The Bigger The Bully Pulpit

The smaller the mind of the man
(it usually is a man, even when the man
fronts a faceless corporation) that occupies it,
The sooner his empire require more subservience
from the poorer - mineral rich countries - of the world
to pretend to support it whilst they hide what they think
behind circular repeats of hollow sounding 'diplomacy'..... 

'Broken English' - Marianne Faithful - A Film Review

 Marianne Faithful died in late January 2025. That winter was one too many for her frailty to survive. In an age of artists stretching their cretivity well into the years past their peak with the help of younger sympathetic musicians, she was seemingly still active until the notice of her death made the music press, long adapted to an active cotery of senior citizens taking aim at infinity with their latest offering, announced her death and the media poured out their usual mixd bag of tributes.

So with the announcement of this film, fourteen moths after her death, and in a year in which the biggest news about her was the sale of the contents of the flats she had lived lived in, in tasteful oppulence. The disbursal of her personal effects underlined the finality of her life. 

The film starts with a framing device that becomes the Plan B for the way to explain Marainne Faithful's life when she was too ill to be explain it herself. She died aged 78 but was still volluable in her opinion of what could be seen as 'a troubled life' at the age 75. When some of this was evidently filmed. When she is interviewed she speaks very clearly and without any self pitly about a past the given her daliances with recreational drugs, The Rolling Stones, The Daily Express, and poor mental health she could be excused for doing.

The framing device is the called 'The Ministry Of Not Forgetting' and with the performance of Tilda Swinton, the ministry was true to it's word. It does not let the viewer forget. Nor does it fully help the viewer remember. Particularly with the films of her career, from 'Girl on a Motorcycle' from 1968 through to 'Irina Palm' (2007), a film I have seen and can thoroughly reccomend. But here the ministry had neither the rights, nor the screen time for sharing with us the details of her filmography in any enough depth. Though the footage of Marianne measuring up for her costume and moving about on set as Marie Annetionette in 2006 was welcome. Theatre is an even more ephemeral thing to catch on fim, so her live theatre experiences were recalled with a few photographs, not even a full list of the stage productions she was in.

But the first point to remember is the myth that Andrew Loog Oldham created, not knowing who Marriane Faithful was or what her parents had done to prepare her for a creative life life as an adult. She grew up in an arts laboratory where writing acting and all aspects of the stageing of plays were open to her. For Oldham to meet her at a party and cast her as a teenage version of The Singing Nun... Well, the less said about how Oldham's delusions were built on Faithful's formal and informal education that he did not know before meeting her, the better. Her connecting with The Rolling Stones was inevitable after a start like that. I liked how Faithful was dismissive abouth the broadsheet notoriety that came to her when the paper, The Daily Express, was on the table with the masthead visible to the camera and she was only slightly rude when disimissing what the The Daily Express wrote as completely fabricatred. The chapter in her life that came after that, between Brian Jones, Jagger and Richards, and Anita Pallenberrg was well beyond what The Daily Express could have printed. That Faithful wrote and recorded 'Sister Morphine' as a way of establishing a more adult set of song writing boundaries, when Decca stopped the song being released because it was un-ladylike, and Jagger took the credit for the song and got it recorded for the first post-Decca album the The Rolling Stones released, by which time Faithful had been commited to an Australian mental hospital whilst the Rolling Stones were on tour there.... I forget now Faithful's actual comments about that era of her life. A lot of that era was relayed in collage form, reduced to a series of photographs and newspaper headlines.

Her story picks up proper with the 1978 video for 'The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan' where how well The Rolling Stones were doing was the casual comparison that was made. Here the male viewer [at least this gay male viewer] readjusts to the presentation quirks of that era. The era of women's beauty seeming to be forced and yet how what women wanted to present themselves as. The relative crudity of the analogue filming as compared with modern high definition digital added to how forced the images seemed to be. But from here on, Marriane Faithful was back, and back on her own terms assisted by the advent of the DIY ethic of punk. The album 'Broken English' gave the public the adult Faithful fifteen years after 'As Tears Go By' had given the public the teenage Marriane Faithful who had to be more grown up on the entertainment industry she was part of than she could admit she was, and stuggled whilst showing she was a skilled stage actress. Faithful spoke about the double meaning of the album title where at one level language was what was broken, and she, as an English woman was recovering from being broken, including alcohol and substance misuse which had added a depth to her voice. One point I have not mentioned so far is the brightness of her smile when she is on camera, the way her presence as a live human being pulls the cinema goer in to focus on her. 

From here on is where the vewer sees less of Maranne on screen and more footage of her is pulled in to tell her story, including a brief section of film of women of the 2020s discussing the battles that Faithful fought for womankind from the 1980s onward, as if the complexity of what opposed her career path coupled with he fragile physical health made it too exhausting for her to be her own witness, therefore better for other to relay the changes. The Ministry Of Not Forgetting staged various interventions with footage of meetings with former life partners and musical collaborators. The saddest intervention was of the footage and photographs of her later era colaborator Hal Wilner (1956 - 2020) the clue to the cause of his death being the year in which he died, of complications from Covid. Just as Marriane Faithful herself could have died but after a period where it was touch and go, she survived. 

The loss of such a close friend whilst recovering was a double blow to her will to continue as a recording and performing artist. But cameos from songwriters Jarvis Cocker, Ed Harcourt and the team of Warren Ellis, violin, and Nick Cave, piano. The more the Ministry Of Not Forgetting intervenes the theatrical a device it became where it did not take much guesswork to say to myself that Faithful was too ill to be made up for the screen for the next close up of her smiling, the performance of her songs by younger female artists was delightful and absorbing and I was happy with them whilst wishing that Faithful herself had been fit enough to be filmed singing the songs, live. I half expected Faithful to do what writer Edna O'brien did in the documentary on her life, 'Blue Road', filmed when she was 94, where mid interview the author have a medical emergency on screeen where the film sequence ended with O'brien taken away from the interview, set up in her library, by anbulance men and stretcher bearers. But no, that was not to be. The hour and forty mins or so had gone by so fast and had skimmed over so much in such an immersive way that viewers could see that well, they could not get away from the ending, which had to had to put Marrane Faithful central to the film.

Whilst it was clear her health was fading. Then as the last few minutes of the film approached there was the footage in the studio of her rasping voice, clearly Covid ravaged but unmistakeably hers, singing the song 'Misunderstanding' from her 2021 album 'Negative Capability' empthetically accompanied by Warren Ellis and Nick Cave. The lyric of the song being a plea for empathy. Cue the credits, and time enough to dry our eyes without feeling in any way emotionally manipulated.

This was life. Empathy is what extends a life, makes accounting for itt possible, and makes how the life was lived more widely appreciated. 

Ninety Years Ago

The cry went up 'guns before butter',
aimed at a people who had ben persuaded
they they were at peace with their neigbours,
until the Commander of the Air Force told them
'Guns will make us powerful, butter will only make us fat'.
Before supporing the conditions for local civil wars,
and following them six six years of world war,
that it took the determination, of all the Allied Forces
fighting together to end, through to outright defeat.

The world took decades to recover from that war,
and even longer to learn to listen about who suffered most.

Cut to the present day and the world's richest country,
once the supporter of advanced peace time medical science
has withdrawn from the poorest countries across the world
the life giving medical science the poor could not afford
but had been given, whilst such support is being withdrawn
from even the has now withdrawn for its own the poor at home.

And even now the USA has plans for a military budget
that dwarfs all previous plans for the military industrial complex,
expanding the military budget to, wait for it....... $1,500,000,000,000.
More than the military budgets of next ten richest countries in the world, combined. 

Find Your Flag - Find Your Community - Then Wait For It To Find You

This flag is the flag for people who see themselves as demi-sexual, which is to say that they see themselves as sexual beings, unlike people who see themselves as asexual, and who cannot find any sexual resonance towards others from within themselves when the occasion demands it, not that they are as ill at ease with themselves as transexuals have been, historically. Transexuals feel that being of a different gender, or having the body of a different gender to the one they were born with would be much more comfortable for them. Nor are demi-sexuals bi-sexual, a people for whom sex presents itself as a different set of dilemas, choices and commitments, including which gender they find attractive and why, ala Harry Styles.

When I was growing up sex and sexuality, as described by sexual preferance were as coarsely misrepresented as humanly possible. Within the lumpen poretariat educatrion on offer to me as a child sex was measured out as being asexual-all children were expected to be asexual enough to need no instruction. Only within marraige should anyone have sex therefore if you were not maried you were asexual. Crudely put, the point of sex was to create children whilst ignoring the economic and social implications of bringing children into the world. Implications that had to be ignored included how the family was the economic responcibility of the male breadwinner. The rearing of the children was based around the material provided by the male head of household provided, as organised by the subordinate wife. And if there was a life outside of marriage for an adult then it was seen as irresponcible and dishonest to itself unless it could be annexed by a family to extend family values. Any such life had to be secretive. The churches helped by limiting the duties of church commitment for many to hatches, infant baptism, matches, marriage, and despatches, the funeral service at the end of a life. 

Such a treadmill style treadbare view of spirituality, and materiality was not much of a guide to how to live a life. Much less was it a guide to how through the mutiality of family and marriage mental health was meant to be preserved. Mental ill health was seen as a curse where the person who suffered it was meant to blame themselves for their lack of understanding of how to fit in with the family, to find their individual well being.

The less said about the misuse of alcohol by married men the better. Beyond that it was endemic, seen as virtuous and the hidden cause of a lot of misanthropy and dishonesty. I was not looking when things slowly changed. When different, more precise, mental health labels were created and accepted, and broke down into 'diversity' the many component parts of what mental was about. I ws not watching as slowly the new labels allowed for difference to became the norm that bred mutuality and respect. In those times there was still only two terms that it took courage to claim a life outside of family. One was 'being gay', the  other was more clinical 'homosexiuality'. Families preferred to ignore behaviour and evidence of both, where it was evident. Like mental health problems families masked and bury the such things to hide the sense of the family member showing evidence of being cursed.

Nowadays it seems there are over twenty flags for different sexualities, and twenty different possible communities identities, assuming that the people of each flag fits can find each other. The earliest flag designs originating from the 1970s and San Franciso mayor Harvey Milk. I am not surveyor of pride marches across the world, so I don't know where I would see all, or any, of these different flags. What I do know is that well away from the brutal binaries of the world I gre up in, where might was rife and ignorance was too common to be worth measuring the speculative discernment thar seems to come with demi-sexuality, where I look for a measurable bond with a person before imagining anything nearer agreeable sexual activity seems about right to me. But looking for a bond, some agreed emotion, with another before thinking further makes me want to be sure of the capability for forming a bond, from within myself, first. 

In a world dizzy with the possibilities of diversiy I need, we all need, to be calm and still, for us to be able to find the same with each other.   

 

For A Life Beyond Borders

And on the day of the year that celebrates international Roma day I present the Roma flag, created in 1933 and first adopted as standard on the 8th of April 1971, at the first World Romani Congress, Here the blue represents the heavens the green represents the earth and the 16 pointed chakra refers the thistory and connectedness of the Roma traddditions as represented in their language and culture.The Roma were a nation without a government that started a millenia before the birth of Jesus who have wethered every form of organised nation state and government with all their attendant cruelties and misrespect for entities not like themselves.

The Roma have a spoken lanaguage but do not have any standard written language, though attempts were made in the 1990s to create such a script. For being such an oral culture, their culture has to be both liminal and sgtrong to endure, and has to accept being outside every written culture there has ever been, though what written there has been has been happy to borrow from Latin and Cyrillic languages.

With an estimated ten to twelve million Roma in Europe and a further estimated three million disbursed further, where they are less likely to be countable by census they remain a vibrant and struggling minority often known for their vibrant contribution to world music than for anything less transient. 

 

The Scent Of Regret

As first blended to perfection by Soren Kieragaard

                                  in 1843, and lived, and read, around the world ever since.

   Sample: 'What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.'.               

 

Picture Of The Day - Two Great Blue Herons

A Great Blue Heron offers stick to his lady for the nest.

Photogaphy:Jocelyn Anderson.