The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie

After the recently abandoned Whitehouse press dinner, where the guests enjoyed their Pea and Burrat salads, the lobster and steak  had to be given to the poor when the room was abandoned, I find the conspiracy theories far too politically partisan and cliched to be either credible or amusing. I prefer to wonder why for his latest non-event the present Misleader of The Free World chose as cover for getting out of an event he did not want to attend to re-enact the plot of the 1972 French film 'The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie', where privileged but corrupt guests try repeatedly to set up a dinner date for themselves, and with each attempt increasingly bizzare and absurd reasons stop them sitting down and eating. Until at the last attempt, the meal is disprupted by hails of gunfire so the guests scuttle to hide under the tables, one guest (see picture above) stealing a snack from the table. The film ends with the guests emptily walking down an empty road, the credits rolling down the screen. Nobody dies. How unlike real life in gun cultures around the world, where life is so expendable it seems to be worth misrepresenting. How surreal, how civilised....     

                                       

 

The Unanswerable Question

If the collective noun for existentialists was 'an angst'
what should the same term be for a loose collection of outsiders?

You'd Better Disbelieve It

 I do my best to steer clear of the new, ever more flexible,
digital colouring-in books of the kitchy fantasy cartoons
of A.I. based imagery that now passes for politics.
But the perveyors of this new media find such fanasies
so easy to create, and they know most about how much
such images undercut the arguments of legacy media
that deep, far, and fast, it is no longer a fair competition.

I don't need to use that many brain cells to know
how absurd this politics-by-meme is. I understand
how infantile the arguments behind  these images are.
But amid the faster moving logarithms of social media
it is hard to find a more grown up politics that explains
the matters the and media that leaver me better informed.
For those I turn to BBC radio programmes and podcasts. 

On Becoming Naturally Anti-Social

And this was when I still went to parties,
I can't remember the last party I attended.
I am sure I left an impression of weakness. 

 

A Joke In A Recent Russian Newspaper

 'Can you tell me where I can get
a long term low interest mortgage?'

Answer: 'in 2018.....  '. 

My Appreciation of Nicolai Gogol

One of the plays I will always admire is
'A Government Inspector' by Nocolai Gogol,
for how much it scripts the vanity, delusion,
and sheer pettiness of life in a nuclear family
in the smal town I grew up in, in Midlands England.

There we had not the humour to realise
when we were being played for a joke
when how we lived became the punchline.

The locals took at face value each announcement
of some bright new future that was never to arrive
until the next announcement of the next future
that never arrived, and the promised future after that.
Until, when the announcements were added together
nobody knowing from which point in the past
they should have started to feel the dissapointment.

I started to feel better about the present
soon after I left the town, though
it took me many years to work out why,
not realising how limited the future
that I imagined for myself was going to be.

Now when I hear a politician say
'We need to listen to the communities',
I wryly smile at the prospect, and wonder
when meeting what my communty could ask them
that they and their minders are capable of delivering......    

Film Review - 'The Titticut Follies' - Frederick Wiseman

Some of the films I see I know nothing about before I go to see them. Oh I could check up, but I prefer to go to be surprised and I know how much, well, some experimental films have high reputation which the everyday viewer will find confusing and disappointing after the film made it's reputation. So what chance did I have with a 1967 documentary filmed in an American asylum for the criminally insane?

Not as much chance as I hoped is the short answer. To put this in context Frederick Wiseman was a documentary film maker who made fifty film documentaries over fifty eight years, which are now being shown in cinemas again, after his recent death aged 95. The British Film Institute called him 'A towering figure'. 'For whom, outside the BFI?' would be a good question for the more ordinary cinema goer to ask.....

But back to 'The Titticut Follies'. It was a difficult film to watch, and process first time in the cinema for several reasons. The first reason is that to complete this film Wiseman had to wrestle control of the material from his colaborator John Marshall and edit it secretely using borrowed equipment. It was only Wiseman's second film as director. It is a film on which he was learning his craft, using a diffficult subject. The second reason is that the film has very little sense of a rythm in the way the material onscreen is cut and shaped. A third reason is that with the filming being in black and white and so apparently poorly edited, the film seems amateurish. But the biggest reason the film is confusing is the subject matter, mostly distressed mental patients who lived in an instiution where only the doctors have any exit from the insanity. If they were  'the control sample', the measure of sanity, the film does not thell the audience that, except most obliquely in how the staff are the performers for the patients at the review, the follies filmed at the beginniing and the end of the film. Not that the viewer is told that the staff are the performers and the audience are the patients, this is 1966. And this is Bridgewater, Massachusetts. 

The institution colours the paitent's every word. The biggest differnce between the paitents and the staff is that the staff are phyically calmer than the patients, but both talk only in terms of where they are. 

The film starts and ends with a revue. The audience don't know who is performing for who with the review. Show songs dominate the revue. In between the show songs the criminally insane seem to lead live where the staff provide a limited structure, where one of the more clear headed patients explains that he asked for help from a social worker, was directed to Bridgewater, and seems to have been dumped there with no route out of the instution.  Medication is heavy part of why he unfit to leave. There were two scenes depicting the treatment of the dead for burial and one scene of what I took to be last rites. The quiet efficiency with which the dead were handled provided some of the calmest, more composed, moments in the film.

So after probably eighty mins of depictions of poorly structured lives, partial depictions of routines where there was no voice over the tell the viewer where the narrative was going or where the film might go next, the film ended by repising the beginning. The nearest to an explanation became two points, one of them made by commentators on the film that I found elsewhere. One was that state policy in the state where the criminaly insane  were being kept had changed when the film was made, 1966, but the staff of the hospital were resisting change. 'Who else was resisting change? audiences might well ask. The aim of the change in policy was to close down the old huge instutions where people disappeared forever, in favour of smaller, more manageable units which could focus with more clarity on the rehabilitation and the reform of criminals. The second point was put on the screen. 

At the time the film was made it was banned-part of my curiosity about it was that it had been banned as a film, to finally be seen by the public in 1991. Why was the film banned? I would answer that just as the criminally insane were left in in instiutions and hidden away from the general public 'for the public's good', so depictions of the criminally insane were banned from being seen by the public also also.

After much petitioning the film was released to be seen by the public in 1991, over thirty years after it was made and long after any point it made seemed cogent, beyond the point about self reinforcing censorship that works like a super-injunction. The film was permitted a release to the general public only with a statement from a judge at the start of the closing credits that Bridgewater no longer treats criminal mental matters this way, saying nothing about the fact that evidently Bridgewater at one time did treat criminal insanity in exactly the way the film depicted.

Seeing the film, even sixty years after it was made, was partly about unpicking how censorship rules work over the fifty states across the USA, rules which the USA might prefer to maintian did not exist, in some oblique 'Nothing to see here, please move along' type legal judgements.

The good news here is that portions of the film are available to be watched on youtube, netflix and other media vendors, where the disjointed depictions of disjointed lives due the nature of the instiutionalisation of those labelled 'criminally insane' make more sense broken up into shorter, still random, sequences. If the viewer on youtube etc feels like voyeur then so did the visitors of Victorian insane asylums who used the payments the visitors made to see and believe they were not insane, towards the upkeep of the institution....       

He Is Not The Messiah, He Is A Very Naughty Boy

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

 

Grass And Dust

After the recent NASA journey, I have to ask
was the grass greener, or the dust more dusty,
than the four scientist/tourists expected it to be
as they passed around the far side of the moon?

'Ellis Park' - The Docudrama About Warren Ellis In Which He Shares His Life

 

I missed this documenrtary when it had a short run in cinema houses, where increasingly the showing of a film once becomes an event for those that see the film whilst being a trailer, or reminder, for those who miss the film. There they later remember the listing of the film and know that the film can't have gone that far from the screens that it can't be found again for shared consumption. ar enough that it should still be findable.   

Compound Self Interest

When I was a child my helpers
(who were always bigger than me)
hid how they helped themselves
much more than they were helping me.

It took a long time after their help ended
for me to see that I was no better off,
than if they had abandoned me earlier.
It was a relief, and cause for grief,
for me recognise that their gain was my loss
when it wasoall over, and I was on my own.

When I experienced this compound self interest
I saw them as the poor trying to make being poor
better for the people around them, as if poverrty
was all their was to be had and it was best shared
to make it seem like a generosity made to be extended.

How poor do the poor have to be to choose
to not see other people as sheep fit to be fleeced?
All I know is that I should be to write selflessly.
For as much such as I write, what I hope that I lack
that sort of self that compounds it's own self interest.

Uncertainty Is Us

Many people reading this and following
the 'doom and gloom' newspaper headlines
which foretell of failed negotations prompting
the end of the world will remember the plot
of the black comedy, filmed in 1964 by Stanley Kubrick,
'Dr Strangelove (or how I learned to love the bomb)',
in which, by a series high level miscommunications
military planes that could not be contacted in flight
were carrying bombs that the isolated pilots rejoiced
in preparing to drop. The film ends with one of the pilots
in a fit of glee pushing himself towards insanity,
with their finger on the button to release the bombs.... 

That film was made over sixty years ago,
before several international agreements
of 'no first strike', that also set limits
on further increases in re-armaments
upheld the cold war detente
that kept the world far enough
from to the edge of fearing
world-wide disintegration.

With diplomacy now being
world leader shouting at world leader
each going through their national media,
uncertainty across the world is now the norm.

The World Wars Fought Through Books

One of the habits common to the many dictators
since Hitler dictated 'Mein Kampf' to Rudoph Hess,
when both shared a prison cell in 1923, is that those
who by sleight of hand enrich themselves, their friends,
and their clan whilst upending the democratic process,
is that they have to have a blueprint for why to take power,
something to inspire their populism, to start off with.

The great leader has to write and publish a book,
if not several, by which their followers can hang on
to the leader's every word. To keep up with the leader
for as long as he remains in his irrestistable ascent.

When the Christian Nationalist Victor Orban
was recently voted out of office I dared to ask 
'How many books has Victor Orban written?'
And lo! In 2021 his chief adviser, Balázs Orbán, 
wrote 'The Hungarian Way of Strategy', incuding 
Vicotr's conrtributions. Also here is one Victor's speeches.

I knew little about Hungarian politics, and less
about Hungarian book publishing, even in translation.
What surprised me was what happened in the 21st century
whicb  could not have happened in Nazi Germany,
the opposiiton to Victor Orban that rose through
the industry of writing and publishing books.

There commentaries on Orban's rise to power
and how it changed his view of how to govern,
manage the opposition, and use the platform
on the world stage that his presidency gave him
gave commentators of all political shades
ammunition against each him, and each other,
leaving Hungarians plenty to read and comment on.

If Victor Orban leaves his government office
and makes the tranfer of power clean and peaceable
I will admire him for that. But I reject that Christianity
is the same as Christian Nationalism. And I expect
that given how Orban is a lawyer who became wealthy
through his presidency, he knows he will be accused
of corruption whilst in office from the moment he leaves it.

The many books the oppsition to him have written
will bear witness to how he tipped the scales of justice
in his favour, when he thought he could not be watched. 

    

The Power Of Reading

I was in my early twenties when
I first had fantasies of being a monk,
little realising how much my family
made such a fantasy attractive
whilst cutting off the possibility
of any such idea of a life.

I read many books, much to my family
disapproval: they watched a lot of television,
where I preferred to consume music instead. 
Televison was controlled by the government,
and the provisions of  the family life I knew
bore all the echoes of life under the duress
of rationing, whilst with the music that I found,
the albums for sale in junk shops and woolworths,
there may well have been  and absence of thought
but I saw less sign of externally applied limitation.
.
It was through one of the books my family disliked
that I read about the three knots on the waist ropes 
that Franciscan monks tied their tunics with,
and about the simple elegance of understanding
of what each knot meant in relation to the vows
the monks took to a maintian a singular dedication.

In fhe days of cloth hankerchiefs
it was common to tie a knot in one corner
of the square to remind the owner of something
that was meant to be remembered, later. 

So it was with the three knots in a monks
waist ropes, the first was to remind the wearer
of their comitment to celibacy, the second
to remind the wearer of their promise to poverty
and the third know to remind the wearer
of their commitmen to humility through service.

As a summary reponce to the temptations
that the world offered how the reminder
was built into their clothing appealed to me.
The title of the book that explained all this
was, quite simply, 'Money Sex and Power'. 

The book remains in print, and has its place
in social media where it is still read today.
The author, Richard Foster, cut through
many unecessary arguments for the reader
with his logical explanations for how
presentations of money sex and power
can be simplified, to improve how life is understood.

Although Christian in intent,
atheists can adapt Foster's logic
to resist the pressure of certain
sales pitchs, when they want to.    

Photo Of The Day - The Jaguarandi (Herpailurus Yagouaroundi)

Jaguarandi (Herpaillurus yagouaroundi.
This species is highly adaptable, this low-slung feline
inhabits many different envronments, from southern North America
through to Central and South America. It is also known as the Otter Cat
for it's uncanny likeness to the otter. The Jaguarandi is a very vocal species
This cat thriteen distinct calls from purring to a whistling and chattering
It lives on a variety of prey including small mammals ranging from
armadillos, birds and even fish.

Photo: Deograndi, istock
Credit: American Museum of Natural History   

 

The Grace Of Slaves

Slavery is an ancient and evolving economic system,
that every empire in history has made itself great on.
Systems of slavery are about money, power, and markets
-how else were domestic slaves to be acquired and sold?
Nowadays slavery is perpetuated by theft of the person
through the already diminished civil liberties of those
about to become enslaved: The levels of domedtic slavery
are the measure of the inequality, within any given society.
In ancient times, with domestic slavery, the proximity of slave
to owner within the same dwelling made many masters
who thought well of themselves think well of thier servant,
whom they had to trust when the task was important enough.   

Industrial slavery, like the trade in slaves as commodities
from the sixteenth century onward by European countries
was spectacularly amoral in robbing the slaves of the names
their tribe gave them, as slavemasters sold them on.
By then slaves were a currency to be sold and bought
by the masters of the slave trade who set the calendar 
slaves lived by, and printed Bibles for mission societies
to give to the slaves who could read that made the slaves
even more submissive, because with what they read
what they did not know was that their Bible had been edited
to remove from it any section that made rebellion from slavery
part of human history. Finally slave owner were responcible
for making thier slaves have sex and breed to create more owned
human beings, whilst upholding the superiority of having a white skin
also having coercive sex with slaves which perpetuated the paradoxical position
of creating many children where the colour of their skin varied awayt from white,
thus multiplying between white people the shame and fear of misceganation.

All this and much more could be filed under the confusion St Paul
admitted to where in Romans he wrote 'I do not understand what I do/
For what I want to do I do not do/but [I do] what I hate I do',
where he was writing about sin, not about the hubris of slavery
or the history of sorely mistaken race relations, through which,
still we seek some enobling grace by which to live beyond conflict.

The War On Hope

I was not there when 'freedom of speech',
always an uncertain and incomplete ideal 
slowly became monetised, a licence to hate.
Where media balance went out the window.
And the most cohesive communities were built
on cycles of delusion and disappointment.

But here we are, in the latest war on hope,
hoping that whoever loses will be there
to start another war on hope, many wars later. 

A Book Is Not A Lifebelt

As the statue of this man surely proves. I am unsure even that this reader
is where facebook says he in, somewhere in Finland. But books,
and being widely read, is a reassuuring lifebelt for a better life
in a world all at sea, if not awash, with language, particu;arly
 when our media shares with us about how the unread we are
and unready to know how to act before the storms of poor planning
that can asssail them, where we get as careless with our words
as we get with the people whose lives depend on them.     

 

A Worms Tale

The world is one big can of worms,
where all too many of them
have too many stories to tell
to grab other worm's attentions.

I share mine and you tell yours
whilst the wealthiest worms
gain more traction for further wealth
by selling their stories in media time,
in media which they own, whilst
formatting other worm's stories
tc provide the worms of the world
with far more words to digest, and feed off,
before like many stories we all get recycled.  

When To Become A Better Listener

From the days of the printed press,
my days started with reading the morning paper
my world still started with 'the media',
though such talk was way too posh
for the people I knew, noshing down
their reduced vocabulary, where
we did not recognise as 'reduced'
the words we used to seem normal.

Five decades on from the Red Top press
as my daily diet of once new information,
the landscape I now track has changed,
beyond all ability to comprehend how it is different.

The media before me divides the world it presents
between people who 'emit' who they are that day,
and people who 'receive' who other people are.
With little awareness that that is the role they are cast in,
in a media world of where one sided communications
are misdescribed  as weak attempts at reciprocity.

When power is the fact that we all acknowledge
the weak become the audience for the powerful
who hold court on the world as if that is their role.

What the weak have to decide is when the strong
are talking to themselves more than anyone else.
Having decided that, they can end the audience,
and spend more time listen better to each other.

'The Rubbish Season'

In IIndonesia the season of 'Musim Sampar' is approaching,
which translates as 'the rubbish season', when the monsoon rains
flush the plastic waste off the land, into the inland rivers and streams
where further water pressure pushes the waste towards the beaches
and into the seas.There the rubbish diisrupts the tourist experience
of clean beaches sparkling waterfalls and seas where what is meant
to move most are the multi coloured fish, when you can see them
through tides of plastic rubbish being taken further out to the sea.

There was a time when Indonesians lived less by convenience values,
 and produced less waste which was more biodegradable. But the plastics
manufacturers have taken to making purchaces more convenient for the tourist
which spoils their journeys the tourists take. Manufacturers have no interest
in an economy of recycled waste, where for a little less luxury tourists
amd manufacturers coiuld do a lot more to defend the non-human diversity. 

Discomfort Us Enough To Wake Us Up

I can  remember during the time during the second golf war
where the nearest I got to incisive comment with my friends
was to quote Sir Henry Wotton (1568 - 1639) who at the start
of the reign of King James wrote in Latin 'An amabassador....
is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country',
not that long after Machiavelli's 'The Prince' was covertly
circulating around the Papal palaces. Now the world is on
it's third and biggest bout yet of the major destruction
of the Muslim middle east. And yet again the media led
imitation of diplomacy travels abroad to every country,
by sattelite and microphone, and boy is it tiring to listen to
quite so many half truths expanded by commentators
to tired journalists who are paid to avoid asking for the truth
in sharp tongues from leaders we once expected to know better.

The world's poor are the only ones not in their own coach
on the great gravy train towards comfortable oblivion,
and just like the wealthy they know the allure of comfort.
For the rest, the imitation of piety and religion are popular,
where what we imitate will not deliver us 
from becoming parodies of who we might have been,
trapped within our language and our lack if reciprosity. 

The Bigger The Bully Pulpit

The smaller the mind of the man
(it usually is a man, even when the man
fronts a faceless corporation) that occupies it,
The sooner his empire require more subservience
from the poorer - mineral rich countries - of the world
to pretend to support it whilst they hide what they think
behind circular repeats of hollow sounding 'diplomacy'..... 

Signal To Noise

ratios will vary and differ
in differently formatted media,
the more visual the razzmatazz
the media you respond to requires,
the weaker the editing of the signal is.

I would advise readers to rediscover
their local and national speech-based
media, or even BBC World Service,
first broadcast in 1932, and first called
the Empure Short Wave Service,
where, with the advent of WWII,
it was revamped, extended, and renamed
the BBC Overseas Service.
It was last renamed BBC World Service in 1965,
when the empire it was was started to speak to
was gone. There, well chosen words in many languages
still paint quieter pictures the listener will remember
long after hearing long after the television images
that wash over viewers fade from everyone's memories.

Film Review - 'Broken English' - Marianne Faithful

 Marianne Faithful died in late January 2025. That winter was one too many for her frailty to survive. In an age of artists stretching their cretivity well into the years past their peak with the help of younger sympathetic musicians, she was seemingly still active until the notice of her death made the music press, long adapted to an active cotery of senior citizens taking aim at infinity with their latest offering, announced her death and the media poured out their usual mixd bag of tributes.

So with the announcement of this film, fourteen moths after her death, and in a year in which the biggest news about her was the sale of the contents of the flats she had lived lived in, in tasteful oppulence. The disbursal of her personal effects underlined the finality of her life. 

The film starts with a framing device that becomes the Plan B for the way to explain Marainne Faithful's life when she was too ill to be explain it herself. She died aged 78 but was still volluable in her opinion of what could be seen as 'a troubled life' at the age 75. When some of this was evidently filmed. When she is interviewed she speaks very clearly and without any self pitly about a past the given her daliances with recreational drugs, The Rolling Stones, The Daily Express, and poor mental health she could be excused for doing.

The framing device is the called 'The Ministry Of Not Forgetting' and with the performance of Tilda Swinton, the ministry was true to it's word. It does not let the viewer forget. Nor does it fully help the viewer remember. Particularly with the films of her career, from 'Girl on a Motorcycle' from 1968 through to 'Irina Palm' (2007), a film I have seen and can thoroughly reccomend. But here the ministry had neither the rights, nor the screen time for sharing with us the details of her filmography in any enough depth. Though the footage of Marianne measuring up for her costume and moving about on set as Marie Annetionette in 2006 was welcome. Theatre is an even more ephemeral thing to catch on fim, so her live theatre experiences were recalled with a few photographs, not even a full list of the stage productions she was in.

But the first point to remember is the myth that Andrew Loog Oldham created, not knowing who Marriane Faithful was or what her parents had done to prepare her for a creative life life as an adult. She grew up in an arts laboratory where writing acting and all aspects of the stageing of plays were open to her. For Oldham to meet her at a party and cast her as a teenage version of The Singing Nun... Well, the less said about how Oldham's delusions were built on Faithful's formal and informal education that he did not know before meeting her, the better. Her connecting with The Rolling Stones was inevitable after a start like that. I liked how Faithful was dismissive abouth the broadsheet notoriety that came to her when the paper, The Daily Express, was on the table with the masthead visible to the camera and she was only slightly rude when disimissing what the The Daily Express wrote as completely fabricatred. The chapter in her life that came after that, between Brian Jones, Jagger and Richards, and Anita Pallenberrg was well beyond what The Daily Express could have printed. That Faithful wrote and recorded 'Sister Morphine' as a way of establishing a more adult set of song writing boundaries, when Decca stopped the song being released because it was un-ladylike, and Jagger took the credit for the song and got it recorded for the first post-Decca album the The Rolling Stones released, by which time Faithful had been commited to an Australian mental hospital whilst the Rolling Stones were on tour there.... I forget now Faithful's actual comments about that era of her life. A lot of that era was relayed in collage form, reduced to a series of photographs and newspaper headlines.

Her story picks up proper with the 1978 video for 'The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan' where how well The Rolling Stones were doing was the casual comparison that was made. Here the male viewer [at least this gay male viewer] readjusts to the presentation quirks of that era. The era of women's beauty seeming to be forced and yet how what women wanted to present themselves as. The relative crudity of the analogue filming as compared with modern high definition digital added to how forced the images seemed to be. But from here on, Marriane Faithful was back, and back on her own terms assisted by the advent of the DIY ethic of punk. The album 'Broken English' gave the public the adult Faithful fifteen years after 'As Tears Go By' had given the public the teenage Marriane Faithful who had to be more grown up on the entertainment industry she was part of than she could admit she was, and stuggled whilst showing she was a skilled stage actress. Faithful spoke about the double meaning of the album title where at one level language was what was broken, and she, as an English woman was recovering from being broken, including alcohol and substance misuse which had added a depth to her voice. One point I have not mentioned so far is the brightness of her smile when she is on camera, the way her presence as a live human being pulls the cinema goer in to focus on her. 

From here on is where the vewer sees less of Maranne on screen and more footage of her is pulled in to tell her story, including a brief section of film of women of the 2020s discussing the battles that Faithful fought for womankind from the 1980s onward, as if the complexity of what opposed her career path coupled with he fragile physical health made it too exhausting for her to be her own witness, therefore better for other to relay the changes. The Ministry Of Not Forgetting staged various interventions with footage of meetings with former life partners and musical collaborators. The saddest intervention was of the footage and photographs of her later era colaborator Hal Wilner (1956 - 2020) the clue to the cause of his death being the year in which he died, of complications from Covid. Just as Marriane Faithful herself could have died but after a period where it was touch and go, she survived. 

The loss of such a close friend whilst recovering was a double blow to her will to continue as a recording and performing artist. But cameos from songwriters Jarvis Cocker, Ed Harcourt and the team of Warren Ellis, violin, and Nick Cave, piano. The more the Ministry Of Not Forgetting intervenes the theatrical a device it became where it did not take much guesswork to say to myself that Faithful was too ill to be made up for the screen for the next close up of her smiling, the performance of her songs by younger female artists was delightful and absorbing and I was happy with them whilst wishing that Faithful herself had been fit enough to be filmed singing the songs, live. I half expected Faithful to do what writer Edna O'brien did in the documentary on her life, 'Blue Road', filmed when she was 94, where mid interview the author have a medical emergency on screeen where the film sequence ended with O'brien taken away from the interview, set up in her library, by anbulance men and stretcher bearers. But no, that was not to be. The hour and forty mins or so had gone by so fast and had skimmed over so much in such an immersive way that viewers could see that well, they could not get away from the ending, which had to had to put Marrane Faithful central to the film.

Whilst it was clear her health was fading. Then as the last few minutes of the film approached there was the footage in the studio of her rasping voice, clearly Covid ravaged but unmistakeably hers, singing the song 'Misunderstanding' from her 2021 album 'Negative Capability' empthetically accompanied by Warren Ellis and Nick Cave. The lyric of the song being a plea for empathy. Cue the credits, and time enough to dry our eyes without feeling in any way emotionally manipulated.

This was life. Empathy is what extends a life, makes accounting for itt possible, and makes how the life was lived more widely appreciated. 

Ninety Years Ago

The cry went up 'guns before butter',
aimed at a people who had ben persuaded
they they were at peace with their neigbours,
until the Commander of the Air Force told them
'Guns will make us powerful, butter will only make us fat'.
Before supporing the conditions for local civil wars,
and following them six six years of world war,
that it took the determination, of all the Allied Forces
fighting together to end, through to outright defeat.

The world took decades to recover from that war,
and even longer to learn to listen about who suffered most.

Cut to the present day and the world's richest country,
once the supporter of advanced peace time medical science
has withdrawn from the poorest countries across the world
the life giving medical science the poor could not afford
but had been given, whilst such support is being withdrawn
from even the has now withdrawn for its own the poor at home.

And even now the USA has plans for a military budget
that dwarfs all previous plans for the military industrial complex,
expanding the military budget to, wait for it....... $1,500,000,000,000.
More than the military budgets of next ten richest countries in the world, combined. 

Find Your Flag - Find Your Community - Then Wait For It To Find You

This flag is the flag for people who see themselves as demi-sexual, which is to say that they see themselves as sexual beings, unlike people who see themselves as asexual, and who cannot find any sexual resonance towards others from within themselves when the occasion demands it, not that they are as ill at ease with themselves as transexuals have been, historically. Transexuals feel that being of a different gender, or having the body of a different gender to the one they were born with would be much more comfortable for them. Nor are demi-sexuals bi-sexual, a people for whom sex presents itself as a different set of dilemas, choices and commitments, including which gender they find attractive and why, ala Harry Styles.

When I was growing up sex and sexuality, as described by sexual preferance were as coarsely misrepresented as humanly possible. Within the lumpen poretariat educatrion on offer to me as a child sex was measured out as being asexual-all children were expected to be asexual enough to need no instruction. Only within marraige should anyone have sex therefore if you were not maried you were asexual. Crudely put, the point of sex was to create children whilst ignoring the economic and social implications of bringing children into the world. Implications that had to be ignored included how the family was the economic responcibility of the male breadwinner. The rearing of the children was based around the material provided by the male head of household provided, as organised by the subordinate wife. And if there was a life outside of marriage for an adult then it was seen as irresponcible and dishonest to itself unless it could be annexed by a family to extend family values. Any such life had to be secretive. The churches helped by limiting the duties of church commitment for many to hatches, infant baptism, matches, marriage, and despatches, the funeral service at the end of a life. 

Such a treadmill style treadbare view of spirituality, and materiality was not much of a guide to how to live a life. Much less was it a guide to how through the mutiality of family and marriage mental health was meant to be preserved. Mental ill health was seen as a curse where the person who suffered it was meant to blame themselves for their lack of understanding of how to fit in with the family, to find their individual well being.

The less said about the misuse of alcohol by married men the better. Beyond that it was endemic, seen as virtuous and the hidden cause of a lot of misanthropy and dishonesty. I was not looking when things slowly changed. When different, more precise, mental health labels were created and accepted, and broke down into 'diversity' the many component parts of what mental was about. I ws not watching as slowly the new labels allowed for difference to became the norm that bred mutuality and respect. In those times there was still only two terms that it took courage to claim a life outside of family. One was 'being gay', the  other was more clinical 'homosexiuality'. Families preferred to ignore behaviour and evidence of both, where it was evident. Like mental health problems families masked and bury the such things to hide the sense of the family member showing evidence of being cursed.

Nowadays it seems there are over twenty flags for different sexualities, and twenty different possible communities identities, assuming that the people of each flag fits can find each other. The earliest flag designs originating from the 1970s and San Franciso mayor Harvey Milk. I am not surveyor of pride marches across the world, so I don't know where I would see all, or any, of these different flags. What I do know is that well away from the brutal binaries of the world I gre up in, where might was rife and ignorance was too common to be worth measuring the speculative discernment thar seems to come with demi-sexuality, where I look for a measurable bond with a person before imagining anything nearer agreeable sexual activity seems about right to me. But looking for a bond, some agreed emotion, with another before thinking further makes me want to be sure of the capability for forming a bond, from within myself, first. 

In a world dizzy with the possibilities of diversiy I need, we all need, to be calm and still, for us to be able to find the same with each other.   

 

For A Life Beyond Borders

And on the day of the year that celebrates international Roma day I present the Roma flag, created in 1933 and first adopted as standard on the 8th of April 1971, at the first World Romani Congress, Here the blue represents the heavens the green represents the earth and the 16 pointed chakra refers the thistory and connectedness of the Roma traddditions as represented in their language and culture.The Roma were a nation without a government that started a millenia before the birth of Jesus who have wethered every form of organised nation state and government with all their attendant cruelties and misrespect for entities not like themselves.

The Roma have a spoken lanaguage but do not have any standard written language, though attempts were made in the 1990s to create such a script. For being such an oral culture, their culture has to be both liminal and sgtrong to endure, and has to accept being outside every written culture there has ever been, though what written there has been has been happy to borrow from Latin and Cyrillic languages.

With an estimated ten to twelve million Roma in Europe and a further estimated three million disbursed further, where they are less likely to be countable by census they remain a vibrant and struggling minority often known for their vibrant contribution to world music than for anything less transient. 

 

The Scent Of Regret

As first blended to perfection by Soren Kieragaard

                                  in 1843, and lived, and read, around the world ever since.

   Sample: 'What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.'.               

 

Picture Of The Day - Two Great Blue Herons

A Great Blue Heron offers stick to his lady for the nest.

Photogaphy:Jocelyn Anderson.

 

The 'Kitchen Sink',

or maximalist, approach to the use of the public media
by any government, to declare that government achievements,
using as many variations of explanations as the public will accept,
sure gets wearing after a very short period in a governments life.

No wonder then, that public cynicism soon throws out the baby
with kitchen sink and stops listening when the first word or phrase
of the news remains the name of the leader for too long any period of time.

Then, people of vision have to look further for their inventive streak,
to reinforce how the news agenda should be about wider views
than the narrow 'kitchen sink' presentations the government prefers.     

The Short And The Long Of It

As America looks to the stars
and re-engineers the world economy
to create new gutters for the poor of world
to look up from, whilst extending
the new world-wide economic depression
via wars it has no idea how to withdraw from,
then many more countries can have their slice
of a shrinking world econmy where those with less
will know the short and the long of it the soonest.

The short will be the thrust of glory America projects
as it fills television screens everywhere with images of feats
of engineering the world had not dared believe in before.

The long of it will be the distortions in world trade,
as the sale in arms, from cheap and deadly drones
upward, outstrips the evolving peace time economy
as seen from wind farms to macro solar energy projects
like the water pumps donated across the continent of Africa
where heat from the sun feeds the pumps that draw water
from bore holes deep in the earth to support the crops
in a new wave of sustainable living for those with the least,
at least where their government is good terms with it's neighbours.

Demi-Sexuality

This flag is the flag for asexual pride. Anyone-straight, gay, or other-
can be demi-sexual. Because for demi-sexuals the emotional bond
has to be confirmed first. The sexual component to the relationship comes
 ...much later.

In this flag being asexual (being emotionally, rather than sexually, attracted
to another) is represented by the black stripe.
Those who are half interested in the idea of sex
are represented by the grey stripe. Those who are fully commited
to sexual exprression within a relationship, and their allies,
are sybolised by the white stripe.
Whilst the purple stripe represents the wider asexual community.
 
 In a world far more mature and patient than the world I grew up in
I would have subcribed to grey stripe. I now have the grey hair,
what there is left of it, and the beard to prove it.
I would love to have discovered this flag, and the comunnity choices
and values behind it, decades earlier than I did...  

 

Where Four Routes To Power Meet In One Leader....

With any dictator, whether their rule is built on heading the military,
leading their political party from above, the heredity of the monarchy
they are the head of, or even the theology of their theocratric rule,
or with elements from any of those four routes to one singular
cult of personality centred on one, seemngly omniscient, leaderr,
the one point they meet up and share under is the rhetoric of the leader
being echoed and repeated by mini-me copyists in a once diverse media,
which is reduced to slaveishly repeating the demands of obedience
to the will of the leader, where the slightest sliver of diversity in language
would become a cause  for heresy, but not necessarily a sign of individuality.     

Two Pink Moons

A proper pink moon as it might be seen in the skies
on the 1st and 2nd of April 2026. A sign of spring to be welcomed.

 

Meanwhile the above is all 28 mins of Nick Drake's 1972 LP 'Pink Moon' an album that is Nick Drake by himself on guitar, piano, and voice. No other backing musicians or arrangers. John Wood engineer and producer. I am a late arrival to the appreciation of the talents of Nick Drake. For a long time my thoughts about him were confined to seeing him as one of those artists who knew when he knew had said enough, and did not want to stay in the music business for the renewal of his first three album record contract, to seek further fame and fortune from an extension of his contract. Whilst I understand how the notion of 'cult artist' works, I bridle a bit at the mechanics of creating the cult around the artist. As for Nick Drake I will enjoy the guitar playing on this album, through many moons to come, moons that are either pink and given other descriptions.