Have Yourself A Minimalist New Year

 Because part of the joy of minimalism is how effortlessly it starts, from the simplest musical pulses, and how from there it grows into a tuneful noise of epic proportions by engaging with musicians who range from the least to the most skilled/experienced where the noise each musician makes is of equal value to the end result. 

I Am Attracted To Food

as much as the next man,
but often recipes defeat me,
particularly those in weekend
lifestyle magazines where a chef
who owns a restaurant
takes something simple
and makes it complex
by adding hard-to-find ingredients
to reinforce his master chef credentials.

Given the odd flavours these cooks throw in,
to make themselves see more impressive,
I almost expected to find his kitchen sink
listed as one of the ingredients
he added to added to make the dish seem special.    

  

The Written Off Life

 I was born wrong for the world
I was raised in, that I was meant to inherit.
There men were men, and if some of them
were bullies, and others got drunk,
then 'a bit of bullying never hurt anyone',
because bullies were never hurt by anything,
and they were the measure of everything.

According to the them only the folks
who nursed grievances ever got hurt,
and they hurt themselves
more than anyone else. 

The only kind of male who mattered 
was hierarchical in character
where whatever else he was, was always boss
of his own world. Particularly when
that world disagreed with itself internally.

I was egalitarian, a male of a type
that went unrecognised, where
for my sense of fairness to be believed
it needed internally consistent behaviour.

I found my greatest consistency as an adult
when I endured being written off by employers
who required me to have an experience
that they all expected other employers to provide.

I was 'too soft' in my inexperience
to be the sort of aggressive team player,
who was fit enough to fight against
the opposing teams of other employers.

My life's mission has been to make do
and patch up the leftovers
rejected by harder men and women.

Worse lives happen at sea,
where the tides wash away
more than men ever remember. 

Meet The New Realism

It is just like the old pessimism,
but it is clearer eyed and more self renewing,
the better to set tighter limits on false hopes
and diminish cheap optimism.   

 

My First New Year Card of 2023

A rather jolly image of hope for the year to come,
in all the ways it combines hope
with the allowance for mistaken outcomes.

 

Lough Neagh Has Gone Green

From agricultural waste and pesticides
seeping from the land into the water.

And also from local government no longer having
a dedicated department to look after all the waters,
all the loughs and rivers, in the modern N. Ireland. 

This lough was formed by the giant Fin McCool
supposedly scooping out the the earth and throwing it
at a rival Scots giant, and missing but creating
the Isle Of Man between Ireland and Scotland.
I wonder what angry green giant, what driven reformer,
can restore the waters to health and fitness for fish,
and for human swimming in? And when can they start?       

 

My Memories Of The Quakers

I remember well the Quakers meeting house,
and Quaker meetings, I attended as a teenager.
The building was so old the government bade it
be preserved, and yet it was so plain inside. 

Quaker politics were critical of government,
the government of the days I that I knew,
and every other era, from the 1650's onward.
This made them attractive to many,
who were looking for more than to rebel;
they sought a more enduring rebellion. 

Rebelling seemed like the easy part,
what was harder was finding the flow
of meetings where the silence should come
from our insides until we were invited to speak
but then only through the spirit. To the uninitiated,
meetings felt like solving a spiritual crossword
where they did not understand the clues.   

What the meetings make clearer
to the newbies there was how full of noise
our heads were, which the more experienced
were ill prepared to explain, to help them
quietly dispose of the aural clutter,
which the experienced mostly hoped,
would pass if those newbies stayed the course
which they would complete in other places.  

Nowadays I have no family.
I live alone in the country,
and I like quiet more than noise,
and some noises more than others.

I like the Quakers most,
when I met them socially, in town,
where, by pure chance,
they had a spare ten mins
and we could find a quiet spot
to have an impromptu meeting.  

Between me and the screen,
I have now what I lacked then
the more open meeting place
through which to guide myself
past all my own old noises,
towards the quiet that seems restful.

This blog is dedicated to the memory of Keith Nichols and Sue Hethershaw, two very particular people I met at the Quakers, without whom I would not be the person that I am now.

My Fourth Christmas Card Of 2023

This card seemed perfect in it's homage
to a reassuring past, it's invitation to
built in obsolescence, and wholesome
way of being recycled, it simply melts!

 

The Best Approach To The Season Of Good Will

Because at least that way we will retain
whatever good will, out there, there is to be shared.
 

 

Putting the 'War' Into 'Forward'

The meaning of 'The Stockholm Sydrome'
has changed a lot over the fifty years
since the phrase was first coined.

It was once a byword for the feelings
hostages have for the men who confine them
where the hostage were said to identify more
with causes of the men who held them
than with the authorities trying to free them.

As an explanation for perverse values
it came from the police and the authorities,
Where else could such an idea come from?
Who else could speak with authority?

Only in more recent times has the story
been re-examined and the lack of empathy
from the police for both the bank robbers
and their captives, alike, been recognised.

The original captive, bank clerk, Christine, 
had her own reasoning and her own way
of surviving being captive. Over time
ideas like 'battered wife syndrome'
and other ideas nestled in around it.  

But captives everywhere
have to find their own way
of surviving both their captors,
and the often hostile treatment
of their rescuers after.

Presently Gaza is in ruins,
more than 20,000 Gazans are dead
many more refugees, displaced abroad.
A presently unhappy story can only get worse.

In Gaza there is not a single hospital,
or more practically a mortuary,
and the living, told to leave places
that Israel says it plans to flatten
to places where Israel then searches,
and does not find, even the ghost of Hamas.

Hamas or Israel are tied together in a Gordian knot,
both accuse the other, and accusations, backed by arms,
only tighten that knot; We don't have to side with,
or against either, we should side with the non-combatants,
the ordinary Palestinian people as they struggle towards
picking their exit from the purgatory that traps them.    

My Third Christmas Card of 2023

'Dylisheus 3', by Don Van Vliet more commonly known
as Captain Beefheart (1941-2010), under which name he,
with the support of several different line-ups of The Magic Band
  released twelve fine avant-garde blues albums for nine
different record labels between 1967 and 1982
and tour Europe, the UK, and the USA, in support of said albums.
Painting scored over music with him not least because
it does not require a record label, does not require touring,
and it very much does it require musicians who were apt
to rebel when asked to play music and adopt pseudonyms
that seemed plain weird beyond all comprehension. 

 

Technology And Language

Presently many people lead comfortable lives,
that are more assisted by 'AI', than they realise.
They don't recognise it because so far A.I. has
been confined to tasks that are rich in mediocrity.
The work has gone on, and on, and on, uncredited.

Now AI has been allowed to work more
with language than before. Huge swathes
of world literature have been fed into machines
in an imitation of giving typewriters to monkeys
and expecting Shakespeare. If we wait long enough.

Computers have proven to be better at copying
than monkeys proved adept at writing plays,
replete with long words, unstable, characters
and plots that seem to be made up on the spot, with hindsight.

Living authors are annoyed at how the creativity
they once lived well off and took a small pride in
now pays them nothing, because machines
give away inferior versions of their work for free.

Beyond the loss of income for what was once,
talent permitting, a comfortable way of life, 
there is a much more serious area of life
that we might call artificial, about which
we are right to worry; war and reporting. 

There is always a danger connected
to collecting the facts in a military conflict.
This makes the truth hide from journalists,
who seek to share it with the world,
whilst resisting the pull of propaganda.

Hamas vs Israel is only the latest example.  

Have Yourself A Minimalist Christmas

 Because like having a minimalist rest of the year, occasion and non-occasion, you can have it anytime, and a little musical minimalism can help us reduce stress. It will always carry the same sense of time flowing, and making sense, in the moment in which it happens. The less the fuss we make of 'the season of goodwill' the more we will sense the sense the goodwill the season is meant to represent, and be taken up in it. Music credits; 'A Rainbow In Curved Air' as written in 1968 by minimalist composer Terry Riley, and performed here on April the 15th 2012 in the VPRO office. The piece was arranged here by Anthony Fiumara and Arnold Marinissen, played by Luna Park Ensemble.

When I Go To Parties

 I don't do that badly;
when people talk to me
they know my name,
whilst I temporarily forget
theirs, and who I am,
and where I come from.

But still, I am accepted. 

Other Non-Events Are Available

I remember the spectres of Christmas past
clear enough to want to leave them be,
the cards from that many relatives
that when we put strings up on the living room walls,
to put the cards on, there were always too many
for them all to go on display. 

With our many relatives living in the town,
most of the cards were delivered by hand.

With the way that so many cards were sent,
that also demanded a return, Christmas was a campaign
thought for what and whom it was hard to tell.
None of us were church goers, and if one of us
ever thought to go, another would stop them going,
for fear that going might make them being happy. 

The detail I remember most, and now find most odd
is the tiny plastic pegs which reflected the light
as they held the cards on the string on the wall.

No need for them now. I get two cards a year
and send the same. I expect the cards I send
to be treated the like the cards I receive
-the are best kept in a draw, and left unopened
until long after the non-event they celebrate.

Concentrate!

The world media have been calling the places
where refugees congregate to survive
'refugee camps' for many decades now.
Whereas if  these place were labelled
according to function they would be called
'Displaced persons camps', because
the people there were displaced
from where they were before,
though calling the second and third
generation 'displaced' is pushing it. 
Most honestly 'Concentration camps',
is the best phrase to describe these places
because they concentrate there,
because world they are part of
won't let them disburse anywhere else.      

The Ever Popular P. T. Barnum Effect

I wish I could be given a free lunch
for every time in recent years
I have heard P.R. promotions
based around the rebuttal of some 'fact'
or story which when I examined it
revealed that what was rebutted
could not have been
even slightly true in the first place.

The story was an answer
to a question that nobody had asked,
and nobody had any interest in.

It was a ruse and a lie, used to draw
the public's attention to some bigger fiction
that the artist who had made the rebuttal
was out to make a lot more money out of.

My Second Christmas Card Of 2023

'Abstract Composition' as created in 1921
by Hungarian artist Fred Forbat (1897-1972).
The best goodwill is of necessity somewhat
abstract, and distant. That way it retains more 
for later when it will be more needed.

 

Thought For The Day

In most modern speech-based radio programming
the question of religion is awkward, to say the least.
For many programmers, who programme for a secular
and liberal audience, saying the least is their best option 
-their safest choice with regard to religion.

To this end the Today programme on Radio 4
has 'Thought for the day', a daily faith-based
reflection on issues in the news agenda.

There the quality and deftness of the comment
varies between the issues of the day, and the faith
of the presenter. At three minutes long it is brief.
Saying anything substantial in that short a time
that also does sound, well, cliched, is difficult.

I still don't understand why the slot
is the time length of one side
of a seven inch record, and how
that length of time was chosen.

The comments made in that three minutes
speak most of the country of the broadcaster,
which when heard in other countries,
even when you know the language,
may sound distant, foreign and tired.

But when the listener can imagine the parish,
or faith community, the speaker is from
this helps them recognise how every faith
starts somewhere, and ripples into a wider world.  

The Online Half-Life

In the context of online petitions
what should 'taking action' mean?

It seems like common sense to say
that it should mean more than adding
your signature to the cause of the day.
Online we are all, to varying degrees, 
keyboard warriors looking for a cause
to 'fight' for. But action is something
that happens away from the screen,
like sharing a meal, washing up, or gardening.

Actions are where we meet people, we listen,
and decide together how to change the world,
and be part of the change we want to live with,
well beyond us being keyboard warriors.       

We Measure And Flatten

the world through how share
the statistics that we hear hurled
by important people at each other
across a media, where
what the numbers mean
is only the start of the argument
about how to share our wealth
with people we never meet,
the measure of whose existence
is how much they suffer.

Our distance from the needy
is something we keep for our benefit.
The rich no longer have the loose change
to give to the beggars they pass on the street
-they are too detached in their security
and now they only use smartphones,
on which they store their visa details.

When being able to feel means feeling pain
for whatever reason, whether real or feigned,
then any and every unfeeling serenity 
will always always be our route to insanity.

My First Christmas Card Of 2023

The sender did not leave their name inside,
for me to send them one in reply. Maybe they feel
as numb about Christmas as I do, and knew
that their numbness had to be left somewhere.
I am happy to receive their numbness
and do not blame them at all. 

 

The Appointed Hour

Many an adult who grew up in the England
of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s will remember
how parenting was presented. What it meant.
The virtue of the gender based division of labour,
which soon turned into the inequality of reward. 
The male absenteeism from the home,
where the mother waited up, not knowing
how sober their husband would be
until he rolled up, the pub closed.

Much less dare she speculate
on the money he spent when there
and where that money might have gone
to improve the home he came back to.

But all that was there for any stranger to read,
were they ever allowed to see the household
and the family at their most honestly messy.

All this would be tidied away from the child
before the hour, appointed by the mother,
where after a dozen years of the parents
stalling all talk of conception and birth
with 'Babies come from under gooseberry bushes',
the reckoning has arrived for 'becoming an adult'.

With the child quietly sat down
the mother starts to bluff her way
past all the years of playground-led
slang-laden misinformation about sex
that she can no more describe than override
using the text in the book of line drawings
about 'how bodies work' that she quotes from,
to make herself sound authoritative and scientific.

The battle is over before it is begun.

The child knows that when they have to be still to listen,
they won't be listened to, they have nothing more
to offer than rigged assent to 'the conversation',
where the mother knows that she has to hide
all the unnamed links between sex, shame,
wanting, and the consequential financial debt,
which, if well explained, would make celibacy for life
seem like common sense, were it manageable. 

But the mother says what she says to encourage the child to marry.....   

Greedflation And War Profiteering

with wars presently between Russia and Ukraine,
and Israel and Palestine, and wars in many other places 
are surely the modus operandi of all the companies
shown at the centre of this map. 

Just as surely as each of the brands listed here
is the favourite of the state it is shown in
remains omnipresent in the lives
of the people of that state.

Where America leads, in consumerism,
it expects the world to follow. So big brands
around the world will institute greedflation
in all the countries that cannot stop themselves
from being exploited, whilst being reassured
by wall-to-wall international advertising. 
, 

 

Misplaced Gratitude

I remain happy to sign online petitions
for causes I believe should go further
though I never know how much my name
added to the list really furthers the cause,
or how much signing might further me.

What gets to me is the follow up email
where the organisers thank me, to invite me
to other actions in support of their cause.

They have no need to thank me.
When they do it reminds me of how
with nearly every interview I have heard
whilst I have been listening to my radio,
the interviewer thanks the guest,
and the guest thanks the interviewer
in a show of courtesy so synthetic
and showbiz-y it makes a mockery
of sincerely meant 'good manners'.

I wish they were mock-rude instead,
it would be more genuinely friendly.    

A Life Of Stillness

Here's to the lives of people's whose life
has stopped because they exist in communities
where the power of speech means accepting
not being listened to. The result is still a life,
even when their routines have the momentum 
of a stopped clock-what they do is right
twice a day, but nobody knows when.

Such limited cogence from thought to word
to action is all that is left open to them.

For all those whose lives are so highly structured
that by rote they turn a deaf ear when they sense
other people's need to be heard, you ignore
the stillness and the ache in the wait to be heard
by others at your peril. Being ignored will come
to you in good time; I hope you understand it then.

 

Hot Feet?

Is it more than muddling metaphors
to suggest that those who 'drag their feet'
in any particular area of their life,
and in the lives of others, 
should have said feet 'held to the fire'
to stop said feet dragging any further?

Low Times Pass Very Slowly

I have tried to fit myself in
around 'the season of goodwill',
but for all my adult life it has been
a square peg/round hole operation;
more and more I fail to recognise
who I am from the words I use,
with  every attempt at complying. 

My thoughts run dry against
the infinitude of false sentiment
the commercial culture generates
every December, and now much earlier.
Such that from November on, for safety
sake, I permit myself to talk to myself,
but I will not say anything personal
to anyone else, to them I accept
being a mute but agreeable nonentity.

It is better to avoid conflict in conversation.

The Potency Of Cheap Music

Forty five years ago I was a teenager
on reduced pocket money who propped up
the divisions my parents kept between them,
submerged in my mother's life, as her helper.
The only interest I could laid any claim to,
as mine alone was popular music in it's several forms,

the national pop music station
was the cheapest, all it required
a lot of time, and mine was cheap.

Then there was the thirty minutes
a week when T.O.T.P. was on television.

But music I could buy and play
by myself meant more to me.
This is where the local grocer came in.
For years they had a box to the right
of the wooden payment counter
that was regularly refilled
with ex-jukebox singles sold at my kind of price.

The grocers must have looked at me a lot
as I looked through the contents of the box
much more than other people did, combined,
as I slowly chose which single to buy that week.

Fast forward to small town life in Ulster,
far away from where I grew up.
Music  is still my major interest, only now
I find music made from the 60s to the 90s,
randomly on CD. I use it to learn about
music I was never exposed to in the past.

As an adult I remain the expert in cheapness
that I was apprenticed into as a child.
Unlike then, I no longer watch television.
Music scores over television every time.

Picture Set of The Month - December - The Abstract Paintings of Simon Hantai

'Blancs' one a series of 1974 paintings by
Hungarian born French painter Simon Hantai.

Hantai (1922-2008) started painting in Hungary,
but the art market proved to be a powerful draw
and a passport to the world. The centre of that world
was Paris. His first home became The Surrealists.

'Tabula' a 1976 painting by Simon Hantai, an artist
who went through many art movements, eventually
settling on creating his own names for his work.  

'Mariale m.a.' as painted in 1960 by Simon 
Hantai, a painting created just before
when the language of art criticism
changed, thus he was saved from
a lot of the false selling that was to come.   

'Mariale m.d.4' as painted in 1962 by 
Simon Hantai (1922-2008) a man who devised
the idea of pliage (creased) a kind of work
where the random creases makes meaningful
shapes of what would otherwise be uninteresting.
Here is more information about him.