Little Black Heart

The gargoyles above the entrance looked down and laughed at me as I left the building, my mind addled by the cocktail of thoughts: obsession and despair, and a black cloud of persistent ghosts. If the gargoyles really cared they would have remembered me and my ghosts, if they really cared they might have offered me some advice:
‘Heart of stone mate, don’t let them get to you.’ or ‘Hard men don’t crumble under the pressure – take it on the chin and come out swinging’
But they didn’t care – it’s a wonder they saw me at all – they didn’t care, and I wouldn’t have taken their advice anyway.
They looked down at this soft fleshy man and his ghostly companions and laughed. Laughed at the weakness of his mind and at the power that his body held over that mind. They laughed, then stopped laughing for fear of cracking their ancient sides. Then they forgot; after all, a few hundred years of watching makes it difficult to remain entertained by the short-sighted antics of humanity; his petty squabbles and self gratifying edifices of glass and steel; his blood letting and chest beating antics; his shallow technical prophets and deep greedy pockets; his pride and stupidity.
Gods in their own right, the gargoyles returned to the timeline of stone, each watching the moss grow green on the other’s cold shoulders.

Profane Thoughts

Imagine a world where certain words were so powerful as to condemn a man to eternal torture.
Imagine a world where religious ideology was enforced without morality.
Imagine a world where the many were dictated to by the few, where you dare not see that the emperor was naked.
Imagine a world capable of, but unwilling to feed all of its inhabitants.
Imagine a world where contentment could only be attainable through the pursuit of wealth.
Imagine a world where success and status could only be measured by wealth.
Imagine a world where it’s okay to steal from the poor and give to the rich.
Imagine a world where you could be thankful for being able to work three jobs to feed your children.
Imagine a world where we fed our children ignorance.
Imagine a world where our children became killers and we applauded them for it.
Imagine a world where to speak plainly was to be misunderstood.
Imagine a world where words could be twisted to become something other of their original meaning.
Imagine a world where people thought exactly what they were taught to think.
Imagine a world where you were either wrong or right; good or bad; liberal or conservative.
Imagine a world where 95% of the land was owned by 5% of the people.
Imagine a world where nobody ever had to admit responsibility for their actions.
Imagine a world where nobody ever had to apologise.
Imagine a world where justice was dealt according to socio-economic class.
Imagine a world where you couldn't believe what your mama told you.

This is How You Disappear...

To paraphrase John Lydon; This is not a pop song.

It's a strange journey indeed: Scott Engel (Walker) travels from being one third of vocal greatness and middle of the road trio the Walker Brothers in the mid-sixties; via deep flirtation with the songs of Jacques Brel, warned off recording his own songs after Scott 4 to this – an atmospheric and poetic masterpiece; something to stand out there on its own; a singularity.
The Walker Brothers white soul was the sort of stuff your mother would find acceptable, and might even hum along to. Make It Easy on Yourself. Fantastic voices to be sure, but only pop music in the end.
Putting aside his covers of many Brel's songs (great voice, but primarily great because these are Brel songs) Engel's solo career as Scott Walker goes off into dark and sketchily charted territory, he takes his beautiful voice, rich as polished wood; on great heart-and-mind wrenching forays into fear and loathing; drama and the theatre of melancholia - from re-telling The Seventh Seal to heartbreaking Plastic Palace People.
But it's all a bit forced, a bit self-conscious; a thoughtful man struggling to find his voice.

In 1984 he deals Climate of Hunter from the bottom of the deck.

Ironically this is probably his lowest selling album, but since when was that a measure of greatness? Climate of Hunter drives a scalpel into tissue so deep and haunting as to raise the hair on the back of your neck. Indescribable songpoems with spiralling soundtracks littered with erratic cowbells and expanding cruscendoes that lead ever inward to a place where words take on a deeper reality.

From the host of latecomers
a miracle enters the street
shining with rain
he is shaking to wash the murder away

You don't get to this kind of destination just from watching new wave cinema or dabbling in chemical splendour. You don't make friends in the music industry (then or now) by walking this close to the abyss.

His voice is no longer what drives the music; he is detached from the content; he has disappeared, out between midnight.

A low volume force feed
lower than pity
slips across under the heart
and your hostage rewinding
from every eclipse
rolls in the voltage run-off rain on his lips

Scott Walker releases The Drift, his third album in thirty years, this month.

More detail and a rare interview with the elusive man can be found in the Independant

The Dealer's Other Hand

For the hapless adventurer and his lost administrator
For Peace activist and pro-life demonstrator
For aborted foetus and world dominator
Cowboy philosopher and the will of the creator
For you who question the morality dictator
And those who perished on the ethical equator

When you just can’t take it for one day more
When the wolf is discovered dead at your door
When the sea level rises through you polished wooden floor
And your favourite team refuses to score
When the beer runs out and you just want more
Call Psychic Detective number Seventy-four

He’ll perform Rorschach tests on the perfectly adjusted
Their DNA sampled and fingerprints dusted
Provide Psychotropic drugs to give you that edge
Anti-depressants to keep you from the ledge
Paracetamol headache and antacid retch
Follow my lead Rover, Shake hands now Fetch!

And when it’s all over he’ll send you his bill
To be paid in used notes to the charlatan’s till
You’ll piss in your Pampers no one will know
What makes you so healthy, what gives you that glow
This boat is so leaky it just can’t save your soul
The world seeps into it disappointingly cold

And your words they are warped in the media's lens
detained twisted tortured all content impends
a future much bleaker than the Far Queue pretends
leaving pages quite empty between monolithic bookends
Squid-like ink-stains swim free from old fountain pens
blurring the boundaries between the Means and the Ends

Babylon Keyboard (Reprise)

there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening
- Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message

Just to define where my head is for those who regularly read what I write here, and whose blogs I visit regularly.
I guess we are as close to friendship as is possible within this medium and that certain judgements should not be made within a friendships, please be aware therefore that none of what I’m questioning here refers to you personally. Quite the opposite.
What follows stems from:
1. reading Zatikia’s post Blogging and realising that she shares my reticence to succumb totally to the experience - sceptics both
2. the elastic comedienne’s thoughts on honesty on previous posts here, and
3.jumping from link to link and reading blogs at random

Okay, so maybe this is all ego-driven drivel… but so what? Who’s to say what is and isn’t relevant?
The way I see it: if some sorority kid from middle America can put his macho antics out there without stopping to think how facile his life is then why can’t I.
The thing is that I'm not that self-confident as to believe that anyone would be interested in the minutae of my life – who would be in the slightest bit interested in what I got up to over the weekend? (rhetorical question alert for elastic!)
I read on some woman’s blog how she had discovered she was bleeding during sex the previous night – who does she think would want to know that?
This is not a ‘Dear Diary’ situation – go tell that sort of stuff to someone who cares, somebody flesh and blood who will need to make eye contact with you; someone who really cares.
There are those with a gift of seeing the funny side of their lives - comedians - and we sure do need them; but as for the rest of us there are very few whose day-to-day life is interesting enough to entertain others.
The fact is that this medium is deeply corrupt; that it does not require you to look at another person and lie; that it does not need justification for the lie; that it doesn’t care why you lie does not mean that it cannot be used positively; to connect people.
I don’t blame the medium for what it is – it just is – but we need to understand why it is we do what we do – it is our curse and our blessing; the need to understand.
Honesty is a purely human concept; a cultural concept; a concept we have developed in order to continue satisfying relationships with one another. And yes, the expectation of honesty is a tool for those who wish to deceive.
The greatest deception however, is self-deception – to believe we are what others can clearly see we are not.

It is therefore prudent to question everything you do – which is not to say condemn everything you do – question, and in so doing avoid deceiving the only person you can truly know – yourself.

Be careful when speaking. You create the world around you with your words.
- from The Navajo

Opened the Window to Listen to the News...

...but all I heard was The Establishment Blues.

South Africa in the 70’s: The Apartheid years, as all the world knows, included the pass laws; police beatings and killings without recourse to the law; segregation; subjugation and poverty.
On the other hand for white South Africans there was a secure future, jobs for life, education, cheap domestic servants, money and superior Anglo/Aryan genes.
No cause for complaint then, who cared if we also had a one party state; conservative nationalism; enforced Calvinist morality; compulsory national service (to ward of the communist threat) and rampant censorship. (Sound familiar?)
Everything was censored; nothing was permitted: no politics, no opposition, all the good books were banned… and no sex.

For us whiteys the visible face of censorship was sex. Sex; nobody ever spoke about sex.

Naked women, as they appeared in Scope Magazine - a very tame mens' mag - were adorned with black stars that covered large proportions of exposed flesh; the last time any boy saw a nipple was when he was weaned from his mama’s breast.

"Jislike! A nakid lady!"

There was a joke put about in the ‘80s by drag-comedian and satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys that went “Tomorrow has been banned because of the crack of dawn”

So how did it happen that sometime in the early ‘70s an LP emerged that contained a song with the line
I wonder/ how many times you’ve had sex
Rodriguez - Cold fact. Boy did we love that album. This American guy singing songs poetic and clever and...well...using the word SEX! It was shocking; a guilty pleasure.
Now white South Africans in general were not well known for speaking out against injustice, we were comfortable, we didn’t need subversion - bleddy hell; we didn't know there was such a thing. Here's this Jesus Rodriguez telling us the world was not so perfect; about crime and love and poverty and cynicism – shit we didn’t even care to find out about what was going on in our own country (Sound familiar?)
But sex? Man, we could go for some of that. It was the hook that made us listen and love the whole album as if it were one 30 minute song. And subversive it was, by white South African standards it was way out there.

‘Mama Papa stop/treasure what you’ve got/soon you might be caught without it’
How prophetic can you get?

‘and don’t try to impress me with your manner of dress/’cos a monkey in silk is a monkey no less’

Rodriguez became an underground legend in South Africa.

Thanks to the efforts of a couple of fans in the late ‘90s, he was rediscovered, to his great surprise, while working as a construction site labourer in Detroit.

Here are a couple of articles that give all the details:

Bizarre is a word for it by Rian Malan 06.10.2005

The singer who came back from the dead from the Guardian 07.10.2005

Get yourself a copy of Cold Fact, you won't regret it.

A forbidden word, when spoken aloud, may open a door in the mind

Changeling

Malaise – it’s an interesting word, a sort of mix between madness and corn.
So I find myself watching somebody else’s stupid life on realityvee; my spine almost horizontal on the too-soft couch. I hate watching this crap; I don’t care about these stupid people; but I can’t move; I can’t be bothered.

Everybody hates change. The prospect of change - moving house, changing jobs, moving on - it scares the shit out of us. Change brings with it – free of charge – the fear of the unknown; the future. The future is to be avoided at all costs.

Who the hell wants to deal with the future? The fear of change is also the fear of time.
Best crawl back into the brightest corner of the cave and try and have a laugh.

And yet – for those who do not shy away at this point (or for those who shy away only to return) change is the only true measure of life and of a life lived.

Children endure change unwillingly but far more easily. It is safe to say that their lives are in constant flux – it constitutes the sum total of their lives.
Growing up is, in many ways, a reaction, an attempt to stop the change.

So I reach the age of twenty five and believe I’m a complete person with fully formed views. Like cycling to the station and not catching the train, but huddling in the warmth of the waiting room and reading the timetables.

And descending from the train’s creaking carcass come the travellers, in their manner a sense of something more; something left behind – loss and deliverance. They have not stood still, they have overcome the fear of change – as my father never said to me “hardship builds character”

So, twenty years later, I’m a complete person right? I took the train; hopped a flight and bit the bullet. I’ve changed; I’m still the same. Change is a natural process made unnatural by man’s ability to see his ultimate destination. Resist if you will, but don’t you want to know “What’s new?”

Embrace the changes with care; feed and water them with thought or impulse; make it happen. Ride the discomfort, the upheaval, it is only a short interval before life catches up and you begin to reap the change for all that is new, feed on it’s knowledge, and digest the experience.

And what will change bring you? Who knows? But it will bring you something other than malaise.

What's in the Box?

Pandora (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1869)

What possesses us to willingly climb into the box? No questions asked, I am what I am, and I’m proud of that. This is me; take it of leave it.
Why is the box so easy to get into? Who carved this niche in which I wedge myself?
Why is the box so comfortable?
You know the box I mean…

• the box full of all the letters from A+ to F that sits besides the teacher’s desk
• the box that causes your mates to look cool as they slide down the grassy bank, cigarette in hand, yelling “Geronimo!”
• the box where we keep the words that clutter our language, with ums and likes and fucks and cools
• the box from which we pluck phrases like ‘political correctness gone mad’ and ‘I don’t know anything about Art but I know what I like’ and ‘hairy legged lesbians’; ‘homosekswals’; ‘ADHD’; ‘conflict of civilisations’
• the box that defines us as: Trouble; gifted; liberal; gay; conservative; upright; deep; shallow; goth; punk rocker; new age peacenik; old-age pensioner; good guy; bad guy; dope head; pisshead; get-ahead go getter; man-in-the street; woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown; conformist; anarchist; Marxist-Leninist; Capitalista!
• the box full of products that offer us whiter that white; clean green fuel; black magic, blue movies, pink Cadillacs and yellow ribbons round the old oak tree
• the box of polished black wood with brass handles (if you’ve sold enough whiter than white soul) or rough pine (if you lost it all on a spin of the wheel); that perhaps will be stained with the tears of your lovely spouse and grieving children.

The box whose cardboard flaps insulate us from the world outside and limit the view.
Is this the best I can do, to stand on mine and call it a soapbox?

View from The Treetops (8 May '06)

Nur al-Cubicle's excellent post The Insanity of Military Action Against Iran for a level-headed look at the issues.
(Translated by Nur al-Cubicle from 'Dissuading Iran', by Jean-François Bayart in LE MONDE 02.05.06)



Three views of the events in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico 03.05.06:
1. from the BBC
2. from ZNet
3. and finally, Fox News



R.I.P. Grant McLennan Go-Betweens singer/songwriter.

Hope's Thin Raft

Dick dozes while democracy burns

I would like to believe this is the turning of the tide
The jester's remarks had them boiling inside
While the troubador's songs leave no room for doubt
The king has to go - they do want him out

And those armies of soldiers who’re once more betrayed
By foul leaders who sent them away for the killing
Have lost all their innocence on propaganda made
Now its anger and brutality in the blood that they’re spilling

Torture, confusion, fear and chemical psychosis
Hard rocking the soundtrack to morality’s demise
As these boys pull the trigger and fuck the prognosis
Leave them there fighting and feed them with lies

And from patriots conditioned come howls of betrayal
Blind to the fact that party politics died
With acts of deception, distortion, black ops and blackmail
At the calculated moment when they consciously lied

And led the world off on a date with the void - dark and cold
A world made crude by apocalyptic extremists
On both sides of the coin cast in fools black gold
they corral us into a future ever bleaker and dreamless

C'mon America give me hope

Reality Czech

"People will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds. "
-Frank Zappa 1940-1993



"Frank Zappa was one of the gods of the Czech underground, I thought of him as a friend. Whenever I feel like escaping from the world of the Presidency, I think of him."
-Václav Havel, playwright and President, Czechoslovakia

Havel became president after the 1989 'Velvet Revolution' which saw the end of communism in Czechoslovakia.
Before the revolution Zappa's music, along with that of the Velvet Underground, was blacklisted. Seen to represent freedom and independent thinking, Zappa became a hero for many in Czechoslovakia.
After meeting with him, Havel appointed Zappa "Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture and Tourism".



"Czechoslovakia can either do business with the United States or it could do business with Frank Zappa."
-James Baker, US Secretary of State, 1990

At a time when Czechoslovakia was applying for aid from the US government, James Baker served his revenge cold.
Back in 1985 Zappa had called Susan Baker; Tipper Gore and others "a group of bored Washington housewives" during a Senate Committee hearing in Washington DC regarding censorship of rock music.



"Whom the gods notice they destroy"
Philip K. Dick 1928-1982

Babylon Keyboard

Divided we stand
And together we fall
- Thievery Corporation: The Richest Man in Babylon

Babylon: polite, funny, angry, arrogant or insane - we’re all talking to ourselves, or at least seeking gratification in having someone read our thoughts.
But are the people behind our clever titles and witty pseudonyms real?
Millions of caged minds itching to be free of the mundane drudgery of modern life.
Millions of frustrated Shamen, Sangomas and story-tellers spewing their magic or drivel into the wires, throwing their bones in the hope that somebody will answer the calling chant.
The irony is that the social interaction that takes place is hollow – the face we present to the world is a mask, even more impenetrable than the mask we present in face-to-face interaction at work or in the street. While this cyber-social interaction seems easier (given the time we have to present our responses and structure our sentences) ultimately it is empty. For while or anonymity should allow us to present some deeper self to the world, it fact it allows us greater scope for self-deception.
By the same token, (and again ironically) the capacity to hurt, or be hurt, is exponentially greater, given this mask of anonymity and the absence of physical restraint.
And so it is that we end up consumed by what we will say next, dredging ever deeper for content that will fulfil our need for self gratification.
Each too busy listening to our own cleverness to really hear (let alone care) what is going on out there.
It is social interaction without an umbilical to honesty; all meat and no substance.
It is mental activity without social restraint; all substance and no meat.
Babylon.