Charlie Gillett

Musically I've always needed a DJ to guide me, and Charlie, who has just died, was perhaps the best. Although I came to him pretty late in 2001 in fact, his programmes were a touchstone of good taste and pure love of music, respect for the artists, respect for the best of the old and the most interesting of the new.

The astonishing list of tributes on his website is moving not only because of the sheer numbers of people who've taken the trouble to say something, but also for the depth of feeling, the warmth, the respect, the feeling that they had not only been inspired or entertained musically but touched by a decent human being, a good man. That is rare and very worthy of record.

http://soundoftheworld.com/

Underwater (again)

The word 'underwater' came into a poem and then suggested itself as the title for all this stuff (and nonsense) - but why?

I discovered one certain source the other day, Robert Bly's superb Iron John, one of the books I go back to again and again. Not a perfect book; the style irritates, it's a bit too slick and American, but it recasts modernity poetically and mytholgically in a way that still resonates.

Modernity/postmodernity = lack of depth (so where do we go for depth? you've guessed!) and Bly frames the thesis around the Grimm Brothers story of the Wild Man discovered underwater. A book for men quite deliberately and explicitly, yet poetically/mythologically inclined females might like it too..

Reminded me of Hopkins too -"What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,O let them be left, wildness and wet;Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."

You need to read the whole thing. Perhaps you also need to read a lot of poetry first, but here's a taste:

"...going down through water to touch the Wild Man at the bottom of the pond is quite a different matter. The being who stands up is frightening, and seems even more so now, when the corporations do so much work to produce the sanitised, hairless, shallow man. When a man welcomes his responsiveness, or what we sometimes call his internal woman, he often feels warmer, more companionable, more alive. But when he approaches what I'll call the "deep male", he feels risk. Welcoming the Hairy Man is scary and risky, and it requires a different kind of courage. Contact with Iron John requires a willingness to descend into the male psyche and accept what's dark down there, including the nourishing dark..."

And I thought too of Excalibur, a sword caught, and taken underwater. Something else I'm diving to find.

Rant

The culture has been dumbed and dumbfounded, the language has been cheapened and blunted and everybody thinks they have to be so gawdam nice. No you don't. Be true, be good, be yourself. Be brave, be splendid, be ridiculous, anything.

Using big words is more offensive to some people than using bad words. They think you're putting one over on them.

The hardest thing to deal with is the truth. Power dictates its own, the New Labour spin machine set the template and so politics and business (two sides of the same bent coin) monopolise a soundbite vocabulary trying to tell you how it is, with all their dreadful cliches and jargon, "going forward"...(erm where exactly?) (Experience teaches that we experience things more in circular and cyclical fashion anyway - there is always change, but "progress" is a tired old myth.)

We need the truth and its cognate (?), trust to keep us sane. Not in the George Washington never-tell-a-lie way (tactful white mendacity has its place) but in order to maintain relationships, advance common purposes, even do business. Decent business, not glib customer service on a first name how-are-you-today basis. (You may wish me good day and establish that our relationships starts on good-mannered terms, but how I am, to you, a complete stranger, is neither here nor there and quite beside the point. We are effecting an impersonal transaction after all, not getting to know each other.)

I have been lied to so much that some basic honesty, even when it hurts, refreshes the soul. At least I know where I stand, even if I don't like it. If I'm not wanted, well, it may hurt a bit, I may smart and sulk, regret the loss of a connection that seemed sweet and valuable. But there are others. Soon come.

"Is it wrong to want to live on your own?" sang Morrissey. Well probably, but perhaps it's necessary to maintain sanity. "I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another's", wrote Blake, who Yeats so memorably described as "beating against the wall/Till truth obeyed his call."

It is a hard option, staying true to yourself in a society full of niceness and nonsense and bloody lies, risking isolation, being misunderstood or half understood or having people think you're an eccentric fool. Make a living, make a life. Combine them? Still haven't cracked it. Or as Joni sang, "I am on a lonely road and I am travelling" Still.

Ha ha!

Know Your Enemy

The devil says sleep
The devil does not say kill or rape
The devil does not say stay awake
The devil says sleep


The devil is real
The devil does not say hurt or steal
The devil prefers the bed the meal
The devil is real


The devil is mean
The devil avoids the noise the scenes
The devil prefers the cave of dreams
The devil is mean


The devil devours
The years the months the days the hours
The devil delights in funeral flowers
The devil devours

Utopian musings

The old situationist in me refuses to lie down or go away. From one point of view it's all so much utopian nuttiness and adolescent wish fulfilment; from another it is incredibly inspiring.

Perhaps it's also a displacement of the religious urge - well of course it is, calling for nothing less than the complete and utter transformation of this fallen world.

Back in January I was musing over the 'saturnine' - limits, order, boundaries, duty. Now I think I'm just trying to regain some inspiration. Though while the art and the books and the ideas are important, life can still be somewhere else. "I might have thrown poor words away", wrote Yeats, "and been content to live"...

The Hacienda must be built...

Writing yesterday, echoing around in the back of my mind was Chtchglov's sublime 'Formulary for a New Urbanism' - there is a theme there of building a new world in the ruins of the old which I like, but also one of remaking the things and places of this world as an opportunity to experience differently....

Endlessly quotable - dear departed old Tony Wilson took the bit about the Hacineda quite literally - a brave move, even if it did end up as just another nightclub - I still find the essay quite suggestive, immensely provocative.

Read the whole thing in full at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm but chew on this for the time being:

"A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences — sewage systems, elevators, bathrooms, washing machines.
This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal — the liberation of humanity from material cares — and become an omnipresent obsessive image. Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires."

I was also reminded of Adrian Henri's mad 'Entry of Christ into Liverpool' - only remotely Christian really. It's really about that transfiguration of the everyday and the mundane and the profane - building the Hacienda, building up Jerusalem...