ShMac

There's nothing ever gained
 By a wet thing called a tear
  When the world is too dark
    And I need the light inside of me
      I'll walk into a bar
And drink fifteen pints of beer


Shane McGowan   d. not known

CRAINDANCE

HMHB

There's a man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in Millet's




Half Man Half Biscuit
National Shite Day

YOU'VE BEEN IN HURRICANES

And I live in England
Or tornado alley
As we like to call it

When the quaint
Met the exotic
Re member me

I want that back
And your neck
And shivering skin
Out on the sun kissed deck
Fresh from the shower

Where have you gone
Whipped up into the eye
Of the storm of us

EGTBS

E.A.P

Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
          Is a world of sweets and sours;
          Our flowers are merely flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
          Is the sunshine of ours.




Edgar Allan Poe d. 1849

TWO POUND THURSDAYS

THE FUNFAIR IS YET TO ARRIVE AT THE LEVEL

THE STATE OF ART

Ken Loach in Conversation with Artist Terry Atkinson

Outside, a radical sells his newspapers. Inside Brighton University's Sallis Benney theatre, film director, Ken Loach and Terry Atkinson are in conversation. The theatre is crowded and warm. The audience is a mixture of ages. Loach and Atkinson are both in their seventies now and have followers through several decades. They are to discuss their life, work and the way political views and climates have shaped both.

Ken Loach cuts a slight figure with wispy white hair. When listening he sits with his chin resting between finger and thumb. Atkinson is more robust, arms across chest, and has a heavy Barnsley accent. They start at the beginning of their respective stories and give an account of grammar school days.  Both men were beneficiaries, or products, of the 1944 Education Act. This provided educational support for pupils who passed their Eleven Plus exams. There were very few working class kids who did benefit and so the Act ultimately produced a functional middle class hierarchy, “a managerial class.”

Loach and Atkinson were two of the lucky ones. They would find that there were spaces for the practices of the newly educated lower class. One such space was the all-new BBC2 channel. Its modernity meant that it was not totally controlled, akin to the Internet today. Teleplays were newsworthy and political and experimental, but this was not to last long. The Clean Up TV campaign would change that.

Atkinson tells anecdotes of how, in these shifting times, he saw freedoms being squeezed. The campaign had a puritanical guise but was intent at displacing any radical element, any alternative viewpoint. T.V. became sanitised and therefore it broadcast purely propaganda.

The Sexy Left

Talking of his own radicalisation, Loach declares that it was "sexy to be on the Left in the Sixties". Obviously going to meetings because of girls was not the only thing on the agenda. This is where a political education was to be had. The groups had a rigorous respect for political theory. His 1975 T.V. series Days of Hope played on this as it dramatised the beginnings of the Labour movement.

The Spanish Civil War was a catalyst for many joining the Left. Orwell's book Homage to Catalonia was required reading. It shows the British ruling classes helping fascists before 1939, or at least standing by and doing nothing to stop their spread. The working people of Spain suffered and their British counterparts sympathised. It seemed to many working class people that the only just war was a class war, as Days of Hope writer, Jim Allen, pointed out.

Terry Atkinson states that it is not really necessary to have a knowledge of political history to be politicised. He thinks that the constant rate of exploitation by those in power will always cause confrontation. There are concerns that global consumerism has created a situation where a "comfortable life is preferred to a conflictual one", but that there will always be exploitation.

The Essential Concept

Loach is asked how he can distill years of history into one screen story. He says that he searches for the essential conflict. The "little nut" you find that describes the whole story. In The Wind that Shakes The Barley, his 2007 movie about Irish independence, the essential conflict comes to be between two brothers. Both want an Ireland free of the English, but one wants it for the people and the other wants it for the political party. This version of events, dramatised, can then lead to the audience gaining political knowledge.

Atkinson has also painted on the subject. He says that his work has to be true to human experience, otherwise it becomes worthy, or politically correct art; like a public monument. He says that his paintings are a response to his reflections, his awakening to political history. Atkinson thinks the art world has become celebritised, and Loach decries the narrowing of cinema's vision by Hollywood and it's merchandising. "What a destruction of the medium!"

The two discuss how the art world is now geared to being business orientated. They marvel at why art students have business cards and talk on how the artist should be responsible to the medium and not to entrepreneurial gain. Thatcher is blamed. Her counter-revolution is thought so embedded and insidious that we expect this kind of behaviour from our artists. "Politics is concealment", says Atkinson.

Questions and Answers

At the end, the audience asks a few questions. One member accuses the talkers of being pessimistic about the media as it is now. This causes refutations, but also an admittance that the "…function of the mass media is to make you pessimistic. This is all there is. It's their view of the world" (Ken Loach).  He is asked what "little nut" he has found for our time now. Mr. Loach reveals that his latest project is to concern contract workers in Iraq. He hopes that it will reveal the West's real impact on that region: the economic impact as well as the military one and the opportunism involved.


This project has since been realised on screen as the film, Route Irish.

Terry Atkinson discusses his interest in how the basic reality of our world is now unpictureable. He says that our world has become less than micro and that we think on phenomena that can never be seen, like quarks and god particles. This for an artist is a conundrum. How do you paint that?


And then the discussion is brought to an end. There are one or two people sleeping in the rows. It is a dry and hot room now. Ken Loach is not finished however. The comment on his conceived pessimism about the media still rankles. He says, matter of factly, that we should not be down hearted, that we need to create and that we've "got to keep at it".

First printed at Suite101.com 

SNOUT

W.C.

In hours of bliss we oft have met:

They could not always last;

And though the present I regret,

I’m grateful for the past.

William Congreve d. 1729

We shall burst forth onto the crusty earth

IT JUST GROWS

Within us there may rise an urgency

We can hold in our hands some newer plan

Major advancements, possibilities

We shall burst forth onto the crusty earth

Like salt from the tongues of thirsty hermits 

Who spit random indistinct scatterings

Or we may be lost there in our desert

Just another bit of grit in the boot

Forever sand, yet individual

NOWT ELSE ON THE FACE SAVE THE FEATURES

Never felt the threat of a zit

Sometimes I’d smile. Or spit

As you weren’t allowed

Not that we met

You did not exist

Yet

SEPT 13th

Thank you to everyone who turned up for Everybody's Got To Be Somewhere. It was an enjoyable afternoon and hopefully we will have some photos soon.

WHAT THING IS LOVE?

What thing is love? for sure love is a thing.
It is a prick, it is a sting,
It is a pretty, pretty thing;
It is a fire, it is a coal,
Whose flame creeps in at every hole;
And as my wit doth best devise,
Love's dwelling is in ladies' eyes,
From whence do glance love's piercing darts,
That make such holes into our hearts......


George Peele d.1596

(DOORS CLOSE)

This silence brings me down solo

And I should embrace the loneliness

As I used to so well

When there was me and a

Beer

And a

Pizza

And little else

When love came in drips

Not the big spurts of joy I dreamt of

When my day was self service

Not the waiting on

Another to cater to

When turmoil was only drama

And tv an empty theatre

When fantasy had not been realized yet

Right there in my room with you

That squalid place we slugged in

Like we had been born to

Where we had no care

Or at least less of any of that

And what does it matter

What mattress or where

If I cannot get in your hair

?

HAREBELL?

SEPTEMBER RAMBLE

Taking them when I set off

Both ghosts with me today

For some reason I can’t shake

So we walk to the pier and turn east

At the sea

Grey and I wish across it momentarily

But that would be France

And not the right place

The only boats out in the chop

Are the RNLI, training I hope

They seem to be beaten

From this distance

By this wind

You two are not interested

Impatient lumps in my skull

As they tack away on metallic liquid hills

That give ungenerously

Causing a static progress

None of us are going backwards

We leave them

And forage

I am starving

If I found some money

I would buy a chicken from Asda

Get a bus home

Roast in the warmth

Looking for twenty pounds ideally

But it is blowy

Volks made money out of people

Maybe some trapped on this cliff

Wasteful tourists only throw receipts it seems

What are these plants?

Woody with black seed pods like a shepherd’s purse

But umbelliform like hemlock

Lots here dying

Maybe sprayed

I am buffeted

Shall we sing

Somewhere beyond the sea…

And never again will I go sailing

I prefer Summer Wind

From across the sea…

Guess who sighs his lullabies?

No money but my eyes scour the earth

And find reminders of youth

Amidst the fag packets and squished tinnies

That Styrofoam aeroplane without wings

I am a kid in Falinge Park

The sun was there

Not here

Some joke, I can feel you laughing inside

I cannot be arsed with Rottingdean

Although you like it

Not my cuppa

I have gone off scones and jam

So I take you down to use the Ovingdean toilet

Then under St Dunstan’s pass and a walk to Wulfran’s

Corn here strangled by bindweed

The white trumpets

Little kids around a grandad’s neck making him bend

No chance of money now

Away from the litter of Brighton coast visitors

Make it to the church and sit in the graveyard

Who was Steyning Beard?

Volks is here too

There are women in the church

I can hear them laughing

It wouldn’t stop you

But I will not deal with company today

Besides I can always come back

When will you?

Up that hill then to the top

Along the racecourse

And I find harebell and vetchling

Amidst bramble which I defruit

And eat apples from a tree

These soldiers dad

That we used to behead

What are they really called

Some kind of plaintain

Cocks and hens?

I like the old words better

Imagining the latin

I still find it hard between

Hogweed, cow parsley and yarrow

Is it in the leaves?

Enter this upper terrace of the valley

It’s all dirty ragwort

Only because of the horses

And nettle and napweed

But what are these little creepers

A carpet for small coppers and

The clouded yellow?

I am with the larks

Invisible amidst the grey

I feel rain

Do you feel it

You are awfully quiet

Have I been breathing regularly?

Did I forget you there?

I shall go on ahead and see you later then

Toadflax, tiny yellow babies
Hung upon the stalk in their swaddle
Bring my head back to earth

I can walk down Bear Road and through the graveyard

Two in one day

Who will be here?

Not Fanny Heaver

She is in Westmeston

And not Fiji’s greatest sportsman

He is in Rochdale

There is a WH Smith though

Not the same

This one died in 1918

An army grave

I shall go home now

I need to get some milk

J.D.

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.


John Donne

EAST THIRD AND BRAIN AGAIN

I went to Canada

And I met this girl 

And she was like a heart attack

But in a good way

And I could do nothing

But think of her

And she emptied my mind

Of all the other stuff

That I needed to think

So I ended up walking

Like an armless zombie

On the blasted streets of Ontario

And I should have gone

To East Third and brain again

But I didn’t and so

I am still lost

Like a kiss

Like the breath

That she took

And I want it back

EVERYBODY'S GOT TO BE SOMEWHERE

QUINT'S FIRST PERFORMANCE TOO!

http://www.writeoutloud.net/public/eventview.php?day=11&month=09&year=2011&eventID=7170

Quint is an installation/performance trio featuring me, Jet Leonard on laser harp and Jon English with his sound painter. Trebly unique.

HOW SPELT IS WEAT

Her hair crumbles like applesauce in autumn

Her breath smells as felt

She sucks up my senses

I’m a tactile dyslexic

Like fingering fish that is smelt

Her laughter is conical

Her body atonal

She beckons me like a sphere

I’m an ophthalmic moron

An aural goofball

Whenever she is near me

I hear sponges and mushrooms

And loud zesty lemons

I see colours that do not exist yet

I feel daytime and spring

And panic and lovely

Amongst other intangible things

And what do I do

Now that I’m twisted

Rearrange myself

I could chop off my hands

With a circular saw

Stick eyeballs on my wrist stumps

Shove a trumpet down my oesophagus

Hop some ears on top of my knees

Stuff my tongue where it is tasteless

And cause my testicles to sneeze

Or distance myself

I could touch nothing at all

Curl myself into a ball

Inside a swaddle of cotton wool

Deprive myself in a tank

Like the altered state of

Willy Hurt

And then

I guess

It won’t

Be senseless

HITCH HIKING. HI, CHICKEN!

HOUDINI COULD WALK UP WALLS

INTO THE EMBERS THEN

This year becomes the untended fire relaxing in its embers