Know Yourself Whilst You Can

  This cartoon is from the mid-1970s and is either a tame satire on the ease of corner shop shopping out-of-daytime-business-hours where 'instant coffee' etc seemed new, a satire on the title of the John Lennon song 'Instant Karma', or a satire on the slow collapse of the values and cogency of the then Labour government. Any values that you had to 'just add water' to could not taste of much in the longer term. 

But I put this cartoon here because with the internet we have, fifty years since it made cynical young readers laugh, because in the 2020s our media is caught up in the midst of its own ever shifting fever dreams, where it focuses on one idea then another so fast that readers can't keep up with what is presently promoted as the next trend/the next leader, as the latest dream is paid for by advertisers seeking to sell the latest wares as if they were created - instantly! 

There is a better life to be had by knowing your own mind and knowing where, and what, it should not be led to accept. No product or idea is instant, particularly when we trace how it was developed. Yes, information is relative, and the relativity that informs it tells me that space/time gives us a choice of which space/time from the past to recognise. But space/time cannot be sure of the future: do your best to live in the present, as near as you are able.      

Good News For The Nervous

Ray Lowry seems remarkable in his foresight
for predicting the number of trigger warnings
that modern readers get with what they read.  

Smoking Warnings Taken To New Heights

And applied where they are least expected,
and when it is too late to change. 

R.I.P. NME

This is what it used to be like 

When it was on form and witty
about the media that it was a part of.

Public Relations

is the profession of repackaging which cannot repackage itself.
 It will always be a sows ear presenting itself as silk purse
by helping others to do the same. 

Government Health Warnings Gain A New Finality

Without the kind permission of Ray Lowry

Joined Up Government

This is how Government fat cats would think,
with thanks to here.

 

 

 

Rubbish Is Us (2)

Without the kind permission of Ray Lowry.

The Never Ending Cycle Of Urban Violence

"Don't Blame us for being violent towards rioters 

we learned how to be violent from television"

Hope Deferred With Vincent Van Gogh

The joke being that if he were alive
how would he hear after mutilating his ear?
And if he were dead they were inattentive... 
The bleakest fact being that in his lifetime
Vincent sold one painting, to his brother Theo
who died six months after Vincent died.

Caution; Journalists At Work

The tabloid press are seen as benign,
but their agenda was always
to reinforce the immobility
of being born working class
and having low social status. 

Rock and Roll Is So Not What It Used To Be

'This one switches on  my electric blanket back home in Finchley.
You need your creature comforts when you are my age...  '

Cheer Up Mate....

The 1948 Blues

Illustration used here without the kind permission
of Ray Lowry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here you can read the introduction 

to the 60th anniversary edition of '1984', 

as written by modern thriller writer Robert Harris.