On reading comments posted on the blog ‘Musings Of A Durotrigan’

I’ve been reading blogs. I’ve been reading Musings Of A Durotrigan. This refers to a Celtic tribe from what is now Dorset, called the Durotriges. It is a blog that I think is fair to say, nationalist and Conservative in flavour and seems to promote a UKIP agenda.
So, Mo Farah, a figure that concerns many patriotic souls out there..how can he compete for Britain when he is a Somalian refugee? Everyone can see he is a skinny black guy that we have been accustomed to seeing miles ahead of everyone else under the badge of a North African or East African country such as Somalia or Kenya. How can we celebrate his achievements as one of us or even as if he was running for us?
 Politicians and parts of the media and multi-national corporations have been hard selling ‘diversity’ to us for a while. They say Enoch Powell was wrong etc, we should celebrate our modern day country as a place that contains a mixture of people with diverse (no other word will do!) ethnic backgrounds. Western culture has apparently ground to a halt, procreatively and so we need immigration to keep our economies going and national identity is a club that anyone can join, if you’re prepared to pay the fees…thats the idea. You get the badge and the chance to prosper; all good.
 Some of us might consider it weird that Mo Farah can be seen as a British success story but really isn’t allegiance to a flag these days a bit weird? What is the point of Nationalism in a globalized world? In fact, what is the point of nations?
 Mo Farah knows more about the world than any paranoia driven, UKIP affiliated, armchair Celtic warrior..Mo Farah knows far more about the real world than Durotrigan or any other nationalist or reactionary or UKIP type. He knows about poverty; he has seen it first hand in the land of his origin. He knows that over 50% of the world lives on a ‘dollar a day’..and that starvation is a very real state of existence for many people in the world right now. Politicians use people like Mo Farah and maybe he uses them as by all accounts he is using his success to benefit the lives of people back in Somalia.
  We live in a world run by business men. There is as much place for Nationalist ideals as the ideals of an old hippy, going on about ‘peace and love’..
 We are told to celebrate diversity and at the same time conform to the increasing homogeneity that comes with global capitalism. There are no ideals in main stream politics anymore, if there ever were. But then ideals lead to convictions and they lead to conflict and that leads us nowhere, perhaps..
 We truly live in times where car sales men are kings. They will do anything to keep the machine rolling and the establishment safe. But I am sick and tired of hearing about people going on about how the nation of Britain is going down and immigration is ruining us etc, when we do very little to help the rest of humanity that on the whole is struggling. We all need to be less insular and less selfish and when we find another life hosting planet and challenge whoever’s hanging out on it to a competition of sporting prowess then we might be able to go, ‘right, now its simple; human v alien’..but until then the world as we know it is going to make less and less sense for reactionary nostalgia trippers like Durotrigan and the like.
 

the musings of an old vinyl spinner

As I passed over the pound coin to the record seller and took possession of my new record “Yugoslavia”, he said with joking suspicion, ‘maybe you know something I don’t’..I replied, ‘I just like things that don’t exist anymore’…so here are the sounds of a place (Yugoslavia) that no longer exists on a format (vinyl records) that barely exists  in the lives of most people anymore; treasure indeed!
 I want to justify my addiction to vinyl records. I get more out of music from playing records..why??. I love all records with their two faces, A and B, ying and yang, that you can flip between but I do love albums and the best way is to listen to them on vinyl. Fact! All music sounds better on vinyl, the sound is warmer, more organic and placing the record, cueing it and playing it  somehow reproduces the music and the artist in a way that CD’s and MP3’s does not.
Then there is the document aspect to a vinyl record; the foot square cover with the artwork and the required information about the recording. This places the recording in time and space and makes you see the point of it in the great ocean of sight and sound we call ‘culture’.. Or perhaps vinyl record playing is just something I am conditioned to appreciate as they were part of my life from a very early age. My mother and I used to put on Doctor Hook’s Greatest Hits and Buffy Saint Marie and sit there and sing along to every song, staring at the record as it revolved..maybe its a hypnotic thing, I find the vinyl spiraling as music plays quite satisfying..but I would recommend it to anyone. Anyone who loves their music should invest in a record player and commit to sourcing music on vinyl because I think collecting records and listening to them is just so much more fun than downloading anonymous files off the internet and CD’s are one dimensional and too brittle and plasticy and small..
 As I drove home with my daughter, I asked if she had Domino by Jesse J on her phone, ‘no I haven’t actually..I’ll download it now’ it magically 3G’d its way to us through the air and within 5 minutes we were listening to it. she now owned it like she’d left a cup out in the rain to gather in some water…music is all around us, as are novels etc, just waiting to be admitted into our devices.  The internet, the information superhighway, now dominates our lives and I regularly blast along it myself to it to acquire the information that I want but I use it more to find the old formats and apparatus that people can and are keen to sell, like vinyl records and record players and books etc,..I  get my information kicks that way… my laptop is a slip road to Ebay city and old tomes and discs come my way to like gifts . I’ve no doubt that before long I’ll be back on cassettes. looking into reel to reels and fantasizing about wax cylinders as the rest of the world enjoys faster and ‘better’ technology.
Records have spines and grooves and sleeves and labels and they can be unique and special and they inspire collections and the collector spirit that many of us with strong hunter mentalities are prone to. Vinyl will probably never die as it is still affectionately regarded as something to treasure by people all over the world and there is talk of renaissances etc, but it is sure to be forever a minority interest although a global one that can involve big money.
The flutes and accordions of Slavic music captured for my ‘Yugoslavia’ record sound as good as they ever did..maybe there are those who are nostalgic for the old days of the united Slavic regions or maybe not. but one thing I can say for sure is that nostalgia is a force to be reckoned with.

this text is on fire

This text is on fire

can you hear me scrabbling through the chimney breast?
i’m downstairs building a fire. i’ve got irons and paper and wood and a lighter and i’m building a fire again. i’ve been out in the confused dawning world that is all amber glow half rain and half sleep to split bits of wood and now in, pets are excited to be able to get undivided attention so early so early and so i build another fire. i scrabble and scape old ash likes smokes dead skin from yesterdays radiant glow and start again with screwed up newspaper and rough hunks of hacked up pallets…i light the paper and watch it naievly burst around the rather damp and therefore resistant bits of wood, thats how it works thats why kindling is so called because of its infantile role in the family of the fire..every fire is an escalating process of destruction in which the quick to burn young go first but the kindling isn’t really responding to the happy heroics of the newspaper combusting. it has to come round to the idea with half a newspapers worth of encouraging and coaxing flaming and it is not in the mood. rain and cold have instilled resistance into its fibres. but eventually it gives way and the transmission occurs and those fibres are all blazing with the energy of fire..i am dry bones for the fire that is in my blood to combust and send me out there singing and searching..what is it that makes me so receptive? where do the sparks come from? is it my head, my active brain, is it  just over active? is what is in my head a little planet of a shriveling balloon or a seeded soft fruit leaking juice; will i just fizzle out or am i connected? are we connected?? head in the clouds! yes! maybe it should be!! its all about ‘the cloud’ these days!! we live and orbit around each other and this inert and tense hub of society and never think about why what is in our heads is there or where it comes from or who we are in that moment and that we are linked to all life and the life of the universe and like harmony works through chords we move in a linear way but always within a chord in the great progression of the story of life..i must break more pallets.

I Am Fire

You reform you do not disappear
As sea relieves sky relieves sea
You are shared eternally,
Stored and divided indiscriminately
Patience is a deep sea of shallow tears,
You can be a reservoir
You can be a river
You can be a mother
You can be a daughter
You are water
I build a fire
Fire builds in me
Consumed by creation by consumption
Tended and contained
Flames lurch like hands parched
I reach out to destroy
Fan the flames wind
Up the toy
I reach out to reach higher
I can be lightening
I can be the sun
I can illuminate
I can be a father
But I will expire
I am fire