The Public Lie, The Private Truth

When I was a young and troubled teen,
I ached to be accepted for who I was 
but my fizziness was a bad fit
for the tight binaries of moral codes,
derived from fuzzy generalities
which for anyone to live them out
they must be either a machine
or, if actually human, a masochist.

Both choices seemed unattractive.

To find out what Mother thought,
but was refusing to tell me, I read
the 'problem pages' of her magazine
to find out how the grown ups
resolved their problems where choice
made morality a choice of discomfort,
or being an automaton for other automata.

It was a worthy a try but it go me nowhere. 

There was no language for what I felt,
beyond 'beyond the pale', an old phrase
originally assigned to the poorest citizens
of nineteenth century European states
who were confined to hinterlands
far away from all capital and wealth,
where they were kept, never to prosper.

Later on I found P.O. box addresses
that my parents knew nothing about,
where I thought I could write off
to tell them more about how I felt
than my family would ever listen to.

They said I could write as often
as I had something to get off my chest
and with each polite reply
they very gently wrote me off
as they proved too attached
to 'infallible family values'.

They let me keep on writing
which may have kept me
from planning my suicide.

Like the poor of the past
who lived beyond the pale,
I sought my own course
and moved away from those
who confined me to misfortune,

If I had to accept misfortune
it must be mine, and nobody else's. 

My Last New Year Card

'Untitled/Uncertain' by William Hockaday  

 

A Safe Prediction For 2023

And temptation will say is somebody else
whilst it goes about it's business
of deceiving you by other means
for what it thinks is worth more to it
then it should be worth to you. 

 

Signs Of Greater Age (53)

Wanting to paraphrase Mae West,
whilst looking at what is on your shelves. 

'It is not the books in my home,
it is the lives in my books....   '.

Because with age and time
the draw of human company thins,
For all their limits books never refuse you.

Books remain consistent and kind,
to whoever is attentive and generous to them...

My First New Year Card

Albert Gleizes - Composition 1937 - 1938

 

Long Live Sincerity

Because with the depth to which
kitsch has penetrated popular culture
the sincerity with which it is delivered,
whether it is faked or real,
is what makes that kitsch endurable,
though what would be even better
would be an inclusive sense of humour.

The Isolation And Bravery Of The Bearded Lady

    As a gay man I liked bearded men well before I was able to say that I liked them, and make personal the reasons why I liked them. When I was growing up the accepted markers for masculinity, when I was growing up were the ability to be drunk and demonstrate to the credulous, particularly yourself, that you were sober. 

  As 'an out gay man', aged thirty, I regrew the beard that I first grew as a teenager, and with the 'coming out' came feel that my beard was integral to me, an active expression of my character. The beard has remained an active part of my character over the three decades of 'being out' in which my character has changed.  

  When blogging and Tumblr came along two decades later I started a beard blog. Here it is. Over the ten years plus since I have never stopped putting more beards up. I have never given Tumblr's digital censor much work to do. If what I had was 'a fetish' then it was a remarkably polite as a fetish. I never saw the point in getting pushy about what I liked. I preferred to let the accumulated oddity of the large and singular collection of images explain me, and let any fetish labelling quietly put itself in lower case before appearing to be relatively normal; nothing to frighten the right wing 'normals' with.

  But one minority area to do with my appreciation of beard culture always always confounded me. Generally I am blind to the attractions of women. Their appearance does nothing for me. I like how women are more oriented more consensus than men often present themselves as being, but being fair is not the same as being fun. I was, and am, the same with women as I am about men, including bearded men, in drag. Drag only seemed okay to me if it was done uncompetitively and just for fun. And yes I have been there and it was not a T shirt that I got after and kept either.

  I was blind to that rare handsomeness that happens in bearded women. Allow me to correct that blind spot, somewhat. The above image is from that most celebrated and notorious of films, Todd Browning's 'Freaks' (MGM 1932) where a troupe of real circus actors acted in a horror film that looked all too real, and blurred too many lines between reality and fantasy to be a mere entertainment. Bearded women have to brave in ways I never had to be when I grew my beard as part of my renewed public identity; their beard 'outs' them in a way that they have to be careful how to own the resulting public profile. 

  It is not surprising then that historically they often became circus attractions. They got an income, had somewhere to live, and had their community with the circus troupe, who were self contained and in spite of being midgets and having all sorts of physical differences from normal full height human beings were adults with capable adult minds who valued their autonomy. That they played up their physical differences in public for show and for money, well they had to. How else would they survive outside of being institutionalised by a misbegotten science which mangled the public understanding of mental health, and lied about what genetics actually were to grotesque degree? Such mental health experts and geneticists as there were would have locked up all the dwarves etc without looking at them, and labelled them 'defective' based what other people said about their appearance.

  Finally, Empress of The Blues, Bessie Smith, who I had a voice, a skin tone, physical strength, and an appetite for life that was much fuller than any beard man I could imagine, did the same as those circus troupes of dwarves and other human misshapes, if you will pardon the expression. When she had earned enough she bought her own luxury railway carriage in which she travelled to avoid the outright racism of hotels, who would refuse her entry and where they let her play would have humiliated her by making her play to white only audiences. 

  The road is fine place to live and work if you are an outsider, long may it be there for outsiders who need the income, and the space it gives them away from 'normal' society, particularly for outsiders like bearded ladies.   

My Fourth Christmas Card Of 2022

'Untilted' an undated artwork
by Liam Warr

 

The More We Search The Past, The More We See The Future

Ninety Years ago the Soviet Union
under then-new leader Joseph Stalin
started to electrify Russian factories,
and collectivised farming in Ukraine.

Between them, the oppressive Soviet State
and a feckless and untried Soviet agri-science
created what became The Holodomor in which
millions of Ukrainians starved as crops failed,
those who survived it felt that they were unlucky.

How bad was it? Ukrainians cooked and ate
their domestic pets and even boiled shoe leather,
and, shoeless, searched for something more to eat.

What we see now under a newer Russian Czar
is not on the scale of absolute suffering of the past,
there are several differences between now and then.
What we see now is played out through a divided media,
amid new divisions in world energy politics,
but the suffering and deaths remain real enough
whether they are of unprepared Russian conscripts,
well motivated Ukrainian soldiers or civilians.

Whether it is more of The Holodomor
or the start of the third World War 
matters not, the upheavals of the future
are going to be global and painful
and make the rich richer and the poor poorer,
where the poor remain glad to be alive at all. 

My Third Christmas Card Of 2022

'Black Sun' painted in 1969
by Alexander Calder  

Godwyn's Law Updated ?

In the American real-time media
and English language youtube
Donald Trump, the 45th president
of the USA, once the great white hope
and now future has been,
is more mentioned than ever.

How long will it be
before he supplants Adolph Hitler
as the person to mention,
in pursuit of winning a weak argument,
as perpetuated by Godwyn's Law?

Quote Of The Year (Any Year You Like)

'Our thoughts are controlled as soon as we learn to speak. 
There is far more freedom of speech than there is of thought.'

-Anthony Weir

My Second Christmas Card of 2022

 'Rote Giebel - Rote Dächer', painted in 1910

by Alexie von Jawlensky

Let's Pretend ?

When Kurt Vonnegut wrote
'We are what we pretend to be'
he was not writing about sexuality
but he might as well have been.

He continued by warning
'So we must be careful... ',
he surely knew from then on
that his words were doomed to be ignored,
when they became a quotation.

We are never careful enough,
with quotations or with real life.
Maybe Sam Beckett had it best
when he said 'Fail Again, fail better'. 

My First Christmas Present To Myself

Because it takes courage to first recognise
and then accept it when you discover
that you are disliked, particularly when 
the people who dislike you are dishonest
and cowards when the matter reaches
admitting how low you are in their esteem. 
  

 

Toxic Taboos

I was quite young when I first learned
how the mechanics of taboo worked,
the crudity with which they stopped
open cruelty, and crudity.

Taboo meant that with no words
for an action the action never happened,
since the thought behind the action
could not be imagined,
or so the theory ran.....

Having no language to think
neutered the banned action,
along with neutering the idea
of ideas being in any way abstract.

The moral life was good actions
done without prompt or thought,
lest thought lead to choice
and choice lead to error.

We were meant to be moral robots.

The older I got the more I found the reverse
that we were not robots and we were not moral,
as I became aware of how dismissively
adults listened to children and talked children
down as if they never took anything in. 

I also learned how children
could be malicious and selfish
with an ease more consummate
than could be taken in at face value
by selfless children like me,
who were more selfless than they seemed.

When selflessness was said to be a virtue,
my 'modesty' came from having no personal space. 

In blind obedience I went where I was told,
into where harmful actions followed
as men (it was always men) directed me
for their own financial ends and walked,
and talked, all over me in their indifference.

And I was lost for words to describe it. 

My First Christmas Card Of 2022

'Untitled' painted in 1940 by Robert Wogenscky. 

 

Picture Set Of The Month - December - The Landscapes of Felix Vallotton

'The Lake in the Bois de Boulogne' as painted in 1921
by Swiss/French painter Felix Vallotton (1865-1925).

'Snowy Landscape' as painted in 1925 by 
Swiis/French painter Felix Vallotton (1865-1925).

'The Jura Mountains' as painted in 1900 by
Swiss/French painter Felix Vallotton (1865-1925).

 

'Sunset', as painted in 1918 by Swiss/French
painter Felix Vallotton (1865-1925).
  

Donald Trump Explained To Non-Americans

I couldn't quite tell whether it is me
or whether it is a mere side-effects
of the choice that youtube presents,
but I have succumbed to the vice
of watching American political news.

I think I know why I fell for it,
because what is presented works
as a self important soap opera,
where the more self important
a politician's comments seem
the more they suck the viewer in,
where the viewer senses the jeopardy
in the politician's public comments
will before before the politician does.

Does this explain the gravitational pull
of the black hole that is Donald Trump?

Other human black holes
full of empty noise are available,..

How To Talk 'Dog'

In different languages across Europe
from here where the mao is much larger
and ther is much more information
about the different languages described.. 

 

'The Trickle Down Effect' Updated ?

The first version of the trickle down effect
was 'The government is giving more money
to the wealthy so they can spend more
on the poor, rather than on themselves,
to make those with less more healthy.'.

Private charity was the way ahead.

The rich did not know what to do
with the money they already had,
not that this embarrassed them,
but the gov't bet that giving to the wealthy
made the wealthy to be trusted more,
in spite of their ignorance, than were the poor
who were to be trusted less
in their thrift and humbleness.

That the money did not trickle down
from rich to poor was not the point;
the money was never meant to,
it was the gov't way of proving
that 'poverty is unfixable' in the long run.

The new trickle down effect
is that the leaders of a given
civic-minded organisation
are to be accepted as bullies
who expect to be fawned upon,
by those they see as beneath them
who in their turn expect to be fawned upon,
in their turn, until the lowest know how low
their status is by how much they are lied about,
and have nobody of lower rank to make look up to them.     

Book Review-'Heroic Failure' - Fintan O'Toole

I was wondering what plus points to commend this book to the casual reader for. I came up with one simple answer. What reading this book means is that I can now understand the appeal of The Daily Mail without ever having to read it ever again-for that alone the book is to be praised.  

I remember the campaign before the vote in June 2016 about whether the UK should remain in the European Union or whether the UK should leave. I remember the frenzied non-arguments and advertising this way and that, which was later proven to be over-budget and should have invalidated the vote. But the blown advertising budgets and false claims did nothing of the sort, even when they were later confirmed by BBC journalists. I remember the famous red bus emblazoned with how much more could be spent on the NHS if the UK left the EU. That bus was all over the media, and even then the leave plan, hidden from the public, was both for the UK to leave the EU and for the 'leave' government to stint on financing the NHS, like some secretive cheating and embezzling business partner.

I do not remember much of the narrative I was presented with prior to Brexit being the way Fintan O'Toole presents the arguments as here. I knew about how the English confuse reward with punishment in a version of sadism and masochism which they compound by denying that it is sadism and masochism. My memories of English sadism/masochism were very 1980s, where youths were expected to 'price themselves into work' but the work disappeared in front of them. There was nothing for them to 'price themselves' into/be paid less for. The jobs that anyone might be skilled up/trained to do disappeared into thin air, and a lot of unskilled work migrated to black economy which in theory did not exist-but everyone knew it did exist, and more that that it was a necessity that the black economy worked when the proper economy failed.

Forty years on and I have survived long term unemployment. The latest application of sadism/masochism became the UK vs the EU. It was as surprising as it was depressing when the chapter entitled 'The Charge of The Light Brigade' listed the many disasters that the English not only endured but multiplied the repercussions of by insisting that the original disaster could be overturned if the application of effort was great enough. I did wonder how much this was sadism/masochism and how much was not knowing when to stop flogging an idea past it's use by date. This in turn made me wonder whether the book was about trying to discover when Brexit was still in it's date, and what it's sell-by date used to be.

The book deals well with Boris Johnson the joker journalist who serially lied about the EU and when anyone quoted it to him or told him that it was a a lie and sacked him he said that they were fools if they ever took it seriously. Jacob Rees-Mogg and his cod-histories are also dispatched with confidence. O'Toole goes into the real Hundred year war (337-1453) and explains it's absurdities and vanities.

The afterword 'Amity Island' is a brilliant expose of the Boris Johnson method of majoritarianism, where if the suffering seems slight enough and few enough people suffer it then he is very happy and he knew how to convince everybody else to be happy. Dissecting that and the consequences of Brexit, where the United Kingdom is disunited and and disgruntled, and how the Tories reside over this disunity with promises that are inconsistent and incompatible with each other is oddly reassuring. If things seem bad then at least O'Toole exposes why. He is the first writer I have seen to explore the difference between England including London and England without London-something that forty years ago I would have said were vastly different but I would never have seen written about at the time.

Book title: 'Heroic Failure: Brexit and The Politics of Pain' 

Author: Fintan O'Toole

Publisher: Head of Zeus/Apollo. 

Updated version of the book released in 2021. 

One Man And His Dog

understanding themselves and each other
in terms that cannot be disputed
even when they are easily misunderstood. 

 

Pale Grey Track Suit Bottoms

I can't remember when grey track suit bottoms
became the definition of modern casual wear,
for fancy free young men to step out in.

At first they seemed to me like pyjamas
that young men could wear in public.  

I first noticed the change in legwear
when charity shops no longer stocked
my favourite coloured corduroys
-too few people now donated them
with wear left in them anymore.

From my past I knew
how young men disliked wearing underwear.
I have been there, I went through that phase
and many others as minor 'acts of rebellion'.

Nowadays I feel faintly alarmed
at the clear freedom of movement
that youths show when they walked
down the street in their tracksuits
wearing nothing underneath
-uncaring of the thoughts
they might be prompting in others. 

When they do that in my presence
I have to remind myself of how much
Victorian gentlemen once did the same
and hid what they were doing
behind resolutely asexual language.

Signs Of Greater Age (52)

The older you get the more you find
that you still like going the movies
but modern Hollywood franchise films
fill up far too many screens
and they lack the depth of character
that you knew films used to have;
the franchise is a sealed world
that denies the viewer
the most creative conflicts
because the viewer is younger.

What pleases you instead are slow documentaries
where some real life subject from the recent past
is explored in all their conflicts and resolve
to survive as themselves, against the odds.   

Transports Of Gratitude

One of the daily graces I enjoy
is that I don't drive
and don't own a vehicle
whilst living in a car culture.

What makes it a grace
is that public transport
is trusted because it subsidised,
and I have reached an age
where such transports of delight
are offered to me, for free.
They need passengers like me.

The citizens of many small countries
who think nothing of life elsewhere
think that only they thank the drivers,
when they disembark from the bus.

What the citizens of such countries
don't realise is that part of why
passengers give thanks so readily
is for the quality of publicly owned transport.

If every country that believed
that such everyday gratitude
was unique to them were to ask abroad, 
'What do your passengers say
when they disembark from the bus?'
where public transport was similar
they would find that such thanks
are as universal as the subsidies
that make for quality of public transport. 

Happy Centenary Kurt Vonnegut Jnr

The writer who predicted much the modern world
through lamenting and lampooning the direction
it was going in. Here is an article for the reader
who is new to this author where his books
are celebrated, worst, none of them really bad,
 to the best which are hard to put down once started.   

 

Mother Night Indeed

 'The experience of sitting there in the dark, hearing the things I had said, didn't shock me. It might be helpful in my defence to sat that I broke into a cold sweat, or some such nonsense. But I had always known what I did. How? Through that simple and widespread boon to mankind - schizophrenia*.'. 

Quoted from page 116 of 'Mother Night' written in 1961 by science fiction writer, satirist and essay writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr (1922-2007). Here is the writers website.

*A long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to a series of faulty perceptions, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality, and a withdrawal from personal relationships into fantasy and delusion. Overall a sense of mental fragmentation. It may well seem like a rational response when reality seems to be complex to the point of being intangible. 

A Thought Too Late For Halloween

I am not entertained by ghouls,
or ghosts, or things without names
that don't know how to be quiet at night.

I find better reasons for fear
from being subject to jealousy
in confined spaces where, too late,
I realise that I am the target of something
all too human, and all too possessive,
for me to easily escape it.

This jealousy can happen all year round
so Hallowe'en 'celebrations'
are mostly seasonal vexations.

The most engaging experience
of this jealousy I ever had, second hand,
was seeing 'The Exorcist' at the cinema,
and less for the reason you might guess.

The cinema was full to standing room only
at the back, with young men from West Belfast
who loudly cheered The Devil, on the screen,
when, through Regan, he audibly taunted the priest
before the priest finally threw himself out of the window
from the height of the fifteenth floor apartment.

I had never seen such an anti-clerical mob before
I had no idea what they could be jealous for.

Picture Set Of The Month - The Plate Designs of Clarice Cliff

'Comet' design painted circa 1930 by Clarice Cliff
(1899-1972) she was active as designer of domestic
pottery from 1922 to 1962. 

 

Geometric design circa 1930. Clarice Cliff started
work as a gilder, a free-hand painter of gold on pottery,
aged 13 until she came to the attention of the factory
owner, Arthur Colley Austin Shorter.  

'Zap' design first seen 1930. In 1927 she was given
her own studio and white 'glost' ware on which to draw
freehand designs in which she incorporated
any mistakes she made as if they were intended.  

'Blue Autumn' circa 1932. The designs of Clarice Cliff
were stamped as hers with a 'bizzare' stamp from 1927
onward. With that stamp came a staff of 70 young
women employed to hand-copy her designs. 

'Red Roofs' circa 1931. Her work sold well in the
1930's through out the world, particularly in the
British Empire. The factory she made designs for
was bought over in 1963, but still hand-painted
pottery according to her designs up to 1968.  
 Here is the artist's website. 

Oil And Water

When oil and water are blended
to make plastic it is the end
of a lot more water than it should be.   

 

When Humour Wins The Day

When the news gets bad enough
that what the newspapers tell us 
gives you, and who you trust,
arguments for trying to make sense of it,
then please don't be ashamed
at rejecting the indigestible,
and wanting humour instead.

You want it less because you need the laughs
and more because for humour to work well
the script has be tight, to be consistent,
and have a strong internal logic to be
what is in effect a self contained world,
that works better because it is not reality.      

Six Degrees

Used to be the width of separation
between two random strangers
when, together, they set to work out
who they held in common
for them living in proximity to each other.

Now that same six degrees
is how much hotter the world might be
for there to be nobody left
to have anyone, or anything,
in common with, not even
for the lonely scientist
who is measuring the rates
of animal and human extinction.   

A Summary Of The Internet

For anyone with any humility, finding The Truth
is more than we can take in with much confidence.
To expect the truth to 'make sense' easily,
or be obvious, is surely asking for far too much. 

 

The Best Mistakes Are Shared Mistakes

When Adam partook
of the tree of learning,
encouraged by his wife,
who was part of himself
more than he realised,
he was doing nothing more
than E(a)vesdropping.

The Fear Of Poverty Has Always Been With Us

How well I remember 'growing up poor',
it did not mean what many might think,
it never meant a total lack of money. 

It meant being kept busy,
'keeping the wolf from the door'
to the point where we dare not ask
whether the wolf was actual debt,
or the fear of debt,
the fear of delay
in paying the bills
until the red letter bill
dropped through the letterbox;
that was the bill of shame,
and proof of profligacy
beyond endurance.

Many a time we cut corners
to contain our costs, knowing
that what made the present bearable
would cost us dearer in the end.
With every economy we made
we knew that we were denying
our future selves their choices. 

On Being 'Self Directing'

Choosers will never be beggars,
however poor they are.
But choosers who allow others
to choose for themselves
will be harder to find
in selfish times.

Read It Again

Because when any law presents itself
as so totalitarian and dystopian as to be
written only for the ease of the rulers,
and dis-ease of the ruled, who have to live by it,
the ruled will resist the new discomfort
which is for the comfort for the rulers.

 Those most in need of what the law refuses
them will be at their most secretive
and their least controllable, given half a chance.
Here is some advice about internet security
for those who are contemplating abortion
in police states where computers run everything
and abortion is circumscribed to the point of being illegal.  

 

Picture Set Of The Month - Irish Bank Notes

The last Irish £10 bank note, issued 1992-2001.
In 2001 the euro replaced the punt/pound, this note
was noted for depicting James Joyce in The Obrien design.  

An Irish £1 Bank note that was legal tender 1945-60
featuring Lady Hazel Lavery (1880-1935) American wife
of painter and society artist Sir John Lavery.

An Irish £20 bank note featuring William Butler
Yeats, it was legal tender between 1976-93 the quote
'we fed our hearts on fantasies' vertically on the left
was not meant to refer how the pounds in our pockets
can, and will, vary in the value of what they can buy. 

 

An Irish £10 Banknote featuring Jonathan Swift
and they were legal tender between 1976-93.
Please read here for more info on Mr Swift.  

Poor Moon Of Didymos

This tiny asteroid moon, Dimorphos,
was was quietly orbiting around
it's barely bigger asteroid host, Didymos,

as together they orbited the universe,
somewhere between Earth and Mars.
Until N.A.S.A. sent a rocket
to destroy tiny Dimorphos,
to prove to humans
that when the earth
is in the path of an asteroid
the asteroid will be the target
of N.A.S.A. rockets until,
in smaller pieces, those pieces 
orbit away away from the earth
and leave mass extinction
of species to be solely man made.

   

Mechanical Miracles

may appear to inspire belief,
but appearances deceive.

When something mechanical
does what it should,
when it saves human effort,
relieves human pain,
all whilst saving the planet,
we should be more than thankful. 

When we let the mechanics
of what we live through
dictate how we should live
we become the anti-miracle,
the alchemy in reverse,
where, in lock-step with the machines
that we make and we depend upon,
we make narratives in where we detach
ourselves ever further
from the cycles of nature
until the miracle of mortality,
that no machine can stop, reclaims us.    

Happier Beginnings ?

Everyone wants that softer landing,
and for many a sense of loss
remains a hard thing to crack.

But through the means
that humans give themselves
we have extended our ease,
from drugs that limit pain
and keep people mobile
up to a self administered death
where for the wealthy,
where when their health fails,
money gives them that final choice.

For the poor the wealth that suits them best
is to retrospectively reduce the pain
they never needed in the first place
from childhoods racked by inequality.

In Memory Of....

Treasure lives where the heart lies,
where Moth and rust make honest dust,
compared with human aspiration.

Matthew ch.6 v.21.

Grief And Grieving

are both personal processes.

For them to be authentic
to the loss that they observe
they must surely be private,
or rather reserved for the few
with a similar sense of loss
for the person who is grieved for.

To live 'amid a national grief'
is to live where nothing seems real.
It is to live where the media
compounds individual losses 
until they lack all individuality.

The presentation of loss
simultaneously represents
everybody and nobody,

The listener soon becomes inured
to what they hear, immune to the grief
for being unable to recognise the grievers.

Diversity Based On Privilege

is one of the many oxymoronic,
and conflicted, figures of speech
that since it exists in public life
has to be embodied in Politics.

As Politics amplifies this paradox
with 'culturally diverse' cabinets
packed with people who all went
to the sort of school where the fees
are investments in future elites, 
and the women who are picked to lead
are chosen and voted for by as few people
as seems it seems decent to admit,
the better to benefit as few as possible,
all the public can ask is how long it takes
before their organised estrangement
shows up in the leader's poll ratings. 

By then it will be too late for reform.
or reversing the slide towards decline
that benefiting just the few engenders.

Everything Fades To Red,

and fades to nothing in the end.
All nature wants to disappear,
As who we once were,
what we did, and why we did it,
are misremembered by the living
for whom mis-ascribing the past
is how they live, their tribute
 to everything around them.   

 

When One Mask Is Never Enough

Friedrich Nietzsche: “Danger in riches. — Only (s)he who has spirit ought to have possessions: otherwise possessions are a public danger. For the possessor who does not know how to make use of the free time which his possessions could purchase him will always continue to strive after possessions: this striving will constitute his entertainment, his strategy in his war against boredom. Thus in the end the moderate possessions that would suffice the man of spirit are transformed into actual riches – riches which are in fact the glittering product of spiritual dependence and poverty. They only appear quite different from what their wretched origin would lead one to expect because they are able to mask themselves with art and culture: for they are, of course, able to purchase masks. By this means they arouse envy in the poorer and the uncultivated – who at bottom are envying culture and fail to recognize the masks as masks – and gradually prepare a social revolution: for gilded vulgarity and histrionic self-inflation in a supposed ‘enjoyment of culture’ instil into the latter the idea ‘it is only a matter of money’ – whereas, while it is to some extent a matter of money, it is much more a matter of spirit.”  - Aphorism no 310, pages 283/4 from 'Human all too Human; A Book for Free Spirits' (1996) by Frederick Nietzsche   

Picture Set Of The Month - September - The Album Art Of Sun Ra

Sun Ra (1914-93) was America's best kept
secret and the leading exponent of free jazz
from the times of his earliest recordings in the 1940's.  

His first recordings were blues singles but he hit
stride with his Arkestra jazz LP 'Sun Song' in 1957.
Here is an informed article with plenty more of the
record sleeves that so illustrate his sense of space. 

He was a conscientious objector in WW2 and settled 
on doing forestry work in lieu of military service,
White psychiatrists described him as 'Sexually
perverted and a well educated coloured intellectual'.  

Here is a 1976 live version of familiar tune
'Take the A train', which illustrates the avante garde
nature of black futurism, his gift to Black America.
by Sun Ra and his Arkestra 

 

How Real Hell is....

Depends on where you live in Europe
or the UK. That said belief an any sort of afterlife
or in Heaven/Nirvana/Paradise is either a sign
of the comfort that richest award themselves
or of extreme naivety about the world we live in.

Finally this survey tells us nothing about how much
Hell might have invested in us through making us
disbelieve in it, to varying degrees, whilst waiting
to make itself real at the end of human experience.   

 

Reverse Your Own Way Into The Future

Because the past never really goes away, anyway....

 

An Anthropologist Writes....

One group says they believe in purity,
and socially security for families,
through marriage where the father
owns all the property by himself
and directs the values of the family
because they cannot direct themselves,
all with anyone ever calling it 'Patriarchy'.

They say they believe in Creationism,
a hierarchy where God tells the man,
to tell his wife and children
that root and branch, man,
woman and their offspring 
who have to be above the animals
and the plants, of which they live
that live and die with no regard
to property, or buying or selling
not even when men trap, eat,
and and sell them to other men.

The other group are men
who believe in evolution
in order to accept the sensuality
that family values says cannot exist
in 'do not touch' type societies.

There 'family values' are law,
the whole of the law,
and nothing but the law,
but in secret these men celebrate
their (r)evolutionary sensuality, 
denying even the temptation
to voyeurism, a warping of their creed, 
that 'family values' invites,
and never admitting that what they do
has a name, where it's name is 'cottaging'.

The family values they hide from
mean that the part they share less
are their lips which respond
to the gentlest of shared movements.

Legion

 Safe in psychiatric hospital

I had placed four friendly plastic bags,
Which once held loving gifts of fruit,
Chocolate, magazines, flowers.
Firmly over my head
In the cloakroom of the locked ward.
Like Legion, I wrestled with the demons.
Tramp, tramp tramping through my brain.
A legion was a Roman Regiment of
Six thousand troops.
Show me a more accurate picture of mental illness.

After my failed cloakroom debacle on the ward,
The self harming  (….razors, needles, fire)
Young girls aged 14 to 21,
And I were irresistibly drawn together,
Our hollow eyes locked in a nightmare of understanding.
They mothering my ageing self with
Hugs, toffees under the pillow,
Carefully drawn pictures,
The delicate offering of painting my fingernails
In shocking pink.
Caught tears at two in the morning.
Legion, in among the tombs, watching his demons
Crashing via two thousand pigs over the Gadarene cliffs;
The relief of it! echoed later as he sits,
Clothed and in his right mind,
Calmly.
By the side of Jesus.
Who is to say that an echoing miracle was not begun in my mind,
(But slowly)
By that small regiment of unlikely,
Oh so young, self-scarred angels
In the locked ward?
After all
Here I am sitting, calmly, writing poetry once more.

By Belfast author, poet and Christian activist Sylvia Sands, about whom I wish I knew more from here. 

An Articulate Comedian Writes....

 

Bowled Over

 It is years, decades, since The Grateful Dead
sealed their reputation and invented 'Americana'
long before other song writers took up the mantle,
now attributed The Dead, where songs described
where they lived and who had lived before them.

The Grateful Dead were long gone by the time
'Americana' became shorthand for lazy reporters,
they were worn out from from touring and decay

Now they are more a memory
in the frazzled minds of the punters
of gigs they put on, gigs where
as one attendee of their 1972 tour
now memorably described them
as 'The rock and roll equivalent
of a cricket test match, lots of lulls
with unexpected flashes of excitement'.

It is forty one years since I was first bowled over,
and there have been many lulls in my life since,
but the band have been the constant to me
through many dwelling and relationships
they will see me thought many more...

As Jesus Never Said

about Judas, a disciple he liked, and his accountant,
'Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer
and for God's sake make sure you know the difference'.

What Jesus thought about how to trust 
an accountant was never recorded.... 

Picture Set of The Month - August - The Album Artwork of Sir Peter Blake.

A watercolour image of John Peel (1939-2004)
for the 2006 compilation of tracks that were
identified with him as a DJ, from the first
decade of the punk era.     

 

Fresh from the debacle of his most famous
brush with celebrity via The Beatles, Blake
completed this just as bright but more compact image
for then newly starting out folk musicians Pentangle.  

Sir Peter Blake's association with Ian Dury
goes back to when Dury was his pupil and Blake
taught art, at Walthamstow Arts School.
What chance Dury returning the favour? Done!   

Ian Stewart (1938-85) was the member
of The Rolling Stones who hid in the background
because 1-he was probably the best musician among
them and 2-in the early days of the band his image
 ran counter to the 'bad boy' image that the band
wanted to project to gain traction with the public.