Radiohead are a band I have long admired,because of their awesome inspiring music along with their social conscience,I have all their records and a poster in spare bedroom,their third album, “OK Computer” (1997), elevated the band to almost godlike status among my peers, and since then their work has been marked by an experimental streak and intelligence of spirit that has set them apart from the mainstream, and they have long been recognised as being consistently among the most vociferous proponents for a variety of causes. Radiohead’s lead vocalist, Thom Yorke, maybe best known for his
environmentalist work, but is also a very strong supporter of human rights
and anti-war causes. He has been involved in Amnesty International causes
as well as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
So I was shocked and disturbed and extremely disappointed recently to have discovered that they have reportedly signed on to give a performance
this summer in Israel. The show will come at Park Hayarkon in Tel Aviv
on July 19 and may have some political spin, as many bands have
boycotted playing in Israel in protest of the country’s occupation of Palestinian land. I would have expected more from as astute progressive politically aware band.
I have recently discovered though that Radiohead have long had a strong connection with Israel, the first place where their iconic single
Creep became a hit was Israel, and their first gig abroad was in the
Roxanne club in Tel Aviv.Guitarist Johnny Greenwood is also married to celebrated
Israeli artist named Sharona Katan and he recently released ‘Junun’, a
collaborative album with Israeli composer/singer Shye Ben Tzur and he also has a house in Nahariya .
What I'd like to say to say to Radiohead is that that we need to be breaking down walls, not
propping them up. Israel has a long history of marginalisation
persecution, imprisonment
and assassination of indigenous Palestinian artists. While they plan to
play on
an Israeli stage, Palestinian artists languish in Israel's prisons,
where they are subjected to systemic abuse and torture.Art is not separate from politics,
even when basically each artist who has broken the cultural picket line
to appear in Israel has made this claim. Look at any oppressive regime
in human history and you see that art has always been part of each
regime's publicimage.
For Israel, high profile foreign artists appearing in supposedly
'liberal' Tel Aviv (originally established as a segregated colony for
Zionist Jews only) is part of its strategies to polish its public image
abroad. Radiohead has in the past made gigs to
benefit for example Amnesty International. Now it plans to perform in
what would be a benefit show in behalf of Apartheid, ethnic cleansing
and brutal occupation.
We must help to awaken their consciences, which seem at the moment to have fallen asleep.We must continue to speak out
loudly and clearly about Israel's disgusting treatment of Palestinians,
One activist group called Artists For Palestine UK has already called on fans to boycott the show:
"Tel
Aviv's hipster vibe is a bubble on the surface of a very deep security
state that drove out half the indigenous Palestinian population in 1948
and has no intention of letting their descendants back in," they wrote.
"If you go to Tel Aviv, your presence will be used by the Israeli
authorities to reassure their citizens that all's right with the world
and nobody really cares that the Palestinians are suffering… Please
don't go."
For more than 70 years now Israel has been ethnically cleansing Palestine. with the denial of basic rights to millions of human beings combined with illegal land theft. In the eyes of international law.Apartheid is defined as "a policy or system of segregation or
discrimination on grounds of race. Or segregation on grounds other than
race. Israel both segregates and discriminates by law on the basis of religion. It is therefor by definition an "apartheid state". So playing in Israel would be akin to playing Sun City in the days of apartheid South Africa. I really hope that Radiohead respect the call for boycott and like other respected artists do not cross the Palestinian picket line. Many others after pressure from fans have been forced to have a change of heart.
In the meantime please consider signing the following petition by Jewish Voices for Peace, Radiohead Don't Play Apartheid Israel , it might make them to reconsider and come out of this with a bit of integrity.
Screaming sky releases steaming tears
as old memories return to caress,
I am lost under the heavy weight of absence
nostalgic for a beautiful scent,
a power that moves me greatly
I continue to crave her presence,
a kindness that I can no longer touch
but keeps calling me through dreams,
offering protection and so much hope
somewhere else now, I guess,
but returns though to touch me deeply
to hold me and comfort my tired old soul
Time is precious, but we can and we must continue to # ShowTheLove for all that we want to protect. Please take a minute to watch this stunning film fromThe Climate Coalition. This is a love song like you've never heard before. Watch, and share. Sharing a short film may not feel like much, but this small act makes a
huge difference. together we can protect the life we love from climate change. A
unique collaboration with Ridley Scott Associates, our powerful short
film features a specially written poem by award winning writer Anthony
Anaxagorou and is brought to life by Charles Dance, Miranda Richardson,
David Gyasi and Jason Isaacs. With a specially produced soundtrack by
Elbow, including choral arrangement by Phil Mitchell and vocals from the
Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Choir. With love in our hearts lets hope we all start to appreciate this planet of ours and its beautiful nature.
Big ups Ken Loach. BAFTA award for outstanding British film. True Hero.
Fantastic acceptance speech! It needs to be watched again and again ...big respect to him. His film that has helped expose our Governments conscious state sponsored cruelty and absolute betrayal of people in need.
Scooping the prize, the veteran filmmaker criticised the “callous
brutality” of the current Government and its attitude towards “the most
vulnerable and the poorest people.” Not done there, Loach also brought
up the government’s approach to the Syrian crisis, claiming the Tories’
disgraceful cruelty” now “extends to keeping out refugee children”.
Drawing hearty applause from the crowd, Loach also talked about the
power of film - “they can entertain, they can terrify, they can take us
to worlds of the imagination, they can make us laugh, and they can tell
us about the world we live in” – and then issued a stern warning that
worse times are to come: “in that world it’s getting darker, as we know,
and in the struggle that’s coming between the rich and the powerful,
the wealth and the privilege, and the big corporations, and the
politicians who speak to them.”
Ironically Ken Loach's speech and Bafta win for I, Daniel Blake were completely
ignored by BBC News, despite the programme following the ceremony in the
schedule.The BBC is a disgrace ,a propaganda machine for the Establishment that we suckers, are still forced to pay for.
While the eyes of the world are on Donald Trump we should not forget that the Conservatives, under the direction of Theresa May carry on with their ideolological destruction of our society , and simply carry on
regardless, with their mission of punishing the poor and those
most vulnerable, we need to continue to stand up like Ken Loach and loudly say enough is enough.
From award-winning director Phil Grabsky comes this fresh new look at
arguably the world’s favourite artist – through his own words.Whose life and work I have long admired.
This new film tells his moving story, crafted from over 2,500 letters and
featuring his most loved works of art,narrated by Henry Goodman, I, Claude Monet reveals
a new insight into the man who not only painted the picture that gave
birth to impressionism but who was perhaps the most influential and
successful painter of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Claude Monet
(November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926) was a founder of French
impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific
practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's
perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape
painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his
painting Impression, Sunrise.
After his devoted companion and first wife Camille Doncieux died he went to live with Ernest and Alice Hoschede and their six children. He grew closer to Alice, and the two eventually became
romantically involved. Ernest spent much of his time in Paris, and he
and Alice never divorced. Monet and Alice moved with their respective
children in 1883 to Giverny, a place that would serve as a source of
great inspiration for the artist and prove to be his final home. After
Ernest's death, Monet and Alice married in 1892.
In
1911, Monet became depressed again after after the death yet again of another beloved companion in this case Alice. Then in
1912, he developed cataracts in his right eye. This crushing news led to a bout of depression, and thoughts of suicide tell me about it,
that kept him from painting but ,Monet found at least solace in his garden and purpose in his
work and managed to at least somehow to overcome his grief. Over the next decade,
Monet worked on an unprecedented scale creating canvases roughly six and a half
feet high and 14 feet wide. In 1916, he built a new studio to house the
epic images of his water lilies,
and, in 1918, to honor the Armistice of the First World War, he
promised the paintings as a gift to the nation. He painted more than 40
panels for his Grandes Decorations, and, in the spring of 1925, he
selected 22 of them to be installed in two oval rooms in Musee de
l'Orangerie in Paris. He imagined the effect as being surrounded by the
natural beauty of his water garden soothing the nerves and calming the spirit.
Claude
Monet died of cancer on December 3, 1926, at the age of
86. He left instructions for a simple funeral, and the only tribute on
his coffin was a sheaf of wheat. He had created his own legacy in
painting the "restful sight of those still waters" that preserved the
experience of his long and productive life, spent pursuing the fleeting
impressions of nature through the testament of his brush.
Monet left a vast body of work to be admired and cherished.
Discover who Claude Monet really
was, in this in this revealing new biography that is in cinemas across the UK from February 21st.
"What I saw, What I heard..." is the title of an evening with Mark Williams MP on
Friday, 17th February at 7.30. - 9.30pm
in
Small World Theatre, Cardigan,
when he will be reflecting on his recent visit as part of a Parliamentary delegation to the West Bank in Israel.
He met with the British Consul, the UN and many NGOs and unofficial
organisations, saw illegal (under international law) Israeli settlements
and the separation barrier ("the Wall") and the impact of forced
evictions on Palestinian communities. He visited a refugee camp, and saw
trials of Palestinian minors at the Military Court in Ofer.
His visit made him look at things differently...
Kate Sherringer of West Wales Friends of Palestine (WWFP) who also
visited recently and saw the kindergarten canopy in Rummanah paid for by
WWFP will also say a few words. So PLEASE go along and spread the word -
the evening is open to everyone, and there will be refreshments and
time for discussion.
The evening is being hosted by Cardigan and North Pembs. Amnesty International Group.
Brendan Francis Behan was an Irish poet, short story
writer, novelist, and playwright who wrote in both English and Irish was born on February 9th 1923 at 14 Holles Street in the heart of Dublin into an educated working class family. He went on to become one of the most successful Irish dramatists of the
20th century and remains a firm literary favourite of mine.
He also happened to be a committed Irish Republican. From his earliest days, his radical politics combined with a literary flair to make him one of the great working-class storytellers. At the age of
thirteen, he left school to become a house painter, like his father Stephen Behan, who had
been active in the Irish War of Independence,who read classic literature to
the children at bedtime from diverse sources such as Zola, Galsworthy
and Maupassant.
If Brendan Behan’s interest in literature came from his
father, then his political beliefs were injected by his mother. She
remained politically active all her life, and was a personal friend of
the famed Irish republican Michael Collins, hero of Ireland’s 1919-1921 war of independence against Britain,who was assassinated. Brendan Behan wrote the following wonderful lament
to Collins: “The Laughing Boy,” at the age of thirteen.
The laughing boy - Brendan Behan
T'was on an August morning, all in the dawning hours,
I went to take the warming air, all in the Mouth of Flowers,
And there I saw a maiden, and mournful was her cry,
'Ah what will mend my broken heart, I've lost my Laughing Boy.
So strong, so wild, and brave he was, I'll mourn his loss too sore,
When thinking that I'll hear the laugh or springing step no more.
Ah, curse the times and sad the loss my heart to crucify,
That an Irish son with a rebel gun shot down my Laughing Boy.
Oh had he died by Pearse's side or in the GPO,
Killed by an English bullet from the rifle of the foe,
Or forcibly fed with Ashe lay dead in the dungeons of Mountjoy,
I'd have cried with pride for the way he died, my own dear Laughing Boy.
My princely love, can ageless love do more than tell to you,
Go raibh mile maith agat for all you tried to do,
For all you did, and would have done, my enemies to destroy,
I'll mourn your name and praise your fame, forever, my Laughing Boy.'
Behan's uncle Peadar Kearney wrote the Irish national anthem A Soldier’s Song. His brother, Dominic Behan, was also a renowned songwriter most famous for the song The Patriot Game,
while another sibling, Brian Behan, was a prominent radical political
activist and public speaker, actor, author and playwright. ’.
In
1937, the family moved to a new local authority housing scheme in
Crumlin, Dublin. The Behan household found much to occupy the day. Visitors recalled pictures of Christ and Lenin, in what was jokingly known locally as the ‘Crumlin Kremlin’ Here he became a member of Na Fianna Eireann, the youth
wing of the IRA at the age of 14 and published his first poems and prose in the
organization's magazine Fianna: the Voice of Young Ireland. In the poem ‘Red Envoy’, a denunciation of capitalist exploitation, he concludes:
I see this old bad order die
In a great swift blaze of fire
A structure, clear and mighty high
Born in its funeral pyre
Worker, know the world’s for thee
Wert thou to raise the servile knee
From off the ground.
Unsurprisingly, the young Behan attempted to enlist in the ranks of the Irish republican left who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. As Michael O’Sullivan notes, ‘His mother hindered his efforts by intercepting his correspondence from the recruiters and destroying it.’
Cathal Goulding, later a significant figure in the course of Irish republican history, recounted visiting a house on Dublin’s Ormond Quay with Behan to meet Frank Ryan, leader of the Irish contingent going to Spain, who rejected the boys on account of their age.
Graduating from the ranks of Na Fianna, the still-teenaged Behan joined the Irish Republican Army, an organisation that had spent the 1930s in ideological disarray, losing much of its left wing through a combination of splits and expulsions.
Still, as historian C. Desmond Greaves noted in an obituary for Behan, Even after the withdrawal of some of its best members, including Frank Ryan, when the Republican Congress was formed, there still remained a substantial ‘left’ in the IRA. It was impossible for it to be otherwise. The intertwining of the national and working-class struggle is the essence of the politics of modern Ireland. Drifting without a political agenda, the IRA launched a disastrous bombing campaign of British cities in 1939. Greaves says, ‘The picture of Brendan Behan who came over to Liverpool at the end of 1939 with a suitcase of explosives is of a lively, irrepressible youngster of sixteen, whose mercurial impressionable manner concealed a real depth of purpose. Impressionable would be the word.’
The young Behan’s decision to partake in this campaign would alter the course of literary history—landing him in the borstal system.
In court, Behan declared, ‘I came over here to fight for the Irish Workers and Small Farmers Republic, for a full and free life for my fellow countrymen north and south’.
While the ideal of a ‘Workers’ Republic’ had perhaps been abandoned by his superiors, the statement certainly represented the ideology of the teenager. The period of imprisonment in the British borstal system, which followed, was to prove politically and personally transformative; his biographer Ulick O’Connor noted that ‘later on Brendan would refer to his experiences at Borstal as having given him the first opportunity to recognise that he could enjoy sexual congress with either sex’, an assertion that was widely condemned at the time of publication of the biography, though Behan’s bisexuality is now widely acknowledged. Beyond sexual attraction, there were commonalities of experience Behan found with working-class British prisoners: I had the same rearing as most of them, Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London. All our mothers had all done the pawn—pledging on Monday, releasing on Saturday. We all knew the chip shop and the picture house and the four penny rush of a Saturday afternoon, and the Summer swimming in the canal and being chased along the railway by the cops.
In 1942, he was
tried for the attempted murder of two gardai while at a commemoration ceremony for Wolfe Tone, the father of Irish
Republicanism and sentenced to
fourteen years in prison. He was sent to Mountjoy Prison and later to the Curragh
Internment Camp. He was released in 1946 as part of a general amnesty
of republican prisoners. His
prison experiences were central to his future writing career. He wrote about these years in his autobiographical novel 'Borstal Boy'. and “Confessions of an Irish Rebel.”
Aside from a short prison sentence that he
received in 1947 for his part in trying to break a fellow republican out
from a Manchester jail, he effectively left the IRA, though he remained
great friends with the future Chief-Of-Staff Cathal Goulding.
While in
Mountjoy Prison he wrote his first play, The Landlady, and also began to
write short stories and other prose. Some of this work was published in
The Bell, the leading Irish literary magazine of the time. He also
learned Irish in prison and, after his release in 1946, he spent some
time in the Gaeltacht areas of Galway and Kerry, where he started
writing poetry in Irish. By the early 1950s he was earning a living as a
writer for radio and newspapers and had gained a reputation as
something of a character on the streets and in literary circles in
Dublin known for his sharp wit and his gift as a raconteur.
His major breakthrough came in 1954 when his play The Quare
Fellow, which was based on his experiences in jail, Set in an Irish prison in the 1950s on the day before and the morning of an execution, The Quare Fellow uses music, wit and a keen observation of human behaviour to explore the question of capital punishment. the play ran for six months in the Pike Theatre, Dublin. This was
followed by a run at the Theatre Royal, Stafford East, in a production by Joan Littlewood, before moving to the West End, before a trumph on Broadway bought international fame to the author. In 1957, his
Irish language play, An Giall (The Hostage) opened in the Damer Theatre
and his most famous work 'Borstal Boy' on his experiences as a teenager in the Hollesley Bay Colony, Suffolk was published. He was
now established as one of the leading Irish writers of his generation.
He
found fame difficult to deal with however. He had long been a heavy drinker
(describing himself, on one occasion, as "a drinker with a writing
problem",) and became known for his drinking as much as for his undoubted literary talents ,this combination
resulted in a series of notoriously drunken public appearances, both on
stage and television. Behan got notorious publicity after appearing drunk on Malcolm
Muggeridge’s Panorama programme on the BBC in 1956. Most of what he said
was incoherent, other than a crude remarking about needing “to take a
leak” Behan was obviously drunk too when he went on Edward R Morrow’s television
show Small World on November 8, 1959. He was yanked off the show at the
halfway point. He tended to attract attention anywhere he went. On arriving in Spain,
he was asked what he would most like to see in the country. “Franco’s
funeral,” he replied. Making a spectacle added to his notoriety, because it was what people
had come to expect. “One drink is too many for me,” Behan once lamented, “and a thousand notenough.” and "I only drink on two occasions-when I’m thirsty and when I’m not “.
He was diagnosed with diabetes in the 1960's and his favourite drink of
sherry and champagne certainly did not aid him, his health consequently suffered terribly, with diabetic comas and seizures occurring
with frightening regularity aggravated by his alcoholism. He found it difficult to write. When the
Guinness company commissioned him to write a slogan for them, he sat
around for months, drank all the free beer they sent him, and came up
with the slogan 'Guinness makes you drunk'.While his faculties may have dimmed a little, and towards the end became the caricature
of the drunken Irishman, publicans flinging him out of their premises, his intellect,wit and passion always managed to shine through.and he remained an Irish Republican and a socialist.
He died in the Meath Hospital, Dublin 1964 aged only 41, thanks to his prodigious consumption of alcohol,after he had collapsed in a Dublin public house in March 1964. which prompted one Dublin contemporary to observe 'Ah, I had not thought he would live so long'. His last words to his nurse, a nun, were ' Thank you Sister, and may all your sons be bishops'.
He was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery where he received a Republican
funeral.The IRA, which Behan had once invited to 'shoot him in absentia',
accorded him an honour guard, although they waited until the officials
from the State funeral had left before firing the traditional farewell
salute over his grave. En route to the graveyard, thousands lined the streets.
His wife the painter Beatrice french-Salkeld, his most stabilising influence gave birth to their only child, a
daughter, later the same year. His gravestone features the inscription 'Breándan Ó Beacháin File Fiáin Fearúil Feadánach' which roughly translates as 'Brendan Behan, wild, manly poet and piper'.
His legacy remains
one of tolerance and respect for the humanity in others, and of caring
and concern for the plight of those who are victims of history, not its
makers. As he once said, 'I have a total irreverence for anything
connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer
stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the
winter and happier in the summer' and 'They took away our land, our language and our religion, but they could never harness our tongues.'
His wit and humor still shines through in the books that he wrote and his stories about the human condition still engage and fortunately the oeuvre Behan managed to produce will be around for years to come. Cheers Brendan Behan.
Brendan Behan sings his brother Dominic's song ; The Auld Triangle
On 8 Feb 1921 Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist prince,and famous proponent of anarchist-communism, died of pneumonia in Russia. He took part in revolutionary groups in four countries and was one of a handful of prominent theoreticians of liberty over the last two centuries.
His viewpoint is firmly rooted in the anarcho-Communist camp and can be summarised briefly in classical terms "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.'
Most of his thinking on the nature of society was formed when he was observing the behaviour of animals in Siberia. While assigned to a Siberian regiment of the Russian military, Kropotkin did innovative and original work on geography and geologyand stages of animal behaviour. His experiences in Siberia also led him away from a confidence in the ability of the state to do anything useful for people.
His experiences also laid the foundations of Mutual Aid probably his most famous work, which was also written as a specific responce to Thomas Henry Huxley's The Struggle for Existence in Human Society , from 1888.
What follows is a wonderful passage from Kropotkin's seminal work which remains as relevant today as to when it was originally written :-
" It is not love to my neighbour - whom I often do not know at all - which induces me to seize a pail of water and rush towards his house when I see it on fire, it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me . . . . It is not love, and not even sympathy which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolve; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their day together in autumn. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy - an instict that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the foce they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life . . . . Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not Love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience - be it only at the stage of an instict - of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of . . . the close dependency of every one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual an equal to his own."
It is a month today that I lost Jane, my soul has been raining hard,memories of better days,but my faithful
departed is still flying around,fluttering from tree to tree,ever so free,I forever dream of her, and her gorgeous smile ignites,and as spring returns I still feel her presence. Here is a poem from the mercurial hand of the late great Dylan Thomas that we both appreciated . The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
( another one for Jane, my muse , 9/5/60 - 8/1/17,nearly a month gone)
I shall continue to search the stars for you Beyond every torrid bed of tears, Leaping from the darkness Towards your magnificent light, I will follow you always No matter where, no matter how, Because I saw your love in your eyes for me Over time you gave so much encouragement, That I will never forget, never surrender Forever grateful for the joys you bought, Alcohol is nice , but it is you that is most intoxicating I am drunk now with my thoughts of you, But your presence stops me falling over As spring returns releasing all its colors and scents, Your gift of inspiration , thankfully keeps on giving.
