Picture Set Of The Month - May - Images By Neon Park

'Marlene Goes To Tunisia' a late work by 
Neon Park (1940 - 1993) an American illustrator
 who was more famous for designing the covers
of all but the first album by Little Feat   

This image of the inside of a gatefold sleeve
of a Little Feat album (I don't know which)
is a less known work by Neon Park

'Golden Slippers' here dates from 1985, when
 Neon Park was two years into his sensing
a decreasing adaptability with his hands
in the 1990s he could no longer paint
with the finesse he was known for
and accepting being a writer who wrote
as a one fingered typist 'search and stab' style. 

'City Lights' is a 1978 album by Dr John,
on which Doc Pomus co-writes two songs
with the good doctor. And with Dr John on fine form
as piano player, hear a track here, the cover
by Neon Park gives it the finishing touch.   

 

'Conclave' The Book, The Film - A Double Review

The Book - I was persuaded to read this book by a friend who reviewed the film well before it won two BAFTAs who said the film was a bit of a cardinal's egg that fell apart half way through. I thought 'read the book, and you can miss out watching it being mangled by the committee of directors, script writers and actors.'. The book was slow at first, lots of minor detail and fussing about procedure where the fuss was a key part of the procedure.

The core of the book is the votes for the next pope where what is revealed about the members of the curia between each vote provides the drama. Each smoothly executed ritual has within it room for human error, room for the works of the flesh to be revealed as part of the drama. The fear of human error was part of the error. The Catholic perfection of ritual is one of the characteristics it is noted for.

The fifth vote fails to secure a two thirds majority for any candidate. From there events take a course for the much more dramatic, and less credible. Secrets kept well hidden in quarters that are meant to be left undisturbed are found out, which reveal serious actions on the part of one of the more popular candidates for pope that make him the least suitable candidate possible. For me the secrets, and how they were stored, seem to have been too easily discovered for their value as secrets to hold up. But I persevered with the book.

From the fifth vote to the last the curia wrangle wit their own internal politics whilst the world outside the Sistine Chapel is reminding the curia that the world is a restless and violent place. The discord of the the world is much more complicated and random than the book keeping of The Catholic Church. Then there is the ending in which the curia choose change in a way that proves greater than they could have foreseen.

I am not going to say how the book ends. But a clue is planted early in the book, and left unexplained until near the end, where the book greatly, but discreetly, expands upon that clue. Then the bureaucracy and flummery of the papacy closes in around the changes that are accepted, whilst highlighting continuity and saying less about what the continuity is a continuation of.

I can't imagine a locked room mystery thriller similar to this low key but compulsive read, unless the book had a title like 'Murder in the Sistine Chapel' in which the reveal of the plot in the title is somehow rendered a mystery in the prose with a similar opacity to that of the bureaucratic decorum the curia show here, to maintain the tension in the reader, right until the end.

St Augustine of Hippo said 'The world is the case', amongst many other quotes. He was writing about a justice a much grander business than a modern locked room thriller which explores as much as entertains. Even with that, hiding/exposing rivalries is as common in Roman society as it has been down the ages. What this book reveals is how shy The Church of Rome is to admit it is part of the world.

The Film

The book presented any film maker with many advantages, architecture, procedure, the oddly buttoned down clerical body language and choreography of the cardinals. The clothing that the cardinals and nuns wear is amongst the more straight forward parts of the book to depict. Harder to depict is the tension of wondering which cardinal will be voted to be the next pope when any of them could be. From the start some cardinals are more likely to be candidates than others. Some would like to be chosen whilst not quite grasping the subtlety of the humility test that has to be passed, where to be chosen for the top job the candidate has to genuinely appear to not want the post in a way that also signals they might be good at it if other people cardinals think they might be an apt candidate.

Two aspects of the film are quite striking, one is the modernity of the cardinals hotel rooms, slab of textured looking grey marble and corridors with deep red wall to wall carpets. How I longed for one of the cardinals to glide along one of these identical looking corridors, where in some stop motion film effect the cardinals feet did not move but his body did and from Ralph Fiennes eyes there was a look that was half way between menacing and other worldly. But alas no such surreal moment was allowed to break the air of sombre sobriety. The other aspect of the film, which was striking but harder to recognise for how it worked was the sound design and the Latin. In the conclave meetings the Latin spoken hid any pride, division and enmity and only rarely did the noise and commotion of the outside word intrude-the book handled that better when occurred than the film did. In the hotel English was spoken, and the tone of it varied from whispers in discreet side areas in corridors left for lit candles to be prayers from whoever lit them to open arguments and declared disagreement. The speech sounded clear but as if it was spoken in a soundproofed room, with a 'deadened' sound to the voices.

Book and film share a major flaw to the plot, where each ignores the flaw as it becomes increasingly apparent in different ways. I won't say what it is, but both strive mightily against this flaw to make the reader/viewer ignore the flaw and maintain the tension, where how the book and film each strive gets the reader/viewer onside to help them hide the flaw. But after the film is over the first conversation where the film or book is pored over will reveal the obviousness of how secrecy can make us go along with what is merely an entertainment, albeit a serious entertainment, posing as being more than an entertainment.

 

The Cassandra Effect You Can Trust

As the world media expands it's coverage
of the first hundred days of the latest US president
[he might be the last if his reforms pan out
the way he intends them to] let us remember why
these first hundred days has become such a marker.

In 1933 when FDR inherited an economy
that was leading the world into an ever deeper
spiralling economic recession he declared
that in 100 days he would lay the foundation
to reverse the spiral effect, starting in the USA
and spreading outward. Ever since then the media
have marked the first hundred days of US leaders
as if there was a crisis when there was none
-or if there was a crisis it was manageable.

Many new leaders have rhetorically seen
their predecessors policies as 'disasters'
that they have to reverse as if the new leader
was a new broom who will always sweep clean.

Maybe to be even handed about government
we should mark the hundred days
as less the planning time for recovery
from previous crises, real or invented, 
and more as laying the foundations
for disasters to come as, past and present,
government lay down a choice of plans
for how to make the future fail in new ways. 
.  

Strange Antennae

Some of the people I identify with most closely
-'friends' is too cosy to describe them well-
have what I think of as 'strange antennae',
in a world full of polite lies they recognise
the decaying bones of less reputable truths
buried inside the fresh faces fronting the lies.

Their antennae twitch and they respond proportionately.

That is they feel the truth and seek to call it out,
leaving the liar conflicted. In situations I have witnessed
how much this has left both parties conflicted.
The liar by their lies and the decoder
by what they felt they had to call out.

Instinctively I am on the side of those with strange antennae
-I too get a certain twitchiness when I have to decide
'how do I respond to this?' Where my solution, since I know
how weary other peoples anger leaves me, is to decide
'what is my optimum length of time with this person'
and prepare the tact of my exit appropriately....

In A World That Is Permanently Off-Balance

Who reading this knows 
where the tipping point is, 
before it is reached 
within any given social, spiritual,
legal, or ecological issue?

I don't, and I remember well
my experience as a navigator
when I was a passenger in a car.

I watched for the landmarks 
the driver wanted me to see
before we passed them. 

More often than not
whilst he focused on the road
I saw the landmark as we passed it.

Many times with small roads it took
two or three times to find the turning
for out destination.

This process of navigation
proves to me why the world is off balance
-to see where the balance is off
we have to pass the point
where the best balance was
to trace our way back to it. 

The past is a hard place to navigate our way around,
to restore the world to a previous improved state of balance.      

Eyesight For The Blind

In these day when jealousy is as blind
to what it covets as it is of itself
I will make it my aspiration in life
to not be human-jealousy is far more
human-shaped than humans ever admit.

Being an alien seems more far-sighted,
and more humane to me.

If the clarity of being an alien is rare,
than it is better than having no vision at all. 
  

The Needs Of The Moment

in a world as rich in life as Planet Earth
is are varied beyond all accounting for.  

Not that I wish to diminish the efforts
of modern science towards proving
the breadth of life, where people lack the will
to think how much good comes from choice
and so cut down the choices for others,
thinking to keep the good to themselves.

Whether human, animal or plant,
Malthusian mathematics are the same
-the zero gain sum of those accounting
for quantity becomes an absolutism
when life is quantified by the unit
of the solipsistic self i which others
will bring about the apocalypse-never them.

And the apocalypse they are hoping to avoid
by cutting down the life around them is one
they don't realise they will be the authors of.....   

Pigeon At Home

Photo by Victor Medina. Street photography that surprises. 

 

Jaw And War

As the latest ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine
collapses into claims about who first proposed it,
who did not abide by it, and who tried to keep it
but was stymied by the activities of the other side
I wonder who will declare the end their hostilities
and hold to it, fevered by war as both countries are.

Both countries are broken by the war economies
that they both have to hold on to, to keep fighting.

I can't help but recall that across Europe, Nov 11th 1918
to 18th Jan 1919 hostilities were paused, but peace
was still far off. It took the hammering out of five treaties
by thirty two countries, over twenty months, four countries
of which led the negotiations, for the conflicts be an ended.

 

My 'Coming Out' Story

The ‘coming out’ stories that are easiest to share are short, dramatic, and uplifting. But for boys growing up in the provinces in the 1960’s who would grow up to be gay, the awareness of being gay was something they grew up with, which at best they were unable to label, and at worst it had dark sides they were unable to account for.

                                        

                                      

My earliest awareness of imagining what ‘gay feelings’ were started from me being aged 10. The culture I grew up in was a small town in the midlands. Life there was centred around family values-often projected via light entertainment on television. There I had light fantasy ‘crushes’ on the bearded men who appeared on the screen for any length of time, across the schedules. I did not admit to having these feelings to anyone. My parents were the only people I might have confided in, and they saw television as their electronic childminder, where they thought less about the images the screen presented, and more about how they might get other jobs done with less need to be watchful.

A homosexual life was a logical impossibility; family values said so by saying nothing about it. Family values also said that there was no life outside of the family. I had no material with which to imagine how a life outside of my family might work. But the signs that all might not be well were already present in my family, where they were ignored. I had a distant father, and a mother who more than made up for his distance from me, well from all of us, by making sure that I stayed close to her. If she had not stayed close to me then none of my family would have. The models of masculinity that I saw around me used adult images of drinking and smoking as badges of honour/membership and macho signs of entitlement. At age 7 or 8 the nearest I got to such an identity was going to the sweet shop to buy Old Holborn tobacco and cigarette papers for my dad where my age made it illegal for me to buy tobacco but the confectioner knew my dad. Being dads errand boy was as close as I was going to get to being acknowledged by him. At least it was a role.

My mother ran errands for elderly neighbours, including doing their weekly shop whilst doing the family weekly shop. The unpaid errand boy script repeated itself in how I related to her. From the age where I was tall enough, she would put me in charge of pulling the shopping trolley or carrying the bags as she led the charge around the shops. This earned me some horrible teasing in primary school that I could neither deny nor rebut. The teasing came from pupils who saw me when they were following their mothers around the shops, where their mothers were doing what my mother was doing, shopping, but for fewer people. The boys who teased me did not have to carry anything. Thinking of it now, their teasing of me was them claiming some detachment from their mothers that they did not actually have, where I could not think fast enough to point out to them their denial.

In the 2020’s there are plenty of stories where the young adults of today relate accounts in the popular media where they explain how as teenagers they were introduced to drugs, where they knew too little about sex to stop the non consensual sex that followed. There then follows comments about trauma, confusion and difficulty forming long term relationships as a result of the non consensual sex.. When publishers share these stories they often preface them with comments that suggest they are rare, if not unique, until they publish the next similar narrative, and make the same claim. Such stories are as old as the drugs themselves, including NHS medicines, I have my own version of that narrative which if I explained it, and how it was disguised, I would not be believed.

 

I don’t know how I navigated my teenage years. However I did it, it was much more through amnesia, and the absence of language, than it was through formal education. The teenage reasoning I am at ease with sharing is how as a teenager I believed that I was gay because I liked David Bowie, who was highly popular back then. But that ascribes more influence to the power of popular music than the evidence would support. But Bowie was to music what Dr Who was to television. Both went through identities at a speed that surprised the public. Both started in the early 1960’s. With each new identity they both left behind clues to a mythology that complemented their multiple previous identities, which gave them a lot of airtime to expand on their pasts. Fine material for a teenage boy to pin his hopes on, where they could ignore any mysterious undertow in their own lives where they had not the language to explain why they were where they were. Back then a lot of life went by unexplained.

                               

I discovered cottaging at the age of 17, and I was always the youngest among the married men who did not want to go home quite so soon to their wives.

 

If my cottaging was proof of some personal discomfort within me, then I got out of the habit of it very gradually, by breaking my ‘coming out’ into manageable stages, from the age of 25 onward. 

The first stage was the argument I had with my family about their choice of my teenage schooling, where I was not allowed to think that I was deliberately being taught practically nothing. Where I disagreed with them most was how their idea of schooling had put my life ‘on hold’ for the duration of it, and a long time afterwards, where saying nothing let the malaise continue. 

The second stage of my coming out was to give myself space in the small town far enough away from the tightness of family life so that I could begin to breathe and choose my friends for how reliable they were. In all of my family life I had seen Mother make few close friends outside of family, and until I set myself some distance from family I could see myself doing the same.

The third stage came three years later when I left my home town, and moved to Nottingham. For four years I lived and worked doing last-in first-out low paid jobs there, between bouts of unemployment. In 1989 this led me into being in therapy for the first time. That led to a much needed rethink, where ‘coming out’ seemed possible but there was no clear path as to how to do it. Later when I asked for more therapy I was put on an NHS waiting for my second course of therapy. That gave me an unexpected path. When I got put on the waiting list I could not wait. So to relieve the pressure of my need I started what is nowadays known as journaling.

                                                             Every night for twenty months I wrote my thoughts down in an A4 pad, to clear my head enough for me to sleep better that night. The average length of a day’s entry was four sides of A4 foolscap. Some day’s entries were longer. The journaling kept me more sane and calm than I would otherwise have been.

 

It got me nearer being ‘out’ as being gay. But what it proved to me most was that I needed to meet a gay man who I could talk to and he would listen to me asking about what ‘being gay’ was supposed to be about. I needed to meet them well outside of the rudimentary ‘secrecy’/not speaking that I shared with those I, now less frequently, cottaged with. 

When one lonely Saturday night a handsome gentleman broke the code of silence that the toilets maintained, by thanking me by name at the end of the time with him, the loss of anonymity scared me. But with a lot of journaling I took that fear in my stride and realised that a rethink and a radical change of course was required. I was still waiting for the doctor’s appointment for the second lot of therapy. I knew nothing about gay bars and had been told ‘They are very lonely places’ by a Christian I knew. When I was told that I should have replied to the Christian who said it ‘Not nearly as lonely as cottaging is.‘, but I did not have the confidence with which to open that flood gate of great hurt and disguised neediness with somebody I could sense it was unwise to be too open with anyway. 

I barely knew about Nottingham Gay Helpline, and knew nothing of the other ways the gay world networked. With my journaling I reached for the idea that if I really wanted not to cottage again, then I had to use it as a springboard for a talk, live, to a gay person.

The only time I had knowingly talked to a gay person who was ‘out’  before was during the government leaflet drop for the aids crisis, when I rang the London gay helpline and the person on the other end was rather dismissive of me wanting to ‘Come out’ amid the wall to wall undeclared small town homophobia that he could not understand. That was the mid 1980s. By 1992  I had come a long way towards taking the sense of tragedy and loss of opportunity to connect out of sexual secrecy. I had journaled quite a lot about how silence=secrecy, and secrecy=silence where I had unpicked how each fed into the other and formed a doom loop to maintain each other. I was fifteen months into the journaling in lieu of therapy, on the cold of 9th of Feb, 1992, when I cottaged in the willy shrinking weather that night, I unexpectedly found a person not for sex but to actually talk to. 

Russell was his name and he was a ginger bear. We talked that night and walked to The Admiral Duncan for a drink. We met again on the Friday Valentine night special. Over the next four months I supplied most of the attachment as he tried to teach me what passed for the etiquette of being gay in Nottingham in 1992 and we both tried to make it seem as if that was love. He ended the relationship because I had too much personal baggage to reward his patience with me. I don’t think ill of him for it. I thought I was ‘out’ but I was not. I did what a lot of gay men were doing, when they took each other at a face value in a way that was unsustainable after a short while. 

Through Russell I found my exit from Nottingham. I found what I really did think of as love. Whatever name it should have, I worked at it, and it has proved durable. Eventually, with a lot of help, I moved to rent a house in rural Northern Ireland in a move that was counter-intuitive. Because nearly no gay men moved from England to Northern Ireland, which was famous for a certain shouty preacher. If there was movement, the direction of travel across England was the same as it was from Belfast - towards London because London was the gay capital of all Europe at the time.

It would be a very long time before I joined all the dots, from being gay, through to where ‘coming out’ included learning how much mental health mattered whatever sexual label anyone wanted to own. They were whole decades where I had lived and travelled in hope, but I was slow to recognise where I had arrived, and where I might go next.

 

 

Life Vs Eternity

Good news! The gospels pass the Beschdel test,
normally a test that is applied to fiction
and film scripts which tests for whether
two or more female characters are 1-named
2-have coherent speaking roles, and
3-get to talk in terms that are broader
than how they are attached to their betrothed,
their husbands, or their birth family.

We know little about the backgrounds of the two Marys,
hints here and there, inferences, and incidental detail
-same as the disciples get. But when the two Marys
become the first to both meet the risen Jesus
and recognise him (one them tries to hug him)
they are definitely looking at a life beyond
who they are the property of. They talk and think
about friendships that are for life. and maybe eternity.....
 

The Best 'Easter Egg'

I am expecting this year
is the empathy in the silence
in the time that is symbolised
in print as the time between
the death of Christ and the time
when Jesus met the disciples, later.

The hope against hope in that silence,
the hope amid seemingly rational fears,
the hope suspended against expectation
is something anyone can have, anywhere,
throughout the year, as events defy description.

With the number of shoddy deals
and sham politics that goes on around us
the patience we draw from that  silence
is what will help us all to endure.  
    

On This Good Friday

I recognise that the church calendar
is different to the many other calendars
and clocks that operate around the world.

If the church calendar held more sway
than some of the less forgiving calendars
then more of our days would avail us
with time for reducing our enmities,
and seeing forgiveness in how we receive.

It remains up to us to make it that way.  

 

As Spring Breathes On Gardens

I remember the breeze on my knees
when I was in short trousers,
walking with mother to her first allotment
when she was pleased to have a property
of her own-she had found the only loophole
she could find that made married women
less than the absolute property of their husbands,
besides family allowance for two children,
but not for one child, being paid to the mother,
which gave married women money in their own right.

Family Allowance cut the father control of the money
that paid for the clothing that his children wore,
but even that was done more for the sake
of the school uniforms the money would buy
than for the children, or for the sake of the mothers
who still had few rights, in their own right. 

Women could rent Allotments, not that many did
because it seemed to be a rather primitive feminism,
perhaps as comparable with the primitive Methodism
of historical memory, incorporated into The Methodist Union:
A married woman having an allotment was a feminist
form of non-conformism against married mores
that was going to be unfashionable with many women
who had more materialist aspirations within marriage.

One her early plans for the allotment that marked it out
as compared with male allotment holders was to plant flowers
near the path that was the route to all the allotment either side.

I was greatly taken by the colours of the flowers. If I'd had
a painting set and paper I'd have amused myself making daubs
of what I saw, but getting the colours right. How wrong or right
was Mother in childminding me whilst gardening? Minding one child
she could complete the tasks the garden demanded for growing food alright.
One child and one garden was fine for using up her time, multitasking. 

But often I was bored and alone, she said that the flower garden
'Was for me', or that it 'was mine'. If I had been allowed to read
whilst being minded I could have paraphrased Virginia Woolf
to Mother. 'An Allotment Of One's Own' and I would have felt
I had a share in it. But with the work she did there was no time 
to listen. Or explain that for the flower patch to be properly mine
she would have to teach me, the way her father had taught her
in the garden space that he rented, that was behind
the village Primitive Methodist Chapel/School she attended.

Alas there were no lessons, primitive or other, Mother taught me,
as to how to garden. What Mother meant when she said the flowers
'were mine' was that the rest of the garden was hers alone to keep me
from not looking where I trod and stepping on what she had planted.

The tasks the allotment required were hers to do alone, as she enjoyed,
or direct me in. My grandad, her father, was a good gardener.
He kept a neat suburban style front garden, grew his veg and salads
in the garden next to the Methodist Church, and was paid
to keep the planted borders around the nearby factory clean. 

I keep a cheerfully untidy garden in which the insects
are the top of the hierarchy, they will be around long after
my very limited gardening skills have withered, like the rest of me.

But with my mother aged ninety
and her still keeping an allotment
that may be some time away yet.

Empty Bottles

Love that is less buttressed
by the support of property law
which endures in the sharing
is rare indeed, and for the care
it shows it has to be cared for.

Expecting it a to renew
when once it has run dry
is like hoping for lightning
to strike twice, for storage
in the same bottle.

I know, I have been there
and know that I can't know
how empty bottles refill again.... 

The Self Reinforcing Vacuum Inside The Passivity Of World Opinion.....

For all who sin via technology
and the internet, Saint Isadore of Seville 
is not much mentioned nowadays,
but in the sixth and seventh centuries
he was a leading bishop and scholar
in a flourishing Catholic Church.

In these shifting modern times
the Catholic Church has recast him
as the patron saint of the internet
and of technology, with other saints
for bloggers, St Francis de Sales,
and computer programmers and gamers,
Saint Carlo Acutis, so that all who sin
online have these three names,
and more besides, as channels of grace
by which to seek forgiveness for their online life.

But there is a darker, less forgiving, side
to new technologies that renew themselves,
where technically secular and theocratic states
make their legal system a circular vacuum
where for those who are charges with a crime
cannot defend themselves in any language
that they know that the court has to respond to
-the charge denies them the language of a defence. 

After tightening up the law, such states
tighten up what can be said and done
in the courts, the press, and in public spaces
by installing security cameras to with an inch
of outside private houses, thus enhancing
the potential for prosecution by default.

In Kabul the authorities have installed a new
technological panopticon-style security regime
where women who before have no legal grounds
for being out in public alone, and multiple laws
that reduced their liberty, are now even more afraid
than before of leaving, or looking out of, their houses,
as 90,000 surveillance cameras impose shariah law
in the strictest, tightest, definition known in modern times.

It is as if The Taliban are restaging Duke Bluebeard's Castle
with the women of Kabul behind closed doors as the cast,
and the United Nations Observers making the world
a passive audience, unable to change the narrative
whilst having no choice but to watch it, or ignore it, on repeat...

Abandon hope ye who enter here and watch
as Afghan opium sells at ever higher high prices....  

Non-Doms On Mars

I used to worry that billionaires
might want to populate Mars
because they preferred the atmosphere
to them being too much in proximity 
to poor people, and in addition, in their new
unearthly non-dom status they would be kept
in unearthly luxury closer to their money,
whilst they evaded paying tax more efficiently.

Nowadays my worries are more earthly.
Has Donald Trump done all his homework
with his tariffs? Has he set up his beyond the earth
customs and excise offices corps yet? How else is he
going to collect the tax from the duty free
zone of Elon Musks new luxury travel scheme
for those who can afford to live so far removed
from where they were born, in the nuevo riches?

Reading For Life

It is easy for one person to think of another
after visiting them 'their house is disordered,
untidy and they have more stuff than they know
what to do with. Their tendency towards poor
housekeeping runs away with them.'.  

But I would not criticise a home that is untidy
because it has books in it, even unread books
that have not changed shelf or been dusted for years.

Let the house be untidy, and some of the books read
only selectively, let there be curiosity and reason to share,
and books to lend to friends when they are otherwise
resting, Where there are surplus words, fit to be shared
let them be devoured or saved for the right season, later.

                      Much like friendship itself.

In And Out Of The Loop

Your attention please to the difficult subject
of expecting attention whether those expecting
your attention are narcissists and when they are not,
they are simply using a position or a platform
to get the message they have to share across
after which they will eventually step down.

The difference between the non-narcissist
and a person who can't help felling rewarded
by attention is that the person who helps themselves
and leaves office voluntarily has 'an off switch'
that tells them when they have taken enough
of other people's time and attention, whereas
for the narcissist every day is groundhog day,
a day when they repeat the same formula of seeking
attention on the basis of their self worth/soaking up
the time others give them as if they other people need
to be that needy of them in an infinite loop. 

This leads to problem no 2....

For the narcissist time and attention are a zero gain sum,
the more of other peoples time and attention they have
the less such people have for their own ideas and lives,
and the more they get trapped in a circuit of being defined
by the needy leader and less able to define themselves.
The less the narcissist can be told they are selfish,
the more intensely they forbid such ideas in their presence
-because to them only other people can be narcissistic
and selfish, for not giving them more of what they feel is owed to them. 

The more reinforced the loop becomes
the harder it gets for those in the loop
to stop themselves going as loopy as the leader.

The Romans had an answer for this when they had emperors.
The emperor kept a servant to walk behind him everywhere
he was deferred to in public to say to the leader 'You are not a God'.

But the lasting evidence of emperors heeding the servants voice was patchy. 

'I'm Still Here' - Film Review - The Family Film With The Sweetener Removed

How do cinema goers find out about films? They follow the online publicity and wait for the film to appear at a movie house near enough to them. Thus it was that I went to see 'I'm Still Here', the Walter Salles directed French/Brazilian film depicting life under the fifth Brazilian republic from 1964 to 1985, and later. 

The fifth Brazilian republic started from a military coup that was supported by the U.S. government with where the military said they would not infringe civil life, and whilst they did change presidents every five years, the president was always a right wing figure from the same cabal/party. Thus whilst the film starts in the era of family fun and expanding middle class hopes, where mention of politics is hushed away and politics is something men talk about away from women and family, with the arrival of President Emílio Garrastazu Médicir for his five year term, 1969-1974 a crack downs against civil liberties happens against a background of 'left wing gangs' [given the military character of the government how could they be in anything other than gangs?] abducting figures like the Swiss ambassador to Brazil. We see this reported in the film, where focus is on the male heads of households doing their civil rights duties of tracking those seemingly randomly arrested and imprisoned with out habeas corpus, out of sight of the family, and the mother changing television channels, to divert the children from the chilling reality that was on the horizon for all of them. This let the children believe the family was a safe place, and the future would be safe as well. 

But in January 1971 a former senator, Rubens Paiva, is arrested at night from his family home, and the family are placed together under house arrest. The film changes tone from cheerful to sombre with great felicity as the political blackout, where, to adapt a phrase, the first rule of a military coup is to not discuss that it is a military coup. As if discussion of it is to invite getting on the wrong side of the authorities when the authorities dislike citizens knowing what being the right side them is. The actress Fernanda Torres pitches her depiction of Eunice Piava, whose husband is missing but hopefully still alive but might be dead, perfectly. She shows a quiet resourcefulness, as the mother of her four children, with no regular means to an income. The mother is arrested herself and shows stoicism and circumspection when interrogated, and when she is held in a cell. Her daughter is held in a different cell and neither knows where the other is, or where the husband/father is. The maid has to hold the children who remain at home under house arrest together whilst the policemen who stay in the house make the atmosphere murky with how they skulk around. 

Eunice has to mark the walls to know how many days she has been in her cell, it turns out she was kept three weeks but kept bad count with the scratches on the wall. But she held herself well and gave away nearly no details about who might have been a communist whilst being interrogated with the sounds of torture audible in the background. 

When Eunice and her daughter returned to the house and the secret police left the house and the family alone, that first hug the family shared on screen looked haunted, the body language between them was that frozen. It looked like ghosts sharing in a group hug. 

What happens from that reunifying hug onward was a long slow construction of a new normality, missing the most vital facts of the whereabouts of their father. The secret police stay in their police cars, parked on the street. The mother is the only one permitted to use the phone and she knows that the line is tapped and that people that the children would be better off not knowing about might ring. 

Where does the film go from there? The family adjusts and Eunice has to be both father and mother without even the maid to help her-there is no longer the money to keep a maid who is a friend to the children. Eunice has to both the one set firm boundaries and the one to make sure those boundaries are not crossed, particularly when secret policemen sit in cars on the road outside the house.

But the family knows that the whole of Brazil is living a strange double reality where the news the family get on television is different from the news reports in internationally reputable newspapers, the family knows it is Brazil in microcosm form where for seeing life close up the inconsistencies and adaptions that have to be observed to get by week to week month make normality seem edgy and dissonant. The balance between life being about grace, versus life being about the pressure to compromise, yield to the government on terms that do not add up is there. As this goes on and on, and on, like the military crack down itself the dog the boy owned is let out onto the street unawares of the family. Cue the screech car wheels and the sight of a dead dog whilst the no-so-secret-police glare at the family retrieving the body of the dog. The upside was the chance to grieve as a family as the whole family buries the dog in the garden. 

Oddly, the president of the fifth republic is only depicted once in the film, when Eunice looks up at his portrait on the wall in the bank as she attends to straighten out the family finances. Other than than that one scene he remains an invisible threat. But this twilight zone of a political regime does not last forever, and Eunice prepares the family to move from their luxury villa complete with secret police surveillance to a large flat nearer their extended family in a another city where the families relative anonymity helps them breath easier.

I am going to end this review here, by adding that the family prove resilient for others, well beyond themselves, as well as for each other, and the 'twilight zone' of the memory of life under military rule, suspected of being either communists or communist sympathisers recedes into the past. If you like family saga films that do updates, 1985, 1992, 2000 etc you will like the last half hour of the film. If you think that these updates feel like false endings that only dilute the resolve shown before on the screen, than be patient with the film, it will reward you with the end.      

Honest Small Ad

Half formed character seeks similar,
for aspiring connection in spite of the gaps.
Brief connections okay but long term preferred.
There must be lots of us 'out there....  ', each
half missing themselves, and half looking for each other.

The Mobile Metaphor

of 'moving the goal posts', when applied
to activities and values well away from sport
but applied instead to how we process real life,
gives how we live a strange elasticity,
where wherever we thought we were,
we are somewhere else, and find that we
can no longer identify what we are living for
-particularly when we don't understand metaphors.   

When Will I Hear 'Nation Speaking Peace Unto Nation' Once Again*?

I was working class when I first heard
the BBC, when I first sought something
to aspire to. I grew up admiring the BBC,
for the clear diction of their presenters
and how they gave each cues to speak,
as if giving each other space was normal.  

It was natural when I was working class to defer
to what seemed 'better', if I had worn a cloth cap
I would have doffed it when the radio was on.

I was in awe of how it was scripted and presenters
and guests did not talk over each other. The BBC
carried it's reputation as the first modern media
as a marker of it's pride in how it promoted itself.

But for being the first in so many fields of expertise
it was also the first to make many mistakes, and the last
to admit how many treasured recordings of the programmes
it has made were prematurely discarded, their value unrecognised.

The difference started there - the BBC was founded twenty years
before Ampex audio tape and recording machines became standard
for American radio broadcasters to record broadcasts on first,
as if they sensed the commercial interest
in preserving programmes, to sell them on to the future.

And Ampex invented video tape for video recorders in 1956,
whilst the BBC filmed public events that it knew were important,
like coronations, but in black and white because the management
thought history should be in black and white, like the print media
who came before it, who breathed jealously down the BBC's neck.

Nowadays I get my daily dose of world news,
comment and entertainment from Youtube videos,
as once I might have got from the BBC World Service,
with no thought before here of Youtube's business model.

They are happy to carry material their users pirate
from other broadcasters, copyright allowing, 
whilst Youtube have a three strike policy
over people who upload video material it owns.

America is a place where justice is bought via lawyers.

Youtube's policy comes down to which broadcaster
has the most expensive lawyers, when few uploaders
or corporations has pockets deeper than Youtube has.   

Over a century on from it's founding,
and unknown numbers of programmes lost,
with the means to make programmes now universal,
the BBC voice remains a distinctive around the world.

But it is a voice that seems to be half drowned out,
amid an ever widening welter of broadcasters,
podcasters, performers and composers - all fighting
for a share of the world population's ears and eyes.

No longer do the airwaves ring with the clarity
of the once proud BBC mission statement,
coined in the days of the British Empire, 
'Nation shall speak peace unto nation*',
but with many other declarations instead.

*an adaption of a phrase from The Old Testament, Mikah Ch 4 V 3.

Marxism Today

I am a great admire of the humour of Margaret Dumont
 and Groucho Marx. Even though Groucho was playing
the role of a would-be omniscient wit had limited
application in real life. Margaret Dumont had the grace
  to be a powerful foil to Groucho's 'childish' insults
    and sophistry. I wonder what the tariffs are
in Freedonia at present? Not as enduring
      as the tunes and the dance routines are.      

 

Mind The Narrowing Of The Gap

In this new age where world leaders
define their authority by how they distance
themselves, using media by which to rule
by decree, and an armed police state, I notice
that worldwide government that once rested 
on ceremonial roles are finding such ceremonies
reduced, as 'strongmen' take all the roles they can
to use as mouthpieces to project their power with.

Processes that once seemed liberal, inclusive
where checks and balances led to accountability 
becomes bully pulpits for men who lack self control
to freely exercise their lack of self control with.       

War By Other Means

always starts with propaganda by other means,
as Edward Bernays knew, from the start of his hype
of  American consumerism and then the stock markets
to ever bigger booms, which were then followed
by the biggest worldwide crash on October 29th 1929.
This bust only lifted, and became a boom in the USA
when the world went Boom!! with World War II,
in September 1939, which America joined, two years later. 

But long before WW II, on the 17th of June 1930,
Republican president Herbert Hoover signed into U.S. law
the Smoot - Hawley Tariff Act which protected  America
from trade that America did not want, from all across the world,
whilst supressing trade between countries for years to come.

Fast forward to 2025 and Donald Trump wants to use tariffs
to reassert a new 'America first' policy, to 'reclaim from abroad'
jobs that Trump claims 'Should be American jobs',
as if American money should command greater patriotism 
towards it than other countries currencies should do for them,
when with the world being 'a market place' all currencies are the same,
dependent for reputation on the policies of the government behind them.

At least in America's wars start by means other than arms, unlike Putin's Russia. 

There wars start with over-egged readings of history, and the need
to hide from the population how much money only works for the ultra wealthy.  

Hurrah For Ronin The Rat

The hero of the day for detecting the maximum
number of mines in one day in the much mined
country of Cambodia for sniffing out over 100 mines
and bits of unexploded ordinances, combined in one day.

Of course, how much this record was contributed 
to by the parties that laid the ordinances
so prolifically originally, and made the land
unusable and have given the APOPO centre
so much work to do, is the debate we all have to get past.   

 

'Ernest Cole: Lost And Found' A Short Review

I had never heard of the photographer, Ernest Cole (1940 - 1990) before a rave review for this new documentary film appeared on my radio, which I admit I was not that attentive of, since I was eating my evening meal at the time. 

Then I saw a listing for the film at my local art house cinema. Again, whilst I knew nothing about Cole, I knew about the subject of the director's previous documentary, 'I Am Not Your Negro', polemical writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924 - 1987). I had in recent years appreciated how James Baldwin had a righteous anger, where because of his views on division by race he put a commitment into modern homosexuality, another part of his life, that the white English middle class homosexuality I had encountered simply did not have. I have for years liked the figures who get marginalised for the art they make and what they had to say, who drew a commitment to social change from their marginality, but had to wait for their recognition. Ernest Cole is one such figure. 

The film is a crisp 106 minutes long, and not a minute of it is wasted. I don't know, or remember, many critics who write about what I recognise when it is present in a film, editing. If the image and sound that is melifluous and smooth to the point where the message of the script is delivered that well the listener has to take stock after to realise what message was/is then that editor is somebody who should be praised and thanked in my view. 

This film is the story of a photographic book, the story of a photographer and the story of a man who was broken by his own message. To start at the beginning, the laws that created Apartheid in South Africa after WW2 were complex, overlapping, and allowed no escape for those who were confined from public expression by them. As Ernest Cole grew up so these laws developed, and were expanded. These laws included laws on censorship which both prohibited black people from taking photographs and prohibited the publication of photos that did not explicitly flatter the white hierarchy in the country, amongst many other overlapping prohibitions. By some fluke Ernest Cole started work in a magazine as one of the dark room staff. He got a camera and illegally started taking pictures of Apartheid as it was publicly expressed, on the streets and where the seats and fountains with 'whites only' written on them were. The way that men and women dressed, according to the richness of their culture more than their material wealth, he found particularly photogenic in black and white. Life in the city streets must have excited him a lot. Inspired by Henri Cartier Bresson he photographed anything and everything, and he had that 'eye' for a picture where the construction of the image spoke of so much more than itself.

For most of a decade his negatives were his diary and his diary was full of the misery of Apartheid, whilst attempting to be joyful about life. We all know the phrase 'I can't breathe' as used to describe the effects of American racism on black people who feel discriminated against, economically and more directly by the police. Eventually Ernest Cole had to leave South Africa to relearn how to breathe. He felt he was choking on his own talent, his gift of expression. He escaped South Africa with his negatives, which the censors and the authorities knew nothing about, hidden away. He got to New York by boat and contacted a photographic agency to try to get his negatives printed in a book about South Africa. Initially no publisher was interested.

He had a stroke of luck as regards getting his work published, but not as regards his life. The Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, was stabbed to death in September the 6th 1966 as he entered a place he felt secure, The House of Assembly in the South African state legislature. Meanwhile Ernest Cole was in New York as a temporary illegal exile, illegal less because of how America viewed his status, and more because of how he had escaped South Africa gave him no means of re-entering the country, and his family were still there. This was a stressful enough status to have to manage daily in itself. Cole's illegally taken pictures depicting a South Africa that went back longer than Verwoerd had been in power found their value in New York, and were published in a book as a witness to a world that South Africa denied existed. With the book 'House of Bondage' it seemed like his life's work this far had found it's place in the world. But he was doubly grieved that the photographic book was banned in South Africa. The suffering he had photographed and the life of exile that caused him such grief had gone far deeper into him than anyone wanted to know. Only fellow exiles from South Africa who were part of an underground New York jazz scene who were similarly scratching a life out from the margins of American society could touch where he felt most grieved.

Before he was thirty he had made the impact on the world he had wanted to have from his first days in the darkroom aged fourteen, but he had no impact on his homeland and was exiled from his family. He remained estranged from his family, criminalised by the South African government and utterly lost living in America. He lived another twenty years on the margins of New York life, and for a period he lived in on the social margins in Sweden, a place where his photographic eye found nothing it could focus on. But he found fellowship with other photographers there. Somehow-nobody alive presently knows how-his negatives and notes about his photographs were kept together and intact but he got separated from them. One of his Swedish photographer friends kept them and they ended up in a bank vault with no records of the deposit in 2016, long after he had died in a New York hospital in 1990, where his mother was the last person to see him alive.

To say 'this film is impactful' is to utterly underplay this documentary feature. If it, and the images in it, do anything to highlight present day racial inequality in a way that remedies and reduces it I will be glad. Ernest Cole engaged in art for life's sake, rathe than art for art's sake. The present day people who cannot breathe are not holding their breath waiting for their release from injustice, they were having the breath knocked out of them by the ongoing renewal of racism via apartheid.

P.s. for a review of the documentary film I saw in February 'Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story' please left click here.         

A Most Earnest President?

To paraphrase one of the more famous aphorisms
coined by Oscar Wilde, to address the pressing issue
that the 'free' world is presently facing....

'To elect Donald Trump once
may be regarded as misfortune,
to elect him twice looks like carelessness',

And however much we try to care,
none of us knows what carelessness
that is yet to come, which will outlive us.... 

Picture Set Of The Month - April - The Paintings Of Chico Da Silva

Francisco Domingos "Chico" da Silva (1910 – 1985)
 was a Brazilian painter associated with primitive art  
and modernist Brazilian painting.

Chico da Silva, was born to an Indigenous Peruvian
 father and a Brazilian mother. His early years
were spent in the Amazon forest. There, he saw first hand
the rich local flora and fauna. His father, a boatman
died from a rattlesnake bite, following this Chico
Chico moved with his mother to Fortaleza.

 

Chico taught himself how to paint, with no clue
that painting would be his career. He initially painted birds
 on outsides of local fishermen's houses, using charcoal, chalk,
and natural pigments. 

From 1961, Chico worked at the Federal University
 of Ceará’s art museum, where he was introduced
to his first dealer, Henrique Bluhm.
His dealer made him famous and got the artist
exhibitions at prestigious venues.
With his fame came the doubt of the critics.
His death in 1985 was from alcoholism,
a cause of death that it is hard to know was cause for regret.