The New More-Is-Less

I used to be astonished at how little
the popular music stars of the day
I admired, but not like, contributed
to their latest hits, as I saw what sold a song
was the padding/star power packaging.

But lately I find myself coming up with
my own paucity. My offerings here are thinner
than I used to write. I seem to be unable to grasp
the direction of travel of the new media,
as it heads in the direction of the false trails
laid down by and for the newAI kletpocracy,
which  always exonerates the latest dear leader.

My stake in the new media game cannot count for much.
The best of my old blogs will find other lives though whoever
steals the ideas in them. Nowadays I am old enough to look back
and recognise that I was left behind before I could see it happening
in the first wave of de-industrialisation, in the 1970's,

I have been looking for the present through the past since those times..... .    .  

Superlative Criminality

There is no criminal like an old criminal,
the expert who can bend the law further,
and further still, towards his own ends
where nobody can guess the end point,
beyond how he bends the law into shapes
that it will never be bent back into.

Financially, the lawyers will always do well
out of this sort of thing, the judges will suffer
much more - as they repeat themselves
in judgement after judgemnt, where each time
the client instructs his lawyers 'Disobey that.'.

Nobody know how the history books
will record all this new lawlessness,
how it will end, or what will replace it.

But whilst we all live through this age
of superlative crminality the little people
can only watch how wealth and power
makes the wealthy unmindful kleptomaniacs.

From Tech To Text

Recently there has been an uptake
in technology from the recent past
that has became passe with buyers
of what has replaced it, as tech firms
make needless changes to what they sell
to increase sales and beat their competitiors.

This consumer choice give me hope
that those who are taking up such old tech
might also rediscover the oldest tech of all
 - language and reading, so that old books
get new editors to be rediscovered/reformated.

The Long And The Short Of A Smile

The time it takes for a smile to be shared
can be very long or so short that to comment
on the sharing takes longer to say than it's sharing.
It took Brian Wilson 37 years, and overcoming 
multiple nervous breakdowns, for him to get
his song suitr 'SMiLE', from it being written
and recorded in 1966/7 to it being edited, fit
for Brian to it perform it live. Such was the strife,
and the travails of the times that Brian lived through,
But part of the pay off was that the publishing rights
were much better for his patience with the waiting.

By contrast  it took the Danish humourist and musician
Victor Borge less time than his satires on classical music
to say to the world one of his most enduring epigrams
'A smile is the shortest distance between two people.'.

Out Of Time

How can I describe living with dyspraxia
in a way that makes sense of it, to anyone
who does not have the condition?

Well, having it does not mean that
the carrier does not know how to write.
or that they cannot read, or cannot listen.
But to those who live without the condition
it seems that the dyspraxic cannot learn
how to follow cues at the same speed,
and with the same confidence, they have.

And after a certain age, a diagnosis
of the condition becomes impossible,
unless in getting the pronouncement
the experts can award themselves 
some social and material advantage. 

The length of time it takes for the dypraxic
to appreciate how they react and understand
is slower than other people expect is painful.
But, when they recognise the condition,
better late than never, life will get better.

But too late for there to be any real recovery.

The British Commonwealth And Anti-Homosexual Law

The British Commonwealth was first formed in 1931,
after a 1926 conference that passed the second Balfour declaration.
The first such declaration having been made in 1917.
In 1926, including Britain, The Commonwealth
was defined as being six or seven countries.
The Irish Free State left it in 1949, never to return.

Nowadays the number of commonwealth coutries
and former commonwealth countries is 57, combined.

Of those 24 have rescinded or updated the laws
that were written in the days of empire, to make consent
the basis of all modern law about same sex sexual activity.

The 24 are Australia, Bahamas, Belize, Botswana, Canada, Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji, India, Lesotho, Malta, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Rwanda, St Kitts and Nevis, Samoa, Seychelles, Singapore, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago (subject to appeals) and the United Kingdom.

The other 33 British Commonwealth countries retain homophobic laws that originated from the days of Empire. Their disinterest extends to obscuring the difference between homophobic and non-homophobic law, and in obscuring the nature of the case law rhat follows. So it is hard to distinguish homphobic case law and non-homophobic case law, and the decisions that follow from it. 

They are Antagua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Brunei, Cameroon, Eswatini, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Kirfibati, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanatu, and Zambia.

The wave of recent recinding of colonial era anti-gay law started with the Nauru, Belise, and the Secchelles in 2016. Trinadad and India followed in 2018. Next Botswana overturned colonial era anti-gay laws in 2019. In 2022 St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Singapore overturned their colonial era anti-gay laws. In 2023 Mauritious overturned some of its anti-gay laws. The present focus on overturning colonial era anti-gay laws is focused on an appeal held in Britsh courts over colonial 'anti-sodomy laws' in Trinidad and Tobago. For much more about the advance in civil liberties please left click here.

It is odd how new American money is buying into 500 year old British colonial law. Many Commonwealth countries are now little more than tax havens to the people who don't live there. This might explain how  American homophobes with money are attracted to this now weak institution. If that is the draw, how do we dismantle that attraction?   

'The Burdened' - Kithchen Sink Drama Lives! A Film Review

It is rare to see a film set in Yemen, a country that is new to film making. It is rarer still in 2026 to see a kitchen sink drama. 'The Burdened' (2023) is both of these things, and more besides. It was co-scripted and directed by Amr Gamal, and was his second film and only the second film to be made in Yemen. I watched without doing any prior reading about the film, or the country that I expected it be set in. That the film script, co-written by writer Amr Gamal, was rooted in the theatre was obvious from the first scene onward. 

The film focused on one family, a mother, father, and three chidren all well under ten years old, living a hand to mouth life in the city port of Aden, which as I read after was until 1967 British, and like many cast offs of the British Empire was left to fend for itself in a very uncertain post empire world. In the last decade or more uncertainty turned to civil war. The effects of the war were there to be seen in the footage of the streets of Aden, where there was very little rubble but the place looked like mny bombs had hit it, and there was not the money to fully repair buildings. The script was terrific and made a virtue of its theare roots and minimal resources to craft a tight story where desperation fought decency, and wanting to do what was approved involved conflict. 

I lost count of the number of times when two characters met one would say to the other 'As-salamu alaykum', 'Peace be upon you' where the reply was 'Wa alaykum as-salam', 'And upon you be peace'. Those two phrases were the most used words used in the 91 minutes of the film, to the point where I wondered if there was some private intonation of the two rsponces in the film where, different intonations conveyed more private meanngs between the women who used both phrases. But the fact that the women where the majority of the characters and greeted each other so often with those two phrases pushed the film far further than I would have expected into it passing the Bechdel Test. The indications of the taboo with women's dress was also made clearer with, depending on the company, the women wore veils that were detatchable in an instant.

The core of the film was a family trying to get by an economy where the government does not pay its own workers the wages they are due for months after the wages were due. And yes, just as talk of illegal abortion was the sure fire way to spice up a BBC kitchen sink drama in the plays it broadcast in black and white in the 1960s, so the same rule of drama follows here. The real delight was in seeing not a second of the camera framing or the script wasted, as the characters explore disaster after disaster narrowly avoided. 

The film ends on an uncertain note of hope.

How Is Your Appetite For Life?

I can't mind appetite suppressants
taking up the air time that they take,
as they are talked up in the media.
I take control of what I eat,
so I have less need of them,
whether they are pills or injections.

I would like to be modest in how I live,
so I ask, is there a pill that will help me
reduce my appetite for living? Something
that as it helps me ask less of other people
will give those people I no longer ask for
more time that they can be with the truly needy?

The Unfinished Book

It is only when we have so few friends
that is clear that we have forgotten
how to  consolidate new acquantances
that a book that speaks about friendship
becomes a book we don't want to finish,
becuase to read all of the book feels
like reaching the end the friendship.

One such book is 'When The Cranes Fly South',
by Swedish first time author Lise Ridzen,
in which an elderly man's life is slowly dismantled
by time and circumstance, but the writing
about the dismantling is so detailed and tender
that even his fears seem like the old friends
he once relied upon and is loathe to part with.

I still have not finished the book:
I am not sure I want to, like life
I don't know that I want to know
what was on order to come after. 
  

The World Is Full Of Unoriginal Thought

There is an awful lot of bad poetry
bad painting, and bad photography
in the world. By all means add to it,
where that is the limit of the discipline
of the talent in your hand and in your eye.

I can testify to the thrill of taking photos
that on viewing them after, turned out less like
what I thought was in the viewfinder at the time.
There deleting the images was the obvious solution.

By all means put the bad art on your own walls,
if you are at ease with it, then let it be your style.

Put it online for free if you want to to, I have,
but please don't think it has any commercial life.
The market for AI 'paintings' already owns that market,
just like the commercial American AI songwriting,
replete with synthetic performance, AI 'painting' is a 'craft'
that is set to engulf and outrun it's once human counterpart. 

The Future Is Alive And Well

Even as it is in many fragments
where what remains is being retrieved
along with the dead who are to be buried.
The components are being reasembled
to be pieced back together from the rubble of Gaza.

Please left click here to listen to, download and share
a thirty minute audio documentary on how that future is being recovered.

Picture Set Of The Month - August - Stills From Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Nostalgia'

Which I saw recently at a 4k screening/rerelease of it, knowing nothing about the film
and little about the director, before I sat down in my cinema seat to watch it.   

Yes, there is a plot to the film, but it is, as The Guardian describes the film,
'a cine-poem'. 

The scene depicted above, where a mad preacher sets himself on fire
whilst preaching on libery was worth the price of entry on its own.  

 

The film also had what seemed at first viewing like a false ending, the scene above
which followed the preacher setting himself on fire. 

The image above was the closing scene in which any cynic/critic 
would have said was one of the scenes in which 'nothing happens',
repeatedly, but the image grows in richness with every second
that the viewer is given that, and just that, to focus on.    

Memorialising Absence

AI slop is not new. Eons before the utopian fantasy images
symbolising human omnicience over nature, human destruction, and despair
via images of luxury multiplied online, to counter the darker side
of the wars between humans, and the human battle against the world
with vuluminous empty fantasies that are meant to put people to sleep,
town planners fought older wars against nature, with brick and mortar.

Where they would convert fertile land, fell forests, pave over paradise itself
and name the road along which they built new, more comfortable, houses 
after the land and nature they had recently paved amd tarmaced over,
under which were sewers and increasingly complex electronic wiring,
all named after the memory of what they had recently erased through burial.

The planners knew  that human memories quickly fade,
even as names of what the memories were of would remain
thus Orchard Road, Birch Tree Drive, Cyprus Avenue,  etc
effectively memorialise the absence of living memory.
and the permanence of amnesia through memory.  

The Imitation Of Choice

It is clear enough to those with ears and time to listen
that however well commentors explain modern politics,
in its many shades of opinion, the parties we choose,
or we reject, present themselves as there to help us 
be more generous to those we see as more deserving,
whilst playing accountants tricks with the money and choice
that they control, thebetter to disguise how they divide us.

Our task as consumers of theses presentations
is to unpick the sophistry and accountant's tricks
that the parties work so hard so hard to disguise
as they continue to present their imitations of choice.    

Moon Of The Month - July -The Buck Moon

So called because many of the names we accept for our moons
were given to us by Native American Tribes. They named this moon
after the time of year that the male deer grow new antlers.

Look out for the 12th of August, when depending on where you live,
you may experience a partial or total eclypse of the sun by the moon.   

 

A Friendly Ghost Writes

I am one of many ghosts who are here
-trust me when I say 'none of us is real'.
We are all figments of selves that were
once lived in real time, in three dimensions.

But we are now left to reflect on pasts
where reflections are all that there is left
in a fading infinitely regressse pattern.

Join us when you are happy to restrict yourself
to a life in the past sense, or simply read us
to avoid falling prey to advertising instead,
in the meanwhile do all you can to avoid reports
from figments from the circuits of  computers
that were never existed in three dimensions.

Nature Special: Pygmy Three Toed Sloth

The Pygmy Three Toed Sloth is one of the rarest mammals on the Earth and it lives only on the Island Escudo de Veraguas, a tiny island off Panama. Its survival is closely tied to mangrove forests where it feeds, hides, and moves slowly through the trees to save energy. One rare fact is that algae can grow on its fur, giving it a greenish tint  that helps it blend into the leaves. This island sloth is Critically Endangered, mainly  because its tiny habitat isso limited and vulnerable. Credit: Wild Wonders.

 

The Ice Cream Sales Man Sees Everything This Way

When the BBC wanted rid
of it's most popular drama series
they first sabotged the in-house
writing and production team
that had held the show together
for most of two decades.

Then they scheduled the show
against the most popular programme
put on by the opposition.
Insiders dubbed this campaign
'selling ice cream in winter'.

The man presently in the Whitehouse 
who schedules all government policy
has some how learned about this
episode of BBC bad programming history,
even as he is using up more than enough
of his legal and political capital sueing the BBC. 

His misanthropy towards his government's expertise
has reached as far as choosing rank amateurs
to run powerful Gov't departments, helping them
to make rookie mistakes he is proud they are making.

This is not just selling ice cream in winter,
where, if he want to, then he could read how unpopular he is,
this is making ice cream in winter the contrarian policy
America is know for across the world, what is left of it.

The Moment Of Recognition

I notice afresh the new censorship,
of coded images of human sexuality
that have always existed in real life
through major barriers being erected
where in the online life that was once
the liberal, prermissive, new frontier
the old media is repeating itgself
and reclaiming old majoratist claims
to be the only life that should exist.

I don't mind this-the past is always witrh us.
But it reminds of the moment of recognition
in the film 'The Stepford Wives' where the wife
who was new to the perfect picket fence life
in the suburb recognises the uniform  falseness
in her new friends' lives after one of them breaks down,
and admits how all of them are married to plastic surgeons
for whom it is integral to their married life that as wives
they have to be perfect in their outward appearance at all times.

That the demand for such a continuous outward state of perfection
cannot be sustained without a lot of self deception should be obvious.   

Doom Loops For The Unwary

The internet is made of doom loops
that are ready to entertain the unwary,
and, before they recognise it, trap them.

The most powerful doom loops are the oldest,
the unscientific theories that pre-date the invention
of the internet by the longest time, such as
'the science of genetic superiority', in which
white males whose families were enriched,
generation on generation, through the sales
of instruments of torture that made the misery
of slavery seem normal, projectedv an image
of themselves for other people to take at face value
that should be examined critically, and taken apart,
before the famkily are treated like the old tempter that they were. 

Alas human vanity laps up this sort of material
and much more besides, I'd say the more was worse,
and perhaps it is, for how such ideas rely on far lower levels
of credulity for their advocates to present themselves as credible. 

Decide for yourself what to be most wary of. And decide again.....