Happy 90th Birthday Jack Kerouac.

' the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirious of everything at the same time the one's wo never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars in the middle you see the bluecenter light pop and everything goes Awww!'
- Jack Kerouac.

Today is the birthday of visionary, iconclastic writer and poet, Jack Kerouac. The shaman of the Beat Generation . Born 12/3/22 of a French-Canadian family in the factory town of Lowel, Mass, U.S.A.
Variously called the Beat Generations apostle, poet, hero, laureate, saint?  Through his own life story he created  a work of fiction .Soared so high, that in the end unfortunately found his own human skin, then found himself out of his depth in bottled delusion, where the burning ship had become his own.
In his life, he had been part of a culture and people , who burned like meteors.  Jack Kerouac was the Beat Generations very own mythologiser, he and his band of brothers helped  redeem a bit of America's soul. His legacy, like that of the Beat Culture, still alive, still relevant, still taking root.
Along with his friends, Corso, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Ferllinghetti etc, he paved a way for a whole host of dreamers searching for risk, some form of adventure. Colouring our worlds with their crazy visions, their minds in revolt, searching for future's possibilities. Hand in hand with rebellion, against the conventions of the times.
Jack Kerouac in his eighteen books  and many others under Jack's influence were to me important epiphanies on my own path of self discovery. He taught me about "Spontaneous prose." - writing without revising....... He called this " a spontaneous bop prosody."  which is a bit like a jazz musician taking an improvised solo, and taking it as far as he could go, no editing , no pause of breath. Sometimes what is left, has no meaning, a void, but often their is a glimmer, that spells hope, that can become endless, can run off the page, infinite but accessible.
On my bookshelf at home Keroucs influence groans on my bookcases, his own works, sharing spaces with others , that were touched by his inspiration.
Their is something about his tragic, magic life that still resonates, hums, their will always be new connections, outhouses where seeds will forever drift. New poets will emerge, try to experience, the whole wide world, and words will dance, impulsively between time, forever and forever. Some might go out to the garden and pick lunch. Enthusiasims will be shared, thougyhs will be exchanged, and for some the personal will always be political. Passion will ignite. Jack was not immortal, though for me his words are, he left this planet on October 21 1969,  47 years , his  search for inner  lamentation cut tragically short. Still yearning for his mother, but lost in a catholic guilt, that had always consumed him. Stuck in  sad exile, his  mystical breath had grown tired , what was once beautiful  had begun to  drift towards bitterness.
So happy birthday Jack.....your impact continues to be felt....satori breath ... om  switchin on.... tomorrow's dawns chorus echoes, anethetizing the sky.... sentences littered with wild perception, language as  a spell that  leaves us forever hooked. In human existence our contradictions will abound, freeze framed, on the road to nowhere. Kicks joy darkness.

William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, 1953

Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Kerouac,

Greeenwich Village, 1957.

Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen show 1958.

A freewheeling Kerouac

interviewed by Fernando Pirano

  

Kerouac : The movie (1985)

Their are numerous pages  and books devoted to Kerouac and the Beats , if you look you will find what your looking for, the searching is part of the journey.Here's a wikilink, better than nothing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_kerouac
and some  of his poetry

POOR SOTTISH KEROUAC

Poor sottish Kerouac with his thumb in his eye
Getting interested in literature again
Through a mote of dust just flew by

How should I know that the dead were born?
Does Master cry?

   The weeds Ophelia wound with
    and Chatterton measured in the moon
     are the weeds of Goethe, Wang Wei,
      and the Golden Courtesans

Imagining recommending a prefecture
       for a man in the madhouse
                      rain
Sleep well, my angel
Make some eggs
The house in the moor
The house is a monument
In the moor of the grave
        Whatever that means
The white dove descended in disguise?

WOMAN

      A woman is beautiful
       but
          you have to swing
          and swing and swing
          and swing like
          a hankerchief in the
                                       wind

149th Chorus

I keep falling  in love
with my mother
I dont want to hurt her
=Of all people to hurt

Every time I see her
she's grown older
But her uniform always
amazes me
For its Dutch simplicity
And the Doll she is.
The doll-like way
she stands
Bowlegged in my dreams,
Waiting to serve me

And I am only an Apache
Smoking Hashi
In old Cabashy
By the Lamp

2111th Chorus

The wheel of the quivering meat
conception
Turns in the Void expelling human beings,
Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits,
Mice, Lice, Lizards, rats, roan
Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics,
Horrible unnameable lice of vultures
Murderous attacking dog-armies
Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the jungle
Vast boars and huge gigantic bull
Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,
Pones and Porcupines and Pills-
All the endless conception of living
beings
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in and out,
From supermicroscopic no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one mind


AND THEN THEY GOT HIM

The Oil of the Olive
Bittersweet taffies
Bittersweet cabbage
Cabbage soup made right
A hunk a grass
In a big barrel
Stunk but Good

163rd Chorus

Left the Tombs to go
  and look at the
  Millions of cut glass-
-a guy clocking them,
as you look you sawllow,
you get so fat
you can't leave the building
-stand straight,
don't tip over, breathe
in such a way yr fatness
deflates, go back to
               the Tombs,
ride the elevator-
             he tips over again'
gazes on the Lights,
eats them, is clocked,
    gets so fat
    he can leave elevator,
has to stand straight
and breathe out the fat -
-hurry back to the Tombs

242nd Chorus

The sound in your mind
   is the first sound
      that you could sing

If you were singing
   at a cash register
       with nothing on yr mind-

But when that grim reper
   comes to lay you
       look out my lady

He will steal all you got
   while you dingle with the dangle
   and having robbed you

Vanish
     Which will be your best reward,
     T'were better to get rid o
     John O'Twill, then sit a mortying
     In this Half Eternity with nobody
    To save the old man being hanged
    In my closet for nothing
    And everybody watches
    When the act is done-

Stop the murder and the suicide!
   All's well!
      I am the Guard

Ivor Cutler (15/01/23 - 31/03/06) - What? / Alone.

What?

Where man has not been
to give
them names
objects
on desert islands
do not
know what they are.
Taking no chances
they stand still
and wait
quietly excited
for hundreds
of
thousands of
years.

Alone

If
you are mortar
it is
hard
to feel well-disposed
towards
the
two bricks
you are squashed
between
or
even
a sense of
community.
                                 Ivor Cutler's kitchen domain.
                                

Poems reprinted from
A Flat Man
Trigram Press
1977.

And those who were dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music - Nietzche

If You Repeat A Lie Often Enough, It Becomes Politics.

               'in a world which really is topsy-turvey, - the true is moment of the false.'
               
               - Guy Debord

International Women's Day - Bread & Roses remake by Queen Cee

Bread and Roses - James Oppenheim.

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for - but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more drudge and idler - ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses.

The above poem written by James Mc Millan was written to celebrate the movement for women's rights and was first published in American Magazine in 1911, and is closely associated with the Lawrence Textile mill strike of 1911, where the above picture was taken.
During this strike, which was in protest of a reduction in pay,  under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World  ( The Wobblies) and led primarily by the women workforce, the women mill workers carried signs that quoted the poem, reading 'we want bread and roses too.'
It has since become an anthem for labor rights, and especially the rights of working women, across the globe. 

Marya Mannes (14/11/04 - 13/09/90) - (extract from) Out of My Time.

American writer and lecturer

' . . .  life demands that the duality in men and women be freed to function, released from hate or guilt. All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion; subjection excludes mutality.
Only through this duality in each can a man and a woman have empathy for each other. The best lovers are men who can imagine and even feel the specific pleasures of women; women who know the passions and vulnerabilities of the penis - triumphant or tender - in themselves.
Without empathy, men and women, husbands and wives, become tools of each other: competitors, rivals, master and slave, buyer and seller. In this war the aggressions of the wholly ' feminine' woman are just as destructive (mostly to the male) as the aggressions of the wholly 'masculine' man.
For centuries the need to prove this image of masculanity has lain at the root of death: the  killing of self and others in the wars of competition and conquest; the perversion of humanity itself.
We need each other's qualities if we are to understand each other in love amnd life. The beautiful difference of our biological selves will not diminish through this mutual fusion. It should indeed flower, expand; blow the mind as well as the flesh. When women can cherish the vulnerability of men as much as men can exult in the strength of women, anew breed could lift a ruinous yoke from both. We could both breathe free.

Reprinted from ' Out of my Time'

Victor Gollanz Ltd and David J. Blow.

Happy International Women's Day.

March of the Mad Hares .

Well spring is well and tuly in the air, time when certain senses awake, the season too of our 'mad march hares'..... boxing, prancing, dancing, having it large. The female of this species is superfecund at the moment, so the males get a bit frustrated, and tend to bounce around the female erratically, its  the ritual of fertility,   and of course desire is in the air, but  for the lady, when she stands on her hind legs - no means no. To us humans they can seem to look crazy, demented. No madder than your average human being though.

Witnessed by those that walk the veil. Long have they been seen as mysterious and sacred to us, for some messengers of the underworld, they come and go as they please.And long have they been invested with mystical property, I for one find them enchanting.The hare in mythology crops up, time and again across the globe.
It is perceived to be solitude and remote.They're mostly silent. seen as the last light fades from the day. and enjoy the darkness.Active at night, a symbol of the intuitive, and fickleness of the moon, an unpredictable creature. It is seen as sacred to the White Goddess/mother earth.

The constellation Lepus was named for the latin word for hare. It's located below the constellation Orion,which was named for the hunter in Greek mythology.Orion has often been depicted  pursuing Lepus with his hunting dogs Canis Minor and Canis  Major.

The hare was originally linked to the ancient Germanic Goddess Oestara (oestrous cycle) or Eostore (Easter) who was said to rule over spring and the dawn. Oestara, who brought on spring late one year as she was nursing a dying bird back to life by changing it into a hare. Thereafter the hare was revered as a magical shapeshifter.

Celtic myths often told of shapeshifting hares. The great warrior, Oisin was said to have wounded a hare in the leg while out hunting ne day. The hare fled into the undergrowth and Oisin followed only to find a woman inside with a cut to her leg.

The hare was also regarded as the solitary keeper of ancient places .with ability to guide spiritual transmigration upon death. Wherever hares roam the Sidge are close by.

In Saxon times there was a cult of the hare and then christianity came along and suppressed this cult and the hare totemic values were  replaced with the safer images of the easter bunny and the easter egg.

Hares that were seen to be acting oddly were also thought to be shape-shifting witches or 'were-hares.'
It was also said that if one crossed your path, it was seen as a warning of imminent danger. Sailors apparently , thought of them as unlucky, but for others a hare's foot was seen as a symbol of luck, but I wouldnt recommend hunting them for any purpose, long may we have them around.
Can dissapear quite quickly, here one minute, gone the next. Swift and nimble, at full speed can get up to 40 miles per hour.They tend to come out around dusk, graze and play all night, and go to bed about dawn. Because of their shyness, don't like to attract to much attention, but if you catch a glance a beautiful sight to behold. They live in a small depression in the ground called a 'form' above the earth, and will often be found in open fields.
 Who knows  could be at a tea party somewhere or if you look out this week, you might  be lucky enough to see one or two , leaping over the moon.

Leaping Hare - Ian MacCulloch
http://www.hayrackgallery.co.uk/catalogue/default.php?product_Artist_ID=26

' The common sort of people suppose that hares are one year male and one year female. . . .
yet hunters object that there be some which are only females and no more, but no male that is not also a female, and so they make him an hermaphrodite.' -

- Edward Topsell , History of Four-footed Beasts 1607.




March of the Mad Hares represents the art of Professor Ralph Skelton, done in the printmaking process called, intagilo. His animal images represent the individual cages in which humans hide and the surreal landscapes that exist within each individual.

Link to Hare Preservtion Trust.
http://www.hare-preservation-trust.co.uk/

Protect threatened Hares Petition.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/protect-threatened-hares-in-the-uk/

No Way Through

Imagine if London was controlled by the military and you had to go through specific checkpoints to go to school, go to work, visit your friends, or got to hospital.
This award winning seven minute video, brings the shocking reality of Palestinian life in the West Bank uncomfortably close to home.

.

Davey Jones (30/12/45 - 29/02/12) R.I.P

Bit late with this one. Found out yesterday Mr Jones had passed away from a heart attack. He always struck me as forever young. With his good looks and British charm, this Manchester born singer/actor starred in the seminal series The Monkees. Between 1966 and 1970 the Monkees released 9 records. I've got a few on vinyl, very crackly , that's how often I've dug them out.
I used to watch their zany, knockabout antics a lot in their T.V show the monkees, when I was younger. They should put them back on the box. As for their head trip movie Head , wow...... well worth checking out. Far out.
For me Davey Jones was always the groovy one. Hey hey......always monkeying around...... Mr Jones R.I.P. I'm still a believer.

As reported in the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/feb/29/davy-jones-monkees-dies-66?newsfeed=true

The Monkees - Last Train to Clarkesville.

The Monkees - I'm a believer

The Monkees - Steppin Stone

The Monkees - Porpoise Song ( from HEAD)

You Can't Evict an idea.

So after over 4 months protestors have been removed and evicted from outside St Pauls Cathedral.

The right wing press would like us to think, that this the end of the story, dissent has been overcome, the people will simply dissapear.
A coordinated attempt to suppress a movement that has delivered a clear consise message, that the system t is corrupt, and the people were  sick and tired of it . The occupy movement here in Britan and across the globe has raised public awareness of corporate greed and the need for economic accountability. The message of a  need for social fairness  and the redistribution of wealth has been clearly delivered, loud and clear.
This symbol of opposition to what is now seen by many as runaway capitalist greed has been shut down, for now at least, but evicting ideas is not exactly the best way to express the powers of a political democracy.
When people come together and question the system, authorities tremble at the solidarity shown..Especially at a time when the government suffers a surge in public unpopularity.  Lets also not overlook the fact that RBS chief executive Stepen Hester's million pound bonus and it's eventual with it's eventual withdrawal, along with  his predescessor, Mr Goodwins knighthood all played out against the background of occupy.| Especially at a time when the government suffers from a surge in public unpopularity.
Protests against corporate greed and social inequality will continue, the people of the occupy movement, like wild seeds will keep spreading. By springtime, these seeds will continue to grow, spreading like it did before, moving forwards, getting stronger and stronger. 
However much they try, you simply can't kill or evict an idea, especially  when the message happens to be a populist one.

Occupy London Eviction: Tents Being Removed From St Paul's Cathedral.