My First New Year Card

Because a year over, particularly a year
like this year has been, is something
 that it is best to see the back of.

The Temptation To Narcissism

is one of the less recognised
aspects of becoming a parent;
that parents do not see it coming,
make it all the easier to be true.

How else to explain self-absorption
when it is unclear where it comes from? 

I am of the wrong generation
to take seriously the present day issue
of claiming to be, or becoming, non-binary,
though I respect how people wish to be known.

I am 'a he', plain and simple
and given the example of my parents
I have chosen to never to become one.

But for those who are non-binary,
depending on which theory they go by,
they could be any one of five different genders,
with corresponding choices of how to be adults,
only two of which will propagate the species.

In none of those five gender roles
are they free of the need to forgive,
particularly to the children
who might want to be like them
and might well want to be different.

Forgiveness is the key,
for all five genders/choices
to keep choice wider in future. 

The Hope Of Certainty

relies on less than we think
and more than we understand. 

 

I Mistrust Pride

Because it disallows objectivity
and whilst it claims the opposite
it cannot be separated from jealousy. 

The Decline Of Modern Leadership

When empires used to go to war
against the smaller countries
that they absorbed to sustain them
those wars were always fought
with the leaders of the empire
to the fore in the field of battle.

As recently as two hundred years ago
Napoleon used to lead his charges,
from the front, from land or sea,
But he was nearly the last of a dying breed,
as battles changed in character,
and theatres of war got technology.

From the gatling gun,
the first rapid fire weapon,
invented in in 1861,
to the remote robotics of today
a mere 150 years later,
the more lethal the weapon
the less engaged the leaders are
as to where the battle line are,
and how the war is fought.

This process that makes peace,
the absence of conflict,
ever harder to recognise directly.    

The Eternal Present Is Not Tense

'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes'-Daniel L. Everett.

I was warned when I started this book that I would want to skip parts of it. In the end I skipped very little and what I skipped were descriptions of Western Academia at it's least self explanatory. Philosophical/linguistic points where the what the author discusses is a sort of chicken/egg argument where he asks 'What came first? Culture or language?'. Culture would seem to be his answer but after settling that question the academic debate among Western scholars of language lingers whilst culture and language appear to be competing runners in a race where they egg each other on and up each others game.

The book starts with a proposition; can a missionary learn the language of a tribe, where the language seems to be the most intractable living language still in use in the world today? the author wants to learn it in order to present The Piraha, who live deep in the Amazon forest close to the river, with The Gospels, nothing more nothing less. The author wants to introduce The Piraha to the Jesus that he himself believes in.

There is a 500 year long history of tribes receiving missionaries first where armies visit the tribes and decimate them after, either through the illnesses the armies carry without being aware of how they came to be so diseased or the wealth of weaponry. There the missionaries do not knowingly play 'soft cop' to the soldiers being 'the hard cop' but the missionaries seem all the more effective in that role, for how they conceal it. That the societies they sought to evangelise were self-policing, lived in proportion on the land they occupied, and the society has little to no need for hierarchies and chiefs when the missionaries come from societies which are highly hierarchical, made it all the worse for the tribes who did not even have a currency of any sort.

So, could a missionary who was no part any soft cop/hard cop strategy, either consciously or unconsciously get a conversion by fair means just through a translation from a proportionately living self policing people with no leader whom they would all defer to?

The good news is that the longer the Daniel and his family stayed the more of the detail of the tribal life of The Piraha they observed. Whilst their lives were shorter, maybe half the length of a wealthy westerner's life, what their lives lacked in longevity they more than made up for contentedness, and a lightness with how they lived. The Piraha had a sense of life in the present tense in their language and culture that resisted all unpicking of it, to create any sense of past and future, a future where life might be different from the present.

The one area where the missionary does some genuinely good work for The Piraha, and sees farther than they do, is in engaging with a Brazilian government land commission to define and protect the boundaries of the tribal forest lands that The Piraha live in as if they own it all, whilst having no sense, nor language for, the concept of ownership.

But with an airtight lock between a language and culture where both are fixed in the present tense as if no other tense existed, or were possible, coupled with the sense that something could only be true if other Piraha have witnessed it, live, all attempts at introducing The Piraha to Jesus and The Gospels foundered. The author would have to have seen Jesus live in the present day in the forest, rather learned to believe in Jesus from reading a book about him for his witness to the Piraha to have any effect on them. Even then the experience of Jesus living in the forest would have to be repeatable in some way for The Piraha to be evangelised, and they could be most resistant to some persuasion, without it being obvious. 

A point that is not made, not even made indirectly, but which is easily inferred, is that when the forest is 'your book of life', then the forest is what you have to read to live by. Anything written in books is so outside the experience of life in the forest that the forest itself makes knowledge outside of it seem pale and second hand. That it is only in books that we get a choice of tense, past present and future, well such choice seems absurd to the forest and those who live in it. The forest will always win over anything written or spoken-the forest is there in front of the Piraha everyday as a symbiotic personal experience.

The power of the forest as an everyday experience comes to seriously affect the beliefs of the missionary, who if he could have found one believer among The Piraha he might have found many. But since even as the gospel of Mark is presented to them on tape, as spoken by one of the tribe, eve there the Piraha detect that the reader who says the words is acting out what sounds like merely an act of ventriloquism committed to tape rather than a reflection of the belief of the speaker.

The missionary's attempt to introduce the spiritual binaries of 'the lost' and 'the saved', and the concepts of past, present, and future tenses, through written and spoken language to a people who live only in the present tense and mostly through spoken language and applied life inevitably fails. The experiment of introducing the ideas ends. The Piraha 1 The Missionary 0 then? Up to a point, I came away from the book believing that witness works where there is need for an upgrade to how communal and personal life is lived; no upgrade was required or was possible with The Piraha. The forest made them as free as they would ever be and made the missionary see how freedom had to be seen and lived for it to be real.

The  Piraha means of communication and lives exclude divisions of time into past present and future, and differing personal status. With this the missionary's faith in the structure of the society he came from crumbles as if it had been very gently absorbed by the forest itself. So The Piraha 1 The Linguist/Missionary 1 is the end score in my reading of the book. With their self evident commitment to co-equality for all and treatment of children as would-be adults The Piraha would not want it any other way.

And Breathe In.....

Because 99.999 % of us have more than we could count
whilst holding our breath, and we are part of an ecology
that is dying for us to take it more seriously
than what we think we have and what we value most.  

 

How Much Is Enough?

The modern western diet
is a miracle to behold; choice,
enough to make Croesus jealous.
Fifteen different brand of everything
to choose from on the supermarket shelves.

I don't know about buying all that stuff,
just looking at it, and guessing the weight
of the waste in packaging, is enough for me. 

China Crisis

The Pillar of Shame
was given it's name for a reason.
Removing it because 'it is fragile/unsafe'
says more about the fragile grip
of any publicly accountable rule of law 
in the country it has been removed from 
than any public commentator there
would ever be permitted to say. 

 

New Tactics, Old System

In the days of the Czars
and other absolute rulers
the state sought to control
the non-conformists and rebels
by paying fake rebels to flush out
the rebels who actually meant it.

This 'agent provocateur' activity
was rhetorically easy to justify,
even when the paid provocateurs
did actual damage to the rules
that their paymasters favoured.

Now most adults can vote
but the loss of choice
comes with the policies
we are offered to vote for,
dressed up by how the internet
presents them to us. 

The only sense of a national boundary
that the internet offers the public
is in the advertising they accept.

The new agent provocateurs
are the troll farms that spew out stories
ascribed to invented characters,
where what could be real
and what is knowingly false
is difficult to navigate.

On both the political 'right' and 'left'
nearly nobody knows what is real,
and what has been invented
to tickle their sense of outrage,
as invented by a foreign power.

With the reinvention
of the agent provocateur
we have reinvented the era
of autocrats and monsters.

Have Your Very Own Donald Trump* Style Christmas

And present your friends with the best
in costly hostilities, worthy
of the season of goodwill.
 (lawyers fees and weak prepared
court cases not included).

*Please note that other would-be dictators are
available to threaten your friends with
but they will survive the treats, threats
of The Donald better than other would-be ex dictators. 

 

When Good Will Deceives Us

Good will should be for life,
rather than being seasonal.
For seasons become the reasons
for scammers to practice good will 
by working exceptionally hard
at relieving ordinary people of the money
that ordinarily might have kept them solvent
had they the resistance to being oversold
that which they never needed in the first place. 

The Bigger The Lie

The more anger there is behind it,
and bigger their debts to the banks
and frauds to the inland revenue
that the liars live with,
until they take it all to the grave.

For the liar the only point
of wanting to be president
is for the powers of exemption
from defamatory lawsuits
and and repayments of their debts
that being president gives them.

They leave it to other deceivers
to present policies that offer
uses for power that help others 
which being in power can give them.   

A Piece Of Fine Writing

 'Shining lines of ripples drew out slowly from the the pointed wooden floats of the catamaran, the flat green leaves of the water lilies seemed to be gliding past. The Longpond lay silent in the summer morning; the sun splashes in front, seen through the lashes of the lids closed in dreamy contentment, were like glittering birds in flight. A wood pigeon was cooing in a fir tree on a distant shore, a family of blue titmice were wheezing and saying, chitter-chee, chitter chee, as they flitted among the willows leaning out of the bank. So peaceful was the shining water, with the faint haze of the summer morning not yet cleared by the sun high over the beech trees: the blinding spiky sun into which the swallows vanished. So fare into the blue air were they flying that the boy sitting still on the cracked wooden seat above the two floats could hear no sound of their twittering. It must be like this after death he thought, seeing the blue of heaven in the water beside him. 

from Chapter 9, page 95, of  'Dandelion Days' - Henry Williamson, written in 1922.    

My Fourth Christmas Card

'A19' by Hungarian painter László Moholy-Nagy

 

Welcome To The New Billionaire Anarchy

Universal Basic Income
will never be long term policy
in any country in the world
for as long as the wealthy
find tax avoidance lucrative,
cheap enough, and easy to do,
because government tax law
is complex enough to make it so.

The legal language of modern tax codes
can never be made to make the accountants
of the wealthy arrange to pay the taxes
that the wealthy know they should pay.

Because the ultra-wealthy
and the new multi-national companies
rarely have to comply with government policy,
and can withhold their taxes
governments will never have the money 
to re-distribute towards those
who work finds unworthy,
who will never be offered a job
in a shrinking market for work
due to creeping automation.

That the ultra-wealthy are those
who control who work finds worthy
whilst they also extend automation
in work, whilst not paying the taxes
on the profits from same....
shows us how much modern government
soon won't be able to organise anything
worthy of the name.  

 .   

The Hope Of Obscurity

Speaking truth to power
will always be difficult
when leaders compete
not just to be inconsistent
but to be inconsistent for gain
as much as they can legally hoard,
and hide from ordinary people.

But such speech will out,
and leaders need not doubt
that for all that they appear benign
they will miss the signs
when it is their time
to leave the world stage,
and embrace obscurity.

The New Unforgiveness

America first got into television in the 1940's.
They were not the first, before them The Third Reich
broadcast daytime television in the 1930's,
until the economy went on to a war-footing economy
when broadcasts were reduced, and then they ended. 

American Christians were late comers to light entertainment,
they came to television in the late 1970's/1980's.
They were particularly naive about the distorting effects
of broadcasting on the characters who filled the screen.

When pastors were inconsistent with their congregations
face to face every Sunday then their congregations knew it,
and the inconsistencies were in scale with the communities
that the congregations were part of. The hypocrisy was in scale.

When pastors started preaching on television,
to tame studio congregations they did not feel
the power of the distancing effect which television does,
the pastors were extremely naive about it.

It was like the effect facebook is now said to have
on groups and individuals; the amount of money
made from advertising and seeking donations
became vast and self perpetuating, and it multiplied
as preachers learned how hate sold better than engagement.

We who use facebook etc should learn
from the failure of the tele-evangelists
to learn about the distorting nature
of the smoke and mirrors they used.
We too speak through distorting mirrors,
and algorithms which we know little about.

Given how negativity so easily multiplies,
and we will be the last to see it started with us
we should seek always to be affirmative.

Peacetime Pastime Creativity

One of the more hidden aspects
of lives lived out in full peacetime
is how nothing disrupt the constancy
of creative activity for the wealthy artist.

There, life is an unending stream
of different projects to be completed,
before death provides a natural end
to any further word or intent to act.

For many artists it does not end there,
there is often that last book to write/
recording to be completed in order
to be published posthumously
though such projects seem melancholy
without their author to promote them.

But long before that the calendar
becomes so full of anniversaries
of past events held on different dates
that the public remember their creative leaders
by the date they first heard/saw and heard
their peak experience of said artist.

By then all creativity seems to happen in the past tense. 

 

Great Turn Offs of Our Time (23)

'He may be a criminal but he is our criminal'
is a phrase that many invoke, when they settle
on some particularly choice lawyer, leader,
or politician with his shiny charisma,
who they know is a criminal but they think
'as long as he is criminal for me
I can control him and he is the criminal, not me.
I can disown his criminality as my employee.'.

But the point about criminality is it's dishonesty.
When we employ somebody else to steal for us
whoever we employ is as likely to steal from us,
and lie by omission about it to our faces
as they are to tell us that thy have done our bidding.

The real question with any criminal practice
is how long it takes for it to be discovered,
and who will be most destroyed by it's discovery.

My Third Christmas Card of 2021

 

When Silence Is Not Absence

Many millions of people live out their days
as if they have nothing to say,
and they have plenty of time to say it,
when it is more the case
that the media they accept
scripts so well what they want said
that they can find no point in mouthing
what their media has thought for them.

A Choice Of Pandemic

There many strains of Covid 19
for us to choose from, and learn
how best to not catch them
in the surest way possible,
congruent with civil liberties
and the economy
of the country we live in.

But it does not end there;
in the wild there is now also
an ongoing outbreak of Bird Flu 
and that is trans-national
and trade barriers help it spread
by limiting the vaccinations
of tame birds to stop them
infecting wild, migrating, birds.

So when you see the turkey
it may be more off  than you think.
But remember this;with this virus
nature has it worse than humans know about... 

The Hopelessness of Forgiveness

When I was just old enough
to be advised about relationships
outside of my parents' evasions towards me
my mother told me two distinct things.

The first was
'when you make your bed then you have to lie in it afterwards.'.

The second thing she said was
'Don't bring any little bastards home to me.'.

I understood what she meant with the first rule; 
when you marry it is for life-there could be no change
and no choice once the vows were said,
not even if who you married was abusive
or was a murderer or a criminal
-you chose to marry the abuser,
their abuse is your reward,
abuse is what you married them for.

I understood the second rule even better.
given a choice of abuse or shame,
and I preferred the shame of bastardy,
as if I myself had been born out of wedlock, 
rather than passively living out an abusive relationship. 

Following Mother's advice
led me not only into my homosexuality
as a way of surviving the shame of bastardy,
but to finding a life times affection and support
from a man who lived in the full knowledge
of being conceived and growing up
outside the cursed state of wedlock.
His family related to each other
with more maturity
than I could begin to count.

Thirty years on from my first full choices
I have no regrets worth mentioning
and find modern heterosexuality more benign
than Mother would have wanted it to be,
but still it is strange stuff best left alone. 

My rule for relationships was more conditional;
everyone is bound to make rules for relationships;
part of their making rules is making the rules work. 

The Hope of Transparency

I don't care and I won't give my thanks
when all the green-wash advertising
put up by the wealthy, and the banks,
subsidises the space I take up
in the social media;
I did not ask them to do it.

I'd rather have nothing to say
and no means of saying it,
than knowingly be part of the screen 
that slowly blind the masses
as to the actual state of the planet. 

Radio Daze

Every day an endless tide of non-events
and scenes without denouement
wash through me via my radio.
With every hourly news bulletin
I forget what I was listening to before
and I'll forget again if I leave the radio on.

The measure of my mental health
is remembering to turn the radio off
when I know that I have heard enough
and I won't be able to concentrate on any more.   

My Second Christmas Card Of 2021

Adolph Richard Fleischmann 1892-1968

Untitled || Ohne Titel, circa 1952

 

Have They Checked Their Travel Insurance?

I have been slow to comment
on the modern 'migrant problem',
just as I have been slow to reflect
on the causes of said migration; war
famine, disease, and global warming.

But this much I will observe,
when slavery was an accepted trade
the ships that the slaves
were trafficked in were far safer
than the flimsy rubber dinghies
that today's migrants are given
to take to the English channel with,
to get as far from the famines, wars,
and diseases that bedevil their once safe,
now unstable, 'home countries' as they can.

Also slave owners had to buy
insurance for their captive cargo,
c.f. The Zong Massacre.Whereas
modern, more voluntary, migrants
have to travel by faith alone,
through hostile environments
that are far nearer being like
that they seek to escape from
than anyone would want to know.

At that rate buying insurance
for making sure of your profits,
whether your cargo lives or dies,
looks like sure proof of hubris,
and being well fitted for Hell
when you are ferried to the next life. 

Artifice Of Intelligence

As Alan Turing would surely have observed
the problem with artificial intelligence
is less that it is artificial, and more
to do with whether it is intelligent.

 

My First Christmas Card of 2021

 

Picture Set Of The Month - December - Ruined Houses In Ireland

In 1842 a German writer and geographer
called Johann Georg Kohl travelled around Ireland,

he observed, “Ireland is the country for ruins.
Here you have ruins of every period of history, from
the time of the Phoenicians down to the present day.

Not a lot has changed since then, other than
subsequent decades supplementing the number
of ruins found here almost 180 years ago.

A well-preserved ruin, masonry cleaned up, gravel paths
 installed, regularly cut lawns, can no doubt expect
a longer twilight life. For those who need the masonry
to crumble because of the ivy, the experience 
 will always disappoint.

 

On This Day In 1884....

Lest We Forget: On this day in 1884, 13 European nations shamelessly gathered in Berlin to parcel out the African continent like famished school children (on a school trip) haphazardly dividing up a pizza. Great Britain was represented by Sir Edward Malet (Ambassador to the German Empire). The US, the emerging but reluctant superpower, had a delegate - the explorer Henry Morton Stanley.

In utter disregard and with not a single iota of conscience or concern for the culture or the families of the continent, the map was redrawn and lands claimed. What followed was the systematic scramble and undoing of Africa. Resistance was met with the brutal force of gunpowder. The Herero Massacre was the first genocide of the 20th century: tens of thousands of men, women and children were shot, starved, and tortured to death by German troops as they put down “rebellious” tribes in what is now Namibia. Tens of thousands of defenceless women and children were forced into the Kalahari desert, their wells poisoned and food supplies cut.

In Uganda, the first election fraud (in favour of Apollo Milton Obote) was masterminded by London. The British governor then, Sir Fredrick Crawford, an honest man to a fault, resigned because he was unwilling to be party to this gerrymandering. This has since become the template for regime survival. Congo and many other African nations have never recovered from this trauma that was orchestrated at Bismarck's official residence on that bleak weekend.

 

The United Colours Of Capitalism

Click to enlarge and get clearer view,
to discover which company you want
to make you the offer that you should refuse
this  seasonal bargain day    

 

The Logic Of Philanthropy

We often hear talk by the wealthy
that defends the present inequality
as 'a more efficient means
of spreading wealth that any other', 
and well we might wonder
how the logic it is based on arose.

It starts with a wealth creation
that runs well ahead of the ability
of any tax system to tax such wealth,
until eventually the powers that be
try to be more prescient
about the nations finances.

Then they find the wealth creators
propose that they are best people
to advise the writing of the rules
of the wealth they say they created
(always their wealth was made
by exploiting human resources,
and materials, they controlled
but denied all responsibility for).

The more the wealthy write the rules
that regulate the taxation of wealth
the more they exempt themselves
in the name of philanthropy.

They divide the poor into the worthy
-those who pay tax enough to support others,
and the unworthy-those who earn so little
that they cannot be taxed.

By definition the rich are always worthy,
their wealth is what tells them how fit they are
for always ruling over the lives of others.

Apocalypse When......

Human beings have written apocalyptic myths
from the later period of The Old Testament
to far into the times of The Roman Empire.

And always these writings get refreshed
by modern readers who replace the targets
the myths were once aimed at, now forgotten,
for people who are alive as they write
-people who the writers think worthy
of renewed and damning accusations.

But there surely come a point
where even fears are prone to doubt;
the old fears no longer have the energy
to sustain themselves as part of human life.

What happens when what was once
'a deep reading' of an apocalyptic text
integral to belief for one generation
loses all it's cogency for the next?

Does the text become
just a play thing,
an entertaining surface read?
How long can the fear
of end of the world
survive human indifference?  

Reason For Belief?

In something/anything that is well beyond
The State, most of what constitutes 'religion',
and all the state's leaders along with the flags,
which they use to distract everyone
from all the deals that they like to keep unknown.   

 

A Non-Conformist Writes About Diet And Choice

Meat substitutes are now being sold
by many western food manufacturers
who, whilst controlled by greenwash,
are keen to hold on to their markets.

This time their efforts are serious;
the 'meat' now grows in petri dishes
or rather their large scale equivalent,
after which it is textured and flavoured
until the consumer can't tell the difference
with what it is meant to be compared to.

with white meats the indistinctness
might well be correct; factory chickens
lead lives that are so absurdly short
and horrible that anyone seeing them
would say it was the animal farming
equivalent of the Nazi death camps.

The less the suffering the better it is,
but that still leaves the greenwash problem;
whatever we are told about the virtue
of what we eat we still have to be
propagandised into submission
to make sure that we eat it.

Thinking for ourselves
what to eat is too risky
to be allowed.

The Pain We Don't Need

Sex is where tragedy
turns most easily to farce,
which is why sexual abstinence
is partly abstaining from tragedy.

Such abstinence is less about morality,
though the reasons given for the choice
will always be presented in that framework,
and more about erring on the side of caution,
the better to abstain from unnecessary pain.

I Do Not Worship Growth

particularly where that growth is of religions
-where belief amounts to a monoculture
that denies the diversity of the past.

There ever expanding statistics
for conversions are an article of faith
within a hyper capitalistic society
where the pressure for infinite growth
also applies itself through money.

My faith is in sustaining
my long term unemployability
as the main means to self control,
one of the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit.

There my frugality means being inventive
in discovering how to live,
and accepting the fragility of others. 

Modern materialism is a blind alley
that pushes people towards a brutality
which denies the shrinkage
it always leads to, in the end.

The Mathematics Of Avoiding Single Use Items

Some may quibble at the amount of washing
and rinsing that consistent reuse involves,
but when we wash what we can
  we leave less mess behind us.  

 

The World Is A Strange Place

When the the fringes interests of Politics
produce fringe interests of their own
where lack of proof is what guarantees
the popularity of the leaders who do nothing
for the voters who once voted for them. 

Modern Semaphore

In this, the era of electronic media, semaphore 
is a long neglected means of communication.
But 63 years after it was first founded
I was surprised to learn that it provided CND
with such a forward looking means
of seeing a future that is more peaceable
than all the world's warring pasts combined. 

 

All Apologies?

I have known quite a few
who were over-generous
with their apologies;
people who said 'sorry'
at the drop of a hat, mostly
when they had no need to.

It was easy enough for me
to diagnose their 'bad nerves',
amongst other maladies.

The worst for apologies
were those who knew
they had done wrong, all along.
But they hoarded their apologies
for after they were at their most egregious.

They hoped that when said 'sorry'
for their worst then all their previous,
behaviour that was also heinous
would be absolved from all memory. 

That is when I doubt their sincerity.

The Groucho Clubcard

Every time I shop in a supermarket
I am politely asked at the checkout
'Do you have our clubcard?'
Each time I am asked I mildly regret
not having a glossy piece of plastic,
akin a donor card, to show them,
that paraphrases the Groucho Marx quote
'I would not be a member
of any club that would have me'.

The Lesser Loss

Misanthropy seems to be at it's most generous
when it celebrates the loss of companionship;
Were the former friend were still there
then they would be enduring
an unendurable suffering.

The grief of absence
seems the cleaner choice
than the half life of loss.

The Opiate Of Absolute Rulers

is the unquestioning obedience
of the citizens of their country,
which they back up with force,
and reward when the need occurs.

Such obedience never lasts long
and it always has to repromoted
to find it's place via the evolving
political paradigms of the day.

Would-be absolute rulers
who have to be voted for
have a much harder job,
keeping favour with the public
by riding the latest trends,
and massaging into submission
the opinions of whoever resisted
voting for them before,
to make them reflect their leader better.

Who knows how to escape 
such consistent misrepresentation?
Every time a route is tested
the old binding becomes the thread
on which to spool a new generation.

The Power Of Forgiveness Falls Short Again

The revolution that I'd like to see
is the revolution with no enemy,
with no scapegoats to be punished
when mistaken aims are missed. 

Such a hierarchy could never last;
it is asking too much to be given
through the power of forgiveness.

None Of The Above

When you are offered a questionnaire
to fill in before seeing the youtube video
that you have clicked on, which asks
'Which of these companies have you heard of?'
always click on the box that says
'None of the above'. Always give youtube
the smallest amount of information
you can get away with giving them. 

For The Loquacious Religious Irish

There is craic with everything,
it is how the light gets in.

The Future Is Not What It Used To Be

The market for the future
always appealed to the many,
whilst selecting the few
-those best fitted for it all along.

A long time ago
the future was driven
by different monotheisms
until The Heavenly Future
could be owned by only
the most bloodthirsty
and most triumphalist
of all the faiths.

That was the technology of war
creating ever newer choices
by which to divide peoples,
reduce peacetime economies,
and destroy once rich
and vastly varied landscapes.

Nowadays the currency of the future
is not time in Heaven,
as promised by religions.
Now the future is bonds and stocks
that are bought and traded,
at astonishing speeds across the globe.

There the bond relates to the raw energy
by which many people lead insulated lives
using materials extracted from the earth
in a fraction of the time
that the earth took to make them.

.   

So Many Unknown Soldiers

For years I have observed each Armistice Day,
when what has become an old loss
gets rewritten as a source of renewal. 
And the media of my country,
reflects a self absorbed vision
in which other countries are merely
battle grounds in which we lost soldiers.

But mine is not the only country
to make self absorption seem patriotic,
around the world there are more than eighty
monuments 'to the unknown soldier',
with America having five on it's soil
the earliest dating from the civil war.

Nor was my country one of the earlier
nations to celebrate/mourn it's losses
-Denmark was the first in 1849,
with it's statue to the brave soldier
created by Hermann Bisen
after the first Schleswigg war.

From Argentina to Zimbabwe
across every inhabited continent,
Europe, Africa, Oceania, and Asia
and North and South America,
history is measured by the deference
to the statues to the anonymous fallen
from countless wars with countless fallen
where the living are surprised at being alive.  

But my country was surely the first
to wrap it's flag so tight around a past
so closely centred around loss and death
that it's history now reads like a dementia case,
where a major part of it now solely lives
below the soil in some foreign field,
or far away, engaged in tax avoidance,
and a history where history is built on dishonesty.  

A Gripe On Reality

The older I get, the more I observe legislatures,
who when, enacting laws,
who with well reasoned cause
pretend to be progressive,
but in the laws that they pass
they end up looking crass
before being irreversibly transgressive.  

A Beggar's Gratitude

For all that they seem abject,
the thanks of a beggar,
proffered in advance
of what they receive,
are as genuine
as the thanks said casually
by the many who have that much
they can't count it,
never mind the extra
they go through life expecting. 

The biggest difference
between the gratitude of the rich
and of the thanks of the poor
is that the poor know less
about how to fake sincerity
as they seek to see
their needs met,
and to be accepted.

The Monologues Of The Deaf

are meant to sound like a conversation,
whilst disguising a lack of observation.

It's Okay

Where simplicity gets more self-deceiving
is when we believe that living 
at nearer subsistence levels,
compared with those around us,
is somehow 'preserving the planet'
when it it is still dying all around us. 

 

All The Lonely People?

If anyone tried to write
another 'Eleanor Rigby'
they simply could not, the song
would come out all wrong.

However good the tune
and tight the arrangement, 
the song could never strike the note
of near universal recognition
that the original found in it's time.

Since that song was written
loneliness has been moved on.
It has been crowded out
by websites like the one
that you are reading this on
where we are in it together,
even as each of us is alone.

Our loneliness becomes our vocation
fit to be shared with the nations
of likeminded absent souls.

Mordant Danish humourist Victor Borge
used to say about the effect of his performances
'The shortest distance between two people is a smile'.

Now people don't meet, and have little to say
when they pass each other in the street.
The shortest distance between two people
is from your screen and keyboard to mine,
something I sit down at home and wait for.

Diary Of A Lost Person

When I went online I was reminded
that the main thing that the internet
is meant to do is bring out the sense
of play for those who go onto it. 

Where did I go to play when I realised I should?
I asked Google 'Does Franz Kafka have a homepage?'
Well reader, yes he does. Find it here for some serious fun. 

Great Films of The Twentieth Century-Koyaanisqatsi

 

When A Liar Speaks

How much they convince their hearers
is less a matter of bigness, though that helps,
and more a matter of the speed with which
the high flown rhetoric passes over it's audience.

When the rhetoric is properly examined,
any listener would soon discover
how much it is arrant nonsense.

But because the message travels so fast,
over the heads of  too many people,
the collective resistance is hard to find,
where they can all be critical enough
to break down what tries to bind them.

Picture Set Of The Month - November - 'At The Tomb of The Unknown Soldier'

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, The Arc de Triumph
in Paris, inaugurated 11th November 1920, along with
a similar memorial in Westminster Abbey, London.      

The statue Landsoldaten (The Foot Soldier)
by sculptor Herman Wilhelm Bissen is located
in Fredericia, Denmark.

'The Tomb of The Unknown Soldier,
at Westminster Abbey. The idea for the monument
dates from 1916, from Army Chaplain David Railton.
It was realised by November 1920, along with
it's French equivalent at the Arc de Triumph.
.  

 

The National War Memorial, Ottowa, Canada
which was dedicated in 1939, and in front of it
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier inaugurated
in May 2000 and kept guard over ever since.
  

Arlington USA, one of five monuments
'to the unknown soldier' in America,
this memorial was completed Nov 11th 1921.
.   

Play Me

I dare you, and discover
how dark, how low, how sweet
our music is going to be.

 

Fashion Wear For Halloween?

 

This Blog Is Taking A Rest, Please Enjoy The Interval Music

 

Fifty Two Years Late But Here At Last

'Get Back'/'Don't Let Me Down' was released
11th April 1969, the advert above was put in the press
to promote it, I reproduce it here to honour the new
multi-media extravaganza/media blitz
for the film/record project that it never was at the time, 
but is now out in the form it was meant to be.

 

The Madness Of America

I am loathe to take pot-shots at America, religions
or the strange course of logic that a religion
can take in the land of the free (to be absurd
and illogical) where the profit motive
infuses and undermines systems of belief.
I know how strange human being can be,
given the opportunity, under Capitalism.

The above rather took my breath away.
It is the image of the son of the Reverend Myung
 Moon, founder of 'The Moonies', Sean Moon.

He is wearing a crown of bullets from the gun factory
he owns and from which he instructs belief in the cult
he runs of worshipping God whilst always holding guns
that are made in the factory he now owns.

It is enough to make a misanthropy beyond Atheism
seem peaceable and sane, by comparison.  

 

A Bad Pun

The gas companies in my country
are raising the price of gas
by much more than they need to,
to, as they see it,
balance supply with demand;
in more than the usual sense of the phrase
they are multiplying the meaning
of the word 'gaslighting'.

The Exam For Failure

has yet to be devised
but were it to exist
I would pass it with ease,
and receive the results
with a balanced measure
of self acceptance.
  

A Fresher Breath Of Air?

I have been very distant in following
the 'Billionaires compete with each other to go into space' story. 

Such is the level of my everyday lack of wealth
that this billionaire's soap opera just did not engage with me.

But the following is why the competition exists;
It is well known that many billionaires believe
that they breathe different air than the people
who are poorer than them. Their inherited wealth,
which they have made multiply
makes billionaires different, as people.

That is why they form buddies with each other
and huddle together on their golf courses,
well apart from the people who serve them,
who have to sign non-disclosure acts
about what they see to bind them in service.

Just as rich people in the dim and distant past
used to 'take the waters' in spar resorts
that only they could afford, 'for their health',
so Branson and Jeff Bezos etc now use their money
to enjoy the vacuum of space, and to get a better measure
of the depth of their detachment from those around them.

The 'Get Back' Story-The Back Story To Music on Film In The 1960's

   In the 1960's music was the medium that attracted young people most, via the then new portable transistor radios. The Beatles ruled the music world, less because of their manager's doubtful business acumen as the band took their place on the world stage, and more for their innate ability as musicians to write, record, and perform strong songs that would very much outlast their era. 

  Whilst the parents of the 1960's were being sold televisions on the back of the world sporting events that led the headlines in the newspapers they read, the young listened to pop radio instead. What nobody could test at the time was what the result might be when the world of music and television properly met. Their first long term introduction to each other had resulted in the formulaic 'Top of The Pops', where from November 1964 to 2004 the music stars of the day openly mimed to their own songs to audiences who were indifferent towards them, they were there to pretend to dance, which was hardly the best introduction anything.

  'Monterey Pop' was filmed in Summer '67 by D.A. Pennibaker, but the film was still being edited and would not be released in any sort of time to influence them when The Beatles came to consider making their own film of themselves. And the documentary of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of England, 'Don't Look back', had barely been seen at all.  

  Meanwhile in England in the autumn of 1967 Paul McCartney led The Beatles through making their third film, this time self produced, just an hour long, and made to be shown at Christmas for the then new colour channel BBC2. 'Magical Mystery Tour', was their first film and music venture without the measured hand of Brian Epstein behind it. What the plot of their film lacked in plot, pace, and sure direction the songs more than compensated for. The critics struck as hard as they could against the whimsy of it all, as if they had always been waiting for the the band to fail at something. But from when the film was made now, the film and the songs have never been out of public view, and are now known for having a sunny charm-that has long outlasted the barracking critics of the time, who have long since been forgotten.

  Enter stage left French/Swiss film director Jean Luc Goddard who filmed The Jefferson Airplane playing live for free, and without a license to play, atop a hotel roof near Times Square, New York, in December 1968, the first ever such rooftop performance. The band had already performed live for television before a tame audience, and had used expletives that could not be deleted before they went out on air.

  After filming Jefferson Airplane off the cuff, so to speak, Jean Luc Goddard sought to film The Beatles in their natural habitat, the studio, recording a song. But Goddard found all cohesive and firm contact with the band hard to make amid the many different film and music projects that Apple and the band had taken on, projects that the band did not realise the scale of until the overseeing of the work overwhelmed them. Before recording of what became 'The White Album' between May and October 1968 they had already recorded four songs for the United Artists cartoon project 'Yellow Submarine', to complete  their contract with the film company that had started with 'A Hard Day's Night' in 1964, and George and John had each laid down plans for solo releases, all for release on Apple Records.

  Goddard found what he wanted much easier with The Rolling Stones instead. He made the film he wanted to make. 'One Plus One; Sympathy For The Devil' as an art house film released in 1969. Whilst the act of filming a song being recorded seemed exciting in theory, Goddard made the actuality of both the song and band seem strangely disengaged, as they engaged with the unknown in the form of extracting the as yet unwritten/unrecorded song, albeit a song that would gain the band an apt notoriety, from the ether.

  Michael Lindsay Hogg was the first television director to regularly put live music onto English television screens with the ITV programme 'Ready Steady Go' between 1963 and 1966. This led in turn to the BBC responding with the mimed Top of The Pops' 1964-2004. Hogg also filmed promotional films for The Beatles 'Paperback Writer' and 'Rain', and later directed The Rolling Stones and friends in the film 'Rock and Roll circus, filmed December 1968 but unreleased until 1996. Were The Beatles inspired by the failed discussions with Goddard to contact Hogg to make their own 'how we write and record a song' film? If so the project grew and the idea of a live impromptu concert became yet another idea for them to explore without them knowing what the end point for the idea might be. As it was, the idea was already ambitious, with the planned film already being about the making the making of a whole album's worth of songs combined with a clear profile of each member of the band. And Hogg filmed many more performances of songs on the way than were ever going to be used in the film. Material that was seemingly doomed to languish unheard and unseen, as the performances were left on the cutting room floor as part of the many under-rehearsed rehearsals. 

  That such a project was fraught with difficulty was obvious to all except the participants. The first difficulty was that at the start of filming nobody knew whether it was to be a cinema film or a made-for-television film, it could have been either. When recording started it was 'just' footage of rehearsals for what was hoped might be a live concert, with new songs being developed for the would-be-concert which at the start of filming had no planning or preparation. Whilst Hogg filmed he could not tell the band what to do, merely record what was happening in front of him. The band were the drivers for what was filmed and they were always working out what they wanted to perform as they went along. To write and record a song without your normal producer, George Martin, shaping proceedings was one thing. To record said song whilst being filmed sketching out the song with the rest of the band is another, to informally direct yourself whilst writing and recording said song was to put yourself and your art through the maximum pressure to perform/achieve that any artist could contemplate. With such split aims, lack of prior planning, singular pressure, and lack of formal leadership for the project it was no wonder that the end result initially seemed to be no more than a mass of footage with no story. 

 Nonetheless, what they achieved between January and July of 1969 was remarkable. They had released the soundtrack to a feature length cartoon, 'Yellow Submarine', written the songs for two group albums, and accumulated over 60 hours of footage and over 120 hours of audio as source material for an impossible-to-edit film of the writing of one the albums. With the album that went with the film half completed but then shelved, whilst the film remained in a state of chaos. Each member of the band had also written key songs for their first solo albums, albums that as they rehearsed the songs they did not know they would be making in the next year/to eighteen months as the start of solo careers where each of them would be tied by reputation and comparison to the other for decades, where they would each have vast success on their own.

  The project that was started as 'Get Back' became 'Let It Be' in the Autumn of 1969. In it's first iteration it became a boxed set presentation of an album, complete with a book of photographs and dialogue from the film, issued on Apple in April 1970. Then it became an 80 minute film that was released world wide where the longer it remained released the more it was viewed as proof of how the band so disagreed with each other and were so riven by the inability to see the other's point of view that the film became proof of why they each needed to have solo careers. The film became an epitaph for the band that none of them saw coming before it arrived. Whilst in private it was difficult for them to argue against that epitaph, however inaccurate it was, whilst all the legal Gordian knots that had tied Apple up, and had tied them all to Apple were still so tightly tied. 

  Completion of the project has now taken longer than the lives of many of the people who feature in the the film, were involved in making it, or were legally involved in what became a very tight Gordian knot that stayed impossibly tight for many years. In loose order they include......

                                     trusted roadie Mal Evans (1935-1976), 
                                                         John Lennon (1940-1980),
                                                   George Harrison (1943-2001),
                                                         Billy Preston (1946-2006),
                    Apple projects manager Neil Aspinal (1941-2008), 
              later manager of The Beatles Allen Klein (1931-2009),
   legal attorney for Paul McCartney Lee Eastman (1910-1991),
    Beatles producer up to Let it Be George Martin (1926-2016), 
                        producer of 'Let It Be' Phil Spector (1940-2021),
   backing vocalist on 'Let It Be'-Linda McCartney (1941-1998),
                      Maureen 'Mo' Starkey-wife of Ringo (1946-1994).

 
and the host of Apple staff members who engineered, tape-opped, and did all the vital smaller jobs connected with The Beatles studio work during their time at Twickenham Film Studios and Apple studios between January and June 1969. 

  The living who are still connected with the film as I write this include...

                                             Jean Luc Goddard (born 1930),                                                                                                               Yoko Ono (born 1933),
                                                 Paul McCartney (born 1942),
                                                         Ringo Starr (born 1940), 
                                       Michael Lindsay Hogg (born 1940),
    Producer of the 'Get Back' album Glyn Johns (born 1942),
                                  and engineer Alan Parsons (born 1948),

  All of whom would go on to be complete many other projects and be part of greater achievements in the 1970's and well beyond. 

Fuelling Disagreement

'Governments are afraid to use the word 'tax'.
I would much rather that they price petrol 
according to it's effect now to make electric
cars seem more attractive than bind a future
government to banning the petrol engine'
-Richard Thaler, co-author of 'Nudge'.

Governments are long used
to creating chaos in their own interests,
and the interests of their backers,
and further controlling the appearance
of the chaos, such that it appears to be order.

If governments wanted to,
in the interests of genuine green politics,
they could raise the price of fuel that high
that the price of petrol and diesel
made drivers reconsider travel
to the point where they go electric
or they stay off the roads
and reconsider the value of travel.

But the government won't do that,
the protest that would ensue
from any such move
might reawaken the urge
towards a more direct,
and deeper rooted, democracy.