Selling Sound Through Colour

When I first listened to music
it was always from recordings.
Nobody ever sang live
for an attentive audience.

I heard what was played
on simple technology-
the radio or the record player,
within the limits of my attention span.

The images the music left me with
were not like films that ran in my head,
At the most there were cliched stills of the stars,
supplied by a red top press more interested in themselves
than what they reported on.

Any images I had were purely from the audio
What I 'saw' came from what I heard and nowhere else,
particularly with songs played and replayed in private.

Now no musician writes so much as a note,
much less records it, and writes a song to fit around it,
without first fixing in their head the video image
that is going to sell the sound  to as many as it will reach
around the world via television and cinema.

It is as if they enjoyed creating mass artificial synesthesia.

Unsticky Bonds

Introverts are said to 'have difficulty'
meeting new people, but that is not how it is.

They will try, and often appear to be successful
-the difficulty comes in maintaining the continuity.

Meetings by chance often works quite easily.
But keeping in touch means working out how they connect,
and being happy in 'reading' other people well.

Put simply, introverts do not easily form firm bonds,
though which to feel secure in their grasp of other people.

Instead they rely on others holding on to them.

Making Amerika Grate (Again....)

This is a letter dictated by The president of The United States of America
 to one of his staff and sent one of the citizens of that esteemed country,
thus proving that literacy is no bar to wealth or power. So everyone
can be as illiterate as they want to be in the pursuit of happiness.  

Entropy

Whatever the sale,
the technique employed that makes
the goods seem appealing
is bound to be more consistent
than the good that are being sold.... 

Whatever Sweetens Us Also Corrupts Us

Sugar manufacturers are like democracies;
both expand human diversity and language.

In democracies the diversity of expression
and life are both manufactured and seen to be good,
particularly when they become overwhelming.

As manufacturers have expanded the numbers
of synthetic sugars so their sources and names
have expanded as well. Which in turn expands
the choice of dysfunctional behaviour
and the vast quantities of illnesses
that human being create in themselves .

The 56 names for sugar....

1-sugar/fructose
2-high fructose corn syrup
3-agave syrup
4-beet sugar
5-blackstrap molasses
6-brown sugar
7-buttered syrup
8-cane juice crystals
9-cane sugar
10-caramel
11-carob syrup
12-castor sugar
13-coconut sugar
14-date sugar
15-demerara sugar
16-evaporated cane juice
17-Florida crystals
18-fruit juice
19-fruit juice concentrate
20-golden sugar
21-golden syrup
22-grape sugar
23-honey
24-icing sugar
25-invert sugar
26-maple syrup
27-molasses
28-Muscovado sugar
29-Panela sugar
30-raw sugar
31-refiners syrup
32-sorghum syrup
33-Sucanat
34-Treacle sugar
35-Turbinado sugar
36-Yellow sugar

These sugars all contain varying amounts of both glucose and fructose.

38-52 is the list of sweeteners which contain glucose, either pure
or combined with sugars other than fructose, e.g. galactose.

38-Barley Malt
39-Brown Rice Syrup
40-Corn Syrup
41-Corn Syrup Solids
42-Dextrin
43-Dextrose
44-Diastatic Malt
45-Ethyl Maltol
46-Glucose
47-Glucose Solids
48-Lactose
49-Malt Syrup
50-Maltodrexin
51-Maltose
52-Rice Syrup

Sugars With Fructose Only

53-Crystaline Fructose
54-Fructose

Other Sugars

55-D Ribose
56-Galactose

The last two are less sweet but sometimes used as sweeteners.

  

Spring Is The Time For Art

'Dark Woods'-Hildegard de Haas (1949) 

Did He Leave His Desk, And Life, Tidy?

Philip Roth famously said 'The road to hell is paved with works in progress'
for how difficult drafts of his work could prove to finish, whilst incomplete.

I hope he left behind no work-in-progress, in his life or in his writing.   

The Long March from Open Markets To Closed Captial

The Dogs Have 'Gone To The Dogs'

Life is much worse than I realized;
even my pessimism has declined in quality,
I no longer find in it the clear sense
of depreciation in all everything around me
that it used to meet my needs so well.

The Perils Of Philosophy

Now this is a helpline I really would volunteer to man....

Tokens Of Tolerance

When it happened, my 'coming out' to the straight folk
in my shared house was easier for them than it was for me.

They could rest from my struggle to find my new self
in ways that I could not, but I liked their acceptance.

Their apparent ease was a tonic when I needed one.
My struggle was partly about how unprepared I was
to join the minority 'community' of my choice.

When my struggle seemed past it's worst
it was clear that what I had become a token
-of liberal tolerance. Any human token
would have done for the majority straight folk.

The further I got into being 'out' the more I found
that real diversity lay in freedom from being judged;
real life was as far from the tokenism of tolerance
as the aspiring community of my new identity.

Ultimately I had only myself to trust.

The Sea Of Failure

The rails of the bridge
 fused to my hands, as they froze
and I was looking down on the river.

Time, tide and grit
-all had failed to form the pearl
of the will to live
and find comfort in shelter.

There was nothing left to reflect on.

My emptiest self woke up,
the emptiest 'me'; who I was
before family thought me into being.

I would soon be gone but no loss,
like the many millions before me.

What To Ask Cold Callers

when they ring us up to selling us something
they think we should want without knowing us;

'Did you ever play ring the bell and run away
with other children when you were a child? You did?

Well you play it again, right now by closing this call
before I put the phone down on it's cradle. I don't like being rude...  .' 

The Undertow Of Credulity

The internet is an each way bet
on the power of disinformation.

Information now comes from so many places
and is so dissected and over-processed
that separating what was once real and true
from what was always fake is impossible.

Both hide from each other
in the undertow of  mass credulity. 

Great Marketing Failures Of Our Time (2)

happened when a major publisher
tried to get written and released
a new version of  'Mein Kampf'
by Adolf Hitler', as a graphic novel.

Quite apart from how the ideas
about divisions between the races
had already been elequently expressed
-albeit from the opposite point of view,
it proved as impossible to get the pictures
to match Hitlers tortured sentence structure
and syntax, which ruined his joke telling skills.

They also had to abandon efforts to visualise
his incohate and incoherent economic policy
which was the daddy of all modern kleptocracies
and had proved to be unworkable, long term. 

Here Is The News

In shock new moves kitsch and pietism
have come to the defence of cliche
to make sure cliche is not recognised
for being a reduced repeat
whilst it impersonates a past
that nobody remembers.

Love Divides

people into different categories,
friends, neighbours, and enemies
among many others, all of whom
are defined by the state of grace
of the humans, and how friendly
the spaces between them are.

We all live between grace and disgrace.

The toughest love comes to us and from us
when we allow each other a liberty of thought
where we don't want to know in much detail
what others might think-as long as they express it well
and they have a sense of restraint before acting on it.

Three Degrees Of Seperation

As I try to be my self I am now at ease
with the idea of neighbours and friends
being familiar about who they think I am.
Though I was never settled with family
saying who they thought I was
-it brought out their coldest aggression.

Friends and neighbours
will always be partially right.
What I have to be careful about
is what they are right about,
and accept the rest as 'normal error'.

I have not always been this assured.

Back when I was young and gay
denial went hand in glove with men
who waved their willies in public toilets
-for the comfort of others as much as themselves.

But for all our awkward silences
we often knew more about the man
who was standing in the next urinal
than what we could see in front of us.

For having nowhere private
from family or other mens wives
where we could say who we were.

We remained friends without common interests.

.

 

Taboos Are Always Shifting

-it is part of how human societies change.
People are continually seeking something 'new'
to keep who they really are out of the view
of those they see as fools, as easily blinded.

Meanwhile those for whom
shame is their guide can easily find it,
and not just in the records of religions. 

The Immaculate Government

When every link in a chain of command
of a given government department
cannot fail by the criteria each link
sets for itself, and the public still find error
in how the government actually operates
then of course ministers will publicly defend
every stage of so perfect a process.

Thus, by inference, ministers blame the public
for finding mistakes where none can admitted.

For as long as everybody refuses to say
how all gov't departments work perfectly
against each other the public's malcontent
rumbles on never finding it's present day cause.

On 'Hate Figures'

We all know them, the public figures
who's every word and action we loathe
and who make us turn the radio.

We can be hate figures for others too,
and all without us ever realizing it.
But think on this; emetics will produce bile
-that is their function. And human emetics
exist to help us understand our hatreds better.

And if we can use them right
these emetic for our hate
can help us to be less bileful,
and much more phlegmatic.   

Great Turn-Offs Of Our Time (3)

Only broadsheet newspapers would repeat the online headline
that ends with the words 'says a think tank/report/gov't spokesperson....  '.

Every time I attempt to read these pieces
I discover how much more speculative the report is
than the headline is prepared to tell the reader.

What they are reporting from will always have
more varieties of views, and have more to say,
than any headline or the article will tell you
and the report itself will still be speculation.

The Death Of 'Religion'

comes to an individual
when they become bored
with the idea of being ashamed
and they forget the rules
by which their guilt is maintained.

If You Want To Get Ahead Get A Cap

And preferably one that is issued with a blessing
from it's manufacturer. Caps are old fashioned
for many reasons, courtesy among them.
Not just the lack of hair on the wearers head. 

Putting The I Into Life

When I was just one depressed teenager among many
I chose a different solution to most of the youths I knew.

I went went to church and grabbed at the shirt tails
of many of the different local Christianities, as if my life
depended on my grip on them. My attention span was one
among many that wavered andbwandered before commitment.

The nearest I got to a clear and honest doubt
was when saying a line from one of the prayers
with which we all prepared ourselves before receiving Communion.
We said 'It is our duty and our joy....   ' and I wondered;
How do duty and joy combine to beat depression?

I never asked anyone in the church about this.
We did not have the old high pew system to divide us
but instead dived ourselves in our seats by never asking
ourselves difficult personal questions about mental health.

Now I am more happy, more angry, and more disappointed by turns.
And through them all there is the thread of duty and joy- to life itself.

My List Of Unread Books

includes......

'Deuteronomy for Dummies' - the easy guide to most convoluted and hard-to-understand book in The Old Testament. Only 'The Book of Numbers' comes close to any similar level complexity, and the numbers in it are notably benign compared with the destruction they bear witness to.

'The Art of the Graceful Refusal'  - where a kind word of refusal does not stop somebody asking again. What it does achieve is putting a longer time between requests, and a calmness into both the request and the refusal.

The follow up was called 'The Old Declension' which is a more detailed delineation of how older refusals have maintained their charm right into the present day.

'Great Dogs I have Met' - Not quite like this, which I liked a lot, but close.

'Logorrhea and Misanthropy'  - Where the celebrated author Will Self writes at great length with as many long words as humanly possible about never wanting to write for the public again.

'Bathing in Bathos' -  Such an anti-climax of a book that I can hardly begin to describe even the introduction of it to readers other than myself, for fear of narcolepsy.

These titles will be hard to find. The following are more accessible, but equally hard to read....

'The Collected Works of Kierkegaard', - Soren Kierkegaard has been one of my heroes since I read his diaries in full - once, half a lifetime ago. But I fell at the first hurdle with many of his other voluminous writings which were written after he fueled himself with very strong coffee in the mornings.

'In Search of Lost Time' - Marcel Proust. Sometimes the time we lose we never get back. Reading this would take all too much time away from me given the list of other unread books on this list and I want a room like the one he wrote them in, in which to read them.

'Darkness at Noon' by Arthur Koestler, which I am given to believe is a cold war thriller about shady governments manipulating the daytime weather.

Last but far from least on this book list is 'Suicide for Non-Beginners' by that famously advanced author Anthony Weir.....

Great Turn-Offs Of Our Time (2)

When a politician says 'We agree and I have made it absolutely clear'
in one of the many panel programmes that they are apt to appear on
you can be sure that the 'we' is some small cabal and not even half their party.
And everything, particularly around the point that is being ground to a cliche,
is actually somewhat opaque. And often the speaker of these blunt words
is not in government and cannot alter what is being talked into extinction.  

Putting Off Being Put Off From Doing Jobs That Need To Be Done

Human nature dislikes being observed.

One of the signs of boredom that we avoid
is making lists of the things we have to do,
and we desist from the list because we know
that the contents will be too long for our comfort.

And we would not want to do the jobs on it.

But when we get past the fear of boredom
then we can make the list, and on seeing it
we will want to start on a task not on that list,
because that seems so much more engaging.

Im/Maturity

I have sometimes been praised
for my 'emotional maturity',
whatever that is. In all honesty
I have doubted what such praise was for.

I have learned to accept the comments
on the basis that such maturity
is about being mercilessly honest
about how immature I need to be
when those immature needs arise.

And I am not that mature,
but somehow I have the confidence
to share what I am with the people
who I hope will understand.  

Unheroically Yours

The stories of family that I like
are the ones that I rarely hear
-stories where the family black sheep
get to speak for themselves,
rather than be spoken over.

There they explain
how they survived their accusers,
after being forced to playing out being losers,
'Because somebody had to do it, and it proved to be me....  '

Attractiveness vs Character

I have no objections to handsome people
being alike in how attractive they seem to be,
or to them often being both happy and wealthy.

My difficulties arise from seeing them gathered
in great numbers in any one place in public.
Such a display of collective perfection,
perfect teeth, dress sense, every hair in place,
en mass, is something I find hard to take in.

Give me human flaws
and the stories of those
who outlive their mistakes
over being dazzled, anyday.

Am I Receiving Me?

I like to talk, I also like quiet. On my own
I talk to myself because thinking aloud is easy.

I will speak as I breathe, particularly after
I have had the open conversations with others
where I did not say what I thought at the time;
it was not apt, or a could not get the idea in edgeways.
.
I try to listen in conversation,
and imagine I am being listened to.
But how my hearing tires when I try to listen
and I know the person I am listening  to
is simply not listening to themselves.

They are not weighing their words
or putting forward ideas, just downloading.

My heart picks up
when I feel the empathy from the other side
-whether it resides in speech or music.
Or best of all in a mutual and deep silence.