Charlie Windsor's Theme

 It's been a while! I am still working on Albian Dreams, with more of a focus on making it a properly multimedia project rather than just a weird sort of blog/novel/poetry collection thing. So with that in mind, please enjoy the first official piece of music from the Albia OST, the theme tune for Charlie Sausage Fingers!

I've been working a lot on music over the past month, as you'll see from looking at the recent output on my YouTube. I still have a lot to learn, but I'm pleased that my pieces are beginning to become more ambitious in terms of structure, even if I am still mainly mucking about with loops in Endlesss. I'm currently working on a grant application for this project which will hopefully allow me to do some kind of structured training in music/video production, but in the meantime I am reliant on the meagre state benefits I receive as a disabled person in the decidedly un-utopian version of these islands we have to live in, and on tips from readers like you, so if any of you feel like chucking a few coins in my tip jar at ko-fi.com/ajmckenna that would totally rock hard! Tippers get access to cool extra stuff like bonus videos, shout-outs in the dedications, etc etc, you know how this works. 

More updates and ramblings soon!

English sounds like injury in Arabic

In the language I am learning like a child

who must be taught the shapes and sounds

of letters, children scream. Already, 

they are more well-versed than I 

in sounding out these shapes,

and screaming too. 

I who, from my earliest days at school, 

was punished for deficiency in cursive; I, 

whose English letters fall somewhere between

a spider-in-an-inkpot smear and a-for-apple print,

am learning a supremely calligraphic language

as hands far more practiced than mine

find their own writing sliding into scrawl

and must accept it, so those hands may yet

incise and suture with precision

after sixty-six days, most without electric light

or anaesthetic.

In the language I am learning 

the word I find most pleasing

is the name of a nation we bombed into freedom

where people are now sold as slaves. 

In this language, the words for my country

are half-rhymes for wounding and guilt. 

In the language I have grown up speaking

people quibble about what it means

to say things like 'genocide' or 'self-defence', 

or 'rules-based International order'. 

In the language I am learning, 

I cannot say these things. 

I do not, yet, know it well enough to lie.

Things I've been up to lately

 I've been feeling lately as if I haven't actually been doing much, so I decided to do this post as a way of disagreeing with my impostor syndrome about that, as much as anything. Most obviously, as you'll see above, I recorded a version of 'We know where the huntsman lives' for my YouTube channel, which you can check out above. I've also been faffing about visually, so I thought I'd document that, starting with the thumbnail image for the above video:

I seem to be using a lot of stuff from The Invisibles for image manipulation purposes lately; make of that what you will. You may recognise Miss Dwyer's sunglasses in this picture of Shadow Chancellor and plagiarist Rachel Reeves:

I've also been mocking Elon Musk, because it is fun and very easy to do: 

Another highly mockable individual is one Vincent Kennedy McMahon, particularly with the revelation this week that he hated UK crowds: 

Sometimes I just get something stuck in my head and have to make it: 

And sometimes the Guardian drops something in your lap that's so obvious you can't not do it: 

While we're on the subject of the Carbonara Kid, I was very pleased to hear a classic public safety film has been revived to warn kids of this new danger (EWOTRIAP):

I also see that Rishi Sunak has rebranded the Tory logo to better appeal to his core vote: 

Also, in terms of my own photography, I've gotten quite interested in photographing real things that look like static or interference patterns. These will probably wind up being used in future shops or video backgrounds, I imagine: 

There's a bunch of other stuff that's been going on, but is more difficult to include in a quick post like this - synth experiments, voluntary work, doing stuff at demos...expect to see more stuff about all of these things on here soon; after a little time off after finishing up Albian Dreams, I'm planning to get back into the habit of updating here more frequently. And as always, of course, if you like what I'm doing then feel free to show your appreciation by tipping me via my ko-fi page; October has been a pretty rough month for me due to an unexpected illness and some surprise bills (don't you just love those?), so any tips are super-appreciated. 

Moment

I closed my eyes

at the flash in the sky

and hoped to be killed by the blast wave

We know where the Huntsman lives

 

We know about the author 
who likes getting off on torture
writing doorstops of smug thuggery 
to settle petty scores;

we know about her charity

enabling depravity 

from back alleys in Bucharest

to Port-au-Prince’s shores; 

we see the politicians

wink and make insinuations

to ensure your misdirection 

as, magicians of suspicion,

they hide the hand that disappears

their colleagues’ allegations;

the columnists who polish up 

once-tarnished reputations,

dressing up facilitation 

as rehabilitation, 

as they cutely euphemise

their grooming 

as ‘home-schooling’, 

call their trafficking ‘adoption’

and expect us to be fooled. 

But we see through

their find-the-lady hand-jive

and their prestidigitation.

We’re wise to their forces

and we know the fucking score.

We know where the lady is,

and we know who the groomers are,

and we know where the Huntsman lives

and we refuse to be prey anymore:

We know where the Huntsman lives. 

We’re breaking down his door. 

Thoughts on the WAG and SAG-AFTRA strikes

It's interesting how much work is going on to undermine the written word today, isn't it. 

It's interesting just how much work is going on 

to undermine the written word

today. I mean right now, in sweating offices and boardrooms,

men who are paid more money than I am ever going to see

before I shuffle off this mortal coil, are talking to shady guys

like the man I once met in a Baltimore restaurant

who seemed like the epitome of charming evil, 

to try and find the dirt to turn a snitch with,

and all with the intention

of replacing professional writers - not weirdoes like me,

who will always be shouting out here at the edge of the 

boarded-up shopfronts, but people paid to write the actual words

which millions remember, mimic, maul into ubiquity

with machines with which, we are told, will outwrite

Wilder, all the while unable 

to write more than a third-form book report. 

It's absolute exhaustion. Is this why

e said the mind was wider than the sky?

To satisfy the kind of men who dined with Harvey Weinstein? 

George Osborne Is Weak

 

And so is everyone soiling their pants over one of the Just Stop Oil people getting him point-blank with some orange confetti. Emphasis on 'some'. Look how little that lady is throwing at him, in my little collage piece above (which is just a bit of banter, right chaps? After all, I'm not even using simunition rounds...) . Look how little hits him! If you genuinely find this terrifying then look away now, because I'm about to blow your tiny, cowardly little mind. 

That's me covered in fake blood and very real confetti after the first prop rehearsal for Shotgun Wedding back in 2015. We learned two things from that rehearsal: one, that the literally underground venue we were using wasn't really set up for a situation where gallons of sugar syrup and food colouring were being thrown around, and, two, that the blood may have looked impressive but the confetti really didn't. So going forward, we decided to bulk out the confetti with dry rice. 

The thing about having handfuls of dry rice thrown at you by people who've been whipped up into a frenzy? That isn't like having confetti lightly tumble down upon and around you. That shit hurts. 

And here's me after the last performance of the tour, at which I specifically instructed the audience to try and throw rice with sufficient force to stop me performing (they didn't in the end, but it did get pretty close). As you can see, I'm absolutely plastered with the stuff. 

A tiny bit of confetti? Don't make me laugh. Frankly, from everything I hear about Georgie 'Porgie' Osborne lately, he wants to be thankful he didn't get hit with something much stronger than novelty wedding favors. I mean, I would have turned up with a brick before I read this Thursday's Popbitch...