Saturday 26 February 2011

Lis of Greedy CEOS Who thought the best way to support region wide movement for change was go on a junket selling arms to dodgy Governments..



Samir Brikho CEO, AMEC

Steve Marshall Chairman, Balfour Beatty

Graham Cartldge Chaiman, Benoy

Mouzan Majidi CEO Foster & Partners

Ben Gordon CEO Mothercare

Keith Howells Chairman, Mott MacDonald

Chris Hyman CEO, Serco

John Stanion, Chairman & CEO, Taylor Woodrow

Prof Malcolm Grant President/Provost, UCL

Paul Skinner CEO, Infrastructure UK

Bob Fryar Executive Vice President foProduction, BP

Ian Gray Non Exec Chairman of Vodafone Egypt

Phillip Dilley Chairman, Arup

Stuart Laing Deputy Vice Chancellor, Cambridge University

Peter Gammie CEO, Halcrow

Lord Dazi Imperial College

Malcolm Brinded Exec VP, Shell

John Peace Chairman, Standard Chartered

Ian Conn MD & CE, BP

Richard Barrett Regional Director. Atkins

Rob Watson, Reginal Director, Rolls Royce

Victor Chavez Thales Uk

Ian King CEO, BAE Systems

Prof John Hughes Vice Chancellor, Bangor University

Dean Webster EO, Cyril Sweett

Michael Soeting Global Head of ENR/Oil & Gas, KPMG

Rob King Development Director ME, the Edge

Shaun Carter Regional Director, Carillion

Sam Laidlaw CEO, Centrica

Charles Hughes VP Marketing, Cobham Group

Dr Rajan Jethwa CEO, Virgin Healthbank

Sir Frank Williams Team Principle, Williams F1

Alastair Bisset Group InternationalDirector, QinetilQ

Andy Pearson MD, Babcock International Group

Elizabeth Reid CEO, SSA Trust

Douglas Caster CEO, Ultra Electronics


As you can see the usual suspects, dictatorhip loving phone companies and tax dodgers , oh the odd university, and look closely some other surprises. Profit is a serial business.

INTEGRITY, THIS MAN DOES NOT KNOW THE MEANING OF THE WORD. I THINK I HEAR A STORM A BREWING.

Friday 25 February 2011

Adolf Wolfli (26/2/1864 - 6/11/30) General View of the Island Neveranger, 1911 and other tales.

Adolf Wolfli , a swiss man of peasant stock was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of thirty-one and was subsequently whisked of to a mental asylum near Bern where he lived until his death thirty-five years later.He was on all accounts a highly disturbed and dangerous individual prone to pshychosis and violent hallucinations.
Hovever after his incarcenation he began to produce an astounding oeuvre of drawings, collages, sheet music, prose and poetry. These illustrations are included in Fromthe Cradle to the Grave a series of nine hand bound books (2,970 total pages, with 752 illustations) that recount Wolfi's imaginary life life story from ages two through eight ( his real life was one of grimness and despair, abused physically, sexually and mentally throughout his life). In his pictures or dreams the protaganist travels around the globe, imposing his own sense of on it. On all accounts a bit of a control freak, it appears Wolfi based his descriptions of faraway places on the familiar topography of Bern and the Swiss countryside and also on a school atlas he owned, but what is clear that the fantastical visions he had were very much his own. Out of his miserable existence he actually produced some astonishing work.
A spontaneity emerged and whatever his life had been before a transformation was achieved that would not have been achieved outside his prison walls. It was his own captors the psychiatrist's who began to regard hiswork in aeshetic terms and actually valued their immedacy and their uniqueness so gave Wolfi (the Beast) a taste of freedom.
His work belongs I suppose inthe schools of Art Brut and of course outsider art.


General View of the Island Neveranger,1911


Big Thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/?wiki?Adolf_W%C3%B6lfi

Tuesday 22 February 2011

Eleanor Dare - FIVE FINGER DISCOUNTS.


For the Sisters

'A great deal of talent is lost in this world for
want of a little courage.'

About shoplifting,
for all those who still believe
Big Daddy is watching You -
Bullshit.
Just say the shoplifters prayer:
Survive Danger
Be afraid and go on
See fear and diminish it.
There are luscious things
crying out for a woman's swift touch,
Take them!

As for store detectives
They are easily uncovered,
they look like they are at work
i.e. depressed, unimaginatevely dressed.
They hold us down with fear -
An army of omniscient fathers
Ubiquitie eyes,
Surveillance cameras, their
dissaproving lenses tracking
our private minds.

Shed guilt, take more than is given and pass it on,
forget the fathers, headmaster
they all had an interest in keeping us down
Stealing is exhilarating, ribcage acceleration
two fingers to drab minds of
primary school teachers and tedious preachers.

Besides,
the rich are unworthy of some things-
Star fruit,
Lapis Lazuli, Beautiful books.
We are dangerous
We have ingenuity, defiance
the righteous indignation
of a thousand years.
Laugh out Loud -
all they come up with
is the
rattle of keys.


Originally published
in the virago book of wicked verse,virago press 1992.
1992.

Saturday 19 February 2011

George Heywood Melly (17/8/26 - 57/07) - Homage to Rene Magritte



When Magritte died
The stones fell to the ground
The birds divorced their leaves
The night and day agreed to differ
The breasts became blind
The cunt was struck dumb
The tubas extnguished their flames
The pipe remembered its role
The words looked up what they meant in the dictionary
The clouds turned acstract
The ham closed its eye for ever
When Magritte died.

When Magritte died
The toes hid modestly in their shoes
The mountains no longer envied their eagles
The apple shrunk to the size of an apple
Or did the room grow to the size of a room?
The bowler hat lost its ability to astonish
The old healer
Returned from a dip in the sea
Put on his trousers
his boots
his cloak
his hat
Picked up his stick
his sack
his cage of doves (clanging its door to)
And set off on his banal journey

When Magritte died.











Wednesday 16 February 2011

SURREALIST MAP OF THE WORLD, 1929.

Artist Unknown, from a special issue of Varietes, a Brussels-based magazine. entitled " Le Surrealisme en 1929"

The Surrealists amused themselves by creating a map that puts imperialist powers in their place. For example: other than Alaska, the United States are invisible; mainland Britain is dwarfed by Ireland; Easter Island looms over a tiny Australia; and only two cities are marked, Paris and Constantinople, with the rest of France and Turkey missing.
This I guess was a map of the Surrealists cultural ideas. They gave great importance to the shattering of rational thought and bourgeois ideas and values, they aimed to free people from staid ideas and restrictive practices, cultures and structures, borrowing loosely from the ideologies of socialism and anarchism.
I too like the subversion of conventions, and draw on an internationalist world view as a source of inspiration and have also always been weary of nationalism and the waving of flags, though I do confess to having supported a few.
The legacy of their ideas lives on however, and today we live in a period of rising movements against borders. Facts are, all borders are manmade and all nations are based on fakery and vivid imagination and subsequently the logic of the world's order equals nonsense.
In 1925 Katherine Harman in a book called ' You are here ' an early surrealist manifesto wrote
"Even more than patriotism- which is a quite commonplace sort of hysteria, though emptier and shorter-lived than most- we are disgusted by the idea of belonging to a country at all, which is the most bestial and least philosopic of the concepts to which we are subjected...Wherever Western civilistion is dominant, all human contact has dissapeared, except contact from which money can be made - payment in hard cash."

Well I can safely say I agree with that, what do you think?
So destroy all borders, but having said that I still feel the need to shout Free Palestine. Call me a hypocrite .
heddwch/peace.

Click on Picture to enlarge.

Monday 14 February 2011

John Keats (31/10/1795 - 23/2/18) - The Nature of Love


Hi Folks , it's that time of year again when people get dizzy and do stupid things. I personally am an unashameable old romantic, so on this silly day thought I'd post this letter from another incurable one, John keats. A letter that really shows the depths of John Keats utter devotion to his one true love Fanny Browne.
Unfortunately shortly after they met in 1818 he became aware that he had TB and would never be able to marry. His love was intense, obsessive, jealous and sadly unfulfilled. In 1821 he left for Rome, where he died .
Theirs a link at bottom to earlier post I did on John Keats, hope you enjoy, don't get too sad though, take care and carry on, and remember fight the cuts.

1819

My sweet Girl

Your letter gave me more delight, than anything in the world but yourself could do; indeed I am almost astonished that any absent one should have the luxurious power over my senses which I feel. Even when I am not thinking of you I recieve your influence and a tenderer nature steeling upon me. All my thoughts, my unhappiest days and nights, have I find not at all cured me of my love of Beauty, but made it so intense that I am miserable that you are not with me: or rather btreathe in that dull sort of patience that cannot be called Life. I never knew before, what such a love as you have made me feel,I did not believe in it; my Fancy was affraid of it, lest it should burn me up.But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, 'twill not be more than we can bear when moistened and bedewed with Pleasures. You mention 'horrid people' and ask me whether it depend upon them, whether I see you again. Do understand me, my love, in this. I have so much of you in my heart that I must turn Mentor when I see a chance of harm beffalling you. I would never see anything but Pleasure in your eyes, love on your lips, and Happinness in your steps. I would wish to see you among those amusements suitable to your incinations and spirits; so that our loves might be a delight in the midst of Pleasures agreeable enough, rather than a resource from vexations and cares. But I doubt much, in case of the worst, whether I shall be philosopher enough to follow my own lessons: If I saw my resolution give you a pain I could not. Why may I not speak of your Beauty, since without that I could never have lov'd you. I cannot concieve any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty. There may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have the highest respect and can admire it in others: but it has not the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own heart. So let me speak of your Beauty, though to my own endangering; if you could be so cruel to me as to try elsewhere its Poer. You say you are affraid I shall think you do not love me - in saying this you make me ache the more to be near you. I am at the diligent use of my faculties here, I do not pass a day without sprwaling some blank verse or tagging some rhymes; and here I must confess, that, (since I am on the subject,) I love you the more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. I have met with women whom I would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel. I have seen your Comet, and only wish it was a sign that poor Rice would get well whose illness makes him rather a melancholy companion: and the more so as to coquer his feelings and hide them from me, with a forc'd Pun. I kiss'd your writing over in the hope you had indulg'd me by leaving a trace of honey-What was your dream? Tell it me and I will tell you the interpretation thereof.

Ever yours, my love!
John Keats

Do not accuse me of delay - we have not here an opportunity of sending letters every day. Write speedily.

http://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2010/04/john-keats-doomed-romantic.html.

The letters of John Keats edited by Maurice Forman (OUP) 1947.