The Potency Of Cheap Music

It is fifty years since I got my first record player.

It was a Dansette and my Mother got both it
and the Tommy Steele single 'Little White Bull'
as my first record to play. Both came from the junk shop
where she minded the store, and worked cash in hand
cleaning ovens and other white goods, for resale
whilst the owner of the shop was filling his van
with the goods from his latest house clearance. 

Popular music back then was relatively simple;
what the BBC played was what was popular
and nobody saw the irony in selling 'rebellion',
where a truer rebel would say they were not for sale.

I spent my 30 pence pocket each week on singles
that for having left the charts were no longer played
on pub jukeboxes. I paid the price of what it would
have cost to play on the jukebox to buy the single.

I accumulated quite a lot of music that way.

Nowadays the recording industry is a different beast,
and the premium is on music played live, the music CD
is a loss-leader to the point of becoming nearly worthless
soon after being issued. CDs would become landfill
were but for charity shops getting what they can for them.

So from 20 pence a single fifty years ago, 
it is now 50 pence a CD, for a whole album,
as found now in your local charity emporium.

Once bought it will remain in your house
as long as you let it stay. There, it's currency
is no longer money, but the length of time
spent listening to the CD, all the better
to appreciate the artistry of the performer.   

Ear worms have never been so cheap, or as potent.

Injustice Starts Here

In the USA racism goes
well beyond it's police stations,
it also fuels the courts,
and the execution chambers too.

Black people have a 220% higher chance
of enduring a botched lethal injection execution
than white people. 

Who knows how much higher
the % of chances of injustice are
on all the stages of justice system
before the black man lands on death row?

The failings of American Justice have never been clearer,
and never more ignored in the rest of the world. 

If you feel that you would like a small voice
that is your own about this issue please left click here.

Your Life Long Friend

Who can change in tone 
and you wish would leave you alone,
but is there to teach you patience.

 

Signs Of Greater Age (58)

1-Getting less post the older you get.
But the postman leaves more leaflets.
The ultimate in impersonal post
being price reducing vouchers
for incontinence pads for adults,
where uncomfortably under-dressed
slightly brain-dead looking,
late middle aged men and women
model the pads as signs of self awareness.

2-In the privacy of your own home,
and garden, saving your urine,
rather than flushing it away. 
Diluted, it becomes plant food,
and having more plants in the house
than you have friends their food is vital.

The Hope Of Imperfection

Improving on imperfection
is not a matter of destroying it
with what we say will be perfection,
but taking the terror out of error.
Whilst being constructive with our mistakes.  

     

The Asymmetric Universe

Everyone alive lives in an asymmetric,
out-of-kilter, world where the main point
for each and every struggler is trying to make
the asymmetric competitiveness work better
for them, or if they are generous attempting
to make he asymmetry a win-win life,
in the short and mid term at least.

This applies whether it is gender based rights,
disparities in wealth, and goes down to privacy
or personally defendable space in a house
and up to the imbalance in propaganda
and military hardware when your country
is at war with another, or an empire
and the first fight is for your own truth
so feel free enough to ask  'Who does asymmetry favour?
and think that you can get an answer worth hearing.

When you can't ask, then 'loser' is a rhetorical term,
and 'winners' will only talk among themselves.

But beyond the label we choose, or can't escape,
this asymmetry goes beyond Darwinian competition,
where Darwin ignored Kropotkin-style co-operation,
it goes to show how we seem to be alone in the universe,
until we learn how to recognise contented alien life forms.  

Picture Set of The Month - May - Posters For The Film 'Stalker'

'Stalker' is a 1979 Soviet science fiction film,
filmed in uncertain present day dystopian setting. 

The writers of the film were Arkady and Boris Strugatsy
from their 1972 book 'Roadside Picnic'.

It is a 'quest' film, 'The Zone' is a place in which there exists 
a room which grants a person their innermost desires.
 Guides to the place are called Stalkers. The Professor
is one such guide who takes a depressed writer and a scientist
through the wasteland that is the outer layer of The Zone.  

The film combined elements of philosophy, theology, science
and fantasy in a way that took the dogma out of each element.

The idea of getting past guards to investigate 
a derelict industrial landscape to find the room
that grants people their wishes grants a poetic
ennobling of that post-industrial world.

The men do eventually find the room, and find their
selfishness or altruism reflected back at them within it
as well as telling the story of a previous stalker/guide. 
To enter the room requires an act of sacrifice. The film's  
film's ultimate message is one of struggle and the need
for selflessness to survive.
 through struggle