, ‘tis a clever example of musical magical trickery!

Definitely one to check out, if you are looking for a missing chapter of Floyd-scapes. And it is a sonic treat too… Here’s the video for Track 6, ‘That’s Got to Hurt’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZfBoJCCXEQ

David Bowie – BBC Radio theatre June 27 2000

This is a comparatively rare item. I’d been looking forward to hearing it and owning a physical copy for some while. The single CD version contains logos for Virgin, EMI and the BBC, but in fact this copy is probably a pirate (in the small print it says that this compilation is from Risky Folio Inc), but it was definitely created from the wonderfully curated master-tape mixes. It was recorded just two days before David Bowie’s triumphant Glasto appearance in front of a small invited audience – just 250 – many celebrity musos in their own right, from Boy George to Bob Geldorf and Lulu. The band with Bowie are absolutely top-drawer and on absolute top form too: Earl Slick, guitar; Mark Plati, guitar and bass; Gail Ann Dorsey, bass, guitar and vocals; Sterling Campbell on drums; Holly Palmer, percussion and vocals; Emm Gryner, keyboard and vocals and best of all, Mike Garson on piano and keys.

The set-list is to die for, many tracks rarely performed live, including ‘This is not America’, ‘Cracked Actor’, and ‘Wild is the Wind’ which morphs into ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (though not at as high quality as on the CD): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b__ddMepFmY

A seminal gemstone of a live recording. The album was originally released as part of the ‘Brilliant Adventures (1992 – 2001)’ boxset

 

The Church – Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars

This is described as the companion album to ‘The Hypnogogue’ album from last year. The Church were originally formed in Sydney, Australia in 1980. Even then they felt like a throw-back from a previous musical age. This new, elaborately produced album combines chants  such as ‘Amanita’, constructed from many layers upon layers of sound and overlaid vocals. Dense and melodic. It is the sort of album that prog fans are likely to be in thrall to. Jangling pop, visions of musical grandeur. It’s essentially Part 2 of a spectacular, if somewhat over-egged, space pop opera. There are plenty of beatific, sensual, symphonic moments.

‘Song from the Machine’ is tribal, full of catchy fun. ‘The Weather’ is an example of their rockier edge, whilst the ‘Last Melody’ is crammed with phasing, sounding like an aged Wurlitzer. It’s engulfing, a monster-mix of the beguiling glam rock of early-ish Bowie. ‘Manifesto’ proclaims, “This is the World – Material World!” You can easily imagine a stadium of arm-waving, chanting fans loudly singing along. Infectious, if a bit tiring, it feels a bit endless by the conclusion of the final track, ‘Music from the Ghost Hotel’, which offers a musical HAUNTING!

From Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUrf1hoKdi4

Slapp Happy and Henry Cow – Casablanca Moon/Desperate Straights

I often search out missing musical oddities. This one is like a personal domino which I had lost from my time at the University of Kent at the end of the 1960s into the early ‘70s. These bands and their members were not part of the celebrated, much lauded, Canterbury  Scene. But they included musicians who overlapped with the members of Soft Machine and Steve Hillage. In particular, on this CD compilation of two of their albums, the musicians often performed alongside many of creative musos of Canterbury. It’s surreal enough even without the Germanic Cabaret warblings of female singer, Dagmar Krause.

Definitely an acquired taste.  The sort of collaboration that you might expect from Lol Coxhill or Frank Zappa. An ‘out there’ sort of album from the edges of the leftfield artist/music territory.  I cannot better the description for Virgin on the remastered edition in 2006: “Recorded in Faust’s studio in Hamburg, Germany, Casablanca Moon is the 2nd Slapp Happy record. It’s an eccentric yet melodic record with addictive songs… Blegvad, Dagmar Krause and Anthony Moore work in a short song format, and understandably quirky and great things happen. Desperate Straights is something else, the first fusing of Henry Cow and Slapp Happy (who went on to make in Praise of Learning as well.) This is a powerful album, musically sophisticated and quirky as all get-out. Songs like ‘A Worm Is at Work’ or ‘Some Questions about Hats’ have to be heard to be believed.”

I love it!

Bad Alchemy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj8dXL6Xz20

 

 

 

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OTHER PEOPLE ARE REAL

 

{a point made in Atonement

I mistook Ian McEwan, the novelist
For John Williams, the classical guitarist

I thought he was drinking
At a table in The Intrepid Fox
In Soho, when it was neither of them

This would have been when I came
To London without a change of socks
And stole a copy of Fenollosa

The Chinese Written Character
As A Medium For Poetry, edited
After Ernest’s death, by Ezra Pound

Mott the Hoople were playing at Central
And we went to see them. Sneaking in

Me and Billy, Billy Williams

They were shite. It would have been such a simple
Matter to have bought a replacement pair of socks

Why didn’t I?

It’s like asking the Americans
Why they didn’t get out of Vietnam

They were still there when we saw Mott
And I mistook McEwan for the man
Who played the theme from the Deer Hunter

It was the same weekend
Francis Bacon made a pass at me in Frenchies

I remember Dad saying he liked the tune
 
.
 
 
 
Steven Taylor
Picture Francis Bacon
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Amalgam


 
A million mute pieces
waddle on inner circuitry
airing myriad connections:
Of our reciprocity
now on the fritz.
It has me glassy-eyed.
 
Do we wean off? Is disaffectedness
in its purest form possible?
Playing with these thoughts
as a takeaway, I inattentively
order your favorite dish,
relish it without remorse.

 

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Sanjeev Sethi
Picture Rupert Loydell

 

Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. He is published in over thirty-five countries. His poems have found a home in more than 500 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. In July 2024, he was Commended in the A Proper Poetry Pamphlet Competition # 02 by the UK-based Hedgehog Poetry Press.
He lives in Mumbai, India.

X/ Twitter @sanjeevpoems3 || Instagram sanjeevsethipoems

 

 

 

 

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IMMIGRANTS TO LONDON: 1960s. NO IRISH

 

The Swinging Sixties were summers of free love, but not for the Irish lured to the nirvana of London town.

NHS adverts filled newspapers and noticeboards in church halls and post offices all over Ireland. When they got to London, the young immigrants were confused to read: “No Blacks. No Irish. No dogs.” Not just in B&B windows at the seaside on their day trips, but in corner shops in Paddington. This was all before IRA bombing began in England. 

London adults at the start of the 1960s were still the war generation. They had fought, or their close relatives had fought, and defeated the fascists. Homes, schools, places of work and roads had been bombed. The country urgently needed to rebuild the economy to cover the cost of war and deliver the promise of free healthcare for all. Hundreds of thousands of additional workers were required. The NHS and UK manufacturing industry courted the young labour of Ireland and other former colonies. Ireland was a poor economy of only 2.8 million people in 1961, each family raising 4 to 14 children.

Irish girls were leaving school with top marks in all subjects. Their choices of work were a convent or farming. If they were interested in medicine, they could not afford the study. Even to train to be a nurse in Dublin meant paying fees, buying your own uniforms, books and equipment; the waiting list for a course was 8 years long. And where would they sleep? From the late 1950s, Catholic matrons from England did the rounds of the counties of Ireland. They interviewed these girls and offered them immediate places, sometimes with a choice of hospital, training fees and everything paid, with free accommodation in nurses’ quarters. It was a source of pride and relief for Irish parents when their daughters were accepted. The training in England was good – a full medical foundation. But were they safe? The daughters would never tell. The parents would find it hard to believe.

One young girl, just turned 18, made the same journey as tens of thousands of other nurse cadets, on a cattle boat, sitting on her suitcase. It was her first time away from her local town. She was the first-born girl in her family, hard-working, accustomed to helping her parents; she would pave the way for siblings to follow.  The large concrete buildings did not resemble the London of her books, and there was no training in what to do on escalators – sit or stand, or how to tell the direction of the tubes. No cultural introduction to 1960s London or preparation for the prejudice she would face.

The Irish nurses were caring, talkative young women who warmed the bedpans and were gentle with dressings; listened to patients and provided dignity during bed baths. Despite this, some patients objected to being tended by ‘an Irish’. People insulted them openly, said they were ‘unclean’, part of the ‘pikey brigade’, which was not a term the girls knew. They were homesick, conscripted as if in barracks by the Catholic matrons. Off-shift, they might be lonely and wander into town just to be among people, but they were vulnerable outside the watchful eyes of the hospital. Offences against them were not treated seriously. Being Catholic, they were ashamed to speak up and felt guilty for the attention they attracted. As tensions grew in Northern Ireland, so did impunity to target Irish Catholic girls out alone in London. It was easy to spot them – young woman in a nurse’s uniform, especially in the parts of West London where the Irish settled. Sectarian violence was being played out in London while film crews scurried to Belfast and Derry.

Why were the Irish the sole nationality singled out in those notices?

  • Neutrality in the war. Irish soldiers signed up to fight with the UK, US and Canada and those too old to fight worked in UK factories to support the war.
  • Catholics in Northern Ireland staged protests to demand the same housing rights as Protestants. They were civil, not military, but as disquieting as the CND marches in Trafalgar Square.
  • Belief the Irish were illiterate farmers, unskilled in urban interaction.
  • The extent of pain and trauma of soldiers returning from war was not something the UK population was prepared for, the horrific injuries, suffering, TB and infectious diseases. It was the Irish nurses who cared for TB patients, with very little PPE.
  • Young Irish men were spilling out of London pubs on a Friday or Saturday night, their pockets full of English pounds from excavating tunnels and tarring all week. Initially their expenses were low – sharing bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens in boarding houses, and they did not have wives to stay home for, unlike their English counterparts. It was as if they had no care in the world.
  • Unachievable body image and beauty were demanded of men and women equally, on paper and screens. Marilyn was apparently free to be as sexual as a man, yet public trials from Christine Keeler to Margaret Argyle showed a stone age repression of women by men still wielding power.
  • English women were exhausted, terrorised by the blitz and harshness of those long six years. Terrorized also for their sons, fathers, brothers and loved ones overseas. The apparition of fresh-faced young girls in uniform, cracking jokes, singing and dancing at the weekends, holding the hands of their menfolk in hospital beds, did not make London women feel any more attractive.
  • The point of the war was to preserve English traditions, keep the native tongue, defend the borders.
  • Relief with the end of the war was eroded by relentless warnings of a nuclear explosion. Accidental, deliberate, the Cuban Missile Crisis, all reinforced by broadcast images of Gagarin above our heads.
  • The Beatles were loved despite being Irish. JFK was mourned despite being Irish. This much success and glamour was not present in Londoners’ homes.

Could this hostility to immigrants ever happen again?

Only Hounslow as a London Borough voted to Leave. No London constituency returned a Reform MP. Today on the coast, we see large signs in Polish proclaiming ‘Kindness to Poles’ and in Ukrainian, welcoming Ukrainians for jobs and to the churches. Are most of London’s 8.8 million residents today the children or grandchildren of immigrants? I believe so. Surely such prejudice could not happen again. 

The Migration Museum in Lewisham offers the last week of a year’s touring exhibition, Heart of the nation: Migration and the making of the NHS.

It closes on 27 July 2024. Free admission.

https://www.migrationmuseum.org/event/heart-of-the-nation-migration-and-the-making-of-the-nhs-lewisham

 

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 Tracey Chippendale-Gammell

 

Picture: One of 3 NHS adverts inside the back cover of the Irish Nurses’ Magazine, Vol 21 November 1954. © University College Dublin, National University of Ireland, Dublin.

 

 

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SAUSAGE LIFE 302

Bird Guano’s
SAUSAGE LIFE
The column which thinks the murderer was William Rees Mogg, in the Nursery, with the Hobby Horse

MYSELF: Call a doctor! It’s fucking Olympicsbury again! Am I the only person who can’t wait for this overhyped festival of narcissistic bores to perform its ever more tasteless closing ceremony?
READER: Killjoy! You’re just jealous because you get totally out of breath cleaning your teeth. Personally I can’t wait for the magnificent opening ceremony featuring a fly past by The Royal Parachute Regiment Motorcycle Display Team. I hear Taylor Swift will be standing in for our dear late Queen.
MYSELF: Actually I think you’ll find it’s Paris this year.
READER: Paris Hilton?
MYSELF: Paris France.
READER: France? No! Are we back in the EU again?

TRUMP PROMISES TO REPEAL ABOLITION OF SLAVERY
In a statement issued by the Republican Party press office, presidential candidate Donald Trump has declared that “The shameful abolition of slavery act of 1864 has stained the history of our great nation for a tremendously long time. Too long folks. Not tremendous. I, your presidential president-to-be, hereby declare that am going to repeal that unnatural act on day one.” He also announced that he would authorise congress to impose punitive tariffs on the import of Mexican chandeliers, which he claims are  “Symbols of the narco state bourgeoisie.” which should be “shot and hung upside down, preferably outside a gas station”.

IL DOUCHE
As well as being an admirer of Benito Mussolini, Donald Trump is also a huge Italian food fan. He has linguini and pizza flown in daily to his Mar a Lago mansion from Omertà, a little family-run restaurant in Sicily. It is his private secretary’s duty to ensure that the end of his tiny penis is constantly caked with a mixture of black truffle oil and grated Parmesan, which, he says, “drives Italian broads crazy”

CAST NOT A CLOUT
During the Republican Party Convention in Milwaukee, Trump’s first words to visiting ex-PM Liz Truss were; “Great job with Brexit ma’am, great job. Tremendous job. What is Brexit by the way? My friend Nigel says you got your sovereignty back, whatever that is. Tremendous. Our special relationship means that when I win the presidency, those European cheese eating surrender monkeys will never be allowed to straighten out British bananas again. Never again. It’s not gonna happen folks. I heard they tried to make you put cow in your horseradish. Is that true? Cow? The French are overrated. Tremendously overrated”. At this point Ms Truss temporarily removed her tongue from Mr. Trump’s anus, and pointed out that Brexit, even though it means Brexit, is pronounced Breggs-it in English but Pwellygoggy in Welsh.

TRUMP PLEDGES CANINE BAN
The Mexican Hairless. What can I say? Its Mexican and its hairless. No hair. Are you kidding? Get outa here with that! A lot of folks in LA have Mexican Hairless dogs. I pin the blame on cocaine and same sex abortion. I PROMISE that on DAY ONE of my presidentialism, I will sign my dog bill. NO MORE MEXICAN DOGS will be coming into the USA, hairless or otherwise. No more dogs. It’s not gonna happen folks. Not gonna happen. My hot wife Ivana loves dogs, but only with hair. Ivana is very smart by the way. Very smart lady. She is a qualified trombonist and let me tell you, that is a very difficult instrument. Tremendously difficult. Does anyone out there really think Krazy Kamala Harris could learn to master the trombone? Give me a break.

READER’S LETTERBAG
Word-based postal intercourse from the Sausage Life intelligensia

Dear Birdman of Alcatraz,
I recently spent 6 months in a Swedish jail for making a sandwich with two slices of bread. Conditions were harsh, the broadband was very intermittent and there was always a long wait for the sauna. Am I alone in thinking the Swedes are far too sensitive about culinary matters?
Brian Yogamatt,
Uttar Pradesh

Dear Brian,
To be honest, I can’t believe you only got six months. Even after a plea bargain I was sentenced to three years soft labour in the notorious Gördetinteigen penal colony after I was overheard in a restaurant saying I wasn’t keen on Volvos. Thankfully my stay was somewhat alleviated after I became the prison’s Gravadlax king thanks to my contacts in the Norwegian fishing industry and after my release I was able to start a small narcotics business.
PS: If the Sarkerhetspolisen (the Swedish secret service) are still monitoring this column they may apply for your extradition after reading this letter. Should that occur, I recommend you make your way immediately to the Ecuadorian Embassy and ask for asylum. I can tell you that Abba and Gracie Fields are still very big in Ecuador, so take along some CDs. Also they are very fond of untipped cigarettes, Belgian chocolate and hot water bottles. Think of them as gifts, not bribes.

READER: How come I’ve been pushed down to the bottom of the page? I wanted to drone on a bit more about the Olympic Games. Also, where’s all the General Election stuff?

MYSELF: The Olympics and the Labour landslide are old hat now. The BBC Strictly scandal is the only story in town.

READER: Strictly scandal?

MYSELF: You haven’t heard? Read on and weep.

WHORE’S WHIPPED
Lord Medved Oligarki the BBC’s Director General has apologised after Olympian medallist Charlotte DuJardin was axed from the top rated series Strictly come Hoofing after a whistleblower reported inappropriate behaviour with a contestant. The allegations of steamy equestrian S&M sessions involving Ms DuJardin dressed as a character from a Jilly Cooper novel have scandalised viewers of the popular TV show, in which professional experts teach horses the rudiments of the Argentinian Tango. Media restrictions prevent me from revealing the identity of the horse in question, as Nigel’s Boomerang is below the age of consent.

READER: Noooooooo! Not Strictly! Friday nights will never be the same.

MYSELF: Eggs Ackley. It’s like Jimmy and Rolf all over again.   

 

 

Sausage Life!

 

 

ATTENZIONE!
‘Watching Paint Die’ EP by Girl Bites Dog is out now and available wherever you rip off your music.
Made entirely without the assistance of AI, each listen is guaranteed to eliminate hair loss, cure gluten intolerance and stop your cat from pissing in next door’s garden.
Photo credit: Alice’s Dad (circa 2000)




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

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

 

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

CHEMTRAILS ON MY MIND
MORT J SPOONBENDER

On September 11th 1958, José Popacatapetl, a retired tree psychologist who’s father was head gardener for the CIA during the cold war, was hitchiking through the Alberqueque desert when he was picked up by a black sedan driven by J Edgar Hoover’s ex-boyfriend André Pfaff head of FBI underhand operations and extra-terrestrial banking who once worked as a quantum mechanic for the KGB under the direct orders of the zombie reincarnation of Josef Stalin whose mummified corpse was kept in a secret underhand bunker in the basement of the Vatican.

 



SAY GOODBYE TO IRONING MISERY!
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SPONSORED ADVERTISEMENT
“Sometimes you just need a tool that doesn’t do anything”

 

By Colin Gibson

 

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‘ Spain ’75. ( Franco’s Death.)

They are waiting for the old man 
To come down from the ladder 
So the women and children of Guernica 
Can set him adrift in a sea of fists
And when he’s finally silent 
Let Lorca come from his prison 
In the soil 
And pour petrol on his prayers 
While the old sun provides 
The matches…

 

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M Paul 

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Judges

 

We sit as the judges in the shadows,
While sirens rage throughout the city
Bit by bit, find diversion in our nudges
Better close the door, look, then pity 

For I have everything I need, & yet
This magic screen is my cul-de-sac
It holds me in a trance, I can’t forget
Sirens, outside my door? Can I pedal back? 

Did I see this light blazing from my screen?
It does not matter, it’s just my imagination.
I don’t need to care for you; this is a dream
It’s too late to catch the train at the station 

Outside, cool wind & nightfall’s chirping birds
Curtains drawn, hidden from judging words

 

 

 

©Christopher 2024

 

 

 

 

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Marcus Aurelius Roman August

August in Rome
Each piazza is a pizza  –
Oven where bareheaded tourists
Braise their brains to Ragu

Self-reflection is the only shade   –
To pause then rehydrate
Our civic duty

While crossing Popolo
I came upon a novice nun
Her i-phone case of plastic pearl-effect
Accessorised her rosary   –
Does one so close to God
Now entreat her Saviour for a ‘selfie’?

Holy Instagram!   –   and parallel   –
Say your daughter has ‘vocation’
To a secular School of Drama
Be sure they will find fault   –
Not in her performances!
But insist she change her nose and chin
Recommending surgical re-interpretation
And then a dental spa for smile-aesthetics

The standard homogenised beauty
Manufactured on demand
For American Film and T.V.

Theatre once an art
It took a lifetime to learn
Is now a moment’s carousel
Of identical mannequins toned and teased

Even my Stoic non-style is a style   –  
They call it ‘norm-core’ now   –  
Amid such modish madness
Roma burns outside   –
Although she philosophically remains
‘Molto-molto’
Cool within

 

 

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Bernard Saint  
Illustration: Claire Palmer

 

 

 

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Dawn Train黎明的⽕⻋ by Mǎ Yongbo ⻢永波

In the depths of night, the train whistle,
Its origin unknown,
Faint, deep, almost a sigh,
Intermittent, with long pauses
Before a similarly faint response arrives,
Like a lonely watchman flickering his lantern across the valley,
There are no stations or rails nearby,
The stations lie north of Purple Mountain,
And across the vast Xuanwu Lake.
These days, the train sounds are clearer,
They traverse the increasingly sparse plane tree tops,
Trembling like white frost,
The departures and farewells of dawn
Always seem frost-covered,
For instance, at the humble terminal in my hometown,
Shadows are vague on the pitch-black platform,
The tremor from afar travels through the tracks,
The train with its giant eyes wide open, exhales white steam,
Running towards me, comes to a sudden stop,
Back then, I was young, excited by distant places,
The darkness and chill before dawn,
But now, the dawn train
Leaves me hesitant, reluctant to wake up.

 

Translation by Mǎ Yongbo and Helen Pletts 2024
Painting:  Claude Monet

 

黎明的⽕⻋ Dawn Train⻢永波

深夜⾥的⽕⻋汽笛声
不知从什么地⽅传来
隐约,低沉,近乎叹息
断断续续的,隔很久
才会传来同样微弱的呼应
像寂寞的守夜⼈隔着⼭⾕闪⼀闪⻢灯
附近没有⻋站和铁轨
⻋站远在紫⾦⼭的北⾯
⽽且还隔着偌⼤的⽞武湖
这些⽇⼦,⽕⻋声更加清晰了
它们越过⽇渐稀疏的梧桐树顶⽽来
像⽩霜⼀样颤栗着
黎明的出发和别离
也总是蒙着霜的
譬如在家乡的末等⼩站
⿊漆漆的⽉台上⼈影绰约0
远⽅的颤栗从铁轨上传来
⽕⻋⼤睁着巨眼,呼哧着⽩⾊蒸汽
奔跑到⾯前,突然停住
那时我年少,陌⽣的远⽅,兴奋
黎明前的⿊暗和冷
⽽今黎明的⽕⻋
却让我如此犹豫着不愿醒来

 

 

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VIOLA VERSED AND VERSUS

On RED HONEY, the collected stories of Saira Viola (Fahrenheit Press, 2024)

Picture of a City’s a song by the early King Crimson;
And so it is with Red Honey, Saira Viola’s latest sex-strung stalks
Across her new neo-noir in New Yawk, LA, London,
As Barristers and Baristas and a core of coke sniffers,
H hunters, or dealers in dope prowl and walk

The splintering line between dream and desire.
Her Blood honey flows sweetly but still has the bee’s buzz
And wasp sting as her heroines heroin to escape the smeared
Clutches of men (as monkey fizz), fuming, claw at their thongs
To stir wings from lip-glossed angels who rise

From the decadence which defines them. These tall tales
Become bible for a bright but blurred following. Viola’s
Valley of the Dolls has so much more muscle than Meyer.
For him, tits were beacons but women’s bodies here
Become prize, as well as wound, as those wounded walk on

To suck cock, spit and shimmy, from Kat Sloane to Kiki,
These spermed survivors blowback on each bastard
And without kick or rabbi see each eager prick cut (down) to size.
The one page flash The Half Shell of Saturday Night is ur-text
And shows that what Viola writes are paged movies,

Neither story or screenplay, these explosions of self re-inform
Those minds doused and soused by the mediocre most master,
For here this bright mistress, a princess pocket sized can transform
What we expect of from a book. Her stories spume and then spark.
They fizz, fume and crackle, screaming at raised pitch and high dudgeon

For the sky to tear so stars tremble, or for the pavements to shatter
Like biscuit under shit and stillettos, martinis and piss, needles, fries.
If Raymond Chandler was here no doubt he and SV would write
Screenplays as he sat and scribed with Viola to make a ‘Marlowe
And Hutch for charred cities, where dares and dreams go to die.

As this slick volume subsumes what you took (or take) from the morning,
You tune into the language spoken in private code by the night.
Whether its ‘Syd began the day with a bump of coke and a scramble
of kisses between two sequinned strangers’, ‘and listened to the dirty
rhythms of the night’, or ‘a slow slung smile on her heart shaped face’

We’re transported, travelling via boobtube to a place where no pardon
Could ever restore or put right the wrongs endured by passion’s prisoners
In their sentence. And in Viola’s as she cojoins the lost worlds
Of the last five decades and back, while creating a style for the future,
Whether its combining names that glaze Dickens, such as in Seven Red’s

Loveit, Rattlewort, and Pennypick, or Chic Sauvage’s Lullu, ‘a shimmery
baguette of a woman with Rubenesque lips, lustrous movie star hair
that fanned up at the ends like a halo of black daffodills’, here are
Girl groups and girl-grouping that see the feminist flag torn and twirled.
This is one those books that burn the hands that dare hold them.

Honey drips from each sentence and from each page as sweet blood.
Readers should thus vampire. Their satanic majesties kept on rolling,
For in these tales sticky fingers and goats head soup are twin sucked.
These story-shots show a film made of fucking and faith and star fragment.
Lawyers lurch. Slander stains them. Waitresses win. Justice ducks

And the warped and wounded survive, healing themselves
In Hell’s Kitchen. The land of spunk and honey lays open and there
At its border stands Saira Viola , spreading it on toast, offering.
Come every bastard, and bite; come every girl glazed by usage.
Saira’s city-scrapes make Highrises and high risers too. Each word sings.

Red Honey : Saira Viola

 

 
 

David Erdos 16/7/24

 

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The philosophy of anarchism, explained

 

Why it isn’t the same as chaos

When you think of anarchism, what comes to mind?

Maybe you have some vague image of a punk rocker with the Circle-A symbol scratched into her jeans. Or some comic-book supervillain out to destroy the world that spurned him. Those are fun caricatures, but anarchism is actually a rich tradition of thought going back centuries, and it was at the center of utopian leftism until Marxism came along.

Today, though, Marxism and other lefty ideologies don’t have nearly the purchase they once did, and it’s not entirely clear what, if anything, has filled that void. That lack is all the more interesting given our current moment, when so many conventional ways of doing and thinking about politics are being challenged.

So, in that spirit, I invited Sophie Scott-Brown onto The Gray Area to talk about the history of anarchism and its relevance today. She’s a research fellow at the University of St. Andrews and the director of Gresham College in London. She’s also the author of a new book, Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy, which is a fascinating look at the potential of anarchist ideas through the work of the well-known British writer.

 

READ AND LISTEN AT https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area/23997329/anarchism-politics-sophie-scott-brown-the-gray-area

 

 

(From Vox)

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The many worlds of Ursula le Guin

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can pinpoint pretty precisely the moment I fell in love with Ursula Le Guin’s writing.

It was 29 November 1974, between 4.30 – 4.45pm, when the final instalment of her A Wizard of Earthsea aired on Jackanory.*

The book had seized hold of me all week, but the denouement, in which Ged, the wizard of the title, confronts and becomes one with the dark shadow he has unleashed on the world, was totally mesmerising.

I’ve been a fan of Earthsea ever since, and though I was late to the party on her science fiction, I have spent the last few years making up for that.

Le Guin is a writer with a rich imagination and a vivid writing style, creating accessible narratives with complex characters. Whether it is a wizard helping a young woman defeat the dark powers who control her (The Tombs of Atuan), a diplomat trying to make sense of a cold world where nothing is as it seems (The Left Hand of Darkness), or a scientist breaking with his own community in order to share knowledge (The Dispossessed), each story grips, moves and entertains us from start to finish.

Like all good writers, Le Guin’s work focuses on things she cares about – the environment, social justice, pacifism. It is also influenced by her views on Taoism and Buddhism.

Colonialism, oppression, war and politics feature strongly.

The Word for World is Forest deals with an occupied community rebelling against the brutal army, a clear reflection of the Vietnam War.

The Telling, inspired by Mao’s suppression of Taoism in China, gives us a world where the colonised community keep their language alive through secret cultural codes.

The Dispossessed contrasts the anarchist community on the dry and dusty moon Anarres with the capitalist home world Urras, finding weaknesses in both.

Her brilliant short story, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, asks what you would do if you knew your society was built on a horrific injustice, a powerful metaphor for the West’s exploitation of the rest of the world.

Effective world-building is the hardest part of writing fantasy or fiction and it’s something Le Guin excels at, undoubtedly influenced by her father’s career as an anthropologist.

Across her work we see a range of civilisations and communities: a backward island of fishermen and goatherds; a floating community that lives on the sea all year round; a country where the people hide their true intentions in highly stylised language; a world built on slavery, whose moon of male slaves breaks free to create a highly misogynistic society.

Many societies are based on different sexual rules: in one, people change sex during the few days each month when they are sexually active; in another, community property rights are embedded in a four-way marriage; in another, women are sexually and politically dominant and boys are sent away to live with men in castles to perform ritual sword fights and acts of gallantry.

We are often led into these worlds through the eyes of strangers trying to make sense of them. Genly-Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness comes to appreciate and understand Gethen. Dalzul, in ‘Dancing to Gaman’, completely misreads the situation, imagining the people of Gaman consider him a god, when in fact he is a human sacrifice. In the story ‘Solitude’, the narrator grows up and participates in a society that her observer mother totally misunderstands.

It’s a sign of Le Guin’s genius as writer that whether told from the point of view of a native or a visitor, each of these worlds and communities feels totally real and true. As a result, we engage deeply with the challenges her protagonists face and, as with all good fiction, reflect on what it means to be human and alive.

Unusually for an author, Le Guin has the capacity to recognise failings in her earlier work.

In later life, she noted that the groundbreaking gender politics of ‘A Left Hand of Darkness’ would have been improved had she used ‘they’ rather than ‘he’.

She also revised the world of Earthsea in the 1990s to challenge its inherent patriarchy.

It’s this level of honesty that makes her fiction sing, which is why, if you’ve never read her before, you really should. And if you’re already a fan, it’s time to pick her off your bookshelves. You’ll not regret it.

 

.

 

Virginia Moffatt

 

 

(Reproduced from Peace News)

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WHEN I HEARD THE FELON EX-PRESIDENT

After Walt Whitman

When I heard the felon ex-president vomit his sewage of lies,
when I saw that behemoth of untruth golden-calf brazen
before the television cameras,
when I felt the battering ram of that “passionate intensity”
breach the walls of reality,
when I watched that sea lamprey mouth suck
the nation into its vacuum,
and when I watched the sitting President gobsmacked
as though physically struck in the chest,
when I heard his hoarse voice falter before the onslaught
and lose the thread,
and I heard the fear of humiliation well up in his
bedeviling stutter,
and felt the spiritual terror of a Catholic boy 
in the presence of the Antichrist,
how soon I lost heart for the spectacle,
stood up, turned off the TV, and walked out
in the cool June evening where the fireflies
carried lamps of earth for us through the dark.

 

 

.

Thomas R. Smith
Art Luckypeach

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Starting to Unravel

Now more than ever we
must clench our teeth.
Tilda Swinton or Charlotte

Rampling? Everyone has
to be fingerprinted, phot-
graphed & registered,” he

said. Foul play is not suspected
but examining your family tree
may just save your life. Where

is the writing on the wall? Soon
the trains are up & running again.

 

 

.

Steve Spence
Art  Julie Goldsmith

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Surrender in Miller Canyon


 
Sun on the rock face
sailing over pine-oak slopes; Arizona
Madrone in the space between ponds where
Leopard frogs sit half
in water, half
on stone,
 
and higher than the apple trees
the first leaves
shading yellow
into the lazy sky. A lizard holding
on to rock absorbs
 
the warm light of the day. A borderland
mountain stands alone in Mexico
and word has passed
through woodland
that a party has crossed over
and is lost
 
in the land of plenty with no
water. October’s light is dry, the paths
from here to there lead
nowhere and it was
a long way through the night.
This is,
 
on such a fine afternoon with the foliage
shining from within, pumpkins
swelling on the property
and a vista from the high trail
of light without boundaries,
 
a beautiful time to give up, drink down
the moment, tell the children
their parents tried
but America is as thirsty
as it is rich.

 

.
 
David Chorlton

 

 

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Alone in a room

Where can I post
the letters I wrote in the hot
car. Like how brick does
not really have a colour, your eyes
in memory make me confused. I am
sorry I could not articulate
my love for you. I only found it
years later, inside the drawer of a hotel
corridor now I have far shorter hair
and a tobacco tin. Mother, I am so
sorry I could
never come home. The plane heading
for england
ran away to a dark
warehouse. The day is so massive to
me, now. Peter loved a
whore and the whore was
me. Lately, I read Elizabeth Bishop
on the balcony and swat flies off my
skin, coffee stains
sweat on the single bed blinking
inside my blue robe.

 

 

.

Blossom Hibbert
Picture Rupert Loydell

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ART AND THE ABYSS

 

Modern art began in France in the decades following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Its emergence was a symptom of radical changes taking place as European culture. This was a time when Europe engaged with issues arising from the emergence of modern secularism and from new disciplines that emphasized ‘hidden’ impersonal modes of causation – such as unconscious drives and social forces beyond the influence of the individual. Throughout the following period there were disruptions in all forms of representation and expression – in literary syntax, in pictorial form, in musical tonality, in dance, in theatre and in architecture. Many of these artistic innovations were inspired by ideas derived from an occult underground itself linked to a popular literary subculture of fantasy and the fantastic.

In the course of its evolution this revolutionary artistic tendency (the tradition of the avant-garde), which began with the Naturalists and the Impressionists and culminated in the aesthetic nihilism of Dada, adopted a bewildering diversity – it generated apparently contradictory theories and dogmas, styles and anti-styles. However, beneath this surface diversity lay one single, unifying factor – the source of all modernist iconoclasm, outrage and provocation: the recognition of the existence of unconscious mental processes. All of the avant-garde movements and breakaway groups were essentially anti-rational and anti-academic. All of them – from Impressionism and Decadence to Symbolism and Expressionism – stemmed from a dawning concern with the irrational and the psychic, with the inner landscape and the inner complexities of modern existence. This is usually the case even if, as in the cases of the Naturalists and the Impressionists the artworks themselves showed a preoccupation with the veridical representation of external realities.

Following a general evaporation of traditional religious observance, the gradual discovery of the existence of the unconscious mind encouraged poets, artists and philosophers to confront a domain of human experience previously the reserve of the priesthood; a world of organic irrationalism, myth and the supernatural. This world provided a unique source of vitality but it also meant that artists found themselves in strange company, occupying as they did an axial position in relation to similar or parallel developments in other spheres. Nationalism, anarchism, fascism, occultism, orientalism and reactionary neo-traditionalism were all contemporary, intertwined phenomena crowding to fill a void of alienation created by the advancement of science, industrialization, increased urbanization and new methods of textual criticism that cast doubt on the traditional reading and validity of sacred books.

In official circles in the French Third Republic the traumas of both the 1789 Revolution and the Franco Prussian War stimulated the implementation of a programmatic, scientific ‘Modernization’ policy. A strong, secular republic was seen as a perquisite for rebuilding a unified society, a society capable of competing with the continuing external threat from Germany and meeting the challenges of the modern world. One sign of this new policy was the foundation of the journal L’Annee Sociologique (1896) edited by sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim developed his ideas of collective representation, ‘social structuring’ and ‘structural determinism’ (Thompson) in order to analyze the multi-layered complexities of modern (and pre-modern) societies and to provide a complete scientific explanation of all religious phenomena.

Durkhiem was opposed to both traditionalist conservative moral philosophy and the Utilitarian individualism of much contemporary political economics and social theory. In many European countries a continuing cultural struggle or Kulturkampf (to use a term from Germany where a Catholic activist attempted to assassinate Bismarck in 1874) characterized the later part of the nineteenth century. The rise of labour movements, the fight for women’s suffrage, the development of the sciences and the prevalence of anti-clerical policies (especially with regard to education and civil marriage) caused upheaval and conflict in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. These were all countries at the forefront of radical, secessionist, anti-academic, modernist movements across all the arts, developing alongside official modernization policies. However, official intervention in the cultural sphere was primarily designed to promote nationalism as a secular religion, encouraging loyalty to the state, which meant that the alternative cultural paradigm of the artistic radicals was usually in conflict with both secular and religious authorities.

In this historical setting the rhetoric and mechanisms of ‘art’ were used to grapple with psycho-spiritual and existential problems which in previous epochs, or different societies, would have been the specialty of the tribal soul-doctor or shaman. So, during that era known as the fin-de-siecle, artists (often labeled maudits, pariahs and obscurantists) found themselves acting as shock-troops in a struggle to confront the alienation and nihilism of modern secular society. In the course of that struggle they redefined the role of artistic creativity in magical terms. They laid the foundations of the ‘modern’ sensibility and were the first to explore a world of relativism and indeterminacy – the world objectified in occult doctrine as The Abyss, the experience of which is called The Dark Night of the Soul – or rather The Dark Night of the Unconscious – or even, The Dark Night of Chaos.

The proliferation of occult organizations and theories at the social margins of the fin-de-siecle era co-existed and intermingled with the various strands of modernism, in poetry and in painting. Like all cultural processes the conjunction was not unprecedented. The artists and occultists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the figures who laid the foundations for contemporary developments but they themselves were building upon the earlier work of others. The usage of ‘occult’ factors in artistic activities can be traced back to the early Romantics: figures such as Novalis, Arnim and E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany, Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey in England and Edgar Allan Poe in America. Among the French Romantics should be mentioned Balzac, Nerval, Esquiros and Nodier. But the most important of all was Baudelaire whose poetic works such as Les Fleurs du Mal were the first examples of truly ‘modern’ writing. It was Baudelaire’s followers – Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Mallarme, Huysmans, Laforgue, Jarry and Artaud who established and pursued the artistic tendency known as ‘The Experience of Limits’ tradition, who made the most significant contribution to modernist-magical poetic writing and exploration.

.

 

 

AC Evans

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Forever Young

 

what happened in nineteen sixty two?
the first Beatles LP came out
Marilyn Monroe died
Nelson Mandela was arrested
and sent to Robben Island
The Cuba Missile Crisis
brought the world
to the nuclear brink
Fidel Castro was Satan incarnate
Bob Dylan’s first LP was released

I knew about this
I’d seen its sleeve in a record shop
a friend had a copy
I’d never heard it
but somehow I knew
a couple of Dylan’s  songs

one about Woody Guthrie
 my grandma died

so did our family dog
both events made me sad

my friend Sam and I
had been to school together
we and thousands of others
went on The Aldermaston March
which led I think to
The Glastonbury Festival
the slogan de nos jours was
Ban the Bomb
the Labour Party  remains
in favour of nuclear weapons

the only time I’ve heard
Bob Dylan in the flesh
was in a club in a pub
The Pindar of Wakefield
near St Pancras Station
it was in nineteen sixty two
who or what was
The Pindar of Wakefield
I didn’t know
but I knew about Bob Dylan

he was a surprise performer
when I went was there that night
so I heard him sing and play
the club was run by Ewan McColl
and the American Peggy Seeger
she introduced him graciously:
he was wearing
the corduroy cap
and the faux suede jacket
he wears on his LP sleeve

the place was crowded
with people who seemed
all older than me
when I think back about it
I fancy Dylan Seeger and me
are the only ones
who were there that night
and are still alive
Dylan was great by the way
he captured us all

 

.

Jeff Cloves

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