When Will I Hear 'Nation Speaking Peace Unto Nation' Once Again*?

I was working class when I first heard
the BBC, when I first sought something
to aspire to. I grew up admiring the BBC,
for the clear diction of their presenters
and how they gave each cues to speak,
as if giving each other space was normal.  

It was natural when I was working class to defer
to what seemed 'better', if I had worn a cloth cap
I would have doffed it when the radio was on.

I was in awe of how it was scripted and presenters
and guests did not talk over each other. The BBC
carried it's reputation as the first modern media
as a marker of it's pride in how it promoted itself.

But for being the first in so many fields of expertise
it was also the first to make many mistakes, and the last
to admit how many treasured recordings of the programmes
it has made were prematurely discarded, their value unrecognised.

The difference started there - the BBC was founded twenty years
before Ampex audio tape and recording machines became standard
for American radio broadcasters to record broadcasts on first,
as if they sensed the commercial interest
in preserving programmes, to sell them on to the future.

And Ampex invented video tape for video recorders in 1956,
whilst the BBC filmed public events that it knew were important,
like coronations, but in black and white because the management
thought history should be in black and white, like the print media
who came before it, who breathed jealously down the BBC's neck.

Nowadays I get my daily dose of world news,
comment and entertainment from Youtube videos,
as once I might have got from the BBC World Service,
with no thought before here of Youtube's business model.

They are happy to carry material their users pirate
from other broadcasters, copyright allowing, 
whilst Youtube have a three strike policy
over people who upload video material it owns.

America is a place where justice is bought via lawyers.

Youtube's policy comes down to which broadcaster
has the most expensive lawyers, when few uploaders
or corporations has pockets deeper than Youtube has.   

Over a century on from it's founding,
and unknown numbers of programmes lost,
with the means to make programmes now universal,
the BBC voice remains a distinctive around the world.

But it is a voice that seems to be half drowned out,
amid an ever widening welter of broadcasters,
podcasters, performers and composers - all fighting
for a share of the world population's ears and eyes.

No longer do the airwaves ring with the clarity
of the once proud BBC mission statement,
coined in the days of the British Empire, 
'Nation shall speak peace unto nation*',
but with many other declarations instead.

*an adaption of a phrase from The Old Testament, Mikah Ch 4 V 3.

Marxism Today

I am a great admire of the humour of Margaret Dumont
 and Groucho Marx. Even though Groucho was playing
the role of a would-be omniscient wit had limited
application in real life. Margaret Dumont had the grace
  to be a powerful foil to Groucho's 'childish' insults
    and sophistry. I wonder what the tariffs are
in Freedonia at present? Not as enduring
      as the tunes and the dance routines are.      

 

Mind The Narrowing Of The Gap

In this new age where world leaders
define their authority by how they distance
themselves, using media by which to rule
by decree, and an armed police state, I notice
that worldwide government that once rested 
on ceremonial roles are finding such ceremonies
reduced, as 'strongmen' take all the roles they can
to use as mouthpieces to project their power with.

Processes that once seemed liberal, inclusive
where checks and balances led to accountability 
becomes bully pulpits for men who lack self control
to freely exercise their lack of self control with.       

War By Other Means

always starts with propaganda by other means,
as Edward Bernays knew, from the start of his hype
of  American consumerism and then the stock markets
to ever bigger booms, which were then followed
by the biggest worldwide crash on October 29th 1929.
This bust only lifted, and became a boom in the USA
when the world went Boom!! with World War II,
in September 1939, which America joined, two years later. 

But long before WW II, on the 17th of June 1930,
Republican president Herbert Hoover signed into U.S. law
the Smoot - Hawley Tariff Act which protected  America
from trade that America did not want, from all across the world,
whilst supressing trade between countries for years to come.

Fast forward to 2025 and Donald Trump wants to use tariffs
to reassert a new 'America first' policy, to 'reclaim from abroad'
jobs that Trump claims 'Should be American jobs',
as if American money should command greater patriotism 
towards it than other countries currencies should do for them,
when with the world being 'a market place' all currencies are the same,
dependent for reputation on the policies of the government behind them.

At least in America's wars start by means other than arms, unlike Putin's Russia. 

There wars start with over-egged readings of history, and the need
to hide from the population how much money only works for the ultra wealthy.  

Hurrah For Ronin The Rat

The hero of the day for detecting the maximum
number of mines in one day in the much mined
country of Cambodia for sniffing out over 100 mines
and bits of unexploded ordinances, combined in one day.

Of course, how much this record was contributed 
to by the parties that laid the ordinances
so prolifically originally, and made the land
unusable and have given the APOPO centre
so much work to do, is the debate we all have to get past.   

 

'Ernest Cole: Lost And Found' A Short Review

I had never heard of the photographer, Ernest Cole (1940 - 1990) before a rave review for this new documentary film appeared on my radio, which I admit I was not that attentive of, since I was eating my evening meal at the time. 

Then I saw a listing for the film at my local art house cinema. Again, whilst I knew nothing about Cole, I knew about the subject of the director's previous documentary, 'I Am Not Your Negro', polemical writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924 - 1987). I had in recent years appreciated how James Baldwin had a righteous anger, where because of his views on division by race he put a commitment into modern homosexuality, another part of his life, that the white English middle class homosexuality I had encountered simply did not have. I have for years liked the figures who get marginalised for the art they make and what they had to say, who drew a commitment to social change from their marginality, but had to wait for their recognition. Ernest Cole is one such figure. 

The film is a crisp 106 minutes long, and not a minute of it is wasted. I don't know, or remember, many critics who write about what I recognise when it is present in a film, editing. If the image and sound that is melifluous and smooth to the point where the message of the script is delivered that well the listener has to take stock after to realise what message was/is then that editor is somebody who should be praised and thanked in my view. 

This film is the story of a photographic book, the story of a photographer and the story of a man who was broken by his own message. To start at the beginning, the laws that created Apartheid in South Africa after WW2 were complex, overlapping, and allowed no escape for those who were confined from public expression by them. As Ernest Cole grew up so these laws developed, and were expanded. These laws included laws on censorship which both prohibited black people from taking photographs and prohibited the publication of photos that did not explicitly flatter the white hierarchy in the country, amongst many other overlapping prohibitions. By some fluke Ernest Cole started work in a magazine as one of the dark room staff. He got a camera and illegally started taking pictures of Apartheid as it was publicly expressed, on the streets and where the seats and fountains with 'whites only' written on them were. The way that men and women dressed, according to the richness of their culture more than their material wealth, he found particularly photogenic in black and white. Life in the city streets must have excited him a lot. Inspired by Henri Cartier Bresson he photographed anything and everything, and he had that 'eye' for a picture where the construction of the image spoke of so much more than itself.

For most of a decade his negatives were his diary and his diary was full of the misery of Apartheid, whilst attempting to be joyful about life. We all know the phrase 'I can't breathe' as used to describe the effects of American racism on black people who feel discriminated against, economically and more directly by the police. Eventually Ernest Cole had to leave South Africa to relearn how to breathe. He felt he was choking on his own talent, his gift of expression. He escaped South Africa with his negatives, which the censors and the authorities knew nothing about, hidden away. He got to New York by boat and contacted a photographic agency to try to get his negatives printed in a book about South Africa. Initially no publisher was interested.

He had a stroke of luck as regards getting his work published, but not as regards his life. The Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, was stabbed to death in September the 6th 1966 as he entered a place he felt secure, The House of Assembly in the South African state legislature. Meanwhile Ernest Cole was in New York as a temporary illegal exile, illegal less because of how America viewed his status, and more because of how he had escaped South Africa gave him no means of re-entering the country, and his family were still there. This was a stressful enough status to have to manage daily in itself. Cole's illegally taken pictures depicting a South Africa that went back longer than Verwoerd had been in power found their value in New York, and were published in a book as a witness to a world that South Africa denied existed. With the book 'House of Bondage' it seemed like his life's work this far had found it's place in the world. But he was doubly grieved that the photographic book was banned in South Africa. The suffering he had photographed and the life of exile that caused him such grief had gone far deeper into him than anyone wanted to know. Only fellow exiles from South Africa who were part of an underground New York jazz scene who were similarly scratching a life out from the margins of American society could touch where he felt most grieved.

Before he was thirty he had made the impact on the world he had wanted to have from his first days in the darkroom aged fourteen, but he had no impact on his homeland and was exiled from his family. He remained estranged from his family, criminalised by the South African government and utterly lost living in America. He lived another twenty years on the margins of New York life, and for a period he lived in on the social margins in Sweden, a place where his photographic eye found nothing it could focus on. But he found fellowship with other photographers there. Somehow-nobody alive presently knows how-his negatives and notes about his photographs were kept together and intact but he got separated from them. One of his Swedish photographer friends kept them and they ended up in a bank vault with no records of the deposit in 2016, long after he had died in a New York hospital in 1990, where his mother was the last person to see him alive.

To say 'this film is impactful' is to utterly underplay this documentary feature. If it, and the images in it, do anything to highlight present day racial inequality in a way that remedies and reduces it I will be glad. Ernest Cole engaged in art for life's sake, rathe than art for art's sake. The present day people who cannot breathe are not holding their breath waiting for their release from injustice, they were having the breath knocked out of them by the ongoing renewal of racism via apartheid.

P.s. for a review of the documentary film I saw in February 'Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story' please left click here.         

A Most Earnest President?

To paraphrase one of the more famous aphorisms
coined by Oscar Wilde, to address the pressing issue
that the 'free' world is presently facing....

'To elect Donald Trump once
may be regarded as misfortune,
to elect him twice looks like carelessness',

And however much we try to care,
none of us knows what carelessness
that is yet to come, which will outlive us....