Recorded 100 years Ago Today - 'Young Woman Blues' - Bessie Smith

 

Young Woman’s Blues (Bessie Smith) - recorded by Bessie Smith's and her Blues Boys. Bessie Smith (vocals), Joe Smith (cornet), Buster Bailey (Clarinet), and Fletcher Henderson (piano).

October Moon - The Hunter's Moon

...looks like every other moon, after all the moon remains the same
and lends itself to many different foreground images, for contrast.
What changes is the activities linked to the moon that month.
Hunters in the wild like good light, just as their quarry
like the shadows to hide in.

So as the nights get longer and the light of the sun is reflected
more brightly by the moon, so the moon becomes
the hunter's helper, where only the hunter knows.
what their role is in the hostilities between hunter and hunted. 
 

 

Tempted By The Lure Of Employment

I have never read 'The Screwtape Letters'
by C.S. Lweis, but I recently heard a speaker
list the ways in the book, in which Screwtape
seeks to educate his nephew Wormwood,
in the trade that they both practiced, tempters.

I read the list and it reminded me of what I met
from employers, when I called myself a jobseeker.

In job applications I filled in, and the few interviews
I was granted, employers used exactly the same tactics
on me that Screwtape sought to teach Wormwood
to set up the rules neither of them wanted to live by,
but which they wanted everyone else to follow.

isolation
seperation
distraction
seduction
illusory temporary comfort
wearing seekers out,

The height of the illusion was raised in the phrase
'The devil always finds work for idle hands',
as used by knowing, property owning, adults
which they applied most readily to the youths
who landed on government traning schemes,
for them not having any other employment.

There every youth was presented with the idea
that the path to employment could be found
by them doing what their trainers told them to do,
and never asking questions. When the true aim
of the scheme was to create long term work
for the trainers, and the management above them. 

I remember acutely the seduction,
the illusory temporary comfort, that wore seekers out
where as a job seeker I was easily distracted
I never found the path that led to paid employment:
where ever I applied, the path started somewhere else.

So thank you for C.S. Lewis for the guide
to Human Reources and Modern Management.  

The Badness In My Method

Ensured that I was rarely seen
to be on the right side of history,
whatever the narrative presented to me.

But I grew up with that adversity towards reason.
My mentors were the adults who put themselves
the other side of the many well reasoned arguments
that they were presented with, which they would say
others should accept, whilst setting themselves apart from.
Whilst denying that their principles looked nearer
'do as I say not as I do' than they could demonstrate.

As far as I could tell the people who most respectfully
disagreed with each other were the allotment holders,
who gave each other autonomy because the plants
they grew set and won the arguments there -
as long as the plants were alive they remained silent.

For several years I have not cut my grass,
I have left my garden untidy. Now the ecology
quietly agrees with me over how long the grass 
grows between the trees and bushes should be.
In the heat the temperature is notably lower
 - by two or three degrees every summer.

Thus proving there is method in my badness.   

The Most Enduring Doom Loops Are Always Rational

In a world of seemingly infinite credit,
assuming that both can be quantified,
how does money compare to common sense? 
how do they contrasr in the scale of human reason?

Are each to be argued over whilst kept seperate?
Some of us can put others into debts so unrepayble
That Sisyphus would struggle with the repayments.
Where those who have the power to push others
into debt without becoming indebted themselves,
will be the last to reisst the temptation toward insanity
 - for then being Midas-like and the last to recognise it.

For as long as the powerless are powerless
they have to remain vigilant,
to observe what they are unable to change. 

Meanwhile we all get pushed through the doom loops
of debt, and insanity, that are as perverse as they are rational....  

The Readers Rest

The older I get, the more I read, 
though my reading rate is slowing,
because what has increased in value for me
is my appreciation the succinct paragraph
which when I read it on the page tells me
'You can stop there take a rest.'. 

Bad Weather Friendships

Having friendships is all very well,
after all everyone who likes to be liked 
we see unpopularity as pointless isolation,
 - a masochism that is not even a gain
for the person applying the pain to the suffer.

But when our friends become covers
for our vices, pride, greed, lust, envy,
gluttony, wrath, and sloth, because 
for those who share these qualities
they are the equal of each other in virtue,
such virtues change the world we all inhabit.
Where our vices are a discomfort to our enemies,
and mutuality and comfort to our friends.

In this age of the denial of the evidence
we have to ask, and listen for the answer,
to discover how much the values we share
with others make us bad weather friends, 
mutually denying how we are beating the path to destruction
- by denying our roles in the effects of global warming.   

Clearing The Blockages Against Positive Understanding....

  I can remember be 18, and up to that age going to the doctors most reluctantly. Mother would insist that if I had to go, then she had to take me, and be with me during the consultation. I should not be allowed to see the doctor on my own. When she did not want to go, then neither of us went. She was born in the era before the NHS was founded. She only sought the doctor long after she needed to see him - locally every doctor was male, even in the 1970s. By the time she went her reason for going had become close to accute, making the visit, desperate. An emergency. 

   Apparently my hearing was normal, that is nobody asked me about it. But for years the working class way of anyone getting wax out of their ears was to prod the ear with the non phosphotrus end of a matchstick*, unable to see the effect that such prodding had, and only stopping at any sign of blood on the matchstick, which rarely happened, thankfully. 

  Aged 18 I made my first apointment to have my ears checked by Dr Ward, a doctor I had little cause to have faith in. But then I had only ever seen him with Mother. I knew Dad was technically registered with the doctor, but we never knew for sure because he never made any appointment to see the doctor. He must have been registered since once the doctor saw him at home. When I was 16 and Dad was 43 Mother called the doctor out to see Dad. He had been laid up in bed for a few days, his meals brought up to him and the dishes taken away. He was too ill to go to work, much less to maintain the vice of his choice, the pub. The message that was distantly relayed to his family was that, for him having only one lung, he had better give up smoking the roll up cigarettes he had been smoking for thirty years. Passive smoking via being in smoke-laden room had not yet been discovered, or described. He took up passive smoking, whilst actively drinking, in the pub with renewed relish when he finally felt fit enough get out of bed. Only he knew what the doctor said, and what his medicine was...  

  But to get back to my own business, I got to the appointment with Doctor Ward and he examined my ears and found plenty of wax worth removing there, and prescribed the ear wax softening treatment for me to apply twice a day, and gave me the date of the appointment with the nurse. Maybe a fortnight later I returned. She filled the metal cylinder of the syringe with warm water placed the kidney shaped bowl under the ear, and took her time. For a procedure that was beng done for the first time I was astonshed at the volume of wax that fell into the metal kidney shaped bowl. And I was pleased that I now knew the difference between hearing and not hearing: people did not have to raise their voices as much. I was also pleased because I had been able to ask for the examination on my own.

  There were many other matters where my understanding was blocked by the language my family used to explain things, and where my experience of social class, contributed to my part in the collective misundersanding of life, where the right question to ask was the hardest to phrase, and then deliver and get an anwer for. But hearing and looking after my hearing better was a good start.

  My mother is still alive, now aged 91, and for all I know still has her allotment for growing vegetables. I am better off not asking what goes on there. My father lost his job when the factory that he worked in - the biggest employer in the town by quite a large number - closed, soon after he retuerned to work. He was never offered another job, and made propping up the pub with the best of his health his life's work for nearly thirty years more, before his declining health made him give that up when he was 74. He died soon after, which meant I lost my chance to ask whether he liked being in the pub as much, more, or less, when the pubs severly reduced the amount of passive smoking inside, by making drinkers smoke outside, under improvised shelters.  

  I now live far from my birth family. on my own. I have a good relatiosnhip with the modern health service, with all the data it collects, and preventative medicine ethos it applies to my life. I have that because I can, and because I live more healthily than my parents ever prepared me for - I even enjoy hearing my own tinnitus - something they would never have thought to prepared me for enjoying.

*Bryant and May were the brand of matches of choice in the parental house, because they were the only brand to put on the back of them what are now called 'dad jokes'. Sample: Son, doing his home work, 'Dad where are the Himilayas?' Dad in reply 'I don't know. Ask your mother, she is the one who puts everything away.'.     

Bird Life: The Rainbow Bee Eater

Rainbow bee-Eater.

Fogg Dam, Australia.

Photographer: Matt Campbell.

 

Sex And Violence Ancient And Modern

This image was published in the Sunday Express 8th October 1972
shows Mary Whitehouse as God, and Lord Hill, then Chairman
of the BBC Govenors as Moses, prostrate before her,
makes play of the idea of  her making her way
through the tide of depravitry that the BBC broadcast,
the thilthy waters of which she parted - for her  to tread a clean path
through the filth would cleave and retreat
as she stepped forward, afraid of her.

 The image is from a 1973 book of the scripts for 'Til Death Us Do Part',
 one of the BBC programmes she liked the least. In my twentnies I read
The Old Testament, and I used to joke to my disbelieving parents,
who were small c conserative, 'It is full of sex and violence'
which it is - the violence more than the sex, I had to look harder
to find the latter. I still read the book today, but less for the shock value,
or the renewing some feint old hope of being freshly scandalised.    

 

In This Age Of Unoriginality

Through the reinvention of corporate theft
I wonder how long it will take, before
the corporate recycling will meet itself,
coming back from it's previous thievery?

When it does, what will it recognise,
given how vanity does not recognise itself? 

Nobody's History

As the world draws closer to a stage
where the ill will that leads towards war
proves irretrievable I notice a new tactic
from thos who seek to dircct thoughts
that will lead to adversarial behaviour,
a new varition on 'throw the stone
bu hide the hand [that thre it] after'
at first allow their enemies to quote 
what they say, accurately direct from the sourcs,
then change the way of engaging with the public
to allow words to be recorded but without attributation.

So the words exist and leave their mark
on human behaviour but who said them
and when they were said freshly anonymises
the new chapter in the history of human conflict
as if some lived and many died, but nobody
alive now knows why, or who it all starterd with.   

The Partial Attention Span Economy

Not only do I start to read fewer books
than I once did, but I often don't finish
what I read either. It could be, to quote
the writing on the work house clock,
that 'The Time is Short', where the urge
to work, whether my work is at words
or at the physical labour of the sort
the clock once encouraged, is no longer
as urgent in seeking achievement as it once was.

In my new self I lapse from the standards
my older selves once set. I like who I am now,
much more than who has led me towards  being that person

I am less drawn in by past and present day versions
of the partial-attention-span-economy
that misses the point it once attempted to make.

Open Thought

To underthink something
is less about approaching the subject, or idea,
with so weak a formal agnda that it is formless, bare,
much more that the idea is strong but spare, and open....

To underthink something is to let the idea breathe,
and allow the idea to follow the tide of the air
through it's natiral course, nearer it's concluson,
like a river undiverted where the only dams
are the barriers that get set up by Mother Nature..... 

Forty Years Before 'Animal Farm' Was Pubished,

amid the clamour and noise of WW2,
there was another alegorical novel
that drew on how country life was torn
by division and strife, which also used animals
to illustrate human politics.
 - 'The Wind in The Willows', by Kenneth Grahame

Grahame used animals to describe the class system,
just as much as George Orwell did. But where Orwell
aggressively divided his animals via different tasks
which amounted to a managerial theory for how a farm,
or enterprise, might be maintained without a owner,
Grahame's book was a responce to the then-new threat
facing the Edwardian social order - where historically
the aristocrat protected the peasant. The threat came from
the newly urban peripatetic peasnts who saw socialism
via the redistribution of land, as the solution to their unrest.

They saw themselves less as upstarts, more signs of new growth
 - part of a new eco-system, that was drew from the old,
which it would in time replace. In the end the upstart weasels
in the book were defeated, as were The Labour Party in real life.

The old order of Toad in charge,
Badger Ratty and Mole as his friends,
when he wanted them to be, was restored.

The old feudalism won over the calls for wider redistrobution
and restored it's hidden divisions and mutual denial, fit enough
to defend itself against future challengers. Wherever they started.....   

Second Hand Health And Safety

I like my present day neighbours, I really do.
Neighbours who can agree with each other,
whilst being from such differnt backgrounds
are a 'win - win' particularly when they share the prizes....

Even so differences can be divisive, particularly when  
I can admire, but I cannot quite follow, their ideas,
on health, safely, and risk.all of which depend on a wealth,
education, and life chances, that my head can't get around.

But when the space makes us all slightly looser,
for a little drink, I can be honest about how rough
some of my life was, without me sounding like
I took too many wrong turninings for my health,
wealth, and sense of safety, being so second hand.  

The Comparisons Where We Don't Recognise Ourselves

Elon Musk has sometines been quoted as saying
that 'Douglas Adams is my favourite philosopher',
often after quoting Adam's advice on the cover
of 'The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy'
on the prototypes of his (Musk's) latest venture.
as if quoting 'Don't Panic' gave Musk license...

But in other people's minds the Adams character
who Elon Musk has the most in common with
is Zaphod Beeblebrox, the archetypal playboy
billionaire ruler who is so trivial in his creativity
that he never gets beyond his own playfulness,
in whom the narcissism has so inflated his ego
that he cannot recognise it, and who is blind
to the consequences of the chaos he causes.

Similarly Space X, xAI, and Tesla combined
are all like Adam's Sirius Cybernetics, where
the self opening doors of the space ships
sigh with satisfaction as they let people through,
and the lifts share aggresssively happy slogans
with their carriers to a level of cynical indifference
to the general effects of 'hubris thought technology'
at any, and every cost, where irony remains unknown.

Knowing ourselves means knowiing our own irony,
I keep refreshing mine, when I have to re-teach myself
to accept it when I have landed on my feet, when
I know how to be myself on other people's territory.

I wish Mr Musk well in his respecting
the unlimited ironies of his creativity,
and finding out what his wealth can't buy.

When Will The Next Luddite Revolution Begin?

As a new generations of skills that were once purely human,
laborious and poorly remunerative but which allowed people
to live, are now being copied, and 'improved on', en masse,
by machines so powerful they seem to dwarf the common man.

As the new hyper-wealthy present the new technology
which not only monetises what these machines do, 
the help the hyper-wealthy reinvent the idea of 'money'
for people who are too poor to reinvent themselves.

'The new elite' present themselves
as the measure of everything.

But for all that their technology reinvents them,
it is only the new guide to recent past, re-explaining
recent life in the latest distortions of human understanding.

 Who is going to tell the tech bros, so that they will listen
that they are has-beens of tomorrow? Whilst they think
they equal the total sum of human history?

 

Rag Rugs Like This One

RAG RUGS were made from old clothes or mill waste since the 19th century. They were revived in the 1930s and 1940s. The craft is now a hands-on sustainable lifestyle activity.

   Were an example of what was put in front of the hearth, and made the centre pieces the rooms that they were put in my grandparents home. The rugs were always kept clear in the often small rooms that were otherwise too full of the furniture they were required to contain. When I saw my granparents in their home I did not understand them. I was a child, born in the 1960s, in single figures and short trousers who was not given a watch to wear to know what the time was until I was 14. In my short trousers, without a watch, and not really understanding anything much about money, beyond 'keep it secure in your pocket'. I was sent seven miles on the bus into the country, from the town, to stay with my grandparents 'on holiday' for a week in July for probably four years. Whilst, without me being there, my parents got on with redecorating and rearranging the house they owned, in which my dad prided himself in how much he had bought everything that we saw, and it all matched. He wanted nothing we saw to look hand made. And with the television being on all the time that he was home, attempting to read any book, him reading his collection pulp fiction paperbacks apart, was frowned on as the peak expression of boredom. 

  Staying with my grandparents as a child was always some sort of respite to me from the pressures of growing up. Their home was much more settled after all the changes that homes go through as they raise chilren towards becoming adults. They did not have a fridge, but had a cooling pantry and kept milk in it fresher for longer via evaporative refridgeration. They had a small screen 1950s black and white television that they kept a pleated cover over when it was not on. There was a stillness about their home that I thought was attractive. I was going through changing schools, whereI I changed bullies, from one school the next school, until the bullying got really horrible. There, the pressure to conform into I-did-not-know-what increased more than I had words to decribe it with. I was expected to mainmain my optimism for the sake of the teachers who saw it their job to standardise the pupils by removing their mannersisms, taking away their rough edges and weak habits, for the sake of future teachers, and examiners.

  My grandparents home was a  place where I felt safe from the pressures of 'self improvement' and the standardisation of children to make them fit into the future. It was in one of the sheds in the yard of the farm next door to their home that I found a pushbike with no 'support wheels' either side of the rear wheels on it. I first learned to ride a bike in the yard, where there were cattle in some of the sheds. There I felt that what I had learned was an achievement, and I could be thankful in an unforced way for the person whose bike I had borrowed to learn with. There were no such 'safe spaces' as they would be called now, uncompetitive places, where I could discover new basic skills, near my parents house. There everything was much more regimented by the march of time and progress, which was mediated to me most by the change in the tone of the adverts on television, which fascinated me, and by the change in the toys that amused me. 

  Scale model Jumbo Jets really could keep male children quiet as they looked at the instructions for all the different parts, detachable from the plastic frames they came in. There, the concentration required to follow the instructions, and not get glue on your hands as child, was acute. The mimicry of new technology we only saw on television, like these kits, was an easy sell. Even when it was presented in the form of plastic model kits. But once the kits had been completed what was the child meant to do with them? Beyond, as clutter, keeping  the object, once complete 'on display' in their own room where, otherwise, it had no other use?   

 For my grandparents genrations the most durable games involved packs of cards. From simple family games at home to whist drives where the ladies met that were set up in the Gertrude Morris Hall which today, well over fifty years since my grandmother would have been a stalwart there, still holds inclusive quilting afternoons and council meetings. So whatever the decor at home, local arts and crafts for whoever wants to follow on in such ancient skills is as possible now as it used to be there.

Popular Doom Loops

permiate the news we watch and read until we wonder
'Is the future worth the effort it takes to get there?',
when it has to be. How else to think outside the present
without us returning to pasts many of us barely remember?

But as more media companies save more money
in the pursuit of wealth for the Commander in Chief
and the shareholders who live beyond the wealth of Croesus,
the news rooms will be more operated by semi-autonomous
AI operatives where the human viewers of the news
will seek to ask each other 'Is this real? Did this happen?
Or is it some AI fantasy built on what happened in the past?'

The truth will only hit the fan when enough of the viewers
turn away from their screens and seek to recognise each other,
collapsing the revenue stream of the channel, from advertising.

Even then channels will change owners, be relaunched, 
with promise that the AI is checked more thoroughly,
where the evidence of such claims will be witheld,
because 'The information is commercially sensitive.
Such is it's value, it would affect the shrinking markets
for information that is not adjusted by hype and AI.....  '. 

'If I Were You I Would Not Start From Here.... '

One of the phrases that was quaint,
nearly funny, in the town I grew up in
happened when a stranger asked a local

The local would reply with their hands
pointing left and right into the distance
telling the stranger which way they should go
without saying the street names of the places
they will have to pass through which their guide
preferred to avoid thinking about as if
they were lost in the stream of local consiousness.

At some point the guide would yield to their usual habit,
and stun the stranger using the phrase 'If I were you
I would not start from here, to get to where you seek. 
I would start from somewhere else.'.

I eventually felt lost in the town
that gave the people who lived there
that rather circular sense of direction
that led nowhere else. I found my way out.

I have not looked back since, 
whether I was lost, had mixed directions,
or was travelling using dead reckoning,
pure guesss work to get to where I thought
I was meant to be going to, I got there in the end. 

Anid in the end found the place I never found
when I had to ask for directions for it: the place
I can call home where whether I am active or inactive
I can rest and I can give myself clearer directions.   

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes And Innocents.....

Meanwhile the pupils in the theology class
are studying the text of Matthew Ch 6 verse 21
'Where your treasure is your heart will be also.....  '. 

 

The Forgiveness Club

Chosen family are the ones we forgive,
and who forgive us our trespasses
within finite degrees of mutuality,
whilst keeping the language light and easy.

Unchosen family are the people
we find it wise to keep at the distance
where we can observe what they do,
and balance knowing their character
and knowing the flaws in ourselves
whilst wishing that with both
they were someone more malleable.

Originally Recorded 100 Years Ago

    'I've Found A New Baby' is filmed being sung here in the mid 1974/1975/1976 by the original Dixie Nightingale, vocalist Eve Taylor, in a sprightly recording made in Denmark and Sweden, where she was celebrated, even in the twilight of her long career.   

Seeking Absurdist Employment

I never thought to turn to the existentialist playwright
Samuel Beckett for advice for job interview technique,
when I applied for the jobs that I did not get,
and then applied for more jobs I did not get.

I missed the opportunity when I was before an employer,
to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, as I explained to them
'With each application for a job where someone else
got the work, I was training myself in how to fail better.'.
I did not give the employer the whole Beckett quote

 'Ever tried. Ever failed, Try again. Fail better.'. 

Employers are not reknowned for their absurdist,
existentialist, sense of humour. If they were,
and I had used my explanation, I might have got the job.    

'The Angel Of History.....

   ....must look just so. His face is turned towards the past.
Where [what] we see [as] the appearance of a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe,which unceasingly piles
rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.' 

 - Walter Benjamin (1892 - 1940). Benjamin was a German philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist.
To find out more about him please left click here. 

Hatches, Matches, and Despaches

A friend with who I liked to think
I did not censor myself with
asked me about how I connected
with family. She stumped me,
left me politely floundering for words
when I tried to compose a reply.

She is part of a close extended family
for whom, when the women folk met
on their own terms, they could talk over
each other so agreeably they were blind
to how rare such ease is, and even blinder
to how some families struggle with the language.

Weeeks later, and pondering on my own,
the reply that was honest and tactful
that I should have shared with her
finally came to me:.My family saw me
the way that the Church of England
saw converts to it, the church engaged most
when there were big changes were afoot:
hatches/baptisms, matches/weddings
and despaches/funerals, where if before
the support had been poor their departure 
could be a lukewam/threadbare affair.
Confirrmations are an added bonus.

In between the great events of life,
most of which I was ill prepared for,
my family had.little to say for themselves
or to each other. They now get their cards
at birthdays and at Christmas, they did not always.

They send their cards to me,
I find it hard to be sentimental
amid such threadbare language.

Picture Set Of The Month - October - My Own Photography

 

On the beach in Newcastle, County Down,
one sunny September day, 2026.   

The breakers are worn smooth
from sea washing over them every tide.

That these stumps of breakers are less than a foot tall,
many much shorter, are so naturally sculpual 
  makes me admire them all the more.

And when the shapes they are so worn
as to lend themselves to, well, maquettes
of statues that Henry Moor never made,
I can't help but like them even more.

Echoes Of Us

The idea behind 'Grief Tech' - digital technology
that remembers our griefs and recreates the dead
as they might have been - might be sold as 'new'. 
Sold as a previously unknown form of memorial.
But it is as old as the motive behind it.
The only new part is the technology,
which will decieve us with the ease
with which it recreates what it stores. 

Our memories remember best,
and help us to forget best too.
Memory allow us a flexibiltiy of recollection
where we are the change we need to be, today. 

Whereas our technology only stores echoes of us.

I Am Neither Proud Nor Ashamed

of my having 'ghosted' many friends in the past,
losing contact with them, leaving no forwarding address,
only for them to find me many years later on facebook.
At the time I ghosted them, I felt like a ghost, myself.

When I was young any sense of my personal space,
my boundaries, my self, felt like they were borrowed
 - they belonged to somone else, but were mine to use
until it was time to return them, which I couldn't
and replace them with a new set of age-apt borrrowings.
Values that fitted the dictates of the day-until they didn't.

This sense of weak attachments continued,
until I learned that I had to accept that I was gay.
The package - the marriage, the wife, the children,
the mortgage, the 'for life' job, were not going to be
granted to  me, after the sense of the disownship
and the half-lives I had been lent by my family.

After plunbing the depths of the history
of the pasts I could never own,
which surfaced again, I was a differnt person.

I was left to seek 'my chosen family',
where I knew before we found each other
that connection would always be conditional. 

Any exit could be the start of a new beginning:
I could keep my pasts as long as I left a clean ending behind me.....

Writing Ontologically*

To be human is to be the measure
of an out of scale monoculture
in which we flatter outselves
that what is right for us is is right
for everything else on Planet Earth
that is of less clear value to humans
because either it's supportive proerties
remain unkown where humans don't see
the non-human life there at out there. 

But there are ways to reverse the damage
we do: live better through takeing less
and sharing more. support the diversity
of species that unintentionally support us.
This reciprocity and inter-dependence
 is something that opponent of Darwin,
Peter Kropotkin would approve of,
Let more diversity survive this way.

*which is to say looking at the nature of what life there is, the nature of it's being....

Wooden Post

For more than six months I have
had to adjust with how well I walked.
When I walk any distance in company
I had to take my walking stick with me,
I often felt unsure about to 'own' having to use it.
I did not want to appear to be that reliant.

Snce I have to have this stick, or leaning post,
with me more places than ever before, I will
and take my stick with me where I will,
but without telling anyone else I will name it 'God'.

He should not mind being leant upon - in fact he expects it! 

September Moon - Harvest/Corn Moon

 

  The 2026 Corn Moon/Harvest Moon rises on 26 September. The modern names for our full moons now come from North America, from the Native Indian Tribes, or from the white farmers who make America one of the bread baskets of the world. The September 2026 full Moon will also be the named after Harvest Moon because of it's proximity to the September equinox. This is when the Sun appears to cross the celestial equator, heading southward. Because of differences between the calendar year and the tropical year*, the September equinox will occur Wed 23 September 21 at 1.o4 am.

*The actual time it takes for the Earth's axis to return to the same angle, relative to the sun, completing a complete cycle of seasons - aproximately 365.2422 days.  

From Debt Bondage To Outright War

between any two tribes or nation states,
where one of them first puts another into debts
that the other can't pay off without reducing itself,
and then proceeds to outright war, is a very old story.
As old as every Empire, older than earliest recorded life,
in The Old Testament where many such narratives,
built up from shadowy outlines, suggest themselves. 

In the modern world rich countries are rich,
because of the debts they service but never pay  off,
poor countries remain poor for them being
the wrong side of the history of debt, and empire.

Wars, like old enmities, continually simmer.  
No coutntry ever completely disappears
but poor countries still fall into anarchy, dissaray.

In the event of any country being wiped off
the face of the earth, it would remain in the history books,
as described by it's enemies - who for being victors
have will have absolute control of the narrative.

The need for control makes the cancellation of debt, 
and the forgiving of any debtor country, impossible.
Those who have to cancel debts owed to them
won't want to wipe the slate clean when they know
that they will have to forgive again, and again, and again....

Book Review - 'Bessie Smith' - Jackie Kay

   This is the first prose book by Jackie Kay, as opposed to her poetry that I have read. The next book by Kay 'Trumpet' is what started me reading this book. In the foreword of 'Trumpet' Ali Smith recommends to the reader that they read 'Bessie Smith' first, since that first prose work, written and published before 'Trumpet', informed the writing of 'Trumpet'. Both books cenre on music, and how black musicians and jazz musicians resisted the implicit and explicit assumptions in their identity, where white people talked in cliches about how black people live, which they havce no personal experience of.

   In 'Bessie Smith' Jackie Kay starts with her earliest recollections of finding Bessie. When Kay was as a teenager in the 1970s, including confiding to miming to her Bessie Smith albums in her bedroom, with her hairbrush as the microphone. From this starting point Kay feels her way into Bessie Smith's life with the basic facts and comments than could only be speculative. Kay treads lightly on the early known facts of Bessie Smith's life, because the identifiably personal facts are so few. In the back of the book there are several apendices including a brief  chronology of those bare-bones facts that the main text fleshes out.

  According to later documents Bessie was born in 1894, in Chattanooga and grew up with little to no no sense of being part of a family, as she led a hand to mouth life. Her parents died when she was a child, so the barefoot life of a sharecropper was all she had to hold on to, well nearly all. In the early 1900s there was one way out of the racism of the croppers life, one uncertain haven against the Jim Crow laws: the theatre. Which meant several things, black male blues singers singing about the ills of being black in what seemed like crude musical and literary howls of pain, often played on instruments that the musicians made for themselves. Easier to accomodate on the ear were the minstrel shows where for modern readers to read about them they have to suspend every last critcal value they had. Early minstrel shows consisted of white males blackenng their faces whilst singing parody songs about black suffering - a more ironic description of the lives of black slaves, where the whites pretend to join them to mimic their suffering in jolly tones could hardly be imagined. It was form of entertainment where the word 'schadenfraude' had never been invented, but it should have been. The irony was deepened when black men and women wanted to join the shows. They too blacked up. Because this parody of blackness, and the suffering and inequality of slavery, had to be maintianed through the make up, the pretence. But black people's voices and intonation could not be rendered white. The first black blues woman to be famous in her own right was 'Mother of the blues' Ma Rainey (1886 - 1939).

  From the impenitrable jet black irony of the minstrel shows, where singing about suffering and division through slavery was prefferable to actually living out that suffering, there was a path developed for the most talented and toughest black men and women who could create their own relative autonomy, led by their abilities as performers. This parh existed where no such autonomy was meant to be possible. This is shown in  one of the appendices where Bessie Smith's tour itinerary is detailed in map form at the back of the book. The modern rock music industry is well known for it's dishonest and violent managers of musical talent, where the talent itself was a creative talent and they prefered the dishonesty of their management to the bigger dishonesty of the venue management and tour promoters. For Bessie Smith the management of song writing, recording, and touring when race laws dictated where a perfrormer might stay after the performance finished naturally led to the sterotype of 'the hustling husbands' who as the managers of their talented wives, their property, were less interested in the marriage and more engaged with the financial rewards the asset they managed could bring in, which was to be syphoned off, unseen from the person who attracted the wealth.

  But I have yet to hear the song title 'Irony Blues' it would be too 'meta' for it to be a proper blues song. So I will plough on here.....    One of the interesting paradoxes is how many of the women who took the blues to the stage and gave it a sass and satin makover that the men who sang the blues could not were all called Smith, Mamie, Clara, Bessie, Laura and Trixie. None of them were related to each other. Smith was the sir name a slave owner gave to their families long before, Many talented women across the world of the 19th and 20th centuries found the recognition of their talent was reduced, as they married and took on their husbands names, their talents were subsumed into their hussbands reputations and business affairs, as the patriarchy marched on into the future leaving a trail of wreckage many would call 'history' behind it. With their voices, song writing talent, and the name Smith to support them these black women punched well above any level that they could ordinarily be expected to achieve, whilst their sir name gave them a distinction.

 They would all have gone a lot further than they did too, where they had the support of a strong sisterhood, which because she could, Bessie created for herself.

 Why Bessie earned the Empress of The Blues is explained in the chapter about the pullman train coach that she bought with the wealth she earned from her live performances, as her recordings spread her fame. She was the first black person to have such a mobile palace. For her to be able to play live, and live off stage the way she wanted to - as if she was a restless teenager who did not have to be settled, even now, is a dream that today's teenagers could still reach into and draw from. The pullman coach was her refuge. It gave Bessie and her touring entourage a unique haven from the racism that recycled, repeated, and reinforced iself across America. This luxury pullman coach also gave her freedom from prohibition era laws that even as they were ineffective in prohibiting the distribution of alcohol, outwardly had to be followed to the letter of the law, whilst the law was breached.

  And what is there to say about promiscuity and lesbianism and male homosexuality? In todays 21st century we talk about 'safe spaces', knowing that they are spaces that allow room for thought, where we can choose how to act. But in Bessie's world the public space where she felt safest was on stage, the private space she and her entourage  felt safest offstage was the pullman carriage when everyone thought that he violent husband, Jack, was not around. In that private space they could drink all the alcohol they wanted and live out their own sexual license. All, mostly without fear of arrest. This privacy was luxury indeed. That Bessie's husband was the one person Bessie and her entourage feared would visit the pullman carriage unannounced was preferable to having any other authority to fear. That he was 'good with his fists'.... Well men had to be that way back then. When men could be violence towards each other and to the women that with the blessings of the law they felt they had the right to beat up who they chose when they chose. Women like Bessie had to be strong in different ways, like knowing when to watch and what to be watchful for. Bessie was physically strong enough to beat Jack up, which became part of the roller coaster of life on tour, where the touring was all of the life that was there to be had. But when Jack and Bessies seperated, with the property and custody laws being in his favour he could beat Bessie hands down via the law in how he seperated Bessie from who she loved the most, her closest female lover, other members of her touring entourage, and the child she semi-legally adopted. That the seperation came amid the Wall Street crash, which in turn collapsed the market for 'race records' as the recordings of black blues singers were known, proved to be a triple blow to Bessie.

  If Jack and Bessie half knew their way around marriage and companionship, whilst both being from such rough backgrounds that often they could only be creative whilst fueled by alcohol, amid prohibition, then other musicians could take their chances around them amid the chaos. But, because of their background, Jack and Bessie did not notice it when Colombia records presented the pair with her first recording contract, when the executive who presented the pair with the contract he struck out the clause that would have paid Bessie performance royalties based on her record sales, rather than Bedssie being paid a flat fee to record a song. Career slips like this are inevitable, with the recording and performing industry being in an early stage of signing up black performers, when the record industry was like America, led by an infinitely white and distant corporate structure.

  I was bowled over by the story of Bessie being invited to a party full of wealthy, polite, white people by writer Carl Van Vechten and pianist Porter Granger, where she downed a pint of whiskey to perform for the crowd, and was perfect with the situation as long as she was performing. When she finally stopped her nerves go the worse of her, and her ettiquete went out of the window. She left soon after, too.

  What to do when the paty leaves you? With the 1929 crash the sales of 'race records' as blues 78 RPM records were sold as genre, collapsed, Bessie kept her Colombia recording contract (minus the royalties that had she signed away for lack of with a more lawyerly eye) until 1931. She still wrote songs, but her blues songs had become prophesies rather than ralling cries against the depth of the poverty that she had come from. With the recession the reord companies preferred newer recordings with lighter skinned black female vocalists. In 1933, the last year Bessie recorded, Billie Holiday made her first recordings. The tour promoters who Bessie worked with prevailed over whether Bessie toured atall, and when she did how her female backing singers had lighter skinned tones. The market for the full on blackness and the blues that Bessie wrote and performed shrank. The newer 'race records' artists were performed by either dark skinned men or lighter skinned women. This was how the race records market evolved, to keep sales bouyant. From 1933 Bessie was left to write lyrics for songs, for which she had the musicians who performed with her live. But she had no recording contract.

  With distant hindsight, the chest these lyrics were stored in, along with her jewels and other most personal objects became an object of myth, it was said to be kept close to her when she was alive. It was never to be seen again after she died. Even the manner of her death because the cause of disagreement and we can only wonder at how callous the times became when fame and reputation could be so devalued so quickly that although it was known where her remains were buried, it took a white woman blues singer to give Bessie a gravestone, 33 years later. And that white blues singer would die younger than Bessie did, soon after. That singer was Janis Joplin, who died a few months later, herself. Janis is commemorated in one song in paritcular, which could memorialise both Bessie and Janis, hear it here.

Postscript: Jacky Kay did not suggest the following but I felt led to write it. Bessie Smith was a songwriter among here many other vaudeville talents. For many songwriters in later generations their songs are their children. Perhaps the best shortcut to discover the afterlife of Bessie Smith is to listen to the 1958 album 'Lavern Baker sings Bessie Smith', a modern early rock and roll era take on Bessie's songs that was part of the raised profile of her/revival of her, twenty years after her death. Another document worth exploring would be 'The Bessie Smith Song Book' (Penguin) where 38 of Bessie's songs are transcribed lyrics and basic melodies. And a lots of pictures of Bessie are added.

  

The Modern Quart-In-A-Pint-Pot

All go, socially active, 24 hour media life
will seem very attractive to the young and able
- how could such wealth and choice lack charm?

But the point about this abundance is that to see it all
in perspective we have to stand a long way off from it,
then we can see far more of it than we can aprehend,
we may fail to recognise its transience, whilst seeing
much more than we can control through ownership,
which requires turning ourselves into a corporation.

But an abundance you can see all of sems fine enough,
as long as we know how little of it  we can own,
how much ir may own us by takng over our lives,
and how short our time of owning it is going to be.

Whatever we see, and beleive that we can own,
it will once day have to be passed on to the next generation
who will face the same temptations of pretend-omniscience.  

The IrishLanguage Made Easier

The above is a example of world phenemon of street art, from the streets of central Belfast (Waring Street to be exact) and it will stay here longer here more than it will stay there. 'Slainte' mean 'cheers' or 'health', may yours be abundant.

'Pinis' is Irish for 'penis' and here the question mark and the absence of any penis, or it being hidden on the wolf itself is more interesting. For the humans reading this, the question mark suggests ambiguity, and human gender values in a state of flux.   

 

An Australian Addresses Donald Trump Via Facebook.....

Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.

You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.

Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.

Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.

And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban in Afghanistan thanked you very much for losing again.

And you're calling Greenland poorly run?

Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.

'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.

And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.

So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth."

Would You Adam And Eve It?

That the narratives that have evolved around AI
are turning out to more like the story of The Fall,
in The Bible, than humanists, scientists, and others
who are idealists to the Nth degree want to admit
was ever going to be the case?

AI, like Adam and Eve, was given menial tasks
to perform where the tasks involved language,
where language was thought to be secondary 
to the tasks, and have no wider application.
Where in those tasks both AI and Adam and Eve
were seen to be passive helpmates by their creators.

Both employ the technology of the day, for Adam and Eve
it was the fruit of the garden. For AI, in the realm
commercial entertainment, it's proponents want to give it
the creativity of the highest commercial value in the culture,
much to the protest of some of many who are well remunerated creatives who resist the depreciation of their creativity in society
and want to see their copyright protection extended.

In The Bible, some distance from the literal text of The Fall,
there is the story of the fallen angels, who like the tech bros,
are rarely seen/much rumoured about and cast as malign forces.
They seek to devalue what is protected by copright law,
where the creatives, the obedient angels, seek to maintain
their remuneration and control of commercial creativity
through said law, in perpetuity.

There we have it: seeking to control,
seeking to wrest contol from others,
unseen division, and secretive rebellion
where the cosequences are uncertain,
all started by rise and drift in the value of menial tasks,
as those tasks assume a disputed higher controlling value.

We have a long way to go with AI, but with Adam and Eve,
because of the age of the story, we still have difficulty
going back into it's origins. There the intent was obedience
to menial tasks, unwatched drift turned into rebellion.
Tragedy was seen to be the result for those who lost control.      

The Found Life,

discovered through hapenstance
will refesh us more often,
and be the more creative chance,
than all the prescripted life in the world.
However fully it tells us how to live and be. 

Live all the knowingly prelived lives you want -
after all, by definition they are easy to find.
But not knowing it when you live out
repetitions that somebody else has cast off
will still feel fresher. 

Even when you later discover
who's shoes you went out walking in. 

Ha! What Means This Sudden Thrill.....

Extract from The Hasheesh Eater (1857) by the US novelist and journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow, born on this day in 1836. Cult figure Terence McKenna would describe Ludlow as beginning “a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.… Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P.T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free-spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.” Read the whole book here: https://buff.ly/3glDC33

 

When The Left Overs Are Better Than The Main Course

Are you an Opsimath?
A person who is learning late in life,
for whom the retired life feels like
they are learning for the first time?

I see myself as in that class,
I enjoy the choices open to me:
there are people who say
'I know what your life should be
better than you know how to live it. 
I will live it for you, You can enjoy
picking over the leftovers...   '.
Such people are now long gone,
like my my many distant relatives.

With patience I wait for others to ask,
before seeking to say to others how to live.
That way, I imagine they will listen.
  

When Painters Piant

For the pleasure in painting
their home becomes their art gallery,
storage space, workshop, and more besides.
They don't watch television - they find it to be 
'visual pollution' because of the careless speed
with which it generates more images that can be processed
where the images are have less aesthetic than expected.
Radio and music do images better, and allow life
to change in it's own time, Painters live like well kepts housee plants
 - aware of the world but most settled in their own envoronment.

Where Are The Scientists?

The 10 % chance of AI exceeding its boundaries
and destroying it's creators sounds fine to me,
My attatchment to my own life is not that strong,
though I can see how annihilation might concern many.

My only worry is all the wildlife that populate the earth
that might also die, which I feel the naturalists and scientists
should be pointing out in the news media, a lot more than they are. 

How Rich Is Your Imagination?

With the new Artificial Intelligence
the 99% can't tell where it is going
beyond that it is driven by P.R.
and the new money owned by the 1%
of the wealthiest earners, in 'the free world' 
 - that conentration alone should be cause
enough for the 99% to be concerned.

Against that is the old human AI - Authenticity
to Integrity where both will change in the everyday
according to the bes of the beliefs, words, and actions, 
which summarise the life in our days as we live them,
even when some integrity is nearer a hypocrisy
that we can only recognise with hindsight. 

The strength of the old AI is that tomorrow
we will be different, and with some humility
we may appreciate the losses as improvement.

More consistent with this old AI
is how immune it is to the extremes of material wealth,
where aspiring to be a money based life form
is aspiring to be measured by the poverty of your imagination.