The Empire Of Plastic

Never in the history of the American presidency
has so much media been so wilfully misused
to promote so many policies that have razed
to nothing the limited good will between the nations,
and further lay waste to a domestic admistration
in terms that confound all belief in civilisation.

Historian Suetonius credited Emerperor Augustus
with the phrase 'I saw it brick and left it marble'
to describe how he had changed the centre of the world,
I wonder what materials America will be described
in terms of after Trump's America expires.....  ...plastic?   

Can You Hear The Disappearing Birdsong?

It has long been known that birds that fly
within thirty yards either side of a motorway
are deafened bythe noise of the traffic,
and have to concentrate their numbers
farther away to hear each others' songs.

Now the birds have a new land based enemy,
the 509 UK data centres of Amazon and Microsoft
that keep the.information super highways moving
which produce extremes of heat, light, and noise,
that deafen birds up to a fiftth a mile around them.

So whether it is the old roads or the new digital highways
we do more to cut down nature as we travel than we realise.

Welcome To Your New Triple Action Government

When intelligence gathered by a government
tells them to not act without a firmer foundation
for what they seek to achieve against their enemies,
who are more entrenched than the government admits,  
then as the government acts we have to consider,
and then reassess, who are they really acting for?

It is more than likely the government want the war,
and why they want it most as a lever for changes
in the markets for products, and public services,
in a move that they can blame their enemies for.

This way the gov't can blacken
the reputations of their enemies,
price-gouge for the profit of their friends,
who can afford to wait for the rewards,
whilst cuttting the political ground from under the opposition
 - all in one single three pronged, long term, operattion.

On Choosing My Own Labels To Live By

It had taken me over six decades of living
around people who only gradually did I chose
the greater distance I needed from them, their values,
for them to give up giving me their hand-me-downs
which still had wear in them where the wear was enough
for me to be richer for having these things,
than they were poorer for passing these things down to me.

Six decades in which it took me that long to recognise
what 'landing on my feet', rather than landing in the feet
of other people, meant. Now I need less the sense of regret
as others who tell me I need the help, when how they help me
even more helps them help themselves without me seeing it.

With famly like that, I did not know which I needed most.
Friends with whom I  had values in common? Or the isolation
enough for the old clinginess I had been taught to leave me?
I now want to enjoy life without the hand-me-down hopes
being wished on me, as if a life without them was not life at all.
All that can fall away of its own accord whilst I choose my own labels.    

Think, It Ain't Illegal Yet.....

Guantanamo Bay is the most famous
nearly empty legally absolute cul-de-sac,
that has no exit, in the world. 15 prisoners
live there as of Donald Trump's return to power.

What is less well known is how many
ICE internment camps exist in the USA:
the figure seems to be, 224, holding 70,000 people,
all of the camps surely run to profit the shareholders
who are publicity-shy, except when shaming the inmates.

Within the modern EU, as of 2020, some 47,000 people
were interned in an unknown number of camps, most of them
in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. Smaller internment sites
are run in third world coutries where many migrants to the EU
set out from, for a life better than the life on offer where they are.
These camps try to divert the activities of the people traffickers
and corrrupt police, who make profits that make them immune
from the process of the law, as applied to other, poorer, citizens.

Lawlessness in the name of the law for profit is nothing new.
New wars, in which costly armaments are fired across the world
depend on broken rules, and broken down diplomatic routes,
to break the rules further. To ask how far these camps and wars
might be enabled before a reversal of the process is necessary
is not just an ontological 'how far can this go' question.

The numbers and types of camps run by Russia and China
are a question for another time, and another study,
but for each the numbers of camps run into the hundreds,
and the populations of them run into tens of thousands. 

Life, and the quality of life we offer others,
is an ongoing question for everyone who thinks.  

When Self Comfort Is At Its Most Deceptive....

 

On Being 'In Recovery'

of enjoying reading once again, after over a year
where I was able to read just a few pages of a book,
and would then fall asleep and forget whati I'd read,
as if the point of reading was to prompt me
to some increasingly forgetful horisontality
where if I remember my dreams, it is only
because my medication was light enough
to allow me to focus on my thoughts
in the immiediate time before I awoke.

Now I am back and reading whole books
and, mostly. remembering what I have read
after I read it, and when the algorithms
of what I watch on the internet go too fast
I change what I give my attention to,
to something slower that enhances the pleasure
in what I read, rather than diminshing my attention span. 

Picture Of The Day: Black Swan

Black swan. Picture Credit: Donna Crandall

 

Classic Animation - 'The Hand' - Jiří Trnka

  This is the yuotube trailer to the 1965 silent animation 'The Hand'. I saw this film in the early 1970s, when BBC childrens televsion showed international contributions and even made programmes for the deaf and arty, 'Vision On'. The BBC showed films that came from behind the Iron Curtain, if the aesthetic passed what they were happy to show. Children in the UK were not conditioned by the work of Disney, or the speed and editing of the MGM and Warner Bros cartoons, though they too were shown. What Jiří Trnka showed in this film was how politics did not have to be for grown ups only - any child who had a hobby and the space to practice it in would recognise the message here. Please see the full length version of the film here.

The Temptation Of America

Europe has the old Roman Empire
as their tempter, a supermarket full of religions
bound together by a crude military authority
and an unstable continuity of leadership.

Asia and Russia have their ancient tempters too,
the latter held together by an authoritarian
version of Christianity that makes belief
more consistently dishonest to itself
than it can ever admit that it is.

Meanwhile the place of wealth and tech, America
is being tempted by an old tempter-fascism
in the guise of a renewed 'Christian Nationalism',
in which 'America first' means an 'America only',
which excludes inclusive Americans who believe
in neighbourliness of whatever colour, gender,
and religious origin. In this new pecking order
whoever is white, male and wealthy comes first,
where science has to be made unfit for human
decision making if it allows 'inferior' minorities
to live, and thrive, outside white male hierarchies.   


   

An Intimacy With Soft Fruit Is Proof Of Maturity

I used to buy fruit that was sold as 'fresh'
unblemished, and sold that young 'to be kept',
which was to say 'not for eating'...   This meant
it was bitter, having travelled many miles under-ripe,
much like children in education. But the older I get
the more I find that the softer the fruit the sweeter the taste,
and the more it agrees with me, even when it is deliquescing
and becomes alcoholic. With the right recipes for its use
it is perfect. As I bake I imagine the ways I would like
to see myself used for best when I am in that state,
and wonder, who will bring out the fullness of my flavour?

I Wonder How Many Of Us Could Use Some Silence?

As Discovered by Lewis Francis Hadley in the 1890s,
Quaker, Hadley whose wish to see the Native Americans 
converted to Chrstianity was fairly obvious in his choice
of texts for which he found the Native sign language.
Nonetheless the life of the Native Americans
rubbed off on him, there is no further record
of Hadley undertaking the work of an evangelist
after completing his work of translating their sign lannguage.

Please read more about Hadley and his work here.   

 

Here Be Monsters

And the monsters who believe their own propaganda
never recognise the limits of their talents and abilities,
and never see how their sense of humour is always limited
to being at someone else's expense.   

 

By Their Works You Will Know Them

The modern history of Conversion Therapy,
from homosexuality to a Christianity,
as bought by American money that fears
modern phrases like 'hetero-normativity'
and other probing social-scientific phrases
seems to be recent. But like so many ideas,
it is a thin respray, a shoddy paint job,
over a once honestly flawed, diverse and genuine,
Christian culture that now draws new skin-deep adherents
whose real love is of some shiny new prosperity theology
devised to influence people who don't recognise propaganda
when they are fed it, and don't realise they are being bought,
sold, and repackaged as proof that political lobbying,
and the distant peddling of malign influence still works.

 

Revew - 'Alice', Jan Svankmajer

   I grew up without many things, that many that I simply did not know I was doing without. A cimena which normalised a communal audience for sharing intelligent films was one of them. Sometimes, many times, I could have thought that intelligence itself was rationed. But that was then. I now feel like it is some sort of badge of honour to have seen my first Jan Svanmajer film in a cinema, the place to see films with other people, long after seeing many of his other films at home, or online.

  To say Jan Svankmajer is a special film maker is to put it lightly. His commitment to editing shows through every frame of every film that bears his name. As a surrealist film maker he has been involved in film making since his first film 'The Last Trick' made in 1964, 21 years after being given his first puppet theatre as a child. I will not go through here the journey from that first puppet theatre to his present retired status as a film maker, theatre designer, surrealist film maker and every other category of creative activity, aged over 90. I am going to leave that to Wikipedia-they do that sort of thing rather well, even though some folk dispute their pages.

  'Alice' is not my favourite Svankmajer film, that would be 'Conspirators of Pleasure' which as a satire on how people consume and divide one another by certain activities also works well as a rather convoluted shaggy dog story that is not meant to be taken too literally. But 'Alice' is as near normal feature length cinema as Svankmajer gets. His version of Lewis Caroll's story is quite violent and uncomfortable, with a lot of images of nails in food, and of bones of unknown aniimals in cabinets  of ossuaries, stop-motion animated stuffed animals, particularly the rabbit who is always late to meet the queen who is rarely present. But as dream/nightmare violence goes it is of a very different quality to, say, the violence of a news report of a bombing complete with distressing visuals, or a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

  Yes, Alice and the rabbit get on badly, and to watch a stuffed animal leak sawdust after being kicked, and then sow up the hole where the sawdust leaked with a needle and thread it had found and eat up the sawdust with a tarnished spoon does stretch the imagination. The red queen and her court are reduced to playing cards that move by themselves across a stage set in what could perhaps be seen as a critique of human political/power structures - they are two dimentional at best. The number of iterations of Alice, and the number of times she is too big/too small and is presented with a situation that I read as an intellience test was quite notable. I was not going to count them, that went against the collective cinema experience. Though the literal minded could count the number of times Alice changes size and form if they had enough repeated viewings of the film. Then there was the device of getting from one scene to the next by diving into draws in desks where there were often sharp objects of different types-scissors, square sets, safety pins etc piled up in the draws, who knows what that was about? I am leaving that point here....   .....a lot more was going on with this film which remains open to interpretation where we can all have our own, and different reinterpretation when we come back to the film again. 

  I was pleased that the young people that run the LUMI programme at the QFT in Belfast are able to get these films that before an audience now, when in the past I was in the wrong place to find them when they were made and had their original cinema run. Back then I mostly heard about these films via reports and showings of them on television.

 

  

How Deep Is Your Breath?

The harder blowhards blow
the shorter their breath gets,
and the emptier their threats become,
until all their listeners come to trust
is in the greater mess that follows.... 

On This Mothering Sunday

I reflect on those mothers
who reflect on the world they live in
and refracted on possible worlds to come,
as they seek to create the place they feel safe,
and see as safe for their children.

When what the children need is their mother
as part of the corner team in their heads
as they face the aggression of school and life,
well beyond the front door of their parents house.

The mothers who are best prepared will recognise
worlds well beyond what they have lived through
on which ther children will have the choice:
Refuse? Or accept? Negotiate? The child will be able to choose
becauase they can 'read' the world, the room, the scene, they are in.

Without being there, their mothers read it before them,
and the child has the vision, like their mothers,
to see beyond where they have never been before
and feel confident as they guide themselves beyond it all.

My prayers will be for the children of mothers
who, without thnking, bind their children to themseves
as if the mother were the centre of the universe
where the father of the universe is made out to be
a distant figure who is seen to be the cause of all conflict. 

Whatever Happened To 'Being Book Learned'?

A phrase I was raised on was 'book learned',
a phrase that less educated, working class, families
used to distance themselves from, and describe
somebody who spent a significant length of time
with writng and reading whilst the working classes
had little time for people who sat on their asses
and looked like they could afford the time
the working classes could not, being lost in books
that had no obvious, direct, application of knowledge
that would return the book reader to being more engaged
with eraning enough to pay the bills and keep food on the table.

The working classes mistrusted those who were not as attached
to the treadmill of the hand to mouth existence as much they were.
Which was why they mistrusted the aim of collective redistribution
as written about as classical socialist theory, if not with The Gospels,.
They preferred the individual Darwinist struggle, man against nature,
and the covert imitation of the underhand, the powerful, and the mighty.   

The Belicose And The Technocratic

Governments vary in character
from the technocratic to the belicose
where the latter hides in the plain sight,
through the volume at which it declares itself,
that many governments have no vision
of the future beyond their enlightened
self interest in seeking to be the whole
of any future that there is for anyone.

This makes the task for the citizen
seeking to renew the idea of citizenship
a more uphill battle than you might think.
Because when the same old faces repeat
their claim as to being the only legitemacy
of choice peoplel can point toward, where
the eponymous Tina tells us There Is No Alternative,
like the one time M. Thatcher, who was always right.

Technocratic governements are happier
are being exchanged, one for another,
they know that politics is a roundabout
and we all get off to make room for others
before we are inevitably be let back on
the roundabout of government, again. 

Picture Of The Day : A Rough-crested Makoha

A Rough-crested Malkoha starts the day hunting for insects.

Tagaytay City, Philippines Photo: Robby Villabona

 

Unexpected Epiphany Of The Day

   It is a few months since I read a book from end to end. My latest read, 'Plain Truth' by Jodi Picoult has broken that particular drought for me. The prose is light and easy to read, given the complexity of the subject matter, a legal case involving a woung woman not becoming a mother for all the best of reasons she could muster, and with the aid of a lawyer having to explain to a court what happened to her and the child she did not keep. To compound matters the book is set in an Amish community. 

  What clinched the grip of the book for me was the following quote where the lawyer defending the young girl is dsecribed thus on pages 237 and 238.....

  'With her eyes closed , she believed him. She could imagine the music of the Grateful Dead crackling across the courtyard, wafting through the open window of her dorm room, where she and Coop lay tangled up in the narrow bed. She could still see the curtain of beads that hung in the doorway of the closet, a crystalline rainbow, and the beady eyes of the squirrel who perched on the windowsill watching them.'

  I have been a deadhead and a reader of books for just under fifty years. Never in popular literature have I read a scene in a book where the immersive music of The Grateful Dead became a synonym for carefree middle aged sex, as this particular scene turned out to be....    

None Of The Above

With the latest imitation of World War Three
being fought by Israel, Amaerica, and Iran,
and their allies and neighboutrs being drawn in
for support, to be bombed for 'supporting the wrong side',
or criticised for supporting the right side too slowly,
three different faiths are playing out identical versions
of being the true faith that justifies vast arsenels of weaponry
being fired on their enemies - hard line Shia Islam,
Judiasm, including Messianic Judaism (Jews for Jesus),
and American Born Again Christianity,

All three have visions of Heaven where their God
rules absolutely and sees the visions of other faiths
as purest heresy, apostacy, and being all round wrong.

But what if the fallen from these wars
ended up in some Heavenly Hereafter
that none of them had projected to find?
Where The Above they were alive in
was not the reward that they had killed,
and died for, and they could not account
for why they, or anyone else, was there
 - with their former earthly enemies?

The Market For Heartache In Empty Houses

Given the choice of living in a country
that leads the world in its presentation of  P.R.
where human rights are very low priority,
or living where every day civility, civil rights
and an open media matter more, I prefer the latter
over the gloss and glitz of P.R. projections,
ala Dubia, that keeps  reality out of the picture. 

A people that knows how well it lives,
because it can share it's imperfections
and manage how unhappiness is natural
to the human condition  has far more
going for it than all the heartache
glossed over in rich but empty houses.

Is Donald Trump Invading Your Dreams?

Other dictators are available,
and many more from times past
would be be ecstatic to relive their glory,
long since gone, through your nightly discomfort.

You decide how much they remain sane
when through you they explore
their faded delusions of grandeur,
with what you remember, first thing
in the morning when you first awake
with a pen and paper to hand.

Here and now seems to be an apt time
to explore the reseach of Charlotte Beradt
into the dreams of citizens living under
the rule of Third Reich between1933-39.

Thankfully the BBC have made a handy
thirty minute audio documentary about it.
Please find said radio progtramme here.

For those looking for the written start,
please go to Amazon to find out the more
written about this genuine research,
but having stopped by there feel free
to look elsewhere, to find the book,
when it is availabe in so many other places,

Well, Hello There....

Temminck’s Lark. From Tumblr

Credit: The Fabulous Weird Trotters

 

No Easy Exit

I have lost count of the number
of world leaders who have dominated
the media that I have found acceptable
to me, that edits the news well.

As soon as these leaders have started wars
they have found they could only end them
through being far more brutal than they suggested
they would be, which is when they put the 'bullet'
into 'bulletin' with the aggression with which
they speak to a media they have made pliant
to their message, their personal echo chamber
which I only recieve selectively, second hand.

The wars continue without any prospect
of a clean, or even acceptably dirty, exit. 

I know what comes next.

Economic displacement in countries at peace,
at home at least. They won't want the refugees
who are fleeing the wars that they have started,
with allies they have backed who consider it
to be beneath them to sort out the mess,
and consequences of what they started..... 

On World Book Day

I would like to commend to readers the above title,
as a memoir, a story of terror and secret empathy,
and a story of desperate survival against all odds.
.above all these two books are warning to the future,
though any attempt at repeating the concentration camp
experience will creep up on the nation that tries it
under new names as if to disguise its return.   

 

The Sky Is The Limit

for World War III - the sky
is where the war will start from
and as the weather rains bombs
onto every inhabitant of distant lands
we will soon understand how man-made
global warming was always going to be
and how lethal man-made heat will remain,
long after there is no-one left to witness it.

So much time will have to pass for the humans,
along with so many fewer species that are left,
to survey the damage and so how to be at home with it.

Full Moon

A worm moon* in the water,
but how to pluck it out.... 


*The named given to a March moon by native Americans. 

 

The Ontological* Approach To War

As World War III, the new war from the air,
lands on the ground below in many countries,
using AI supported drones where no human
that we know of is in control of where they land,
and where there was no declaration of intent,
because such clarity might limit AI's ambitions,
the world is facing hitherto unknown unknowns
on scales where we don't know how to calculate.
What is real that the common citizen cannot be told:
The point of the war, if it has any point at all,
is that it is an exercise with advanced new weaponry
that exceeds all previous limits on warfare
more than all previous total wars combined,
more totally than the starters of the war understand.

*Ontological meaning taking an argument
further than it has gone before, as far as it
will go, to see how far it can be made to go.  

Picture Set Of The Month - March - Iranian Rugs

Baluchi rug - Baluchistan is a region of Iran, a country
far more known across the world for its rugs
and traditional arts like music, than for it's
reputation and arguments over oil since the 1920's.  

BP, British Petroleum had a controlling stake
in Iranian oil fields from the 1920s onward,
meanwhile most Iranians remained poor.   

 

But with Iran's contribution to world culture being 
 like this Kashkuli Gabbeh Hand-knotted Wool Rug,
so slow, with so much attention put into making it,
compared with American inattention forming media
of today I know who I would look at most the long run,