Cecil Collins (23/4/01- 4/6/89) - Fool and Flower

Fool & Flower
(1944)
Private collection

Some whimsy, why not.  Cecil Collins  an artist of transcendent imagination, was born in Plymouth , he became influenced by the Surrealist Movement, he had two paintings exhibited at the Surrealist Exhibition in 1936.He had won a schorship at 15 to the Plymouth School of Art from 1923 -1927 and then onto the Royal College of Art until 1931. He fell in love with a Elizabeth Ramsden  a fellow student who inspired him to create a series of visionary paintings celebrating her beauty.
He departed with surrealism  however and subsequently he said:" I turned my back on it and went into the country and started to think..... and meditate on what I wanted to do."  And this is what most of his subsequent work were about,  they were both  meditative and gentle.
In this picture a fool reaches out to a single flower to a backdrop of an empty sky. A sense of wonder occurs, a moment in time suspended, the earth reaching back , a symbol of unity, a balancing act. The present or the future perhaps offering possibilities providing a link between what is visible and under the ground the roots, that we cannot see. An image of ceremony, an image of ritual beyond mere materialism, a touch of Zenarchy.Connecting us to an aesthetic window. Sometimes what binds us is both outside and in.

More on Cecil Collins here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Collins



( For Ervine

space bard

r.i.p )
.

Thanksgiving: A Native American View

Today at a time of poverty, recession, unemployment, occupation and discontentment, a little revisit to the less than benevolent beginnings of the good old  U.S.A.Thanksgiving day a whitewashing of genocide, colonialism and racism is celebrated. Hey ho.
To any American visitors of this blog hope your fox New relatives try not to season too much of  their thanksgiving dinner with to much pepper spray and I thank goodness I'm not a turkey.





More  info
here

http://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/

John Trudell - The voices said.

The Workers: Let's Work Together

The workers are a group of 14 public service staff from around the country, who have come together to record the classic song ' Let's work Together ' .Please help get some solidarity in the charts on the day of action on November 30th, by watching the video, buying the song, and spreading the word. On November the 30th millions of workers across the country will be taking action in support of a fair deal on public service pensions. Up the workers, even though I don't at moment, solidarity is the keyword word. Always thought music and politics make healthy bedfellows, depending I guess on which side. Yes charts are rigged, like the economy is rigged, just like banking is rigged, the system and the government used against the interests of the whole, so we have to try out different methods.Power concedes nothing without a demand.

More info on single and campaign
here.

http://action.goingtowork.org.uk/page/share/the-workers

 to download

 http://www.theworkers.org.uk/download-the-single/

Edward Thomas (3/3/1878 - 3/4/17) - November

November's' days are thirty:
November's earth is dirty,
Those thirty days, from first to last;
And the prettiest things on grounds are the paths
With morning and evening hobnails dinted,
With foot and wing-tip overprinted
Or seperately charactered,
Of little beast and little bird.
The fields are mashed by sheep, the roads
Make the worst going, the best the woods
Where dead leaves upwards and downward scatter.
Few care for the mixture of earth and water,
Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,
Straw, feather, all that men scorn,
Pounded up and sodden by flood,
Condemned as mud.

But of all the months when earth is greener
Not one has clean skies that are cleaner.
Clean and clear and sweet and cold,
They shine above the earth so old,
While the after-tempest cloud
Sails over in silence though winds are loud,
Till the full moon in the east
Looks at the planet in the west
And earth os silent as it is black,
Yet not unhappy for its lack.
Up from the dirty  earth men stare:
One imagines a refuge there
Above the mud, in the pure bright
Of the cloudless heavenly light:
Another loves earth and November more dearly
Because without them, he sees clearly
The sky would be nothing more to his eye
Than he, in any case, is to the sky:
He loves even the mud whose dyes
Renounce all brightness to the skies.

Jackie Leven ( 18/6/50 - 14/11/11) Spiritual Soul Warrior R.I.P

It is with great sadness that I found out that the great Jackie Leven had passed away. I feel numb and will try to explain in a bit. I knew the man had been ill,suffering from cancer but thought he'd get through it, like he had got past many other demons.
An idiosyncratic outsider with a magical voice, a poet who saw the world through his rich different eyes, he sang songs fron the heart of lifes deep experiences. If you have never heard of him his songs typically described hard drinking loners and often their lost lovers, with a rich deep resonant voice that used to soothe me, when I too was lost, like a dark chocolate laced with something bad.
His was a wild Scottish spirit redolant of a fire within. Never fashionable or cool but that did not stop him being admired by many.Born to Gypsy Blood in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland with a London Irish father and a Northumbriam mother. A loner in childhood, he led a life of an intinerent wanderer. He found his way to London by the mid 70s forming the band Doll by Doll whose records had a certain rawness but ones I still reach out too.

Doll by Doll - Main Travelled Roads

By 1982, they'd split and in 1983 he was nearly murdered by a group of strangers severely damaging his larynx and unable to play guitar or sing. He sank into a despondent place , cutting himself adrift, finding heroin and alcohol , and so perhaps it might have ended. But he reemerged stonger founding the CORE trust which helped fellow addicts. His songs have rescued me from many a dark hour, soothed me with their raw tenderness. His work took on a soulful, spritual intensity, redemptive , haunted,becomming prolific in his journey, releasing for me a series of staggering dazzling solo records, full of tragedy, but resonating with warmth that somehow I connected to. Other friends of mine, never quite got him, but that did not matter, his records became like certain books, ones to treasure. Live I was lucky to catch him twice he dislayed his honesty, mixed with humour and candour.Always a brooding intensity, you got what you got, what must of us wanted, never an encore and never fake.
Tonight on the way home from the library I'll raise a small miniature bottle of whiskey to the night air. A True original voice has been lost, but some of us will continue to remember him.Such beautiful music, burning vision. Goodnight Jackie, R.I.P


Jackie Leven- Hidden World of She

Jackie Leven- Call Mother a Lonely Field

Jackie Leven - Revenge of Memory

Jackie Levem -  I Say a little Prayer

http://www.coretrust.co.uk/

http://www.jackieleven.co.uk/

Rejected Crumb !

A lot of posts on the net on this subject already, but what the eck.
Famed Cartoonist and someone else whose work I admire, ( don't really do hero's , not enough room in my head) has had a proposed cover for the New Yorker rejected.  They commissioned him, back in 2009 to  do them a cover on the subject of 'gay marriage', so he drew them this. They subsequently rejected it but gave Mr Crumb no reason. The story would possibly have gathered no moss had it not been unearthed at the VeniceArt Biennale recently.
What possible reasons did the magazine come to this descision? It's fairly common knowledge  that Robert Crumb is  known for pushing the boundaries a bit and is not everybody's cup of tea. His work has been attached to the 'underground' and the words 'cult artist' have often been bandied about, so his appeal was never one for the mainstream, what with his repetative style and his obsession with an exaggerated sense of the female form. He has a rather twisted way of looking at certain things. Another possible reason is that the New Yorker is majorly concerned with political correctness, and they must have suddenly realised this work might upset some of their friends, nevermind the artist in question, who has stated he will never work for them again. I for one don't know how it could offend anyone who appreciates  Crumb's  work, it is  kind of to be expected, this one for instance, after all  seems to have been done in all the best possible ( Crumb) taste. If the New Yorker doesn't want it, I would be happy enough to put it up on my living room wall, where it would be lovingly appreciated , I don't suppose it will bother him too much though, he will continue to illustrate the world as he sees it and I believe it's simply too late in the day for his fixations to simply dissapear, and despite criticisms will remain, one of the most important and influential graphic artists of  contemporary America.

More on this story below

http://www.vice.com/read/the-gayest-story-ever-told-0000048-v18n11

Crumb by Crumb

Palestinian Freedom Riders and Wales Residual waste.

50 years ago the US Freedom riders staged mixed-race bus rides through the roads of the segregated American South, Palestinian Freedom riders will be asserting their own right for liberty and dignity by disrupting the military regime of the Israeli Occupation through peaceful civil disobedience, this will take place on Tuesday 15th as all over the West Bank they will attempt to board buses that discriminate against them. They will attempt to board segregated Israeli settler publlic transport headed to occupied East Jerusalem.
Meanwhile 5 North Wales Councils are considering the notorious French company Veolia for their Residual Waste Treatment Project. Personally I think they should reconsider.
The Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR) which veolia has subsequently built in the West Bank serves the Jewish-only Israeli settlement. Remember that Britain has declared, through the UN Human Rights Council, that the JLR's operation is a breach by Israel of international law.
Veolia at the moment is trying to sell its LJR shares to a company called Egged, that seems to let Veolia of the hook and North Wales project in the clear.M'mm Egged is the same company that until January 2011 also operated gender-segregated lines, commonly called " mehadrin" buses, mainly running in and/or between major Haredi population centers. In these sex segregated buses women are expected to sit the in the back of the bus and wear so called modest dress. Sounds like gender discrimination to me, it is interesting how companies that violate international laws reappear in disgiuse so to speak. Welsh councils in a spirit of solidarity I feel should have nothing to do with either company. But sometimes transparency can get buried in the search of deals.
50 years apart 2 symbolic journeys, different locations but apartheid is apartheid , no matter where it rears its ugly head, so this week I  hope the world stands in solidarity with the modern freedom riders. An old tradition awakened .Who knows perhaps the future will let justice and freedom prevail .

http://palsolidarity.org/2011/11/palestinian-freedom-riders-to-ride-settler-buses-to-jerusalem/

Anthem for Doomed Youth - Wilfred Owen

POETIC PILGRIMAGE - NO MORE WAR

Occupy Cardiff

Democracy in action