The older I get the longer it becomes since I watched television everyday. Though in all it's variety, youtube makes an interesting vice - as part of the online life.
There I know I am meant to be writing, but the chatter distracts me.
Nowadays I have a more purely audio life, I like it when people speak in whole sentences and carry a thought forward in response to another speaker who is doing the same.
Speech based Radio has had me in it's grip since the mid 1980's and still has the means of transporting me. What I miss, more than I can say, is the rich in person conversations, sat with friends, that I used to have as a balance against my radio habit.
I write 'more than I can say' here. But of course I can say it -but nowadays I have too few people to say that I miss human company to/with. Whoever I seek company with lets me share that all too rarely, lest my company seem not apt for the occasion.
The print media remains online for loners, so I write but the people I used to joke, laugh, and lie with have all gone, that is why can't say what and who I miss.
I would not be missing them if they were with me and neither would I be writing out how I can't say who I miss, because of the presence of people around me.
I guess that when a person is an alcoholic, and is in denial about it, then they will cheerfully, concur, without the first scintilla of repentance, when quoting St Paul 1 Corinthians Ch 13 V 12, where the much travelled saint writes.... 'For now we see [life] through a glass darkly', and equally they could recite the phrase the follows, 'But I shall know even as I am known' knowing how popular they are with their friends in the pub.
This single would appear every year on The John Peel (evening) show on BBC Radio 1 at it's seasonally appropriate time in the mid seventies. Can, the German band who performed it, were popular but success was never so at ease with them as to compromised them.
There other mainstream single success was with the motorik disco of 'I Want More' find it here. With it's instrumental chorus and opaque vocal it holds up very well.
After seventeen years of being imprisoned Abdulmalik Bajabu has been released from Guantanamo Bay and has been returned by his jailers to his home country of Kenya.
Abdulmalik was held by the US Government for seventeen years without charge or trail.
In December 2021 six US federal agencies all agreed together that 'he posed no threat', which cleared him for release, but it has taken three years for his release to be organised.
One down twenty nine to go.... read more about this release here.
'Point in the Bow' as painted in 1927 by Wassily Kandinsky.
With the rise of Nazism Russian painter Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and his wife Nina Fled Germany. In January 1934 they moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine in a new building indicated to them by Marcel Duchamp. In exile the painter took full part in the artistic activity of the French capital.
Abstract artists welcomed him less than surrealist poets and artists did. He found common cause with Miró, Arp, Breton and Max Ernst, he met his compatriot Marc Chagall, the Romanian Brancusi, Alberto Magnelli, Fernand Léger and Piet Mondrian too. But ultimately, it was his surrealist friends, in particular Miró and Arp, who most influenced his pictorial development in Paris where he integrated his biomorphic forms into his pictorial vocabulary, to go as far as he could beyond geometric abstraction.
You can always enlarge the text by clicking on it, and if these lists of names mean little to you then it matters little, the history of human/creative activities is full of irrelevancies for the living to pick over.
I remember when money and identity were fixed by where individuals lived, by who their parents were, the schools chosen for them, and the grandeur of the bank building that local people put their money into, to save for that mortgage that would tie them to the town by the local property their parents insisted was right, where the mortgage holder would remain in debt long enough to make them stay after the debt was cleared.
I can remember this because I had no money and dimly saw how my identity was tied to me reinforcing how much my parents choices mattered.
They said they had little money, and less to spare for me. Dad had character-when character meant having mates to drink with, and drink was his security until the lack of money in his pocket didn't matter; his character was enough for all the family.
Such was the power of localism back then.
Nowadays money is flexible and invisible, and no single building helps us to identify it. For apparently being transferred 'peer to peer' where the next trend always has yet to appear; wealth that once seemed secure can fall down some digital sinkhole/plughole that nobody knew was there-leaving people in debt for no logical reason.
Electronics have taken over identity too, Where attention shifts to smartphones -which are electronic swiss knives that do everything the user has to watch where the phone is, and what it is doing that they did not realise it could do.
The oldest line on any new flexibility is 'Be sober and vigilant for the devil roams the earth posing as a roaring lion seeking whom he may to devour'* -in other words every new ease we find requires us to make new security conditions too.
In the wealthy 'democratic' West our democracy depends on three lies that we repeat ad nauseam 1-put rubbish in the bins for weekly collection 2-give something away to a charity/thrift shop, or 3-place an item in an auction house for sale.
The first lie is that the employees at the place we leave what we don't want are well paid to recycle what we leave them.
The second lie comes from that next stage -be it charity shop, council tip, or auction house, where we expect there to be some extractable good of commercial value left in what we leave for upcycling.
The third lie is the biggest, which is that whatever raw material we process, whatever we pass on, it loses 99.99% of it's redeemable value in how it is prepared for us -thus giving rise to the infinitely recycled lie that as humans we are not the species that overran the earth, and we are not the engine of the sixth extinction of all species via how we lay waste to the planet's eco-systems, for our seeing where we live as 'raw materials', ripe for destruction.
Because cheaper (and more processed) seasons of good will are available on demand, if they prove to be less sincere than they appear, then please accept this insincere apology for the afore mentioned synthetic sincerity.
Sometimes being synthetic is as near as people can get to being sincere.....
With every season of good will and expression of joy to the world I wish it was the last, less because I want the world to end and more because I can't cope with the brain-dead cliches that media manufactures think are a fit commercial celebration for the living to own the event.
The flatness that follows the kitsch
and the empty 'hale fellow and well met'
type greetings hollow me out, beyond belief.
What I would like to read is the Christmas science fiction story
where Martians mimic what rich earthlings do at Christmas,
and badly mangle the theology and get the event utterly wrong.
The nearest to such an account I have found
is in the following unsentimental work
by William Burroughs 'The Junky's Christmas'...
The world is built on problems that resist resolution where the more singularly we strive to correct the wrongs the more our corrections look like playground arguments as spouted by adults, in other words 'politics', or some other half-arsed attempt at marrying humanity with humility.
We under-estimate the limits of our will, as our errors take on a life of their own making us responsible for results we don't want to own, but have to.
When with their apologies the rich and famous feel better about their second apology than felt about their first where they knowingly crafted the first with a knowing and thoughtless crassness?
Certainly not the public, when the media give the sloppiness a free pass an quote and requote it verbatim....
Everyone who has an online life, however secure their computer, endures the adverts that are carried by the popular programming of their choice.
Adverts are to programmes what tics and fleas are a dog, stuff their owner to deal with.
So if you want to deal with your advertisers, then in the search engine of your choice put in the name of a company whose adverts you don't mind and your computer world will be set for you to receive regular adverts from that company; because you chose the company and you never wanted their product, just adverts for them, job done.
The baggage the adverts leave on your computer, the trackers and the cookies etc, can be dealt with later.
When ever I am advised that I 'should update my life', or repent of my past - the better to absorb the latest version of virtue - I don't know how to respond.
I know my past, it's rights and wrongs, and what of it that I should not repeat -most of my childhood/being parented the conditions of which I am now glad were unique to those times anyway.
So why should I change what I say about myself and my past, when change becomes one cheap lie after another to fit around the latest in consumerism
I am who I am whether I want to lump it, like it, or live in a past where I know I belong.
Paywalls were put up by newspapers to fund the future of journalism, online after the bottom dropped out the analogue advertising market and far fewer folk bought printed newspapers.
Digital print relies on fixed subscription where reliance on adverts often hides behind pleas for paid memberships, where the newspaper proprietor says 'you can't take this print away from behind the pay wall'.
That advertising has pushed print news to this defensiveness place is old old news, and many who are interviewed can't help but go along with the media of the day, to get publicity for their latest project.
But when money and power colour information don't expect a press free at the point of it being easily read any time soon, much less in the future.
divides into so many specialist subjects that don't/won't reference each other that where wealth creates knowledge whatever we learn isolates us from each other, as, like poor Alice in Alice in Wonderland, we each go down different rabbit holes of isolation and misunderstanding.
I have no antidote, or any way of making the scientific rabbit holes meet t up with each other, all I try to look after, the better to limit it, is my sense of isolation
And never is it more easily unsettled than in the media schedules we follow, where as long as the schedules remain fixed; as long one programme follows another in the right order as printed in the magazines that list everything, then listeners and viewers know where they are. The print represents reality.
But when a broadcaster decides that radio and television should be a multiple movable feast, a smorgasbord of programming where any programme can be available at any time, when it is first broadcast, in the week, no longer matters then also the order of the listener's life no longer matters either.
Trying to listen to new editions of the programme when it used to be broadcast, or according to when the listener regularly likes to listen is one answer. But what to do when the programme, or presenter, is 'retired' and strangers take over your listening experience?
Then you are the stranger, to yourself and the past which is no longer sustained, or sustainable. Time has become truly flexible and temporary.
is a phrase wistfully used by those who are trapped and passive to the point of resisting accounting for how their traps happened, to describe those who are more free than themselves and obviously have courage enough to show contempt at how much modern consumerism thinks it matters.
My brother Cain the afflicted likes to sit brushing softly my shoulders by the water at nights edge, or in a cinema dimlit where scenes of peace turn to scenes of slaughter.
Sometimes he will tlk to me; his voice murmurs the commotion in his mind and begs me to delay my final choice and I obey, for he is wise an kind.
He shall choose the last long pain for me; he knows the thing that must be done, my brother; it is not treachery - our love was free, it is no will of his or mine, but rather
the timeless tyranny of things ordained makes life seem death and love refflected hate; and full my heart, my sacrifice unsustained: "I wait for you, my brother, at the gate.".
Now and Not Then
Shall the dire day break when life finds us merely husband and wife with passion not so much denied as neatly laundered and put aside and the old joyous insistence trimmed to placid coexistence?
Shall we sometime arise from bed with not a carnal thought in our head look at each other without surprise out of wide awake uncandid eyes touch and know no immediate urge where all mysteries urge?
Speak for the sake of something to say and now and then put on a display of elaborate mimicry of the past to prove that ritual reigns where once ruled love and calmly observe those bleak rites that once made splendour of our nights?
Dear, when we stop being outrageous and no longer find contageous the innumerable ecsatcies we find in rise of hand or leap of mind - not now or then, love, need we fear thus; those two sad people will not be us.
and now forever missing from my life, but always recalled with tenderness for the brief time I had care of him; Oscar D. Tail was a rare soul, with a unique ability to impart joy and hope into those around him.
As one of the many recipients of his joy, to all of those who received it after me, unknown to me, I wish those he blessed in the life he had after me well, as they too reckon on his positive effect on their lives.
Please left click here for an alternative view of this long missed prince among dogs...
Everyone in the world knows the story of King Midas, the king who rated gold that highly that the gods cursed him so that everything outside himself that he touched, including his family, turned to gold, thus devaluing utterly what once pleased his eye so.
President Trump brags how his touch turns money into more money, including increased debt when he is careless - which he is often. Until he was impelled to embrace being known as the wealthiest serial bankrupt in the world. But hey! Money is only money; it is not life.
Now with Trump being in Putin's favourite pocket fascist, who Putin needs for him to stay in power, and keep at a distance, so that Putin can organise his country's media hall of mirrors, in the assuredness of mutual loathing. So welcome Trump the Polonium President who in choosing his cabinet will poison and wither every branch of government he is allowed near, without him being blamed for his choice of 'Yes' men and women all of whom will be elected to be the biggest 'No' to usefulness and competence in government in the history of The Republic.
When it arrives, how many hundred million Americans, along with the migrants, will say 'We didn't see this coming'?
Beyond the land of the living dead lies America, which has lied to itself, and the worlds it has been part of, for so long, that no subject under the sun can be understood in absolute terms any longer.
When America crowns it's 47th president the ceremony will have all the gravity of a rigged Miss World beauty contest for the elderly, where vanity bids the gerontocracy to think they are young and what counts most is how good the ritual looks on television. Never mind the governmentcrumbling behind it.
I would be free of pavements newspapers with no news clocks that bully my existence cars that whisk me away like God descending unannounced upon me buses that move like lugubrious elephants horse fettered to the stupid hands of men.
I am tired to tears of the mental life of my room full of the ghosts of never known things this spluttering monster machine creaking into rusty senility its hammerstrokes deciphering for innocent posterity my heart's sudden audaciousness
I would gather about me soft-sandalled things shadows on a burning lake trees bending to the earth in love. Where oh where are the beautiful people? -the quick of wit the clowns who spit on life's sanctimonious countenance the insolent the indolent the fey and gay with sunlight dripping from their limbs?
I would pawn my hypothetical soul to wake sudden in the dawn and find a girls foot print in dew outside my door.
As part of my daily digital hygiene regime I use the anti-virus/cleaning programmes downloaded to my laptop, and every time, which ever one of the three programmes I use, it always tells me to sign up to their VPN right away, as if my survival depended on it.
I never do, but find different ways to make sure that what I do is safe, sane, and secure by what I refuse to let Google remember.
Google does not need to keep the numbers on my credit cards, only I need to keep them.
I decline to use VPN because their urging me to use it reminded me of my mother, who placed great store by saying she was the acme of my personal security whilst never letting me know what was really going on, outside of her or with regard to all the choices I might make, emotionally, socially, and financially/with employment.
And because she was my example of evasive protection, that unawares of me was most engaged with protecting itself.
I only learned much too late why so many events in my life 'went wrong', why paths that seemed right at the time closed down long before I could reach the most rewarding part of them.
VPN is a source of profit and consumer control for many of the biggest internet protection providers that it is in their commercial interest to keep secret, the better for them to scare the nervous and gullible.
My parents operated an information apartheid, where, like VPN, they told me well disguised lies that kept me passive, compared with what they knew about each other.
The longer mother strove to 'sound so nice', the harder it got for my parents to admit the depth of their lies about me, or unpick the falsely founded relationship they had set up as my future.
I am sure there should be a category of book described thus; books to pass the time with by reading them sat at the back of the bus. I got my copy of this book out of my local public library and it is easy and light to read, so it is perfect for reading on public transport. I would go as far as to suggest taking a bus or train journey you don't need to take just so that you can give yourself time to read a book as good as this.
Given that he was born with cerebral palsy and it was not diagnosed until he was maybe ten, the efforts his mother made to get the young Christy to enjoy stories, learn to read and write, were beyond measure. But she was a busy and confident woman who gave her family reason for confidence, especially the young Christie who when he did learn to read and write was home taught and allowed the space to be creative that his healthy and normal brothers and sisters seemingly did not need as they got on with work, romance, and the other subject with which to fill a life that were normal to the 1940's, 50's, and 60's in Catholic Dublin.
But it is highly commendable that when he was young and his condition was not diagnosed his brothers showed as much indifference to his disability as they could when taking him out and making him part of their gang. At first reading, the way that Christy writes about his childhood and growing up as part of his family leaves practically nothing to be read between the lines for any contrary impressions. But some things can be inferred, he never went hungry, he was intelligent and his family knew it - for all that he had not the powers of speech they had. He had a normal sex drive/wanted girlfriends and idealised the opposite sex at the same age that boys without cerebral palsy did. His father may have been a distant figure, with his work as a bricklayer taking him away from the family quite as much as it did but he seems to be a figure worth revering for his consistency in supporting his large family, materially. He was also a figure who inspired his children to support themselves and each other.
The word that hovers over this book, unused because of how brisk the description of life was, is wholesome with a lower case w over it. Not for Christie Brown's family the pall of shame and guilt at sins committed in secret, where the results could not be explained because the acknowledgement of them froze those who had to acknowledge the deed and it's consequences. I write this as a person for whom the height of Motherly information about 'the birds and the bees' when I was fourteen was being told in venomous tones 'And don't bring any little bastards home [for us to see].' where long after I could never be sure whether Mother meant the person that she did not want to see was the girlfriend I might have got pregnant, the child she might be carrying, or myself after I had been with somebody she could not disapprove of with enough authority and vigour.
Not that adolescence and growing up were plain sailing for Christie, or for any of the family around him. His mother has to shame her bricklayer sons and husband in the family into building a small flat for the Christie Brown who was approaching adulthood and needed space, to think and to exercise so that he could get stronger. And what is anyone to say about going to Lourdes for a holiday, where the biggest respite for being there is that the disabled are very much in the majority there as those present would not be at home because they are shut away? A minority of one with their carers? I have known of holidays for social minorities, where as a group how they recognise one another is a therapeutic effect that is always of value. For anyone who in this age of vastly improved standards of medical and palliative care, the idea of going to Lourdes in 1949, suspecting that you might not come back cured but the break from the family was what you really needed at that moment, it will be a surprise what even a simple break can do.
The nearer the book gets to the end the more I read about Christie Brown's life opening like crushed flower, that is he becomes an adult in spite of the childhood spent mostly in his room where his left foot was his most ready means of expression. Learning to own and work the rest of his body was painful and involved many metaphorical falls. But when he dictates his first autobiography to his younger brother who writes it down. Emotional release through writing, where with the writing a person can organise and reorganise their thoughts is a process I appreciate a lot-it has done good things for me.
The way the book ends is both circular and an opening out in a way that was unforeseeable. The first few chapters of the book are read in public at a benefit concert in support of cerebral palsy services in Dublin, and then-star Burl Ives plays folk songs as, well, the name support act. To me the ending is a proper emotional gut-punch as all descriptions about seeking to rise above the worst adversities life can throw at a person are delivered in a modestly flawless finale.
For anyone who does not recognise the drive required to face the adversity of cerebral palsy when it has not been even diagnosed, then please think on what was going on with the disabled. When Christy was about four years old and living in Ireland, The Third Reich was starting it's grim campaign for the extermination of feeble minded and physically disabled children. The comparison between the Nazi attitude to the disabled, and his mother's support that got the young Christie through so much pain and limitation is as much as you need to contemplate on. That is why this book was the hit it was in the 1950s, just a few years after the mainland European atrocities were stopped, and every country, allied power or axis power was exhausted and slow to recover/rebuild itself.
Are going to be like the future lies of the next president of the USA.
The California tech industry will be behind both, and with both the lies will rely on the laziness of the people who accept without enquiry the idea that an easy life for them is an easy life for all who mattered.
When, as slave masters of old knew so well, that that was very far from the case.
The president will have his yes men, cabinet and the tech companies will reinvent indentured labour for the poor-but-computer-literate in the far east who will be the human end of AI that in the wealthy West the tech companies will do their best to erase all view of.
Meanwhile, as computer use hots up the planet, and uses more resources faster than IT firms admit, whilst burying the advertising industry in greenwash the president wants to repay his corporate oil and coal backers as if carbon was a myth, and only profiting your own matters.
It seems astonishing to me that I could write twenty eight chapters about what so far is about three years of life. I knew it was a good life, even when it was difficult and intense. And in the narrative of those times I am still several months away from the actual epiphany, what became the central change; my actual 'coming out'.
I can remember much of what happened, the material is still there. But for the minute I am resting from writing more, resting before committing to print the events that became the change I did not know was going to happen, and was not what it appeared to be at first.
It has become a cliche to say that the four most emotionally intense changes we can go through are changes in relationships, changes in jobs, changing where we dwell, and lastly for most of us, bereavement. In the eighteen months that follow on from Autumn 1991 I would experience several changes of address, and a rather dizzying change of direction in my life where I would end up in places that I did not know existed.
Writing about changes and moves that are that fast and cover that much ground takes preparation So the rest of the story-another eighteen months of it-will get told but it will be told best in the right time for me to write it-probably next year; in 2025, if the world I am publishing this reconstructed diary into lasts that long....
to looking like this a little over two years later...
In the meanwhile you can guess how I got from looking like this in December 1989...
'Hold Your nerve' Is fine advice for anyone with a laptop who is keen on using it to communicate with the world, But it always helps to have another, more experienced, person to tell you and show you how to hold your nerve better.
Every machine requires some instruction and with laptops every learner talks to the machine as if it was like them, human, when the proof required to show the difference between the learner human and the machine they learn from comes quicker than they think, particularly when the human listens to themselves and the machine shows every sign of being deaf.
We are free to cry all year round and through out the length of every election cycle, but always we want cry and hide our tears most when the latest election result has been announced; that is what being addicted to 'breaking news' means.
Today we could cry for the forty years of polarisation of an American media by the lack of requirement of balance and objectivity.
We could cry for the contorted electoral boundaries that are the result of both main parties parcelling up voters by profile of race wealth to disguise the divisions by riches that the rich prefer, which they know hurt the poorest most.
And lastly Lady Liberty should have a good cry about what preceded those divisions and the Jim Crow laws which made some citizens forever 2nd class and unrepresented - as if opportunity was purely the chance to fleece those with less as they started life where what faith was in most was the love of money. which left no room for the love of anything else.
I was not present at my conception, I don't know how well the occasion went. But then again, from the way my dad behaved towards me after, and well into me becoming an adult, I doubt my dad was that present, either....
As a 70's teenager I was starved of reading that might extend my understanding of the complexities of the world, the more to make me companionable.
The word 'adult' was euphemised to describe the girlie magazines that married men justified buying in secret and hiding from their wives, where their secretive reading, if that is what it was, led them deeper into a male juvenilia which was as rhetorical as it was profitable to the publisher, not that anyone said so.
I could never fathom how deep the mutual dishonesty went, there or what the profit motive destroyed. I rarely got near that stuff, though I sensed from my family how often when male want faced off against female rejection, the discussions led to disgusts that were always too disagreeable for children's tender ears to understand.
What I read were my mother's women's magazines which supposedly reflected how women thought, from the headlines on the front through to the articles inside. But fifty years on, I have at last been corrected.
With those magazines what the advertiser had to sell had to be cheap, for Mother to think she might want it, which then set the agenda of the articles being defined by what rich men did not want working class women to know.
The days of mass circulation of print media, narrowing down what people might learn have been reversed, thankfully, thru how much the self made programmes on YouTube are supported by adverts, where the breadth of opinion is that vast nobody knows where it is likely to end.
I don't know how completely anyone can abandon the hope of 'being loved' and still like themselves. It is like abandoning vanity. However close to zero vanity anyone might get there is always further they have to go. And who knows what their freedom is for if it is not to make their vanity seem useful, or for them to be loved?
This freedom from love is surely more about making absurd announcements with confidence.
Come softy to my wake on pavlova feet at the greying end of the day; into the smoke and heat enter quietly smiling, quietly unknown among the garrulous guests gathered in porter nests to reminisce and moan; come not with ornate grief to desecrate my sleep but a calm togetherness of hands quiet as windless sands and if you must weep be it for the old quick lust now turned to dust only you could shake from it's lair.
Come softly to my wake and drink and break the rugged crust of friendly bread and weep not for me dead but lying stupidly there upon the womanless bead with a sexless stare and no thought in my head.
Everyone who live in comfort and reads about the discomfort going on in the world, materially, spiritually, from the comfort of their chaise long will know what news burn out is.
It is what happens when the media reports on the needier and the report goes on, well beyond our attention span.
The story does not change, the agenda remains the same with a slight tweak, and we think 'How much more of this repetition can we/I take?' rather ask about the repeat suffering that those who are suffering are experiencing.
When the news repeats itself until we tire of it, and the world, as reported, seems to be a sick place then being tired of the world being sick and tired is the only place left to go, unless we steel ourselves to investigate the serious darkness that shades us all.
The first armistice was declared for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month one hundred and six years ago, in 1918.
That armistice was broken, dishonoured, and ignored until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles 28th June 1919, five years to the day after the shot that started the war, and assassinated Arch Duke Ferdinand, was fired.
The Allied signatories of the treaty were France, Japan, Italy, Russia, the UK and Northern Ireland, and the USA; they all signed the document together.
The Central Powers/Central Empires, on the other side, each signed individually. They were The German Empire, Bulgaria-which had a Tsar until 1946, The Ottoman, and lastly the Austro-Hungarian, empires.
The statues that mark the end of the war that I want to see, but I know I won't find them, are dedicated to all the unknown women in the Allied countries who worked in the jobs that the men left behind when they became soldiers.
Those jobs had to be done, and when done by women were done for much reduced pay. Those Women 'were not householders' and could not vote, could not be recognised as citizens of their country.
Where are the statues to the women who nursed the men, wounded on the battlefields, and did so much more besides? The statues to those women who held up half the skies where the men flew to bomb the enemy underneath? All whilst as women, hoping for more but expecting less sought to earned their part in the peacetime society they believed would follow from their efforts.
What modern voters know, and modern governments fear their voters understand better than they do, is that for every attempted renewal of governance through large scale IT projects, the instructions for 'going forwards' may not only be expensive but in their implementation may do the opposite of what their promoters said they wanted to do.
Mistaking 'forward' for 'reverse' is easy to do with society-wide social change projects.
I only have to think of Margaret Thatcher who widened The Road to Serfdom, so more folk could be made to be the serfs to democracy she wanted them to be, for me to believe that many a leaders aims become their (and other people's) undoing, when implemented.
But with technology in the drivers seat there always has to a new back seat driver/ new leader and party to give them directions for where to not go, only for us to end up there....
I don't know whether I am more, or less, than the sum of my appetites, or what the total of what I am might be, as compared with others.
The ancient Egyptians invented the idea of 'the soul' which the person refined through their life and behaviour, so that if it weighed less than a feather the soul could enter Heaven.
I an unsure of how far to follow that belief, which in it best explanation might have many contradictions indeed.
As long people don't look that deep and accept me as I appear to be, that is all I ask.....
"Enthusiasm for life is like a hanged man's erection" - Albert Caraco*
*Albert Caraco (1919 – 1971) was a French-Uruguayan philosopher, writer, essayist and poet. He is known for two major works, Post Mortem (1968) andBreviary of Chaos (1982).
Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894 - 1961) was a French author, medical doctor, and anarchist-hence the above quote to a friend. During WW2 he worked as a ships doctor even though he invalided out of military service. He is best known for the long and pessimistic book 'Long Day's Journey Into Night', though 'Death on Credit' and more recently 'War' are all popular in English translation.
Sixty years after his death an archive of Celine's papers taken in1944 from a Paris flat he lived in during WW2 was handed over to the French state literary authorities for cataloguing and publication, where, apart from the sheer quantity of the papers to be examined, the streaks of misanthropy and antisemitism in his work remains difficult to process.
Even the French like their literary anarchists to be affirmative about their anarchy.
Nowadays in the wealthy west consumers spend more time surveying the shelves of the shop for the five brands of the same food item that they don't know what to buy than ever they would spend a quiet contemplation.
They spend more time in supermarket than ever they would spend in church where there one God, and one brand, telling or asking him, why is he so wonderful. It can't be the effective marketing......
I was thinking about God the other day whilst browsing my local supermarket looking for some modesty but beyond that not knowing what it was that I wanted.
I saw the hand height row of buttons near the exit, where after they have paid for their shopping they can press the button that best expresses their mood, wide smile, smirk, frown, or grimace.
They can silently comment, and say what their shopping experience was that day.
I don't know who collects and collates all the responses, but I do know that often finding kind and personal words when I leave church can be more than difficult, some parishioners are allergic to wet fish handshakes.
Perhaps in the interests of a measurable efficiency, the church can take a discreet leaf from the world, and at adult hand height in the foyer they should have the four buttons to press instead. They might get more responses....
It is more than likely that, like dissidents down the ages, government agent provocateurs made sure that Guy Fawkes, Thomas Wintour, and Robert Catesby took the only logical course of action that seemed right for the cause. And the government agents knew they could stop what the three started, and would enjoy seeing them arrested for something they had goaded the three to do.
This story needs to be updated for the age of conspiracies consider it done.
Longevity in creativity is a relatively modern phenomenon, the further back into history we might go, the more limited the means for creativity were, and the older a writer or composer got, the more uncertain their life chances became whilst their energy for life and creativity slowly, then more overtly, drained away.
Enter the world of amplified music, often played on guitar, where the player's ability to stand, concentrate, and sing the lyrics they had written are less demanding in themselves, though touring the music town to town, city to city, will tire a musician eventually.
Enter one musician who died recently. Bass player Phil Lesh of The Grateful Dead, who in their time set the standard for touring, playing live, taping gigs, and making the road a creative place to be, where with their music they formed a deep bond with their audience that was as unique as it was immersive and enduring.
That bond may be somewhere between myth and memory now, due to the 1995 departure of Jerry Garcia, where after his death no number of digitally buffed up live CD's of when that band bond was at work can replace the feeling of being in their presence, as the band played.
But from the accounts of their past, future generations can know that deep and loyal bonds between musicians and their audience may still be created in future -when the musicians get tight with each other and put the work in, finding who to play for, and most of all play for much more than money.
When I saw that this was on at my local art house cinema I needed no persuasion to book to see it. The sound system in cinemas makes them the ideal way to appreciate a music documentary. Paul Simon has been a performer for longer than I had been alive. He started with Art Garfunkel as a duo called Tom and Jerry in 1957, and they remained connected with each other even when Paul Simon performed solo as he had done, periodically, from 1965 onward.
When I sat down to watch this three hour forty minute documentary I realised how little I knew very little about the career of Simon and Garfunkel and that I knew even less about Paul Simon. The most I could say about him was that he rarely did television interviews, did few print based interviews in music magazines, and in the years that he chose to be a celebrity he was uncomfortable with it. As the documentary showed, his marriage to Carrie Fisher at the height of her fame for her being in the Star Wars films was a short lived and quite intense disaster, one of a series of projects that Paul Simon undertook that misfired with the public.
But to begin nearer the beginning, the people the public know as Simon and Garfunkel have been friends since about the year 1950. The names Simon and Garfunkel are anglicisation, well maybe Americanisation, of the names of two young Jewish men with a vocal talent that rivalled The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Along with, in the person of Paul Simon, a skill with writing tunes that maybe bests, Brian Wilson. But where Brian was a great tunesmith who had access to vocal harmonies that were miraculous, who Capital called a genius which in inflated his ego and fame to infinity only for it to crash after, Paul Simon only set out on Simon and Garfunkel properly after he had studied law including music business law, and allowed Art Garfunkel to arrange the songs Paul Simon wrote after Simon presented them to Garfunkel, and Garfunkel got no fee and had no legal hold on the work he arranged. In private Paul Simon was, ahem, more controlling of his material than was apparent in the incurious interviews with the two of them together in the 1960's.
'The Graduate' was the film that cohered Simon and Garfunkel as an act. Their soundtrack to that immensely popular film made sure that they would never be anonymous or poor again. It would also give them a live audience to tour and play to that would eventually create the pressure that split them up. From The Sound of Silence (1966) to Bridge Over Troubled Water' the trajectory and pressure was upwards, upwards and further into the fame trap in such a way that they could not see the exit. In popular music today journalists wearily talk about 'the album/tour/rest/album/tour/rest cycle. It was seen as 'rest' for Art Garfunkel when he was offered acting roles in the films 'Catch 22' and 'Carnal Knowledge', he did not need to be with Paul Simon when Paul wrote the songs. But for the sake of balancing the duo and of creative input Art Garfunkel had to be with Paul when the songs were written to create the vocal harmonies that kept the duo together. So when Art Garfunkel could not leave the film set of Catch 22 because the film was taking longer to make than was originally stated it would Art arrived in the studio with Roy Halle to find that his parts had been arranged but something that was core to duo's unity had cracked, broken. They toured 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', rested but when Art wanted to be the first to hear the songs for the next album he was told 'No, you went away and did not come back to do the vocal arrangements for the last album.'. There proved to be other complications for the duo too, that made splitting inevitable, not the least of which was that there were no lyrics for Art Garfunkel to create vocal harmony arrangements for, for them both to sing. End of part one of the documentary. The footage of Simon and Garfunkel is wonderful, visually it was a reminder of a lost innocence, and all immaculately edited too. See the documentary for the first half alone, if you want to.
The second half of the film heavily features Paul Simon in his Texas home studio and a local church making 'Seven Psalms', his latest album made as a sprightly eighty something year old, whilst surveying his solo career from the first record 'Paul Simon' recorded from 1970 onward, and released in 1972 through to the 1990 album 'The Rhythm Of The Saints'. I really enjoyed the studio footage of Simon grooving with Toots and the Maytals for the song 'Mother and Child Reunion'. Likewise the footage of the creation and touring of the 1986 album 'Graceland' showed a normally reserved white man seeking to reach new horizons and find space for his lyrics in the joyous rhythms he least expected to be including as part of his music. There were other career troughs and peaks to explore, including what led to the 1981 Simon and Garfunkel reunion concert in Central Park, New York, and the subsequent tour. All of this became interspersed between footage of Paul Simon in his Texas studio working through Covid and the sudden onset of deafness in his left ear first, but alternating between both ears later. Again I thought of Brian Wilson who has had hearing in only one ear since 1964. The footage of Paul Simon struggling against the aural equivalent of tunnel vision was almost existential.
But I felt that having made that point in the film, the director could have shaved ten minutes off the end of the film. That or the time could have been used to mention the musical he wrote 'Capeman', or the five studio albums he has released between 'The Rhythm of The Saints' (1990) and 'Seven Psalms' (2023), none of which got a word said about them. But maybe they deserved a ninety minute long documentary of their own.
Lastly, in the past my view of American music was often informed by the wonky live harmonies of The Grateful Dead, where as Jerry, Bob, and Brent reached for a particular harmony part in a song the listener was taken aback at how close they got to the harmony they were aiming for, and yet how far from the harmony the end result remained. The perfectionism in Paul Simon remains an acquired taste for me, but the more he adopted world music the more interesting his music became.
When the rivers in the land of plenty run red with death, and the language that describes them has been poisoned, made unfit for human use, then generosity has turned for the worse, it has been inverted. It is irredeemable, unfit even for slightest recycling.
Who then will choose the only roles left -the wounded who can't help themselves as they live out their woundedness? Or their false accusers and comforters who wound others, and defend their actions with bland rhetorical reassurances?
Who then will resist being the victim, persecutor, and rescuer where to resist we have to escape the circular arguments in the new, Olympic level, blame games?
