rhinoblog

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:50:00 +0000

an open letter to a few young friends of mine

in a week when an ex serving Special Forces Major in the Parachute Regiment - who, by his own admission, knows absolutely fuckall about the arts - is appointed to be the new shadow minister of culture, it feels like time either to die of an apoplexy-induced aneurysm or, rolling around in the warm puddle of one's own uncontrollably evacuated bladder, of hysterical laughter.

it's patently been the case for a very long time that the value of the arts to our benighted cultural community has become defined only in its material sense. the fact that the arts do, indeed, provide a significant contribution to the economy, is entirely secondary to their true function, and is, indeed, fundamentally irrelevant.

the arts are valuable in the sense that our minds are valuable. we can point at all the material bits of us - from metacarpals to amygdala - and say that this is this and that does that, but it's actually our minds that matter, in the end. and you can neither locate nor put a price on a mind. (I'm avoiding saying 'the soul', because I'm one of those odd atheists who actually believes we have one, but that's another thread, even if it applies in just the same way.)

one of the lasting legacies of The Bitch was to engage all subsequent politics with the appalling notion that the commodification of everything was a desirable and necessary condition to the achievement of a properly run society, and that everything - everything - needs must become material grist to the free market mill of capitalism.

let us never, ever forget that the one man who, more than any other, has dictated the UK fine art agenda for the last thirty-odd years is an ex-advertising troll who, with his brother, devised and ran the campaign that helped get The Bitch into office. he's The Bitch's bitch - always was, always will be, with no more capability to discriminate between good and bad art than a deaf and blind axolotl. he's just rich. if Richard Branson (god forbid, but he probably will!) were to set up an art gallery of his own and stock it with a commissioned artist's assembly of his flash-fried turds, they would immediately be hailed as great art and sell for lots and lots of money.

so it goes.

moving on.

miracles do happen.

the nation's art education has become epitomised as the failing struggle between the attempts of a few dedicated teachers - all, without exception, now either broken or on the threshold of breakdowns - and an education establishment that's determined to mould its 'clients' - and the international students whose higher fees merit their prioritisation over the natives - into nothing more nor less than a set of compliant debt-management social units.

the rector and chief executive of one prominent arts-based university (quite telling, that title - they used to be called simply 'chancellors') which shall remain nameless was heard explaining recently, off the record, to a dumbfounded teaching colleague of my own acquaintance that their function now was primarily 'to enable their students to support capitalism' (sic).

despite all this - despite everything - there keeps emerging, generation upon generation, a steady stream of young artists whose passion to make art is fuelled, not by the desire to make money, but by the need - I'd almost call it an instinct specific to a very particular grouping in our species if that didn't sound élitist - which it is - but what the heck - to follow in the footsteps of those artists whose work has preceded and inspired them, and to run with that inspiration, to make work of their own, to express themselves as only they, uniquely, can.

at risk of sounding disturbingly saccharine, I do consider myself extraordinarily fortunate to have encountered, in the course of my own working life, so many young artists (not 'aspiring artists', because all true artists are aspiring - the path's the thing, not the getting there - some are just newer to it than others). some of them I've known for many years, some have long since drifted away over our mutual horizons, and some have only recently hove into view. it's profoundly exhilarating to realise that this need - the heat generated by this eternal flame - is never going to be extinguished, that it's going to continue to be passed on, from generation to generation, for as long as there are fellow humans around who need what it is that only they can provide, in the face of and despite the political predisposition to smother it.

so - my New Years message to Charlotte, Jahouli, Julie, Jessica, Linas, Neringa, Chippy, Sophie, Sorcha, Todd, and anyone else who cares to listen - whichever discipline you're working in, regardless of whether you think you're succeeding or failing, regardless of whether you think you know where you're going or whether you think you're losing your way, regardless of whether you're pleased with how it's going or desperate that it doesn't appear to be going anywhere in particular, regardless of whether they like it or I like it or even whether you like it yourself:

JUST - KEEP GOING .

JUST - KEEP GOING!

you'll never get where you think you might be going, but as long as you JUST KEEP GOING you will - I promise you - discover some unimaginably amazing stuff on the way which, hopefully, will feed into your own practice and thereby get shared with the rest of us. because we deserve it.

oh - one other thing.

never listen to a word of advice anyone like me offers you.
go and get a proper job. you'll end up much happier.

peace.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:24:00 +0000

more mori …

a half-life is the period of time it takes for a substance undergoing decay to decrease by half.

a half-life is a life half-lived.

there is a moment in everyone's life that, unbeknownst to them, marks the halfway post between their birth and their death. it is a moment that can occur, unluckily, all too early: the twenty-year old future road accident victim will have passed it by the age of ten. the majority will reach it some time after their thirty-fifty birthday. we will never know when we've reached it, but the probability of having done so gradually increases until, by the age of forty-five, it's within a whisker of a certainty that it has already passed.

it used to be an eager ascendancy - a hand-shielded peering squint up into the rising-sun-lit path of the brave bright future.

Things We Used to Wonder: who'll be the first to get a girlfriend … lose their virginity … learn to drive ... get a university place … land the dream job … get rich and famous …

now - a reluctant descendancy - a series of ever more cautious steps down an ever-steepening gradient towards oblivion, the disturbed detritus of our past clattering at our heels.

Things We Wonder now: who'll be the first to develop cancer … to succumb to Alzheimer's, or Parkinson's, or any other in that depressing list of surnames-turned-syndromes in the geriatric pages of the medical dictionary … and, l'ultimo degli ultimi, which of us will be the first to die?

there must have been a halfway plateau time, a time without either frantic future-fixated flapping or futile past-yearning furling - a moment, in this life trajectory, of transition, however fleeting, from upward to downward, a moment of free fall; but it was unremarkable, quite forgettable, forgotten.

the past is, notoriously, another country, one with irrevocably closed borders.

don't look back, Orpheus, don't look back.

just keep on singing.

and for godsake don't mention the Maenads.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:56:00 +0000

Eileen Daisy Roylance
18th April 1918 - 15th November 2009

I've been off this bloggery thang for a while, it would seem.
so here we go again.

Death of Mother would seem to be an appropriate time and place to re-prime the pump.

"This is a day we've all been dreading, the day that marks the end of something, something so big that nothing - no event, no memorial, certainly no mere words - can possibly do justice to its magnitude, to the hugeness of its effect.

At her ninetieth birthday party last year, lots of jokes were made about looking forward to mum's centenary. I, for one, fully expected that she would last, if not forever, at least for a good few more years yet. Whenever I mention her to friends, I invariably resort to the old platitude that she's as tough as old boots. And it will be some time before I - before any of us - will find ourselves easy with converting that 'is' to a 'was' - using the past tense when we talk about her.

In the end, she has gone suddenly, and somewhat unexpectedly. Obviously, we've all been preparing ourselves, but, actually, how do you really prepare for such an event?

In reality, of course, the preparations began three years ago, when dad died. They were the perfect couple - entwined like an ancient pair of vines that's grown into and wrapped around each other - utterly devoted, quite inseparable, and yet, finally, subject to that awful separation that the marriage ceremony implies but glosses over - til death us do part. For some time after dad passed away, mum kept finding scraps of paper with a few loving phrases or verses tucked away in books and at the back of cupboard drawers - deliberately hidden for her to find after he'd gone. I'm sure I wasn't the only one of us who feared back then that she'd follow him almost immediately, and the fact that she didn't is testament as much to her devotion to the rest of her family as to her physical and spiritual toughness. She really wanted to follow him, but she felt there were still things to do here before she could.

This interim period of widowhood has been a harrowing time for her, as it has for all those in the family who've had to witness it, but she endured, and carried on, more for the sake of her family than for anything else.

Whenever I hear the word 'selfless' I think 'mum' - she was literally incapable of putting her own needs before those of her family. Dad was the same, of course. So there's a crumb of comfort, now, to we who have to continue without her, in the knowledge that she's finally reunited with dad - in whatever form we choose to imagine that - but I choose to believe that that, ultimately, is what she's been looking forward to ever since he went.

There's comfort, also, in the knowledge that her end was sudden, neither painfully protracted nor preceded by the tragedy of mental deterioration that's so distressing for the families that have to suffer it. If mum's body was as tough as old boots, her mind, to stay in the realm of the platitude, remained as sharp as a whistle right to the end. When she used to play Scrabble, she took no prisoners. She was equally merciless at Boggle. And woe betide anyone who tried to pull one over her in the market.

Because she lived so much closer to mum than either myself or my brother Nigel, our sister Yvonne has become mum's primary carer in recent years, and I don't want to let this opportunity pass of publicly acknowledging the huge debt of gratitude we owe to both her and my brother-in-law Andrew for the work they have both been doing to make mum's life easier as her physical frailty increased. Whenever I phoned mum, she had something to tell me about something either Yvonne or Andrew had done which had made her life easier or happier, or both, and she used to express concern that they might think she was taking their work for granted. She wasn't. Thank you, both of you, on both her and our behalf, for all you've done.

We'll all be remembering different aspects of her, of course. To some she was the Eileen whose fairytale wartime romance and marriage to Les was, I imagine, the envy of a fair number of her peers, and of dad's. To others she was that nice Mrs Roylance who helped them with their reading at primary school, and knitted chocolate Easter egg chicks for them every Easter. To others she was the mother of those three charming, gifted and good-mannered children who were the very apple of her eye (that's my brother and sister and me, by the way). And to us, she was either auntie, nana, great-nana, or mum. She was a good mother - loving, generous, non-judgmental, totally supportive - and she worked incredibly hard, all her life, to make the family home as comfortable and welcoming as she could manage. But as a nana she was truly great. She was besotted with her grandchildren, and they, in turn, seemed to recognise the innate childishness in her that lingered behind that grownup mask of grey-haired responsibility and experience, a kind of delightful playfulness that was always bubbling under, waiting to be released by the children's laughter.

We who've always known her know that she was uncomfortable with being in the public eye - she was embarassed at public praise, and could barely manage a quietly stuttered 'thank you' when it was given. I can so easily imagine her response to our presence here now: "It's lovely to see you all together", she would say, "Don't be too upset on my account." And then the words would get stuck in her mouth and the hankie would come out.

So - mum - that's it. No more flowery tributes. No more awkward words of praise. We're thinking them, of course, but we won't embarass you with them. The most important thing is that we know that you loved us. Your whole life was a demonstration of that. And we know that you know that we loved you. So rest now. With dad. You remain in our hearts, now and for always."

That's what I said at the funeral the day before yesterday - the dutiful son's eulogy, the edited version, the words that all the family wanted to hear. "Beautiful", they all said. they were hard to deliver. tears were shed.

I'd already confessed to my sons - the only ones who really matter - that I felt somewhat monstrous for feeling less grief than relief, so the hypocrisy of those beautiful words had to some extent been pre-absolved. and I think my genuine grief (I needed to spend a few final minutes alone with her, after everyone else had filed out, weeping over the coffin) emerged, less from the loss itself, than from the guilt I felt - still feel - at feeling that relief.

my boys, certainly, and one or two friends - the few who have had some insight into my complicated relationship with my family - understand. it would require something tediously biographical to explain it all, and I really don't think this is either the time or the place to get into all that.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 13:55:00 +0000

how bad?

bad.

now that we have the benefits of an instant and comprehensive global overview of all things apocalyptic - climate, economies, extinctions, TV schedules - it's fairly safe to say that we're fucked.

to finish that sentence with an 'unless' has already become redundant - unlessing has been going on for sooo long, unlessing was for the last ten, twenty, forty years, when there was still a chance to avoid the worst of it, provided (there's another redundant) there was the political will to a) listen b) attend) and c), somewhat crucially, act.

didn't happen. they lied. shush little lambs they said leave it to us we have experts working on it we know what we're doing it'll all be ok don't rock the boat keep paying your taxes.

so we're fucked.

in how long? ten? fifteen? twenty? the probability rises with each decade. in fifty - around the 2060's - it changes to a certainty. life on earth as we know it - comfortable, western, human life - degrades. seriously. it becomes an increasingly desperate struggle for basic survival, wherein the compensations for the struggle - the contemplation of natural beauty, the enjoyment of cultural recreation, the sharing of our children's children's euphoric discoveries of their relationship with the world - become displaced by the typical behaviours of a civilisation in decline. ugly. it's all happened before - think Roman Britain circa 450 AD - just never before on the scale that it's going to happen this time.

global warming is ongoing - it's too late to do anything about it (sorry, Al - you gave it your best shot). the ice-caps will melt and the glaciers will retreat (it's already begun), sea-levels will rise, thousands of littoral populations will be displaced inland as their ecologies, their crops and meadows are drowned.
the fossil fuels are going to be exhausted - sooner rather than later, and even if they can finally crack the energy shangri-la of nuclear fusion, seriously commercial reactors are not going to come online in time.
the global economy is already in meltdown - however many gazillions get pumped into the rescue package, it's already too late.
the world population will continue to increase, at the same time as millions of acres of arable land are going to be inundated - net result, a world population far exceeding the capacity of the available agricultural land to sustain it.

so it goes (we miss you, kurt).

as far as we know, this way of life - this being human way of life - is unique in the Milky Way(which, since we're as likely to explore any further along our own spiral arm as the cow is to jump over the moon, is tantamount to leaving it at 'unique', full stop). there's absolutely no sign of it existing anywhere else than here. in universal terms, the chances of its being duplicated (the fractal complexities of the evolution of this thing - us - from those original prokaryotes that, somehow, divided and then started copying themselves) are very, very very low. not impossibly low, because the universe is a very, very, very big place, and has been going on for a very, very, very long time. just a bit too low to be put in the category of 'likely'. more likely, this being human way of life is unique, at least, in the Local Group.

which ought to be something to be proud of, really, oughtn't it?

I mean, here we are, not only sentient, but self-aware, capable of extraordinary things - not only of grasping an egg without crushing it, but of imagining and then constructing a machine that can do the same thing, not only perceiving our environment as a comprehensible event, something definable and tangible, but as something either pleasing or displeasing - responsive to an aesthetic filter that eludes the definitive, or, in the case of our behaviour toward each other, something good or bad - responsive to moral and ethical criteria that are totally resistant to the maths that quantify quanta so eloquently.

'pride' is, perhaps, the wrong word, since none of this is of our doing. it happened, we happened, thanks to an immensely long and complicated chain of evolutionary accidents, a chain that is so long, and so complicated that, for many, despite Darwin, the hand of God still continues to need to be invoked, if not as Seven Day Maker, at least as both Big Bang Igniter and Universal Shaper of Events. it is, of course, perfectly possible to eschew such culturally tenacious fictions without denying the miraculous, to celebrate the incredible good fortune of our progress towards humanity without surrendering to the credulousness of superstition. it is perfectly reasonable, nay, incumbent on our collective journey to self-discovery, to pay due homage to all of His works, without having to invoke Him as Maker. (wiki note: cite precedent for insight through paradox.)

we have rather taken it all for granted, though, haven't we? it's hard to avoid wondering just how much more careful we might have been with ourselves if we had had something to do with it. if, instead of passively sitting around and letting evolution take its course we'd been obliged to participate in shaping the code somehow - embedding a useful behavioural tweak here, editing out a counter-indicative trait there - we might have taken a little more pride in our appearance, a pride which, in those circumstances, would have been justified.

instead, like so many whose sink-estate lives have sunk so far into the pit of dependence that their sense of social responsibility becomes almost entirely atrophied, we expect someone else to sort it all out. even though, deep down, we know that nothing lasts forever, we don't actually believe it. even though we have known - for quite long enough for us to have been able to do something about it - that this was coming, we preferred to remain in denial. it's what we do. (dying, to cite a similar fine example of impending finality, is something that happens to other people. either old or unlucky people. anyway, way down the timeline. not even worth thinking about.)

so here we are, in the last few seconds of the last minute before midnight on that famous analogue of evolution as a twenty-four hour clock, with no clearer idea about the plan than had the bacteria when it all began.

trouble is, there never has been a plan. nothing, at least, that might be offered to an indifferent alien arbiter, a mildly curious but ultimately careless Proxima Centaurian, as an insight into human aspiration, something that might demonstrate our species-specific objectives and the road map we had drawn up to get there. plenty of plans plural, the vast majority of them - it has to be said - nothing more than variants on the 'if I ruled the world' theme, embodied, more often than not, in a psychopathic head of state. from Genghis Khan to Pol Pot, from Attila to Hitler, from Timurlane to Stalin - the way we do things (concludes the august representative from Proxima Centauri) seems to involve an awful lot of one-generational killing, and seems always to end in tears once the instigator of the killings has passed away.

for all that this last minute, relative to the big picture, is a blinkandyoumissit moment, and the individual durations of those preceding twenty to thirty civilisations (go Egyptians! at 3,000 years, still in the lead) mere moments compared with the dinosaurs' 160 million, the accumulation of so much experience of dealing with other humans over so many generations should, you'd think, have resulted by now in something other than what is: 6.7 billion fucked-up people on a fucked-up planet that they know how to repair but don't. makes about as much sense as continuing to drive a starship with a failing warp drive - but hey. those wild and whacky humans, right?

so what, apart from this Cassandra-like woe-betiding, is the proper response to such certainties? what is to be done, once we have embraced the realities, finally foregone the self-deluding unlesses and depending-on's, performed the ultimate volte-face that absolutely no-one of substance seems prepared to do, and confronted the imminence of the demise of human dominion on earth?

first thing is to recognise - without prejudice, as the weasel lawyers say - that we're not as perfect as we think we are. this in a phylogenetic, not a vainglorious sense.

if we're looking for reasons as to why we behave as badly as we do, there's one possibility that's glaringly obvious. it seems to me perfectly reasonable to conceive that there's a flaw in the hard-wiring - that our DNA carries a fundamental genetic error - a tiny one, but one that, replicated over millennia of adaptations, has virtually guaranteed the current predicament.

in a nutshell - having been programmed to succeed, by whatever means it takes, the genes for which we are, in Richard Dawkin's phrase, survival machines, seem to lack any way of modifying that survival behaviour once success is achieved. we are, in other words, engaged in a perpetual race to win, at any cost, despite having actually won millennia since.

as a species, humans took first place on the winners plinth so long ago that we have no cultural memory of it at all. who, in the yet to be named Olduvai Gorge could have predicted that this ungainly first cousin to the apes, laughably inferior in size, speed, tooth and claw to all of its predators, would become so successful at avoiding predation. within a few short millennia of freeing the opposing-thumbed hands by balancing on the rear legs, humans were developing in intelligence and co-operative skills far in excess of other pack-hunting species, manipulating tools, weapons, and fire in ways that no other animal ever learnt to do, and establishing the foundations of the discretely human cultural structures that far surpass in variety and complexity anything comparable in the animal kingdom, and that are still in place.

by the sixth millennium BCE, when Sumeria - the first great civilisation - was beginning to be established, humans were unquestionably the winners in the species-specific survival games. by that point, a rationally-engineered genetic programme would have compared the projected criteria of 'success' with the achieved conditions, recognised the near-one hundred percent match, and shut down that part of the programme that was still running in 'win at any cost' mode. instead, that programme continued to run - continues to run - investing the competitive imperative (an essentially redundant trait) with a false, and ultimately self-destructive cultural importance. divested of its evolved focus on survival in the face of threats from other species, for want of an evolutionary off-switch, it turned on its next closest perceived threat - its own survival machines, urging them to compete with each other, in perpetuity, for whatever advantage they might gain by destroying each other.

and so it continues.

even the urgency of the current situation, as its implications are finally, finally! being grasped - a late-blooming but rapidly proliferating meme - is being turned into a race, something in which there will be winners and losers. an economic system both rooted in the free market, with competition at its core, and on the totally illogical (insane) assumptions that growth should proliferate indefinitely and that the planet's natural resources are infinitely plunderable was only ever going to impede any efforts to mitigate the consequences. so for every argument that competition will produce the most effective solution to all our ills, there must be the counter-argument that competition to make that solution profitable will fatally compromise it.

to cite the overriding problem of global warming, for instance - everyone who cares knows that one of the most urgent priorities is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and all of the energy companies have immediate access to the technology that would enable this. however, since a limited company's market value is determined by its investors' confidence that it will continue to provide them with a share of the profits - their dividend - the first priority in all boardrooms is to keep the shareholders happy. so the strategic compromise - one that's been adopted wholesale across the most polluting industries - is to pump up the PR budget by an order of magnitude, in order to persuade the media ('us' is irrelevant - commercial TV is the one that matters, because 'we' will believe anything those slebs tell us) how much is being done to reduce the company's carbon footprint. in actuality, what that consists of is doing just enough to comply with equivocal directives from government (and, more likely than not, receiving a generous subsidy for doing so), which are drafted to balance the political fallout from whichever of the industrial or the environmental lobbies is likely to be the more upset by them, and these flexible and multi-interpretational target-based strategies, as we know from bitter experience across all public and private institutions from education to the NHS, encourage a box-ticking culture that mollifies the auditors in the short term without actually achieving very much at all in the way of improvement.

the second thing to recognise, therefore, is that our leaders lie, (gasp! really? no!) and that the political agenda is always a murky mess of fudge, evasion, and short-term self-interest, both in the individual and the partisan sense. it seems, sadly, to be the case that, just as the radical young musician transforms, with dreary inevitability, into the pompous, self-satisfied, middle-aged millionaire with batty ideas about how to save the world through eating tofu and adopting African children and giving one final merchandise-rich concert on a floating island in the middle of Lake Titicaca, so the radical young politician, bursting with idealistic fervour, is gradually transformed into the fawning backbencher whose only remaining aspiration is to catch the chief whip's attention sufficiently, if not to be elevated to cabinet, to at least be transferred to a safe seat at the next election. truth-telling, in either regard, is counter-productive. the art of politics is in large degree just the art of not being found out.

the third thing (and this is going to sound strange - bear with me) is that miracles do happen. it's not a matter of 'believing' in miracles, in some mystical or quasi-religious sense, but of acknowledging that highly improbable events that bring very welcome consequences do, in fact, happen - all the time. whenever there's a news report on some natural disaster - earthquake, tsunami, hurricane - that has wreaked utter havoc on some poor (usually) community in the middle of nowhere, there will come a moment, many days later, long after all hope of finding survivors has been abandoned, when a rescuer hears a cry, and someone - often a child - is lifted from the wreckage still alive who, to all intents and purposes, should have been dead. this is not an infrequent event. it nearly always happens. and it is always described as a miracle.

other miracles:

the passenger who changes flights at the last minute and escapes death on the one that's going to crash.
the premature baby weighing scant ounces who grows into a strapping athlete.
the cancer that goes into remission by itself.
the Afro-American who becomes President of the USA...

...und so weiter.

everything that we are and have become is the result of a series of accidents. chance rules.

unless we've been exceptionally unfortunate in our lives, all of us have experienced good fortune at some time or another - the happy event that owes little, if anything at all, to our own efforts. there are a million charlatans out there - from the priests to the aura-adjusters - who make a tidy living out of manipulating our innate respect for such phenomena. whether or not we subscribe to the belief that, as individuals, we can somehow harness this thing - chance - and, through some form of superstitious propitiation, manipulate it to our advantage, we have to admit that chance dictates a far greater proportion of our lives than we might be prepared to admit. furthermore, there do seem to be certain times in our lives when we feel, and effectively are 'luckier' than others, and, conversely, great swathes of our lives when we feel as though we're completely out of 'it'.

it is as if the same universal axiom of chance that, in macro, oversees the seemingly random emergence of something (the visible stuff - galaxies, stars, planets, us) out of nothing (the invisible - dark matter? quantum foam? strings?), applies, in micro, to the seemingly random connections between events that we classify as 'lucky' or 'coincidental' or 'miraculous' - the huge tidal waves of accident that describe the collisions in accretion orbits resulting in something quite big like our own planet attenuated, over time, into the tiny ripples of luck that lap at our tiny little lives like goldfish shoals nibbling at our toes.

to summarise:

our competitiveness is killing us
our chosen path of social organisation guarantees flawed leadership
shit (and some good stuff) just happens

so what's to be done?

don't look at me - I'm as lost as you are.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:12:00 +0000

carpe diem

Tu ne quaesieris - scire nefas - quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoë, nec Babylonios temptaris numeros.
ut melius, quicquid erit, pati. seu plures hiemes, seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare Tyrhenum.
Sapias, vina liques, et spatio brevi spem longam reseces.
dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

Ask not - we cannot know - what end the gods have set for you, for me; nor attempt the Babylonian reckonings, Leuconoë.
How much better to endure whatever comes, whether Jupiter grants us additional winters or whether this is our last, which now wears out the Tuscan Sea upon the barrier of the cliffs!
Be wise, strain the wine; and since life is brief, prune back far-reaching hopes!
Even while we speak, envious time has passed: seize the day, putting as little trust as possible in tomorrow!

(Horace - Odes 1.11)

a useful reality check - to imagine that today might be one's last on earth, and to behave accordingly, the challenge being to identify and interrogate that behaviour that predicates on the anticipation of a future, and to determine how much that anticipation acts as a restraint on what might otherwise be a more spontaneous, possibly more honest way of living.

it's a challenge that assumes, of course, that we tend to the craven, being afraid to behave honestly and spontaneously, to live 'in the moment' as our hippy and Buddhist friends say, for fear of the consequences.

much of a human life, for better or worse, consists of developing a sufficiency of capital in the present to ensure some form of return in the future, and of weighing the odds of surviving to benefit from that return.

it is of no benefit to me - today - to replace that slipped roof tile. it will cost me time and effort and money. however, the next heavy rain will penetrate through the gaps and start rotting the woodwork in the attic, causing serious damage whose repair will cost much more sometime in the future than were I to attend to the slipped tile today.

similarly, it is of no benefit to me - today - to do this work that I hate, for this employer whom I despise. however, were I to quit and tell him or her what I really thought of them, I would not be paid, and would not then be able to afford the stuff I was looking forward to as future compensation for all this drudgery.

on the other hand, if today were my last day on earth, what's the point?

the only time in our lives when instant gratification of desire occurs without conditions or penalties is at our mother's breast. the norm, subsequently, becomes an increasingly attenuated period of deferment consequent on certain behavioural trade-offs, be they the good behaviour of childhood in return for a treat, the dating rituals preceding the fuck, or the eight-hour days of drudgery in return for a fortnight of family holiday hell.

our relationship to time is (unsurprisingly, since the Big Bang was responsible for both) ineluctably enmeshed in our relationship to space. however, whereas our spatial sense (this is bigger than that, this is further away than that, this surrounds us, this is inside us) is relatively easy to understand, because we come with a sensory array (eyes, ears, skin) that connects us with it, that with time is much less so. the notion of an individual existing in a moment of time (the now) which is subsequent to all else that he or she has experienced (the past) and which precedes all else which has yet to be experienced (the future) is as elusive and problematic as the notion of self-consciousness itself.

clearly, the universal understanding of 'now' is a flux, something fluid, not the fixed event that we suppose it to be. 'now' can range between the hundredth of a second that it takes to say it and the days, weeks, months, years, or more that encompass the event described, as in 'global warming is happening now'. this now I write in has long since become a then. the future that in this moment of writing I can only guess at has already moved into the past.

our personal journey through universal spacetime seems to be conducted in a sort of bubble, a flexible spacesuit constructed of the same spacetimey stuff that is continually adjusting itself according to our individual preferences, a bubble that extends around us, preceding us (our future) and trailing behind us (our past), a personal bubble of nowness that contains all we need of futureness and pastness to define ourselves.

any exhortation to live in the present rather than in hope of a better future - and, conversely, not to live, or to get stuck in the past - is as fundamentally meaningless as the challenge to describe the sound of one hand clapping. the present - this 'now' - is, to labour the koanic analogy, an infinitely tiny dot of nothing contained within the parentheses of the past and the future, so such exhortations can only be read as judgements, as implicit criticisms of the limits of another's temporal behaviour, the styling of their personal spacetime bubble.

we frown on an individual's bubble getting too large. its limits are deemed 'normal' only up to a certain extent. global memory naturally fades with distance in time, but certain memories, clearly, remain entirely recoverable almost at will - or, Proust-like, seem capable of ambushing us at some seemingly random stimulus, as often as not to do with our sense of smell. to 'dwell on' or to 'live in' the past, however, is universally regarded with disapproval, at a personal level. the only social grouping that consistently refers to the past (or rather, a selective view of the past) as an idealistic totem is the political right wing, whose chauvinism is always and definitively backward-looking.

it will always merit a certain cachet, the idea that we should unloose all those time-bound shackles and live a little, but in reality, only the extremely wealthy and the insane can get away with it, the former because the acquisition of wealth is a transparent attempt to cover all bases (the more options, the less exposure to the whimsical consequences of fate or personal irresponsibility), and the latter because the same neuro-chemical disorders that create a perceived exemption from the 'normal' taboos on, say, openly masturbating at a Girls Aloud concert apply to all other random, otherwise consequential behaviours.

this 'seizing the day' thing, then, is, like all poetic ideals, of little practical use except as a burr, an irritant in the comfortable cloth of our diurnal procrastinations. in common with all the jewels of wisdom in the QuoteMe™ canon it has become just another grain of grist to the dreary mill of corporate-speak, adopted, along with the bulleted hooks, the sound bites, the motivational powerpointations, as a utilitarian commercial mantra.

grave-horace-spin. any order.

all else being equal, there always will be a tomorrow, when, with stodgy certainty, the grand careless gestures of today will be called to account. all actions have consequences, which we can choose to ignore, but which, more likely than not, will return, in the fullness of time, to - in that wonderful american phrase - bite us in the ass. the analogous english maxim about throwing caution to the winds needs must be tempered with the Confucian caveat about pissing into it.

but o the temptation to say

fuck it ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:41:00 +0000

Carnival vs Lent

"The Battle between Carnival and Lent" - Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1559)

"Like his contemporaries Erasmus and Rabelais, Brueghel clearly understood the power of the ludic over its graver alternatives. And yet it is the coexistence of these two themes that he celebrates and immortalizes. Carnival has no meaning without Lent; locked in an eternal contest, they enact the battle between passion and reason, appetite and intellect, pleasure and piety, excess and scarcity that encompasses so many of the questions that guided and shaped the lives of early modern Europeans."

(Paula Findlen at Painting in Concert)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:05:00 +0000

truth or dare

"Shopkeeper Tom Algie faced a dilemma over Christmas - how to give himself and his three staff time off but without letting down his customers. So he came up with a solution to suit everyone: leaving the hardware store open with an honesty box. He left a note telling shoppers who came in on Boxing Day to serve themselves and then leave their payment in the box he had rigged up."

so what happened?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:48:00 +0000

Quadrantids

(peak tonight after midnight)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:01:00 +0000

what bus?

one of my boys had one of those never-again experiences with a National Express bus driver back from London before Christmas, so I checked on the complaints procedure and whacked one in.

fourteen days later, and still nothing, I thought I'd do some delving, and came across this.

UK and US unions call for investigation at National Express Group amid resignation of Chairman David Ross

so I don't think I'll be wasting any more time with procedures.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:04:00 +0000

You deserve to be happy

says who?

the militant be-happy hitlers trot it out at every opportunity. it's the kneejerk there-there hankie-proffering accompaniment to any emotional knock-back of the he/she dumped me why o why my life is over kind. it amplifies the less convincing, patently untrue "Everything's going to be alright", and imbues the miserable with a momentarily distracting sense of moral outrage: my fundamental right to happiness has been infringed. it's illegal! who can I sue?

simple answer: Thomas Jefferson - he who in 1776 promoted "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as top three of the "inalienable rights" of man in the United States Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, however, was actually paraphrasing John Locke, whose 'Two Treatises of Government' were approved in Virginia only a few days before the Second Continental Congress, but whose own top three were, actually, "life, liberty, and estate". clearly, the Locke route would have precipitated much less self-indulgent misery down the years: estate (property), after all, can be acquired, with money - something we can all understand - whereas Money Can't Buy Me Love (=happiness).

innit?

mumbling nitpickers have pointed out that the right to pursue happiness isn't quite the same as the right to be happy - but as this comes into the same category of bar-room banter surrounding American creation myths as the perennial to-ing and fro-ing about the right to bear arms, it's really not worth getting into a lather over.

Jefferson, of course, was naïve to imagine that something so nebulous as the right to 'happiness' could be included in the welcome package at the birth of a nation - although such apparent naïveté perhaps masks a less smiley-faced political agenda: the late eighteenth century was after all a period bursting with Utopian as well as Revolutionary ideas, and what could have been more populist, at such a time, than to propose hitching the impossible to the contentious and stamping all three together under the imprimatur of constitutional legislation. (the French - doyen of the European Revolutionary Age - pointedly omitted le bonheur from their own top triad of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.)

whatever.

what's done is done, and the consequence of such flimflammery is that we are obliged now to listen to the brattish bawling of that righteous legion of jilted, dumped, double-crossed, shafted and like so totally pissed off people who genuinely believe, poor dears, that they have been cheated of their right to be happy.

I could have been a contender! boo-hoo.

the truth is, we barely have the right to breathe, let alone to act freely, without acquiescing to the implicit contingencies of those rights: the terms of these freedoms are going to appear either reasonable or tyrannical depending on your point of view. we might, for instance, consider that we have the 'right' to roam wherever we like, do whatever we like, whenever we like, take whatever we want, in whatever circumstances we discover it, and we might believe that property is theft, that the stress should be on the commonality of the common wealth, and that authority is definitively synonymous with oppression. or we might believe that the health of the body politic is only maintained at the expense of a defined set of legally enforceable limitations of such 'rights', that the price of such social must-haves as universal franchise, free education and health care, the 'right' to free expression of our opinions and religious foibles, freedom from want and hunger and the depredations of pirates and highwaymen and teenagers in hoodies is a fractional tax on our behaviour as well as our income - that liberty, in other words, is not a given absolute, but a relative condition, something that only exists in relation to other things like social responsibility, self-scrutiny, and vigilance.

obviously, it's preferable to be happy rather than miserable. this is why Buddhists, whose premise, more pragmatically than most, is that the ground bass of life is suffering, feel obliged to walk around with that idiot fixed smile on their faces all the time. it's very nice when it happens. and it does happen from time to time. even to me. but, if it's not happening, it's not something to get all litigious about.

ever the fan of Diogenes, I have been known to play a game inspired by his glorious and legendary cynicism. called Hunting the Happy, it was predicated on the understanding that it's really quite easy to spot someone who's genuinely happy, because they're the ones who aren't either fake-smiling and wishing one all the benefactions that the best of good days can shower upon one as they count out one's change, or they're the ones who aren't shuffling along living-dead style with an expression of grim endurance on their face as they suffer the endless loop of transit from the hell of home to the hell of work or vice versa. so, on any given journey (from home to the shops usually used to work, but the longer the better), I would set out to count the number of happy people I saw. the number was always low, but when I started to apply a few reality-filters - my Evil Conditions of Exclusion (no children, no lovers, no alcohol or drugs involvement, no hippies, no Buddhists, no cultists or village idiots), the number dropped to zero. always. and it became too depressing so I had to stop playing it.

'happiness', crucially, operates by a fundamentally different set of attributes than apply to any seriously comprehensive view of the world: it's a very strange person who can profess to be 'happy' at the same time as professing to care about cruelty, injustice, oppression, or inequality, in any form that contradicts our espousal to the cause of aforesaid 'inalienable rights'. such confusion is forgivable in a child, but the continuation of such childlike reconciliations into adulthood is - well - a bit gay, a bit hippy, a bit too fucking DUMB for anyone's good. and yet this is where we are. we want - we want desperately - to be happy, choosing wilfully to ignore the fact that the only way to be happy for anything other than the few fleeting moments in any given lifetime when it might actually happen of its own accord is to wrap ourselves in a cosy cocoon of pre-adult oblivion in which neither intellect nor personal moral barometer is engaged.

however, as age and experience lend unwelcome if incontrovertible evidence to the proposition that, in fact, happiness of the childlike kind is the ineluctable province either of childhood or of such childish states of mind as can only be emulated in adulthood with the assistance of drugs and booze and god, there gradually emerges the initially wearisome discovery of a compensating mechanism - that all-over glowy feeling it's possible to get from putting a smile on someone else's face. it's hardly comparable, it's true, to the passionate pyrotechnics of, say, falling in love, but, unlike that kind of happiness, it's guaranteed to stay the course. one doesn't have to be a saint to be neighbourly, polite, thoughtful, kind, and generous, but, eccentric though it might sound to a generation dedicated to the axiom that all men and a few token women and blacks are born free to pursue their constitutional right to happiness, there might actually be a grain of truth in the old saw about virtue being its own reward.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:36:00 +0000

YAY!!!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:24:00 +0000

on the waterboard

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:58:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:05:00 +0000

oops (dropped the baby)

click for movie

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:31:00 +0000

same old

whoever first suggested that the best thing to do with power was to give it away omitted the obvious rider: that this needs to be an endless event. it is not enough - having come to accept (as all but the hapless and insane needs must, in all conscience) that power is a poisoned chalice that as sure as eggs is eggs will corrode one's moral compass the longer one enjoys it - simply to pass the buck: the big question is not, to whom should one pass it (since passing it to anyone is akin to handing them a container of nuclear waste), but what to do with it, period.

it goes without saying that anyone who wants power - ie everyone who aspires to political office in any way shape or form - is as little to be trusted with it as a psychopath with a bazooka. the tricky thing for every aspiring politician is to assure an electorate that's desperate to believe that honesty in a politician is possible that they - uniquely in the history of global politics - might be that person, if we'd only give them the chance to prove it. the most successful actually believe this themselves (the art of politics being as much about self-delusion as about social deception) - I'm even prepared to admit that a lot of politicians go into politics because they passionately believe that their passionate beliefs, hitched to their starry-eyed idealism, might enable them to change things for the better.

bless.

it's hard to imagine that someone like Robert Mugabe was once a much-admired freedom fighter - a hero and a liberator in the eyes of his fellow Africans struggling to emerge from under the yoke of British colonial oppression. the path from hero to despot, alas, is all too well-trodden in the history of post-colonial statehood. almost certainly, if Nelson Mandela had remained in office as South African president, his mythical status as - uniquely - the only honest man in world politics would have become deeply compromised. whether Mr Mugabe's opposition successor-in-waiting, Morgan Tsvangirai might be able not only to rescue poor Zimbabwe from the economic ruin caused by Mugabe's inept leadership, but also to retain the supposed integrity of his position (as compared with the transparent gangsterism of Mugabe's administration) is 100% fantasy. once in power, Mr Tsvangirai would have to resort to exactly the same tactics as his predecessor in order to maintain any sort of order at all - the generals would just have different names. 'twas ever thus.

and - sad but true - it's hard to have to accept that looking back on the administration of a President Obama from some point more than ten years hence will be an exercise accompanied by any less sighing and grinding of teeth and more or less concealed mutterings about failed promises and disappointments than has followed in the wake of any one of the forty-three of the buggers. this is not cynicism. this is pragmatism, pure and simple. the only people who have anything good to say about ex-leaders are those who have benefited materially from either their economic chicaneries or their patronage. and it is they - if they happen to have influence with (or happen to own) the media - who decide the degree of hagiography that will henceforth apply to that person in the carefully constructed version of history that they will thenceforth inhabit.

now and again, however, we do arrive at a spectacular nadir of incompetence in our leaders of choice, and the examples of such catastrophes as a Mugabe or a Bush provide us with a future benchmark of failure.

so every cloud has a silver lining.

the best bit about the politics game, like Christmas and marriage, has always been the anticipation: the hope of future betterment on the new broom principle is enough to make the blood race and get us cheering for our candidate of choice. it is testament either to our obdurate optimism, hopeless laziness, or intractable stupidity that we continue to invest the collectively enormous power we have as a society in the palpably compromised hands of our so-called leaders. one day we might finally realise that this power thing is as superannuated as pack-hunting the woolly mammoth with flint spears - that power is to corruption as rat-fleas is to plague, and that maybe there are other ways of doing things that don't always end in tears.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:19:00 +0000

the greeks had a word for it

as someone who has never needed a dog needing a walk as an excuse for taking himself for a walk as and when he felt like it (and is therefore doubtless considered at best eccentric and at worst - well, cry havoc and let loose the poodles of paranoia), it goes without saying that I don't 'do' sponsored: whether it be swims, runs, pub quizes, or we're all mad here gurnathons, count me out - what I do for fun, I do for fun, pure and simple, not tied to some delusional excuse that I'm actually doing something worthy at the same time.

it's become almost impossible to consider walking around the world, or indeed anything slightly more adventurous than picking your nose, simply because you feel like it, because you feel like having an adventure, any more - there always has now to be some specious charitable justification for anything that's considered in any way outside the box of normative, taxable behaviour - yet one more example of the triumphantly - and eye-wateringly cynical - rebranding of parsimony as philanthropy.

the ever-widening rift valley that keeps the ever-richening rich from having to have any truck at all with the ever-poorening poor is a landfill of reneged pledges planted with a minefield of excuses and evasions. that there should be such a shortfall between the functioning requirements of the health and education services, for example, (the two categories that spring to mind as seeming to be most commonly associated with fund-raising funathons) that they have come to rely on this regular income from sponsored haircuts and three-legged races bespeaks a doctrine of abject despair in regard to our commitment, as a society, to an equitable distribution of the common wealth to the common weal. clearly, tragically, given the choice of kicking the latest cabal of self-serving dickheads who presume to serve us out of office and back to the troughs they came from for failing to do so or helping some fake-titted and -tanned local TV newsreader airhead up the teetering career ladder by sponsoring her arduous and plucky attempt to stay awake through a repeat of last year's Eurovision Song Contest to raise funds for who cares what - we'll opt for the latter every time. it's become a cultural habit, through a very very clever piece of social engineering that's turned unofficial taxation into a feelgood whilst keeping us blind to the reasons why such extra taxation should be necessary in the first place.

I suppose if I were to try to explain this by suggesting that the only - the only - substantive purpose that slebs serve is to suck us dry of our own sense of self in order to serve theirs, which, in turn, is entirely and utterly in thrall to the relentless meatgrinders of the oil, pill, and war economies that sustain the culture that promotes them, you would (quite rightly) start looking at your watch and remembering a pressing prior appointment. it used to happen to Cassandra all the time. it happens to be true, is all. you know I'm right, really.

charity - as in Christian charity (and, presumably, in all its analogous pan-religious manifestations) - is by definition selfless - a quaint idea that got lost in all the me-me fun of the nineties. I'm not one to bash the book very often, but there is some stuff in there that's so sweet it bears as much repetition as any episode of the Simpsons. in the catchily-titled Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, for example, he talks about agape (Greek for selfless love - but you knew that of course) thusly:

*agape (chapter 13: verse 4)

* is longsuffering (i.e. tolerant, patient)
* is kind
* is free of jealousy, envy and pride

and (v 5)

* does not display unseemly behavior
* is unselfish
* is not touchy, fretful or resentful
* takes no account of the evil done to it [ie outwardly ignores a suffered wrong].

- and more of the kind, until verse 13, where he summarises, fairly famously, "And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

thus was born the central tenet, not only of the religious movement that dominated and defined Western culture for the next two thousand years, but of all subsequent spinoff notions concerning elevated interpersonal relationships that involve the use of the word 'love'. (confusingly, agape got translated as 'charity' when Jerome made a proto-bible in Latin from the original Greek in the fourth century, and that got carried over into the Authorised King James Version in 1611, but all that's best left to the theology scholars to explain.) it's something you either dig or you don't - the idea that love isn't on the market for trade of any kind: it's either freely given, unconditionally, or it has to be called something else. a surprising number of people don't subscribe - the ubiquitous pre-nup is evidence enough of that - for much the same reasons, I guess, as words like 'equality' and 'freedom' are bandied about as totems of belief in blatant defiance of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. the momentum of the commodification of everything is as near unstoppable as it's possible to be short of some sort of extinction event right now, but hey, who wants to live in a world where crazy men can't mutter to themselves and take solitary walks just for the hell of it?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:14:00 +0000

SAD?

maybe - St John's wort
maybe - shopping
maybe - chocolate
maybe - dogs
no-no - Prozac

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 17:00:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 20:00:00 +0000

If music

be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Twelfth Night Act 1, scene 1, 1–3

ex-KLF guerilla artist and musician Bill Drummond proposed a No Music Day a few years ago and tries, every year on November 21st - St Cecilia (patron saint of music)'s Day - to get everyone to not listen to music for a day. his argument, in a slightly Fabergé nutshell, is that the ubiquity of music in our lives is desensitising us to its richness. this argument is met, annually, with an equal mix of cautious approbation and derision, the division being along broadly speaking class lines - the approvers being broadsheet readers, the scoffers, tabloid. such is the cultural price you pay for burning a million quid as an artwork (one of the KLF's more notorious projects).

the broadsheet response is usually anti-muzak, pro-birdsong, with a polite sussurus of dismay at the universality of jingles - even on the BBC my dear!; the tabloids stress the necessity of music to blunt the otherwise intolerably tedious swarf of the working man and woman's working day. both miss the perfectly reasonable point of the provocation - that a brief holiday from the habit of consumption might refresh the appetite, nothing more.

as always, I'm in two or five minds about this. the appetite for music would seem to be a fundamental human trait - very close to, but one step up from the root traits of sex and eating: we could survive without music, but the corresponding hole that that would leave in our souls would be, to most of us, utterly debilitating. whether or not we can have too much music - well, I certainly doubt that: unlike excessive consumption of food or alcohol or (I was about to say sex, but the rider to such a statement has to be - dream on) any of the other life-enhancing and/or pain-reducing add-ons, there's no discernible downside as far as I can judge. unless - and this is Drummond's point - a surfeit might somehow diminish its effect.

most of us spent - or are spending - a great deal of our youth in this manifestly unproductive activity of listening to and/or making music. mine (because I am one of the grizzled whitebeards to whom youth's respectful deference is automatically due merely on account of his staggering oldness) was probably far less affected by the background ubiquity than yours (assuming you were born sometime later than the Relief of Mafeking). however, the broadsheet complaint about muzak should be tempered by the shocking reality of its origins - on the BBC, even, my dears! - during the war (that's WWII), when 'Music While You Work' was piped into every munitions factory and power plant and similar workplace in the land in the belief that the worker who had something to whistle to as he or she worked would be a more productive worker (actually, it was originally a US invention, which the BBC ran with, but here's not the place to go into that).

point is - this music-to-make-you-work was science, not art, and exclusive of the vital element in determining the individuality of our responsiveness that distinguishes the work of art from the work of manipulation - the element of choice. the sort of music that is, generally speaking, offered as background to our lives (with a few honorable exceptions) is actually a major component of an architecture of social control that is so ubiquitous as to have become invisible. the poly-convoluted spaghetti of manipulative wires that contributes to the belief that we - the kids! - have actually asked, nay begged the Spice Girls to reform is the stuff of an Orwellian wet dream.

old potatoes.

for no particular reason that I could readily identify, I found myself, earlier this year, at a complete loss for words when I came to writing about a release that I was really enjoying listening to. writers block? it'll pass, I thought. always does. but it didn't. it went on for weeks. the weeks extended to months. and now, at the end of 2007, I find that I've listened to a bare handful of new releases, accumulated a teetering pile of sad, neglected promos, and have actually succeeded in writing about only three of them.

if I did this for a living, this would be catastrophic, of course. fortunately, it isn't (everyone at No Ripcord Towers is indentured in perpetuity - crap contract, but what can you do?), and, as you've doubtless been reminded a thousand times before, 'crisis' and 'opportunity' are the same word in Chinese (actually, I wonder about that, too, but then, I'm beginning to wonder about everything, as you may have noticed).

the wonderful Mr Michael Eavis, who I like to think of as my neighbour (well, he is in the sense that his farm - site of a little music festival that you might have heard of - is a mere three-mile stone-throw from my own garden) has routinely, if arbitrarily, left gaps between festivals. one of his reasons for doing so, apart from giving everyone concerned in its organisation - mostly volunteers - a chance to recuperate - is to give the land a chance to recover from its regular churning by tens of thousands of wellie-clad feet. there's an old farming term for doing this - leaving a portion of land uncultivated for a year in order to let it regenerate naturally. it's called leaving it fallow.

it's hardly breaking news that the way we respond to music (I don't like the term 'use') is a reflection of our selves unlike any other experience: from the cradle to the grave we go cherry-picking in the vast orchards of available musics to assemble our own unique soundtrack - that musical 'taste' portfolio which, in turn, becomes an expression of our selves - and a standard social shortcut to identifying fellow members of our musical tribe. by default, this soundtrack works like a high-altitude aeroplane's contrail - a sharply condensed and definitive cloud of favourites at the trailing edge of the fast-moving engines of discernment, rapidly fading off into a wispy line of evaporating memories as time goes by. its continual renewal is as much a function of our will to renew as a reflection of our capacity to discern. clearly, to judge by the perennial favourites that are the staple playlists of Radio 2, there comes a time in most people's lives when the effort to keep pace with the new becomes superseded by other efforts, and the soundtrack that was playing when we were at our free-est and most emotionally volatile becomes the quarry for the remainder of our lives. regardless of age, however, the durability of some tracks - or even whole albums - in our personal playlists marks the beginning of that mysterious process of crystallisation whereby a latter-day pantheon of classics gradually emerges out of the frantic buzz of the now.

I recognise something a little lucky in being able to take as much anticipatory pleasure from cracking the seal on a new Efterklang release as I did on lowering the stylus (oh the matchless thrill of that soft crackling thud) onto track 1 of Sgt Pepper. (it was many more than twenty years ago today ...) I also recognise that there's a lot - a really lot - a really really lot of music in that ever-filling music box - so much that (one really has eventually to admit this to oneself) some of it - even some of that stuff that was totally preoccupying once, was a landmark experience even, maybe for weeks at a time - is never going to be listened to again, not by me, not in this lifetime. there is simply not enough time. I actually feel a rush of panic even as I write that - where's that 7" of 10cc's 'I'm Not In Love'? where's that Lost Jockey LP? - and a sense of impotent dismay. but it's true. I could spend every waking minute of every day for the next umpteen years re-listening to all the stuff that has ever mattered to me, and still there wouldn't be enough time. and anyway, where do you start? at this time of year, I go goobly at Johnny Mathis ('chestnuts roasting on an open fire' - joy!). but even such a protracted and hopelessly self-indulgent orgy of nostalgia would inevitably be haunted by the dismay at wondering what I was missing NOW.

there's no relief from any of this. it is as it is. it's a fast-flowing current, that ole man Zeitgeist. from even the most elevated vantage point, blink and you'll have missed something. sit back and have a sandwich and a cup of tea and whole genres, whole Himalayas of events will have arisen, flourished for a moment, and then subsided back into the bargain-bin murk at the bottom. and from that perspective, one might as well just accept that, for all one's earnest efforts to keep up, one might as well adopt the old newspaper hack's axiom - that today's news is tomorrow's chip wrapper. Travis and Coldplay were considered two of the best bands in the world only two short years ago (not by me, I hasten to add). need I say more?

so this has been my Fallow Year. I didn't decide that. but - as is often the case when a vague form of anxiety is tagged with some arcane prognostic classification - having so named it has helped it emerge from the smog of concern and unease as something that was perhaps necessary, after all, part of an active principle as opposed to an abject failure to engage. it remains to be seen whether a personal re-engagement - at the level of flinging this stuff into the blizzard out there with the careless abandon of the infant and the delusional - is imminent, but time will tell. it always does.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:27:00 +0000

failed phlebotomy

so I turn up to the appointment in the town hall, remember to lie about my age, read the booklet, fill in the forms, talk to the nice reception nurses, and take my place amongst the half-dozen others waiting their turn. I really don't know why I've left it so late. even now, I'm nervous. of what? pain? hardly. humiliation? possibly. so what if I faint? it must happen all the time. I've persuaded Kim to come along as moral support. it's her first time, too. she doesn't seem remotely concerned.

after a short while, my name is called and I go behind a screen with one of the nurses - taking in, en route, the slightly mediaeval sight, spread out in full view in the body of the hall, of the eight or nine high metal bed-gurney-things and their associated clinical equipment, each with a prone person on top with a tube coming out of their arm and a nurse in blue at their side. I think this is what the emergency field hospital would look like if Glastonbury were struck by an earthquake. except everyone here looks very jolly.

my jolly nurse goes through the form with me (remember your birthday remember your birthday), skipping through my yes/no answers on the form. I resist the temptation to embellish my replies with silly comments. have you ever had sex with another man? it crosses my mind that it must be quite challenging to a few of the worthy burgers who pass through these doors to have to answer that question put by a jolly plump nurse. but a simple, unmodified 'yes' will, apparently, be enough to exclude you from donating. forever. only total normals need apply here.

tough call.

we share a jolly joke about how if I'd left it a year later I wouldn't be able to donate at all, but that now I'm registered I can carry on until I'm seventy!

whoopee.

she assembles a few bits and pieces on the mini-laboratory-like tray on the trolley that manage to look both cheery and scary at the same time (everything that isn't stainless steel is either blue or white plastic with nary a drop of vermilion in sight) and explains that first she'll take a prick-test to check for haemoglobin levels. anaemics need not apply. she asks me to extend the middle finger of my right hand. so specific. I actually have to think about it. it's the minutest of pricks, although I don't enjoy watching her squeeze a good glob to draw the sample into a pipette. she apologises for getting blood everywhere - we share a joke about how I'm making up for lost time - and puts a plaster around the pricked finger. she deposits the glob into a bottle of green liquid (green for boys, blue for girls) where it very slowly starts to settle towards the bottom - evidently one's eligibilty to donate depends on the rate of descent, which is governed by an electronic timer. slowly it falls. I find myself suddenly anxious that it's not going to be alright. it's OK. I pass.

I return to the back of the hall, and barely have time to conspiratorially compare answers with Kim (how do you know with certainty that you've never had sex with someone who might once have injected, or themselves had unsafe sex with someone who might have had sex with someone else who had HIV/AIDS?) than my name is called again and I'm invited to come through and lie down on my allotted gurney. it's right in the middle of the hall. I was hoping for one less conspicuous, out at the edge. it's at this point that I realise I've drawn the short straw as regards the distribution of jolly nurse-attendants - the person into whose care the drawing of my lifeblood over the next few minutes has been handed seems to have been recruited from the agency that specialises in hatchet-faced stuff-the-small-talk nursing auxiliaries. she refuses to smile. OK, I think, all coolio, she's having a bad life day, let's just do this thing.

a rotund and ruddy white-shirted fellow with a clipboard and reading-glasses perched on the tip of his nose wheezes over and asks me for my name and address in the tone of someone checking a box of frozen fish fingers against a list of suspect consignments. only when he asks when last I donated and I confess that this is my first time does his manner shift slightly - in the form of the minutest of glances between him and hatchet-face that I fail to interpret. he asks me to expose the inside of my left elbow and wraps a blood-pressure velcro bandage around my upper arm, then asks me to clench my fist, locates a vein, swabs it - quite thoroughly - warns me that he's about to insert the needle with that pathetic lie that all medical people and dentists use - 'just a slight scratch' - and inserts it. actually, I hardly feel it. then he fusses around a bit (I've averted my eyes by now - I suppose he's adjusting the gate and the tubing), asks me to continue pumping my fist throughout the donation, tells me that it will take around ten minutes, and leaves me under the watchful eye of little Miss Taciturn.

so I lie there, pumping my fist once a heartbeat, just like everyone else around me, and, trying not to dwell on the fact of my precious blood slowly dripping through those tubes into a hi-tech packet discreetly concealed below the gurney, allow my mind to drift beyond the rather spectacular chandeliers and tasteful green panelling of our refurbished town hall, beyond the slight embarassment at the fact that the nurse sitting over there at the edge of the hall not doing anything in particular can see that my heels are evidence of the need for the next five-yearly trip to Clarks, to a general kind of non-specific internal musing on the nature of altruism and the warm and glowy feeling that accrues therefrom.

pump, pump, pump, pump.

the first indication that something might be wrong comes from the slight shift in attention from my diligent but uncaring attendant: she is scrutinising the process of my 'donation' with a look of unconcealed disdain, as if I'd just farted.

"Could you squeeze a bit harder?"

I do so.

"And a bit faster?"

I do so.

"Is there something wrong?"

"It seems to have stopped."

"What?"

"Your donation - it's stopped."

"What? You mean ...?"

"One moment. Frank!"

she tries to catch Rotund Fellow's eye. he eventually comes over, checks the tubes, readjusts the needle, and asks me to keep pumping.

I do so.

a few minutes later, the same thing - "It's stopped again"

it takes a while for Rotund Fellow to be found. by the time he returns again, I'm beginning to feel like a bit of a lemon, lying here, pumping away, trying my damndest to bleed, and thinking why oh why does this have to happen to me?

there's more fiddling with tubes, more adjusting of needles, a re-adjustment of the angle of my elbow - and then, oh fuck, in the middle of all this, I start to feel a bit funny.

"Do you feel alright?"

Rotund Fellow speaks. fractionally more caring than Hatchet Face. not much.

"I'm fine."

actually, I'm beginning to feel really funny, but I'm buggered if I'm going to let him know.

"You sure?"

"Well, maybe a bit light-headed."

and at this point, I actually feel myself beginning to turn grey, as the blood, quite literally, drains from my head. to his credit, Rotund Fellow's ruddy face registers my ruddiless one and stops fiddling immediately, withdraws the needle, applies a pressure-pad, and nods at the nurse who I'd noticed sitting over there apparently doing nothing.

now we discover what she was waiting for.

a well-oiled machine engages: Rotund Fellow continues to apply pressure to my elbow as she who henceforth shall be know as Fainting Nurse lowers the head of the gurney so my head is level with my body and raises my lower legs onto the sort of large squidgy play-block that they have in kids nurseries - the only red thing in the room, I notice in passing. I continue fatuously protesting my imminent alrightness - as if I were about to fool these highly trained professionals - and surrender to the totality of the moment, this squirmingly public exposure of my own wussiness, complete with meticulously applied cold compress on fevered brow and diligent wafting of face with a piece of cardboard. oh the shame of it. da-da-de-da-da. memories of playground taunting envelop me. well, actually, the calm reassurance of Fainting Nurse that it happens a lot 'with first-timers', and that I'll be fine in a few minutes, envelops me, as she brings me several glasses of water to drink and discourages me from rising too soon.

so that, bar the final slice of cake and a nice cup of tea, is that. they can't even use the pathetic cupful I did manage to donate, because the hi-tech collection bags they use have to contain a specific amount in order for it all to be processed properly.

whilst I'm lying there, waiting for permission to get up, Mistress Whoareyousmilingat asks me what I've eaten and drunk today, and takes some satisfaction in pointing out that this - clearly - pathetically small amount of food (quite normal for me) 'probably' accounts for my bleeding incompetence, and that it might be better, next time, to try eating 'a proper meal' before I donate. so it's all my fault. in retrospect, I think she's wrong about that. I suspect she was blustering around to divert me from Rotund Fellow's incompetent placement of the collection needle, but that's neither here nor there.

what's interesting is the near-fainting. fact is, I'm ok with blood and pain (others as well as mine) under the conditions in which they usually occur. what seems to be the case (because, although I've never tried to give blood before, it has happened before that I've come close to fainting during routine blood-testing) is that, in some people, myself included, alas, the knowledge that one's blood - this lifey-stuff - is being removed from where it properly belongs, and that one can't, or rather, mustn't instigate the usual steps to staunch it, seems to trip an emergency fuse that overrides the conscious decision not to intervene in the blood-letting and compels one - by dint of withdrawing the blood supply to the brain, thus rendering one imminently unconscious and bereft of verticality - to lie down and reconsider that consent. there's no clear way around this other than to try again (in three months time, when the haemoglobin levels have had a chance to fully return), maybe having a heartier breakfast beforehand, and hoping, next time around, for a more amenable team than the cheerless Messrs Hatchet & Frank.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:20:00 +0000

lest we forget

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 18:07:00 +0000

doom and destruction

so we've got ten years, give or take.

this is not a long time.

realistically, folks, it's not going to happen, is it? not as long as the global players - the Americans and the Chinese (the two who, between them, are quite happily contributing more than the whole of the rest of the planet put together towards the destruction of its ecosphere) continue to put their faith in the infinitely flexible prevarications of deniability and the Mr Fixit school of technology and free enterprise to - well - fix it. they've been caught a bit short in their hopes that the science would be proved wrong - although there will of course continue to be a few diehard morons who insist on retaining their face-saving mask of scepticism - but is the continuing untenability of their position likely to be affected by all this? really? you think?

it would be kinda reassuring to believe that the version of events that we've come to depend on from the movies - the charismatic hero's last-minute sidestepping of the unscrupulous corporations and politicians and damp-eyed people-power kicking in to save the day - will happen. but it won't. a) there's no hero sufficiently charismatic (sorry, Al, sorry, Jonathan, but it has to be said), and b) the movies are fictional, guys! in real life, everyone who, let's say, falls in love, and declares that their love is going to last forever (a common enough movie-trained assumption) is either going to be divorced or wishing they were divorced within three years. five tops.

so, almost certainly, by 2017, ten short years from now, deadline date, the steps which by then need to have been put in place in order to avert global environmental catastrophe will have been fully initiated only by New Zealand, Venezuela, Greenland, and the seceded state of California, and the rest will still be arguing about quotas. as if, by then, such will matter one iota. the die will have been cast. global temperature rise of 2° Celsius minimum, with all the attendant irreversible damage that that means. and if we don't know what that means by now, we really haven't been listening, have we? really. I'm serious. we haven't been listening, have we?

clearly, nothing ever changes for the better simply because it's better (as in morally better) - if that were the case, there would never have been slavery, cigarettes, or TV phone-in competitions in the first place. under the standing rules of the free market, the only reason for change has to be profit, otherwise the precious entropy of the whole system is challenged.

hence, whereas the comforting version of the history of abolition, for instance, has the abolitionists' righteous indignation finally being recognised and implemented - huzzah Mr Wilberforce! - the more complex truth is that the economic foundation of the eighteenth-century slavery/sugar nexus in Europe (and, incidentally, the cotton/slavery nexus in ante-bellum North America) was weakening under pressure from the urban immigrations attendant on the Industrial Revolution, when the wage-slavery of local factory production - exploiting the desperate need of rural farmworkers displaced by mechanisation for urban work at bare subsistence levels - was proving a more profitable alternative to the industrial exploitation of even slave-produced imports. the Christian principles of the abolitionists, therefore, were the icing on the cake: the cake was already half-cooked to the traditional recipe of Messrs Adam Smith et al.

similarly, whereas the health arguments against smoking had been fully exposed and in the public domain for at least forty years prior to this astonishing overthrow of the smoking culture that has taken place in Europe, at least, in the last five years, it took the final opening to imports of one very large, less scrupulous market to persuade Imperial Tobaccco and Philip Morris to finally let go their decades-long expensively tenured lawyers in prevarication and concentrate on what really matters - profit. Potential sales-loss in smoke-challenged Europe (est pop 728,000,000 in 2005) weighed against potential gains in still-happily-puffing China (population 1,321,851,888 in July 2007) - no contest.

as for oil and blood - let's not even go there.

the future of humanity seems, truly, to be in the balance, as never before.

in the long run, of course, doom is inevitable. the dinosaurs must have thought they were in it for the long haul - at their 150-million-year dominance to our puny hundred-thousand this must have seemed a fair assumption - until that pesky asteroid hit. and, let's face it, our species track record of making any civilisation last longer than a thousand years or so is poor, to say the least. so we're long overdue what the biologists would call a speciation adjustment - a winnowing of the genetic chaff to encourage more diversity to redress, in turn, the balance of all those extinctions our careless global husbandry has precipitated. and whether or not this comes about through chance - the usual method - the bolt from the blue - or through our own carelessness is of no consequence at all in the greater scheme.

maybe that's it. maybe we blew all the chances we had. we have, after all, known (that's empirically known, not just speculated about, as in "you know, there's some dude says there's gunna be another ice age unless we stop smoking so much of this shit") about this impending environmental doomsday for quite a long time. Rachel Carson's novel 'Silent Spring' - often cited as marking the popular birth of the environmental movement - was published in 1962, and was itself an artistic articulation of a set of concerns that had been around in scientific circles for many years before. no-one wanted to hear it, basically. or, at least, having heard, no-one could face the reality of it.

even now, when we're all recycling so hard our unheated homes have begun to resemble Steptoe & Son's back-yard, we're unwilling to face the truth - that, unless in the immediate - that's immediate as within the next ten years - future we're all prepared to accept a massive - that's to say, a HUGE degree of compromise to our accustomed lifestyle expectations - from travel to food to accommodation to family size - then there is, simply, no future.

of course, for the very rich, there is an extension - the usual methods of insulating oneself from the unpleasantnesses of the hoi polloi will continue to apply for a while. gated communities, gated lives, and gated minds with sufficient material reserves to ride out the kinds of social collapse that are predicted might revert to the sorts of baronial structures that, in the macro-social sense, the collapse of the USSR has precipitated in Russia. it would be nice to think that, in best Schadenfreude fashion, such micro-societies would quickly implode under pressure of aggressive rival factionalism. more likely, they would, eventually, survive (by the same principle as the floater in the toilet bowl), emerging finally, from their hellish enclaves, hirsute, lice- and halitosis-ridden, to become the temporary template for the revised future - one which, by the way, I for one would be most content to be dispossessed of - only to be immediately culled by some meanwhile-massively-mutated world-wide influenza epidemic that their in-house lab of top pharmacists had failed to predict.

what a shame.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 23:30:00 +0000

a day in the life

woke at nine, made myself a cuppa, took it back to bed and read for a while - a particular and totally guilt-free pleasure that only seems to make itself available on Saturday mornings. I'm reading Robert L Forward's 'Dragon's Egg' - a slightly earnest but engaging little epic about first contact with the inhabitants of a neutron star. not Dostoevsky, but it serves me well.

rose at ten. another beautiful cloudless morning. not quite as cold as yesterday, but the birdies were nevertheless glad of the seed I laid out on the bird-table I improvised twenty years ago from a bit of marine ply left over from Michael's houseboat and hung on the washing-line, and has been brought out out every winter since. I don't know why I dislike starlings and thrushes so - perhaps it's their gang-behaviour. I admire the rainbow sheen in the thrush's coat, however.

the war on the visiting cats proceeds: I get totally incensed when that sniffing and corner-of-the-mouth-rubbing thing gets going against some plant or other - there's one bush in particular that's become marker-central for all things four-legged and remotely feline - and it goes on for a bit, with the turning and the raising themselves up on two legs to get as high as possible to the delicious smells, until the build-up reaches that pre-orgasm-analogue moment when they have to turn their backs, raise their quivering tails, and, surrendering to that whole-body pleasure-shivering thing, spray a thick jet of their disgusting body-fluid across their love-thing of choice - MY FUGGIN PLANTS! a well-aimed rock will usually dissuade the buggers for a day or two. they always come back though. such is the pleasure principle.

broke fast on toast and marmalade. greeted the finally emergent boys at 10.30, grunting semi-articulate delight in Assassin's Creed - the PS3 game that they'd had me pre-order weeks ago and that was released yesterday - but managing finally to tear themselves away to go to work. at least, Bo went to work - Jack drifted off somewhere with Kie the famous traceur and joint star of their almost-finished movie, who appeared at some point.

gathered the washing together and put on the first of two loads, then set to to finish the bathroom. it's been ten days now of re-tiling and grouting and stripping and re-varnishing, a task made fearsomely difficult by the never-ending use of the shower in this house: each day I've had to jury-rig a sheet of polythene around it to protect the exposed plaster or the fresh-drying coat of varnish. condensation round the window-frame has added to the difficulty, as has the fact that these past months of grout-leakage (I first realised there was a problem when I noticed the damp patch on the stairs side of the wall between the staircase and the bathroom) had left a bloom of damp plaster behind the tiles that had to dry out.

it didn't take long. to finish, though, I'd decided to re-route the shower-curtain slightly in order to shield the newly-varnished window-ledge in future from the worst of the splashing, and, in order not to have this result in the near-total occlusion of light into our tiny bathroom, I needed to rig up one of those curtain-tie-back things that they have in the better houses. in order to do this, I decided I needed to make a couple of eye-splices in a short length of some rather nice white rope that's been sitting around for - oh, all of twenty-five years - last put to use on the stage of Gellerupscenen in Århus as part of the suspension system for some extravagant piece of scenography that I used there. I couldn't remember exactly how to do this, but - as always - the knowledge was but a google-click away (and, as always, the search spun off as much enticing trivia as treasure - like, in this instance, the close resemblance of the eye-splice to the cunt-splice - I kid you not).

then Kim phoned to say that the two modelling-light bulbs I'd given her only a month or so ago had both blown and did I have any more. so she came over to pick them up - with her mum, Issie, fresh over from Portugal for a few days. a brief visit, since the ageing Hotpoint had just then entered its final spin cycle, which is a total conversation-killer. then, just as they were leaving, Henri turned up with Jess and Finn and li'l Liza - a very pleasant surprise, as she'd rung earlier to ask whether it was a good idea to come in at all today, it being Carnival an all, and I'd muttered darkly about the impossibility of parking and the early road closures and stuff.

so I set the boys up with the PS3 and laid out tea and cakes - and barely had we touched on exhibition plans and MRI scans than Liza started kicking up a total tired-and-grizzly storm, which curtailed that conversation, too, as, if not more effectively as the Hotpoint's final spin cycle. which was a shame, because we needed to catch up a bit, but hey, babies. another time.

the Tor was busy, what with the Carnival an all.

I resist deriding it, this 'retard magnet' as one of my younger friends most colourfully describes it. it clearly brings a lot of - well, joy is a strong word - let's say it keeps a lot of people busy who would otherwise be - how to say this - not. it makes the pub landlords happy. bless.

the booze-queue in Heritage extended halfway back into the store, so I gave up and bought a bag of Colombian in the deli instead. a once-a-year visit to this national award-winning and criminally expensive shop on the corner of the street. really, really nice coffee.

during Carnival, watched 'Primer' for the second time, and actually managed to unravel one or two of the brain-knots it left me with from the first. a really intriguing little movie whose construction verges on the perverse - self-consciously reflective of its temporal paradox narrative theme - but, thanks to the performance of the relationship between the two geek friends, manages to maintain a credible core of human concern in what could otherwise have been a rather arid if fascinating generic what-if movie.

there - that's what bloggers do, isn't it?

how astonishingly dull.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:09:00 +0000

metrodiner

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:32:00 +0000

is it, nan? is it, elton?

(probably)