Wednesday, 23 April 2025

Our Revolution Will Not Be Illegalised




I am not a TV,
a CD, a TS, a TG,
a scam, a trap, a troon,
a 'huge problem for a sane world'
(though I may be a problem for you);

I am a biological woman
and my bloods will show you that's true,
but long before I got on hormones,
and long before you ruled,
I knew just who and what I was.

I knew it when I sang the words
to Jackie's Strength on my own in my room,
refusing the pull of my diaphragm,
sanctioning breath to my throat,
awake and alive and aligned with myself
in ways outside the scope of your court. 

I knew it in moments of pushing my body
so hard I could throw it aside: knew
when other girls threw me, knew in the honesty
miles forced upon me, the oneness I felt
with the play of a sword, and in dancing,
and dancing, and dancing, and dancing,

I knew it in the way I felt suits fit me,
knew it on my wedding day
when we both joked that I looked like a lesbian, 
knew it in the things we did for years before our marriage;
knew when my first girlfriend held my hands
in her much bigger hands;
knew on my back in a dozen beds where
other bodies helped mine understand.

What I know that I am remains constant
whatever the laws of this land
which beggars itself for the bucks of rich bigots,
where a judge, as a boon to his neighbour the litigant,
can make thousands of people no longer legitimate
with one lazy stroke of his doddering hand
- an absolute bargain for seventy grand,

but meaningless. I've always known what I am
and no bent court can change that. I'm not a KC,
I'm something more worthwhile, that I fought to be,
and I assure you that silk looks much better on me:
an all-natural trans woman, already free. 

Friday, 18 April 2025

A Post about Daredevil

 


If Matt Murdock is serious about getting New York back from the Kingpin, he is going to have to start acting a lot more like Frank Castle. 

Because you cannot run a successful insurgency and respect the rule of law. The goal of an insurgency is not to knock out perps and leave them tied-up for the cops with a cheeky note from your friendly neighbourhood vigilante. The goal of an insurgency is to kill the fucking cops. 

The goal of an insurgency is to bleed the enemy, to impose a cost on them in terms of loss of manpower, loss of resources, and loss of civilian morale which destroys their will to continue. If you want to conduct a successful insurgency, you have to start thinking like a terrorist, and using the tactics of the terrorist. 

Insurgency is not getting in the ring and duking it out mano e mano. It's sneaking up on the enemy and slitting their throats. It's seducing troops, getting them drunk, and taking them to the woods where your buddies can shoot them. It's poisoning food. It's sniping. It's planting IEDs. 

It is, in every way, about punishing the occupying force. Of course Frank would be better at it. Hell, we see that in the post-credits scene. 



This is, of course, just a post about a superhero show. 

Spy Wednesday (video)


 

Thursday, 17 April 2025

Spy Wednesday

 


Spy Wednesday

Judas wears a three-piece suit
cut like post-Tin Machine Bowie
and curates her socials:

shares a poster for a gig,
a time-lapse of her signing,
some positive quotes;

but says nothing to antagonize 
The Guardian. After all, 
she has work to promote,

and it took so much
to get them on-side.
No sense in risking that now. 

There’s no profit
in broadcasting virtue.
In posting a pink and blue flag.

Solidarity lived in the old world.
They don’t give out prizes for that.
Play this right and she might win the Orwell:

Why risk that by rocking the boat?
So she chases two Nexium with Chivas Regal
and worries the knot at her throat.



Run Like A Rumour

 Been working on stuff in response to the disgraceful ruling yesterday by our illegitimate so-called Supreme Court. This sound piece, Run Like A Rumour, is my first. It's based on a text by John Berger and features music I cooked up while Endlesss was still a thing. 



Wednesday, 16 April 2025

Selections from the Zibaldone

 


My brother and his wife bought me a cute notebook for Christmas this year, and I've been using it as a kind of zibaldone since. So I've decided that, during weeks when I don't have the time or the energy (and this week, incapacitated as I am by what is either 'flu or covid, it's the latter) to do an original entry, it might be worth putting together a few quotations therefrom. So here are a few, in no particular order, interspersed with my sketches from the same notebook.


'Abuse is not sanctified by its duration or abundancy; it must remain susceptible to question and challenge, no matter how long it takes.' - Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile 

'In bourgeois ideology, the idea of freedom is the freedom of all to be market actors. In bourgeois ideology, the idea of law is that it binds the propertied and the propertyless equally to their respective situations. These twin conceptions have been the basis of the reactionary idea of 'liberty', which has always been the keystone of formulated bourgeois ideology, from the 'liberty' of the Founding Fathers to own slaves to the 'liberty' of the current billionaire oligarchs to own the entire media ecosystem and to thus control the entire ideological discourse. It is this conception of 'liberty' that is being championed when people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg drivel on about absolute freedom of speech. They must have the freedom to speak over millions of others who have chosen not to be billionaires.' - Jack Graham, Bourgeois Salvations

'Bond famously has a licence to kill, which raises the question of who has the right to grant someone permission to murder. The answer, as Fleming and Bond saw it, was the British Crown. Bond's enemies also killed and destroyed, of course, but they did so without the correct paperwork and authority. This made them bad.' - John Higgs, Love and Let Die: Bond, The Beatles and the British Psyche

'Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.' - Thomas Ligotti, The Sect of the Idiot


'We always make such distinctions between those of us who are us and those of us who are tables and chairs and then some table turns up and thinks at you, criticizes you, talks to you, looks down on you. Likes you.' - Joanna Russ, We Who Are About To...

'The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?' - Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation

'The cops don't get satisfied. They get placated.' - The Limey



'...I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last.' - John Berger, Miners