'A Free Spirit'

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.  

Two Poems By Christy Brown (3)

Abel

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.    

Twenty Years Missed,

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...   
 

 
 

Welcome To Your Polonium President

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'? 

 

Relative Land - Where Decline Disguises Everything

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 government crumbling behind it. 

A Poem By Christy Brown (2)

 Wishful

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. 

Mother Was My Virtual Private Network

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.

'My Left Foot' - The Book By Christy Brown - A Review

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.

 

When The White Of The Eye

meets the white of the canvas the colour
in both is what connects the heart to the art therein. 

 

The Next Lies About A.I.

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.
 

Families And How To Escape Them; Update/Chapter Twenty Nine

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...

        

Humour Is The Solution

Whatever you do in life,
develop a sense of humour.

Whether mild and innocent,
or streaked with shades of black,
it will pay you back, and do more,
when it finds recognition
with the right neighbours.  

The Secret With Machines

'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.   

The Freedom Of Tears

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.  

 

Putting The 'Dis' Into 'Disowner-ship'

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....

How Much Do I Owe to Adverts For Products I Never Bought?

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.

Give It Up

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.     

 

A Poem By Christy Brown (1)

Come Softly To My Wake

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. 

Burnt Out ? We Will Be....

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 Missing Statues To Those Waiting To Be Honoured

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. 

Reversing Into The Future Will Mean Crashes

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....

Who Could Ask For More?

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..... 

Up For It, But Where To Go?

 "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) and Breviary of Chaos (1982).

An Anarchist Writes.....

 

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.  

Personal Service?

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.... 

Innocence Often Cannot Be Proven

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. 
 

 

A Reflection On The Death Of Phil Lesh

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.

In Restless Dreams - Paul Simon - A Review

 

  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. 

The Self Renewing Blame Game

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?     

Picture Set Of The Month - November - The Nature Paintings Of Ron Wood

Ron Wood is well known not just for his
paintings but for his depictions of
his band mates in The Rolling Stones
among many other musicians.

But I much prefer Wood's paintings of nature,
not least because the depiction of motion is slower.

I don't know the names of these paintings,

But I don't feel that I have to, the images
speak for themselves. 

And nature might appear to be slower
than rock and roll, but it will outlast it.