Love Song for a Moderate

But we had to Get The Tories Out, right? Right?

How can they call you a fascist 

when you're such a moderate soul?

You never voted for Brexit,

you send your kids to a state school

(a good one, that you moved for, it's true,

but why make your kids pay for your                                                                   principles?

Besides, you still followed the rules.)

You campaigned for a new referendum,

but we can't ignore the Red Wall: 

some people's concerns are legitimate.

2019 was a real wake-up call.

We can't be beholden to activists,

have to sacrifice some for the good of the                                                                      whole.

It's not fair that they call you a fascist: 

you're simply a moderate soul,

and when the time comes you will grass on your neighbours;

and, when this is over, 

claim you never noticed

the smell from the camp down the road.

Big Iron (The Hooded Stranger Remix)

 

Everyone liked that 

To the town of Old Manhattan came a stranger one fine day

In blue jeans and a backpack and a hoody coloured grey

No-one noticed much about him as amid their midst he slipped 

Biding time until he could unsheathe the big iron on his hip (big iron on his hip) 

Now in this town there lived a fatcat by the name of Brian T 

Who made his money off the misery of folks like you and me

Denying people treatment to increase his bottom line

Had filled his belly up with sweetmeats he would sleep off every night (sleep off every night)

In Manhattan's concrete canyon night was falling on the town

And the Stranger waited patient as commuters milled around

He was plotted up and planted in the place he had to be 

For the Handsome Hooded Stranger was there after Brian T (after Brian T) 

In the boardroom Greedy Brian stretched and gave a lazy drawn-out yawn

Another day of talking shit in pointless meetings, he had done

Now it was time for socialising with his brothers in the grift

He thought of how he missed Jeff Epstein as he got into the lift (got into the lift)

With a smile upon his jowls Big Brian thought how he would play 

When all at once the Hooded Stranger changed the course of Brian's day

As three shells marked 'delay, deny, depose' were very swiftly whipped

From the barrel of the big iron, now no longer on his hip (no longer on his hip)

Greedy Brian lay there dyin' as the people gathered round

While the Handsome Hooded Stranger vanished back into the crowd

And the people stood there gathered swore an oath to keep it zipped,

To never snitch upon the Stranger with the big iron on his hip (big iron on his hip) 

Big Iron

Big Iron

No-one would snitch upon the Stranger with the Big Iron on his hip

(Big Iron on his hip)

    

                    *         *         *

(With apologies to Marty Robbins, and with thanks to the Handsome Hooded Stranger, you the readers, and everyone happy to honour the ancient bardic tradition of tossing a coin in the hat)

Art Happens at a Human Speed

 I'm still working on the next big essay for this blog, which, like the Tyson/Paul essay, I'll also be doing as a video for my YouTube channel. In the meantime, though, enjoy my thoughts on how AI will never be able to create art: 

The Price of Membership: On Tyson/Paul

 

In 1910, the year of the historic Johnson-Jeffries title bout, the artist George Bellows exhibited a painting he called Both Members of This Club. Like Bellows' best-known work, Stag at Sharkey's, the painting is an intense, erotically charged depiction of a prize-fight at Sharkey Athletic Club, a venue across the street from Bellows' residence in New York City. Unlike Stag, it depicts a fight seemingly nearing completion, with one competitor visibly falling under his opponents' blows: and, more significantly, one of the two fighters (the one who appears to be winning) is black. 

You could be forgiven for seeing, in the title of this picture, a sort of paean to pugilistic brotherhood: these two men, so unequal in the world outside the arena, are equals within it - indeed, the racism that divides them is eliminated to such a degree that the man who, outside, would be required to perform deference to his so-called superior can, instead, rough him up with impunity, to the visible delight of the well-dressed crowd. But such a reading ignores not just the toxic atmosphere surrounding the Johnson-Jeffries fight (the event which gave us the phrase 'great white hope'), but also the irony intended by Bellows in the title, an irony you can only appreciate if you understand the legal status of boxing in New York at the time it was painted. 

In his article for the Syracuse Law Review, 'Jim Crow & the Regulation of Boxing in New York State', Albany Law School Government Lawyer in Residence Bennet Liebman outlines the murky legal status of prize-fighting in the years prior to the establishment of the first State Athletic Commission in the Frawley Law of 1911, just one year after Bellows exhibited Both Members. It is a history of official illegality and unofficial circumvention, which pivoted on the distinction between private and public. The 1900 Lewis Law, supported by Theodore Roosevelt, had outlawed public boxing matches. If, however, members of an athletic club wished to engage in a bout with their fellow club members in attendance, this was their own private affair. 

And this created the loophole exploited by clubs like Sharkey's, which would swear in fighters as 'members' for the duration of their bouts, present them as such to their audience - and rescind their membership as soon as the fight was over. Far from being an ode to warrior equality, the title of Bellows' painting is a bitter acknowledgement of hypocrisy and exploitation. On paper, there is no division between the 'club members' beating each other to a pulp in the ring and those who watch them do so, grinning with delight; but the reality is that their membership ends at the ring ropes and with the final bell. And, beyond his merely expressive skills, the reason Bellows' painting has endured is that it captures a truth about boxing in the United States: that it is a sport which, shielded by the merest pretence of Corinthian athleticism, has always been a spectacle of exploitation and exclusion, in which the privilege of membership in the club that is America depends not so much on merit or virtue but on how well black and working class bodies can thrill the white and well-fed faces in the crowd. No fighter's career has embodied that truth more than Mike Tyson: and the circumstances of his most recent bout, an undignified shuffle around the ring with a vacuous YouTube celebrity, tell us nothing good about the state of membership in Club America today. 

Like every great black boxer since Jack Johnson, Tyson represented a challenge to white audiences that went beyond his technical superiority. Each fighter has embodied that challenge in a different way, depending on their times: before Tyson, for example, Muhammad Ali confronted racism with a clear moral force that chimed with the age of the Civil Rights movement and black liberation, refusing to fight in Vietnam, changing his name as a result of his engagement with Islam, and entering legend by reclaiming the title he was stripped of in his epic fight with George Foreman in Kinshasa, where his rope-a-dope strategy saw him transition from a dancing trickster into the embodiment of the MLK-era maxim that you had to learn to take a punch to win. 

Michael Gerard Tyson, however, came up not in the Civil Rights era but Reagan's America, an epoch of vicious reaction, of the Rambo and Death Wish sequels and 21 Jump Street, an era in which white anxieties about race were now embodied in the monstrous figure of the untouchable street thug, against whom law and decency were powerless. And no thug seemed more unstoppable in the white imagination than Tyson, who went 37-0 in a five year streak from 1985 until his shocking loss to James 'Buster' Douglas in 1990, most of those wins by knockout, sixteen of them in the first round. I can't speak to what Tyson meant to black communities during that time, but I can tell you that many white people feared and hated him, and were desperate to see him defeated - if not by a new Great White Hope then by another black man who could be deemed in some way to embody the alleged virtues we thought Tyson scoffed at. I remember the excitement in the UK when one of the men anointed for that task was our own Frank Bruno, a gentle giant (who would, years later, reveal his struggles with mental illness) who would nevertheless, we let ourselves believe, have the reach and strength to overcome Tyson's brutal punching power and restore the Heavyweight Title to the country that gave the world the Queensberry Rules. Tyson won by TKO in the fifth round. 

This desperation to see him defeated was a key element in why so many of us were so fascinated by Tyson. He bought his way into the club by exploiting that fear, eschewing the flamboyant antics of an Ali in favour of a grim, silent stare across the ring at his opponent. Tyson's trainer Cus D'Amato schooled him in the exploitation of fear, both his own and that of his opponent, and during that first incredible run of pro fights, you can see that fear in the eyes of his opponents as, having been sent to the canvas by one of Tyson's devastating strikes, they find themselves having to decide whether or not to get back up and risk taking more or stay down for the count. 

But Tyson's fears went deeper than just those he confessed to feeling about his opponents pre-fight: prior to his discovery and training by D'Amato the softly-spoken Tyson had been a target for bullies, and had to fight to defend himself on the streets long before he ever did professionally. To some degree those early fears never left him, and the fame boxing brought him added a new one: the fear of what would happen when he was no longer the unstoppable force, when the audiences who clamoured to see him - many of whom, he knew, were hoping to bear witness to his downfall - would finally see someone club him to the canvas, and watch him fail to find his feet before the referee called ten. 

That those fears lay at the root of the ugly behaviour Tyson exhibited during his glory years does not absolve him for that behaviour. He indulged in drugs so heavily that he had to wear a prosthetic to pass piss tests, he brawled with other fighters in the street, and abused his first wife, Robin Givens. And in 1992, with his star fading after the loss to Douglas, he was convicted of the rape of beauty pageant contestant Desiree Washington, and sentenced to six years in prison (of which he served less than three). However much sympathy we might extend Tyson for his troubles, and however much we might praise the humbler, more reflective man he has become in recent years, that rape conviction ought to serve as the terminus. 

(That it did not at the time, like the title of Bellows' painting, says more about the ugliness of boxing than it does about that sport's capacity for redemption. Tyson could still fight, could still draw crowds and buys on pay-per-view, and so he was once more declared a member of the club, a privilege which would only seriously start to be rescinded after he was disqualified for biting Evander Holyfield's ears in their second fight. Even then, some venues were still willing to give Tyson a chance, and it would only be after a run of four losses and his refusal to leave his corner for the seventh round of his fight against Kevin McBride that he would find his name definitively crossed out of the rolls. Or so it seemed.)

So why, then, when I contemplate the recent spectacle of Tyson's bout with Jake Paul, do I find myself feeling sorry for him? Well, despite having just written six paragraphs about the man, I don't really even like Tyson all that much. It's just that, in the great tradition of the antihero, I simply despise Jake Paul much, much more. 

Why do I hate Paul more than a convicted rapist? Well, for one thing, the only difference between Paul and Tyson on that score may be  the word convicted. Paul has already been accused of sexual assault by two different women, and given his praise for confirmed rapist and wife-beater Donald Trump, who Paul has described, in a statement which shows what a sickening orgy of idolatry American evangelicalism has become, as one of 'God's angels' and a 'saviour of the world', I'd say it's a safe bet there will be more. Plus, Paul's father Greg is a huge transphobe, and in my experience there's no stronger predictor of someone being an absolute danger than opposition to trans rights. Despite his nickname of 'The Problem Child', it's fairly clear from everything Greg says about his offspring that Jake is very much a daddy's boy, and hence no fan of bodily autonomy. Hell, let's face it: the man just engaged in an act of elder abuse that was livestreamed on Netflix. That doesn't inspire much confidence in what he gets up to behind closed doors. 

But Paul's romp with Tyson disgusts me not just because Paul is a horrible person, a man who cultivates the tattooed and bearded look of the racist freaks who move cocaine out of Fort Bragg, but because Paul's seeking this fight is, in its own way, an application for club membership. Despite a pro career which has consisted largely of fights with other YouTube celebrities and washed up MMA fighters, Paul desperately wants to be considered a legitimate fighter, and has used the once-feared Tyson as a prop for his narcissism. It doesn't matter that nobody who actually gives a damn about boxing was convinced by the spectacle of him winning on points against a 58-year-old man; it doesn't matter that the women's match on the undercard, between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, is being lauded by real fans as the true main event of the evening: it doesn't matter that saying it in 2024 doesn't mean anything like the same thing it meant in 1989, Jake Paul can say he beat Mike Tyson and to him, that's all that matters. He and Iron Mike are now, according to the record books, both members of this club. 

But Jake Paul, the son of a wealthy realtor who grew up in a neighbourhood of suburban mcmansions where, in the words of one of his fellow YouTubers 'all you have to worry about...is how mean the chihuahuas are', was already a member anyway. Where Tyson's father walked out on him and his mother before he could even walk, Daddy Greg supported his little boy's bid for vacuous fame every step of the way. For Tyson, boxing was a lifeline that saved him from the streets and, in all probability, an early grave; for Paul, it's a new revenue stream, a chance to diversify his brand, and, perhaps most importantly of all, a way to feel more like a man. 

And in pursuit of that feeling, Paul tempted Tyson not just with money, but the chance to add another professional match to his record. Like the stuffed shirts at Sharkey's, he held out the opportunity to bathe in the spotlight to a man who held none of the advantages that he grew up with, for his own sordid gratification. I was going to end this essay by comparing Paul to one of the most visible figures in the crowd in Bellows' painting, the grotesque, inanely grinning man who seems enraptured by the battle going on before him, but I realised this would be unfair - unfair, that is, to the man in the picture who, whatever else, at least has the decency to be enjoying the combat vicariously. No, there is a better figure with which to compare Mr Paul. 

Jake Paul grew up in a mansion, doted on by a parent who facilitated his introduction to the wider world. At some point in his life, Paul discovered combat sports and was enraptured by the sight of men in battle. And he now uses his fortune to pay some of those men to go a few rounds with him, because it makes him feel strong and tough and good about himself, and increases his level of testosterone. 

Jake Paul is neither of the men in the ring in Both Members of This Club. He isn't even one of the men in the crowd. Jake Paul is John du Pont. 

But then, even that comparison is unfair, really. After all, du Pont didn't need us to watch. 

From the Files of the Republic Intelligencers: Artefact Cluster KO1 - 'Kirkoswald Spheres'

An example of an artefact belonging to the Kirkoswald Cluster, showing the peculiar logo and 'Coat of Arms'

Classification and Clearance: Artefact Cluster KO1 is a collection of objects discovered in the village of Turnberry, in the vicinity of the TideFate Oceanic Research Complex owned and operated by POI WESTPHALEN, in the Civil Parish of Kirkoswald, South Ayrshire, Republic of Caledonia. At present, knowledge of Artefacts in the KO1 cluster is to be restricted to Intelligencers of Grade C1 or above; information pertaining to the existence of objects in the cluster may be shared with Assets Rated A+ or higher only where such disclosure has been permitted by Intelligencer SERAPH. 

Description: KO1 cluster artefacts are small white spheres resembling golf balls, decorated with the logo of a non-existent golf course (or resort?)  known as 'Trump Turnberry'. This logo consists of the course/resort name stamped in a copperplate font, underneath a somewhat exaggerated illustration of a 'Coat of Arms' of the sort maintained by the former College of Arms under the Windsor Regime, albeit with a number of errors suggesting it was designed by someone unfamiliar with the conventions of genuine Old Regime heraldry.  Most of them have been recovered from bodies of water in or around the village of Turnberry and the aforementioned TideFate Oceanic Research Complex by individuals diving, fishing or swimming, though on one occasion one such object was observed travelling through the air in a manner consistent with having been struck by a golf club. At present, six such artefacts have been recovered so far, though it is theorised that there may be more. It is not currently known whether or not POI WESTPHALEN is aware of their existence, though given the regularity with which he attended the Research Complex in the years prior to the creation of the TideFate California Power Facility, there is a high likelihood that he may have come into contact with KO1 instances. 

Disinformation Strategy: In line with instruction from Intelligencer SERAPH, Assets in Republic Media have been advised to promulgate the explanation that the KO1 artefacts are the work of a guerrilla art collective whose goal is as yet unknown, but who are assumed to be weaponising POI WESTPHALEN's memories of his late father, whose enthusiasm for the game of golf he does not share. A number of more outlandish explanations have been seeded in online fora by Assets of low credibility, with the goal of making the 'art collective' explanation seem more plausible by comparison. 

Current Hypothesis: It is the opinion of Intelligencer SERAPH that the appearance of the artefacts has some connection to the research carried out at the Tidefate Complex and due to be implemented presently at the California Power Facility. They may form part of a disinformation strategy pursued by POI WESTPHALEN to distract from his actual research, or they may be a genuine byproduct of the complex's activity. Given the implications of the latter possibility, Intelligencer SERAPH is inclined to believe the former more likely. 

Further Investigation: Intelligencer SERAPH has been cleared to travel to the USA, officially as part of a Cultural Exchange tour organised in collaboration with Asset BUCKAROO. While there, she will liaise with Asset CATSPAW, who has been monitoring POI WESTPHALEN, to investigate and, if need be, neutralise the Tidefate California Power Facility. While Intelligencer SERAPH is abroad, her work monitoring the TideFate Research Complex will be the responsibility of Intelligencer CLEVERBOY. 

Date of Most Recent Update: 31/10/2012CE 

 

Albian Dreams Omnibus Megapost

 

I learn, from today's episode of the excellent Podcasting is Praxis podcast that Daily Mail columnist and massive creep Quentin Letts has tried his hand at a counterfactual history of the United Kingdom. Unsurprisingly, his attempt is terrible racist, misogynist guff, but the Praxiscast crew's skewering of it is hilarious. It reminded me, however, of my own ongoing dabbles in counterfactuality with the history of the Union of Albian Republics, which, biased as I undoubtedly am, I think are much better than Letts' execrable wanking, not least because, lacking Quentin's quaint servility I had the guts to murder Charles Windsor in a chip pan fire, and I regret nothing. 

So I thought, y'know what? This blog needs a post which aggregates together every instalment of that story (so far) for ease of access and sharing. This is that post. 

Behold!

Albian Dreams Book One: The Savile Wars

Prologue : Albia Eruditorum - in a pastiche of Elizabeth Sandifer's Doctor Who essays, the status quo ante for the Savile Wars is established on the way to a consideration of Jeremy Brett's bravura turn as everyone's favourite Timelord

Riot Cops in Roundhay Park: remembering the Savile Wars - in the first instalment of her remarkable memoir, my parallel universe counterpart Angel McKenna describes the fallout from Geoffrey Howe's decision to read the details of what Margaret Thatcher knew about Jimmy Savile's crimes into the Parliamentary record in the early 1990s. 

An Albian Poem - an example of my counterpart's verse. At this point I was assuming the final form of this project would be a selection of these counterfactual poems, with the alternate history on here as mere background colour, but the opposite largely proved true. 

Meanwhile, in Moscow - Agent Billings goes for a McDonalds with a snooty colleague.

The Prisoner: the long and crucial final act of David Bowie - Angel McKenna's obituary for the late Mr B outlines a little of the Albian Artists' Prison system.

In Albia - an early example of Angel's poetry, from when she was an optimistic ideologue instead of a hardbitten Republic Intelligencer. 

Car Crashes and the Smell of Burning Hair - in another instalment of Angel's memoir, we learn about the love affair between Prince Dai and the future First Citizen Mercury, and the Windsors' attempt to do something about it. 

Pucker Up and Think of England - amid the fallout from the Windsor Crime Family's only half-successful attempt to murder Dai and Freddie, Agent Billings finds himself tasked with assisting a mysterious asset of British Intelligence known only as 'JR' (she prefers Jo) in a bizarre, Q-branch style attempt at killing the First Citizen and strangling the Albian Revolution in its crib. 

Death is One of the Main Characters - Jo meets Angel at Forbidden Planet and muses on the popularity of stories of boy wizards, before revealing her proclivities in a dramatic graveyard encounter. 

The Pleasure of Shaking a Tail - Albian Review of Books critic Bill Hagchester reviews the memoirs of a number of figures involved, in one way or another, in the Lipstick Plot, filling us in on some details of Angel's postwar work as an Intelligencer and her relationship with US Cultural Attache Charles T. Billings.

Albia, September 2001 - an older, more cynical angel busts a Windsor loyalist black magic ring in the week following 9/11, while US President Gore and his Soviet counterpart Zyuganov meet to discuss what must be done. 

Angel's Lament - my counterpart bemoans the loneliness of life as an Intelligencer in another of her poems. 

Ghostwatch - you're not cleared for this one.

The Black Spider at Bay: A Claustrophobic Castle - in a piece written in her cover job as a journalist, Angel has some fun remarking on the straitened circumstances of the Windsor Crime Family and their loyalists in their new digs in Jersey. 

A Birthright of Distinction - in one of her mature poetic works, Angel McKenna sticks the knife into Chuckie Seven Eggs on the occasion of his farcical Coronation.

A Midnight Feast - on the night of his Coronation, a sleepless Charles Windsor recalls happier times with Sir Jimmy, and makes an ill-fated attempt to cook chips. 

Epilogue: Gansevoort, 2009 - Angel meets an ex in what they used to call Hell's Kitchen, learns about advances in frying technology, and imagines a nightmare alternative world where the Windsors were never deposed. 

Albian Dreams Book 2: Angel's In America

Parhelion: A Prologue - in a universe much more like our own, two Americas meet, with disastrous consequences for both. But what does any of this have to do with Albia, and Angel?

From the Files of the Republic Intelligencers: Artefact Cluster KO1 - 'Kirkoswald Spheres'

As Free As Bears Are

Poster for the Newcastle Ewan Brown Anarchist Book Fair by the Fair's 'in-house artist', which partly inspired this poem

 

Did you know that bears like views? It’s true:

if they see a sight they like they’ll dig

a pit where they can sit and just admire it. 

Perhaps we should start digging up the flagstones

every hundred yards or so and pile them into

places we can be as free as bears are,

free to lie as well as sit, to stretch our bodies,

let the sun diffuse into our stiffened joints,

and be the eyes our streets are said to need,

not just the mouths the pubs make money feeding.

Perhaps we could plant flowers in the now-uncovered soil

so bees can take a break from spreading pollen,

grow that grass we’re always being told to touch,

or even trees for common fruit. We could. 

As well as being inspired partly by the above image, this poem was also inspired by discussions during a workshop given by Amy Langdown for their 'Narrative Shift' project with Alphabetti Theatre. 

I was a Teenage Eschatologist

 

In my teens I was obsessed with signs and wonders,

with working out the Number of the Beast,

decoding quatrains, counting Popes:

establishing the Terminus of every human hope. 

This past October it flared up again

(no pun intended) as a response to some

auroral paranoia, nine parts schizoid

numerology to one cup of solar dynamics,

that held we’d know an ending

like a minor Nic Cage movie,

and was further fuelled by Jacobsen’s 

Scenario: the whole Boreal

Hemisphere made ash inside two hours

(and fortunate indeed those first to burn,

spared carol concerts played by gramophone

and finger, spared the slow starvation of that last long winter),

victims of flawed tech and launch-on-warning

- just a cautionary tale, of course,

or so it seemed until the rumours

that strange troops were seen in Kursk. 

Would the teenage eschatologist I once was get a thrill

from living, still, in times of prophecy and dream?

The woman on the police show my dad watches on TV

says I’m praying for the Holy Land. They’re bombing Galilee. 

Tip me why don't you, it's only the end of the world

Festive Fayre

What do you reckon, this year's Christmas card?

It was clever of Dickens to make the man who hated Christmas rich,

because it gave his well-heeled audience an insult to sling at the poor

which could suggest parsimony, not poverty

(along with what that queer unBritish Christian name suggested)

if they dared complain about the cost of gifts and geese and mandatory

good cheer, and how that cost keeps rising every year. 

It clothed their self-congratulation and their cruelty

in a jolly cloak of fellowship and charity, a reality he artfully

revealed to be the very centre of his story, surrounded by 

a tactically-deployed sentimentality,

which licensed them to happily ignore it, as they tucked in

to their puddings and their poultry. 

I don't mean to say that Dickens was a hypocrite:

simply that he knew what being poor really is; knew, too,

who had spare cash to buy the magazines he published in,

and gave them what they wanted: 'Scrooge' and 'humbug'

as a shorthand they could wield to penalise

anybody crotchety enough to spoil their fun,

to point out that their locked and bolted doors belied their cry,

port glasses raised: God bless us, every one. 

(this poem is brought to you by the seasonal depression I always fall into at this time of year due to having to balance buying Christmas gifts for my family with being dirt-poor; if you would like to help alleviate this gloom then please consider popping some cash in my tip jar at ko-fi.com/ajmckenna )

INSIDELEFT Interview!

 YouTuber Steven Fearon interviewed me on his channel, INSIDELEFT, about my recent poem Tell Me, Physician, and much more besides. I really enjoyed having this opportunity to explain what was going through my mind in writing that poem, what inspires me creatively, what I've learned and why I think it all matters (and even slag off that racist disappointment Caitlin R Kiernan a little bit). Give it a watch, and maybe even like, comment and subscribe! 

Winter Terror

Maybe it wasn't the coldest day

of the year, but the wind made it 

feel that way: wind so loud he had to

shout, the man sat by the Monument 

begging. 

He had to shout just to be heard, 

and the cold made him shout louder:

the cold he felt then and the cold

that he knew he would feel if he failed

to get enough cash for a bed for the night

in a hostel. Cold that kills, and cold 

that weakens, cold that weakened him

even as he shouted at the passers-by,

voice filled with jostling rage and desperation,

each shout angrier and sadder than the last.

Myself, I had no money I could give him,

was living on toogoodtogo bags, online tips

and the joke that this country calls benefits. 

If I could, I would have,

because I know too well how it feels

to see your future shrink to less than just 

a single night, to see those wrapped up 

snugly pass by, to feel that mounting rage

at those whose kindness you rely on. 

Do you begin to understand, now, 

as prices rise and payments are withdrawn,

a little of the desperate rage he felt then? 

As nights draw in

and wind whips up

do you feel it? The true

terror of winter? 

Monthly Update: August

Traffic Light Banana

I tend to use this blog mainly for writing essays, which means I tend to neglect the actual 'log' part of the process. To correct this, I intend to write an update post like this once every month, giving you a rundown of my activities, and pointing out ways in which you can support me in continuing them.

First of all, as you can tell from the image at the start of this post, I've been drawing and sketching a lot lately. I started doing an art therapy course where the goal was to produce a painting at the end; in service of that goal, we were given sketchbooks and told to start practising. 

This was a big challenge to me, as I hadn't picked up a pencil or a paintbrush since I stopped doing art as a subject after my third year at Secondary School. So I figured I should get a lot of practice. My early efforts, like this picture of the luchadors Santos and Blue Demon, were pretty simplistic: 

Over time, though, I began to improve somewhat. 

Yes, I drew the berserk EVA, I am such a cliché

 

That Basement

Avebury Cove Stones

Eventually, I was able to complete the painting I had decided to do for the project. I decided to create a semi-abstract piece called Jubilee Weekend, summing up how I felt on that very Bank Holiday weekend when a friend took me out for a drink to talk over the recent death of my mother (something I also mention in a recent piece of music I made, Phrygian for Fred) and my anger over being surrounded by symbols of jingoistic celebration at a time of personal grief. This event was very much on my mind following the recent, sudden and unexpected death of the friend in question. 

I planned that the picture would contain a number of elements: a screaming mouth; a painting of the view from the pub we went to, or as near as I could manage from my photographs of Tynemouth; a torn Union Flag; a drawing of the flowers from the cover of Virginia Astley's album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, one track from which, 'A Summer Long Since Passed' became something of an earworm for me in the weeks following my mother's death; and a KACO-style poster reading FUCK YOUR FUCKING JUBILEE. 

Jubilee Weekend

The final version is less satisfactory to me now than it was at the time (having done a little more work with acrylics since, I would probably spend more time building up each layer if I did this again), but, as I say, it had been over thirty years since I'd last painted anything, so there was a real sense of achievement in getting these images out of my mind and onto canvas. 

After finishing the course, I continued sketching, working hard to improve. My friend Stephanie Smith gave me some great advice about how to look at subjects to build up portraits in more detail, as well as suggesting I switch from an HB to a 3B pencil. I think this really lead to a major improvement, something you can see from these two drawings of Jacques Derrida I did at two different stages: 

M. Derrida

Jacques Derrida

I also decided to acquire some canvas board and work on a study for a portrait of Derek Jarman, the filmmmaker, artist and diarist who's been a big influence on my writing and whose book Chroma is one I have returned to at numerous times, and was reading again with new eyes after having spent some time working with paint. I want to make a video about Chroma for my YouTube channel, and one strand I want to include in the video is me making a portrait based on the photograph of Jarman, taken by Howard Sooley, which appears on the cover of my copy of the book (later editions use a different cover image). In preparation for doing this, I decided to do a study - a practice run - on the canvas board and, while my painting lags behind my sketching in terms of improvement, I still think the practice portrait I've done is a definite improvement on Jubilee Weekend. You can see that I'm working harder on building a painting up layer by layer, mixing paints to get the right colour, and getting used to the nature of painting as an additive medium, one where you correct mistakes not by erasing and trying again, as you would in a sketch, but by painting over errors. 

Study for a Portrait of Derek Jarman

That, then, is where things are with my visual art at this point in time. But this update isn't just meant to be about drawing and painting! I've also:

- written a short story on this blog which has been very well-received;

- organised, promoted and hosted an absolute banger of a poetry and music night at the Kittiwake Trust Multilingual Library in Gateshead, on top of my regular volunteering shifts there; 

- performed at the most recent Poetry in the North event at Estate Tea Company in Heaton; 

- and took part in the protest against fascists in Newcastle earlier this month! 

Stop being fascist little freaks man

As someone who is both mentally and physically disabled, this takes a lot out of me, but I do it because I want to contribute something to the world instead of just sitting around doing nothing (not that there is anything wrong with disabled people sitting around and doing nothing, and indeed I fully support our right to do so and will be doing exactly that as soon as I'm done typing and sharing this post). It would be lovely to think that my Universal Credit payments covered all of the expenses incurred in doing this but, let's be real, they don't. And that brings me to another reason for making these monthly update posts: if you value any of what I do, please consider throwing a little something in my tip jar on ko-fi.com. As an added incentive, if you tip more than a tenner you can help guide my artistic evolution by suggesting something for me to draw! You can even have the final result sent to you digitally if it's something you don't want shared on my insta, which is probably the best place to follow me if you want to be updated on what I'm doing more than once a month! 

That, however, about sums it up for this month. Thanks for taking the time to read this, don't forget to share it if you think more people should be aware of my work, and whether you tip, share, or can't do either, I hope you have a great weekend!

And now, I am going to sit around and do nothing for a bit...

Magnolia grandiflora

Parhelion: A Prologue

From the Rolling Stone Special Issue 'Remember, Remember: One Year On from the Day America Changed': 

'I know it seems like such a cliché,' says Brooklynite Herb Tillerman, 'you know, like when Xers and Millennials talk about 9/11, but I really do remember the sky that day. It was beautiful. Like Lynch used to say in those videos,' his voice half-cracking, Tillerman attempts an impression of the late film director, who perished, along with millions of other inhabitants of the West Coast, in the freak atmospheric event, commonly now called the FAE, which seems to have preceded what happened elsewhere on that day, but trails off into silence before he can finish. 

Herb's friend John Graf takes up the story: 'Yeah, it was blue alright, but I wouldn't say it was, like...when people talk about 9/11 they make the sky sound innocent. But even before it happened, it felt...weird. Stretched. It was like a balloon just before it pops. I mean not all the time, not like from sunrise but just before...'

'Before it.' Tillerman chimes back in. 'Yeah, maybe that was the FAE or something, man. I remember there was a...sound. Well not a sound but...'

'A thunder without sound, is how I describe it,' says CUNY Professor and poet Gwen Charleston, when I meet her later that day in the prefab classroom where she, as she puts it 'continues to attempt teaching' a year after the event which upended how so many of us see the world and our place in it. 'Of course that's a paradox, but that's what I'm trying to describe. A sound which is not a sound. We all heard it. Everyone in the city. Everyone in the country. We were all together in that one moment, hearing it, that soundless sound. And then...do you know what I remember most about it? The trains.' 

This was something Tillerman and Graf had mentioned to me as they sat by the rubble-strewn wreckage of the Gowanus Canal, clutching their enamel mugs of government coffee. 'Yeah, the trains, man.' Herb shook his head. That was unreal. You could see them, like they were in a diagram or something. And...I dunno if this happened to you, bro...'

Graf nodded agreement. 'It seemed like forever we just looked at them. Like they were models, chugging around a toy store track. For a second, it was just like this...a fucking MIRACLE in the sky, man, and then...'

Again, Tillerman picks up the thread while his friend trails off into silence. 'And then it weren't no fuckin' miracle,' he mutters. 

                                            *                   *                    *

'What is a miracle?' The voice of MIT's Acting Head of Physics, Barry Barenboim, crackles down the phone line, and I find it impossible not to picture him standing in a lecture hall. 'One very good definition might be that a miracle is something we have never seen happen before. And by that yardstick, however terrible its effects, then, yes, the event of Election Day 2024 was, certainly, a miracle. The question that faces us now, though, is to work out the meaning of that miracle. What does it tell us, this impossible catastrophe, about the world, the universe, the - God, I wish this word had not been cheapened so by a dozen childish movies in the years before what happened, but - the multiverse that we inhabit?' He pauses; in the silence I picture him adjusting his glasses. 'My fear is that it tells us nothing good.' 

'We can say, with some certainty, that parallel universes exist. That much is proven by the historical documents we have found from the Other America. Not to mention the numerous instances of, well...instances. Which have had their own bizarre psychological effects...'

'Instance' is one of many words which have taken on new meaning in the year since November 2024, the term we now use to describe people who find themselves inhabiting the same country as their otherworld counterpart. Such people are rarer than the popular imagination would suppose, but at the same time more prevalent than pure statistics would suggest. Some people have found themselves looking at, talking to, interacting with, a perfect copy of themselves; others, like the celebrated Cyruses, have found that gender does not stay consistent across universes. The effects of this phenomenon on the psyche have yet to be fully explored, as Doctor Aarya Begum explained to me: 'You are talking about people who have spent their lives existing in a culture which tells us we are unique, suddenly encountering a living, breathing - or in some very traumatic cases, an unliving, unbreathing - carbon copy of themselves. We simply do not have a psychological model to describe this! If someone came into my office on the 4th of November last year and told me they had met their doppelganger I would have had no hesitation in calling them delusional. But now for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people in this country - I mean are we even one country anymore? - in these countries which now occupy the same land mass...this is a daily reality. A daily insanity! I'm sorry...I understand you've talked to Professor Barenboim. He can give you the physics, but...Look, let me tell you something, okay? When I was a child I had a horrifying, vivid nightmare in which I found my own dead body. I had that nightmare once, as a child, and I've never forgotten it. And now I have it every night! And in the daytime too! I live in terror that one day there will be a knock on my door and I will be called to some morgue to identify a body that looks, to all intents and purposes, like myself. I do not say this because I want your sympathy. I say it because I want you to understand how the phenomenon of instantiation has made even the self-concept of so-far uninstanced individuals much less secure. We are dealing with a pschological crisis we have never seen before.'

This is, I'm sure you'll agree, heavy stuff. And it has always been my instinct to try and cope with heavy stuff through humour. That's been useful to me more than once in getting answers out of people, but in retrospect it probably wasn't smart to try and lighten the mood by asking Dr Begum that question about the Cyruses. 'I have no idea and I don't care to think about it. Go ask a lawyer, if you're that bothered, whether it would be incest or masturbation, and whether it's defamation while you're at it.' Reader, I'm ashamed to say I didn't follow up on Dr Begum's advice - after all, lawyers are busier than ever these days. Just look at Musk v Musk. 

In all seriousness, though, the doctor was right to criticise my levity. These are not light-hearted times, whatever the ramifications of that fateful day for celebrity gossip. Perhaps no-one better summed that fact up than Professor Barenboim, who is worth quoting at some length: 

'More than one work of speculative fiction has dealt with the possibility of two separate geographic entities existing, through some dimensional sleight-of-hand, in the same physical space. In most of these stories the unit chosen has been a city, and it's easy to see why. The city is an understandable human unit. And why wouldn't it be? We are literally civilised people - our minds have been formed by centuries of living in cities. The mind might be wider than the sky, but our fantasies are city-sized: the memory most people have of  the event is one of looking up and seeing a duplicate of their city in that fatal sky. 

'But that experience was duplicated in every city across this nation, and every town too. If Thoreau were at Walden Pond today he would have seen his hut hover above him. If an isolated group of people were walking the great plains of Kansas they would have seen floating substrate from below. I still don't know how some parts of the country weren't destroyed when the Minuteman warheads hit the dirt - near as we can tell, that must have been something to do with the FAE. So the event was terrifying, first of all, simply because of its scale. 

'It was, of course, also terrifying because this Other America was, very slightly, not coterminous with our own. It did not share the space we shared (It also seems, from the documents and instance interviews, that it also had not advanced to the same point in history, but as fascinating as the implications of that may be it need not concern us now). It manifested roughly 10,000 feet above us, phasing into our world from whichever one it came from. At which point, like all other things in our world, it became subject to gravity. All the horror that we have experienced flows from that simple fact. 

'But even that isn't the thing that worries me the most. You see, miracles only happen once. Not because they never happen again, in fact for the opposite reason - once something has happened, you can almost guarantee it will happen again, somehow. Miracle becomes mere phenomenon, and phenomena are repeatable. 

'What terrifies me most is this: when this happens again, whatever part of this other or some other other world flashes into our own could do so in the exact same space its counterpart occupies. And if that happens, all the carnage we have seen will seem as comparatively minor as that Tuesday in September a quarter of a century ago.' 

Poets, psychologists, physicists, drifters, grifters, celebrities, and more: we are all of us coming to terms with a new reality, the implications of which are deeply disturbing. But there's one thing I still wonder about, and it's this: right now, somewhere in this multiverse, there is an Earth that, a year ago, completely lost America. 

What's happening there?

Tell Me, Physician

Bad doctors make good torturers. Not just

because of training in anatomy:

because long training and high station

flatter vanity, and breed resentment

of a truculent humanity, who will 

insist they understand their bodies’ mystery

better than their lettered intercessors,

as they Google diagnoses, or ignore

their pain beyond capacity for healing, or

insist on medication, or dispute classification; as they

waddle, fat, back into surgery regardless

of how many times they’ve been told

to lose weight. And so a doctor learns

to hate, and to desire a new relation

with her patients: one where actions are

dictated and complied with without question.

And such fantasies, when licensed,

overpower with ease the catechistic 

call to do no harm, and so the healer

learns to injure without qualm.

Bad doctors make good torturers, it’s true,

and good doctors are vanishingly few,

so tell me, physician: which are you?

-------------------------

This poem is dedicated to Kamran Abbasi, Jenifer Block, and all the terverts at the thoroughly captured British Medical Journal, which has decided to run cover for the Nazi-style pseudoscience of the Cass Review, which the not-captured British Medical Association has rightly criticised. It is very clear in this situation who the good doctors are: and they aren't the ones who cross-dress as journalists and like to drive trans kids to suicide to get their jollies.

Insomnia

 

The thing about 'Insomnia', the song, by Faithless, right, is that the late (and I mean genuinely late, not whatever Trump means when he calls Hannibal Lecter 'late') Maxi Jazz was a middle-aged man when he wrote it. Because that song is about what it's like to experience insomnia, the condition, in your forties. The Corrs were right about what it's like at the other end of the age spectrum: 'it really doesn't matter...'cause when tomorrow comes, we can do it all again.' Well, bully for you, kids, but it isn't like that when you're my age. 

When you're my age insomnia is a horrible limbo condition, an eternally recurring purgatory of hopelessness, a merry-go-round of lying down, closing your eyes, trying to sleep and failing because of course you can't try to go to sleep, you either sleep or you don't, there is no 'try', it isn't something you can will yourself to do because the act of willing yourself to do something precludes relaxation, so the carousel goes round again and you get off the fibreglass horse and you sit up and read, or draw, or watch YouTube or play video games to break state, to distract yourself, and if you're lucky an hour later your eyelids will start feeling a little bit heavy and you can lie down, let them close and slip past the nightwatchman but more likely no, psych, you feel the anxiety rising and realise you're trying again after all and the fibreglass horses are laughing at you behind their painted-on eyes and you may as well rise and try another trick and see if that gets you past go, or else you wind up like me, now, heavy-lidded but restless, eyes like pissholes in the snow, too tired to face the day but too wired to wave it bye-bye. Insomnia sucks. 

I should have known this would happen. I was overdue. Anxiety drives my insomnia and this week I've been making some proper moves to try and sort my life out for the first time in ages, applying for things, polishing my resume, arranging meetings to discuss new things I'm working on (of which more in due time, dear reader, I promise) and so with tedious fucking inevitability of course the first night this week I had to relax because I had stuff on the calendar today would be the first night that I couldn't, the first night I wouldn't be asleep by ten and up the next day with the lark. I mean I'm up now, yes, but I already was when Vaughan-Williams' chum came on the scene, not that there's much chance of hearing him ascend above the sound of drunks and sirens in my part of town. But even they can't drown the laughter of the gods who glimpsed my diary. Hypnos, Morpheus, those lords of sleep, those well-known bastards. 

I can't get no sleep. 

Copii

When we encounter a friend long unseen,

it is rather like the feeling we have when,

being driven in a car, we mount a steep, short bridge:

a joy leaps up

and takes us by surprise, and we cannot help smiling.

Language can be like this too: we hear words

we have learned but not studied or spoke

in some time, and unexpected recognition

buoys us up, 

and we smile and think ‘Ah! I know you.’

Sometimes we hear the same word, 

or one very like it, in a language which is kin

to one we’ve learned, and a smile even wilder

rises up

to see the other doors our old key could unlock.

I smiled that way in the library,

unexpected and involuntary

when I heard the Roma speaker say

copii

which I knew, in Romanian, means children.

I cried at the translation

Of the words in the sentence I didn’t know:

One thousand. In a lake. Drowned.

(Note: this poem was inspired by a Roma Resistance Day event at the Kittiwake Trust Multilingual Library earlier this year, organised by members of the Roma Holocaust Memorial Initiative, who campaign to build a memorial in Newcastle to the Roma victims of the Holocaust)