Bowled Over

 It is years, decades, since The Grateful Dead
sealed their reputation and invented 'Americana'
long before other song writers took up the mantle,
now attributed The Dead, where songs described
where they lived and who had lived before them.

The Grateful Dead were long gone by the time
'Americana' became shorthand for lazy reporters,
they were worn out from from touring and decay

Now they are more a memory
in the frazzled minds of the punters
of gigs they put on, gigs where
as one attendee of their 1972 tour
now memorably described them
as 'The rock and roll equivalent
of a cricket test match, lots of lulls
with unexpected flashes of excitement'.

It is forty one years since I was first bowled over,
and there have been many lulls in my life since,
but the band have been the constant to me
through many dwelling and relationships
they will see me thought many more...

As Jesus Never Said

about Judas, a disciple he liked, and his accountant,
'Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer
and for God's sake make sure you know the difference'.

What Jesus thought about how to trust 
an accountant was never recorded.... 

Picture Set of The Month - August - The Album Artwork of Sir Peter Blake.

A watercolour image of John Peel (1939-2004)
for the 2006 compilation of tracks that were
identified with him as a DJ, from the first
decade of the punk era.     

 

Fresh from the debacle of his most famous
brush with celebrity via The Beatles, Blake
completed this just as bright but more compact image
for then newly starting out folk musicians Pentangle.  

Sir Peter Blake's association with Ian Dury
goes back to when Dury was his pupil and Blake
taught art, at Walthamstow Arts School.
What chance Dury returning the favour? Done!   

Ian Stewart (1938-85) was the member
of The Rolling Stones who hid in the background
because 1-he was probably the best musician among
them and 2-in the early days of the band his image
 ran counter to the 'bad boy' image that the band
wanted to project to gain traction with the public.   

Only In America

'My family made the pilgrimage to this town in 1999 just after we lost our cotton gin* to a corporate competitor, long after the town had transformed itself into a place for retired Chicagoans and Southern fundamentalists to buy cheap property where it was safe to keep and bear arms and brag about it. In the five years since we'd moved, my parents had leaned how to fit in with some of the Northerners, talk with a slightly nasal accent, smile less. People came here to change their live for the better, to live at a different pace, though later I would learn that a change of scenery would never change somebody like me..... '

'I hadn't felt truly natural since junior high, when I first saw my handsome neighbour walking his dog down the street: a moment that had me begging secretly for a leash. "I don't want to talk about it' I said

"Your friend what's-his-name didn't have a problem talking about it." Friend. The word sounded cavalier, without a trace of irony, landing smugly between the blinker's ticking like a hard fact. It made me want to want jerk the wheel in the wrong direction, slam the gas pedal and drive us into the side of the nearest building.".

*A cotton gin, or cotton engine, is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibres from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. 

Three quotes from the spare and haunting 'Boy Erased' by Garrard Conley.    

Our Just Deserts?

Soon the Church of England
will gather together yet again
to agree on the churches' stance
on the sexual mores of their members.

Once again they will declare
that the imperative to breed,
declared in the Old Testament,
as a key part of their creed.

What they refuse to accept,
is that humans have over-bred
and have over-run the planet
and that non-procreative sex
is the safest sex for the planet,
which would like to keep fewer of us
in far less luxury a lot better
than we presently expect.

So whilst the Church of England
aridly justifies desert values for breeding
let us resist; it will create too many of us
for the green brown and blue of the planet
to remain rich in their natural colours
and not be returned to inhospitable desert
that won't even support talking snakes
or any other primitive life forms.

Votes For Women

Because where the opinion of women
has to recognised then they might feel
more like their autonomy matters too.

 

Picture Set Of The Month - July - Women Fighting For The Vote

Between a hundred and thirty and one hundred years ago
English women protested for the universal franchise.
Many protested with extreme violence for equality
with men, others worked within the law.

 

Many suspended their protests
for the duration of the first world war
in the hope of being given the vote after.  

In 1918 they had partially succeeded
-as long as the women were married to men
who owned the property that the women lived in.
Only on July 2nd 1928 was the triumph of women
made complete, and then it was for women over 21.