I just stumbled over MFU from the Impermanent Press. It certainly looks interesting...however I have spent my book fund for the month, so it will have to wait.

I am aware that people sometimes mistake my pantheism for British sentimentality about animals - but it isn't that. I am just appalled at human chauvinism (which I attribute, in part, to the Christian religion pretending that humans are a special creation, quite separate from nature and all the other living beings).

The modern scientific world view makes that belief almost laughable (to me), so my occasional arguing against humans is not mystical fascist indifference to human suffering - but just an attempt to balance our world view. It is clear that Indian and Chinese religions have tended to understand better the 'systems view' of our place in nature, and (in the modern world) I guess it is the Deep Ecology people who are taking this sometimes contentious position - there are too many people, and we are ravaging the planet's resources.

I saw a book review in the Guardian, and when I checked the library already had it. I have already read a chapter in my tea-break.

Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson. Excerpt. Guardian Review.

It seems to be a very lively book about the first 40 years of the 20th Century, and the sheer desperation of trying to make a living as an artist. An especially reckless choice for the kind of middle-class drop-outs that formed such a large proportion of the crowd. Of course, there was a High Bohemia, too (like the Bloomsbury Group) - but generally things were tight for the bourgeois in The Thirties so to denounce money and possessions was considered downright reckless, imprudent, and anti-social.

My interest lies not just in a general history of people who pre-dated the 'Sixties thing', before the Beats even. It was finding a description of my Bohemian dad (vegetarian, pacifist, mystical atheist, non-drinker, etc) in an old book recently (see 9th and 15th January blogs in the Archives) that sparked my interest in the period - and he was obviously around the edges of these kind of groups...I know he knew Luke Gertler who was the son of Mark Gertler (one of the better-known British artists of the time) - you can find Panto's book with a puppet play script by Luke, here (item 330) - his friend Mog (Morris Cox) ran a self-publishing business for many years, from the room upstairs....

Goddess is Alive, Magick is Afoot...

get your UK badge here or the bumper sticker here or just read a list of Wicked (Wiccan) jokes here

Check out Leonard Cohen's original words "God is Alive, Magic is Afoot" from "Beautiful Losers" - at the Pagan Library

Buffy St Marie sang this, too

I am cynical (in the best sense of the word) but it's a lousy label to be given - now that cynical is more likely to be used about heartless behaviour and manipulation by those in power.

The only low-life cynicism I can think of right now is conspiracy theory....

It's a shame. I identify with Diogenes because of his preference for a simple life - not getting involved in the world of 'working for others' as a trade-off to get 'things'.

"Diogenes of Sinope, d. c.320 BC, was a Greek philosopher, perhaps the most noted of the CYNICS. He pursued the Cynic ideal of self-sufficiency, a life that was natural and not dependent upon the nonessential luxuries of civilization.
****************
Because Diogenes believed that virtue was better revealed in action than in theory, he made his life a protest against what he thought of as a corrupt society. He is said to have lived in a large tub, rather than a house, and to have gone about Athens with a lantern in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man--but never finding one. In later art, Diogenes is often depicted in a torn cloak, with a dog, carrying a lantern.
************
{sin'-iks} The Cynics were adherents of a Greek philosophic school founded in the 4th century BC by ANTISTHENES. Its best-known member was DIOGENES OF SINOPE. Antisthenes held that happiness is achieved by cultivating virtue for its own sake. This is attained, he said, by conducting a life free of dependence on possessions and pleasures.
The Cynics admired SOCRATES for his self-sufficiency and his indifference to unnecessary luxury and possessions. A good life, they taught, involves a return to nature, giving up the decadence of civilized urban life and living simply and strenuously. Their name is generally supposed to come from the Greek kynikos, "doglike," presumably a commentary on their severely critical philosophic style"

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

- Albert Einstein [found in semicoma]

Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

George Burns

Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, a good cigar and a good woman - or a bad woman; it depends on how much happiness you can handle.

George Burns

I'm very pleased to be here. Let's face it, at my age I'm very pleased to be anywhere.

I'd rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.

George Burns
(take two)

Re-discovered this Jerry Mander link

It amuses me (since I re-posted the Archives) to trawl back through my diary. The previous Blog (Thinking Allowed) stopped after 9/11, so this one goes back to late September 2001.

A lot of pain over those couple of years - physical mostly - but it's all down to an occasional ache now...

It does amuse me to find all those links; to see the first meeting with HR last December (when Pete H was still OK, and up for a visit); my first contact with Aurelien (such fun we had in Paris); the adventures with Keili; what to do when your partner goes away on a world-class holiday for a couple of months - while you have a funeral to go to; etc, etc.

It gets tiring hauling your bones to the market place some days.

Winter in the Northern hemisphere - and the hormones and pheromones don't work to enliven me - hibernation seems such a good option - or am I just approaching 60 ? (Well yes, I'll have been round the sun 58 times in February - that's a lot of cosmological ground to cover).

Didn't go to a 'family' do last night, as a faretheewell to Rhiannon (off to India for 4 months) - just because I was working today, and would rather put up with the 'party-pooper' label than drag myself to work on a Saturday, with everyone else pottering around the shops (and YES I KNOW I get the Wednesday off instead - but I didn't do the 9-5 for 35 years, so I am still not in training for this kind of schedule, even after I have been doing it for 6 years now...)

And will the 7 year cycle bring something new again (as it so often has) ?

I have been compiling links recently, but I know a page of just links is really of limited interest to others - but it's great for me, so I have stuck it up on the Web for my own use, without tying it into the website as yet.

My Heroes

Kung Hei Fat Choy!

I may be jumping the gun slightly, with those good wishes (as it is only New Year's Eve on the Chinese Calendar)

and my moon picture on the Home Page is not quite accurate (New Moon is actually at 21.05 Universal Time (what we used to call Greenwich Mean Time)

but hey, it's a 24 hour world, I am not Chinese, and there are several other calendars to look at as well (currently I am looking at the 'pataphysical calendar) - so take your pick.

This just feels like a better time to wish people a happy spring, etc....

Glad to see Pentaphobe's website coming together suddenly. Or is that emerging....

Go check it out.

Check out the music

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

GBS

I keep finding myself using Wikipedia (an open source, free online encyclopedia - written by users). It's a great, hip, resource.

It's where I got the news about Jeff Nuttall, today.

I just remembered the HUMAN CLOCK. Go visit. It's great....

Sad to see Jeff Nuttall died the other day. Not that he was a friend or anything - in fact, the couple of times I met him, back in the 70s, I thought he was a bit of a boring old drunk (but then again, aren't most of us at times?)

I was a young and zealous smoker at the time, who didn't like people who drank (the older generation) as it seemed to be a stupid drug. It was only later that I discovered the drinking culture of the Mediterranean and realised it could be a civilised way to pass time together.

Still, he had been enormously influential in that cross-over from Beats to Hippies (who, I suspect, he despised). That CND generation were so serious and angry. It wasn't that my lot were any less suspicious of the world, just that our particular wave of people went for a bit of joyous irresponsible hedonism in the face of the ghastly, cowed, everyday world of the 50s and early 60s in the UK. It's all strategy and tactics. I am now just as angry and just as optimistic as I was back then.

The punks took it back to direct anger. Whatever.

Still, The People Show was kind of fun at times (boring and arty-farty at others) and my original clown teacher Emil Wolk was part of that.

Another one bites the dust - so I'll quote Michael Horowitz in The Guardian

"He died on a Sunday, leaving the Hen and Chicks pub in Abergavenny, where his trad band's lunchtime gig had been the highspot of his week for 10 years. At his soul's incarnation in Elysium it will surely come to pass, as Jeff once dreamed, that "Spifflicate water-buffalo drunk on rainbow fish will snore beside the oval father where he basks". For the rest of us, as long as "global politics" fester in lies and pea-brained Hollywooden mega-violence, it is bollocks to them, and long live Jeff Nuttall. "

It is delightful to be able to email my sister - and I have now sent her the excerpts which mention our father in the book I came across (see 9th January). It affected her as much as it did me. We neither of us know that much about him, or his family, or that period before we were born, as we missed out on normal 'family nostalgia' and fireside stories (couples separating was all a bit more secret - shameful? - back in the 50s).

There's certainly a genetic connection across the generations - but it takes different forms. For instance, I would say I had my mother's face/eyes and my father's body, and (to some extent) temperament. Broad generalizations, of course, but perhaps there are small insights to be gained from such speculation.

I think I'll publish some of it - as I think the family portrait needs to be a bit 'warts and all' to be valuable.