renaissance man
This interview is great. Richard Locke talking to a lady interviewer about love. Locke really was, at least to my way of seeing things, a pretty major dude.
I first came across him (sorry!) in a period of interest in retro gay porn, as the star of Kansas City Trucking. And I then tried to learn more about him.
He seemed quite interesting; living in the desert in a geodesic dome, a la Buck Fuller.
Since the ‘year of Covid’, now just over three years ago – lockdown kicked in, March 23, 2020 – Teresa and I have not had much in the way of holiday.
The only real break we’ve had – and by break or holiday I’m talking specifically about time away from home – was a short family trip (four or five nights?) to Wales, in October, 2022. The only reason that one actually happened, as opposed to all our cancelled plans, was that Simon and Claire paid for it. We just had to get there.
Every single break – mostly just one or two nights away – that we’ve attempted to take (and there have been precious few, four or five attempts, perhaps?) has had to be cancelled. Except for one or two occasions – like now – when lack of transportation added to our problems, this has been solely due to lack of funds.
The latest in this small but frustrating string of disappointments is a night away this Monday coming, for Teresa’s cousins’ wedding. On this occasion the chief reason is no wheels (my car is in for repairs; and we’re getting it back later than anticipated).
To add insult to injury, we usually lose a bit of money when cancelling our AirB&B reservations. Plus we have to beg the host not to blacklist us as bad AirB&B folk!
We can’t afford car hire or public transport. I’ve asked family and friends (the latter via Facebook) if anyone has a vehicle we could borrow. No dice.
Life can be proper shit sometimes!
I think I might’ve posted this video before. Regardless, I’d be happy to post it many more times. How many more times? As Led Zep once asked! Who knows?
Anyone reading my recent posts will know I’ve been having a tough time. Amidst such travails, a blissful musical epiphany is a welcome and unexpected thing. But, whatever (or why-ever, or ‘wherefore’ as Shakey’s Romeo puts it), it happened!
I’ve had a few over the years. And what I’m calling an epiphany some might call some form of meltdown, perhaps? I had a very memorable one dancing around a pal’s living room to Santana and McLaughlin’s Life Divine, way back, in my mid to late teens.
This one came over me whilst drumming to Scary Pockets’ amazing re-envisioning of Tears For Fears greatest track, Everybody Wants To Rule The World. It was partly a spliff, taking my consciousness out of its usual ruts. But it was more the act of drumming, and freely and passionately, that really popped the lid off.
Just as with my pogoing-round-the-lounge to Devadip and Mahavishnu, it was very largely purely eargasmic; a response to music that mainlines to my pysche. But it’s also partly loosening the shackles on some part or parts of myself.
And on both of these occasions I wept like a gale! What I feel this tells me is that I have a lot of feeling(s) within me, that need to find proper outlets. This kind of moment reconnects me with that feeling of freedom and transcendence that great art can sometimes provide.
And with music, as a collective thing, there is sometimes that blissful synergy that can make one feel so connected to others, spiritually. Which, in a world so relentlessly materialist it frequently grinds one’s soul to ashes and dust, is refreshing.
I’m having a mental health crisis. not because I’m some kind of lame ass wuss who cannae tek’ the pressure. But because nobody can take pressure past a certain point.
I’m well past that point. And I’m looking for help. Naturally I’m trying via my GP. But it’s a month – to the frickin’ day – since I hit a meltdown crisis point. And despite trying a whole alphabet soup of organisations, I’m not getting any help.
A whole FUCKING MONTH!!! And nothing has been done. Despite repeated calls to my GP, NHS 111 (option 2*), and a host of other organisations.
* As I type this I’ve passed twenty minutes in a queue. What does this daily experience teach me? That I am utterly worthless in the eyes of society. And why am I utterly worthless – along with all the other schmucks subjected to this living hell – because I’ve already been taxed to oblivion, and overcharged beyond credulity, and there’s nothing left for the vultures.
I’m beyond despair. Entering into the territory of rage.
I finally passed the 40 minutes mark, and hung up. I’m growing ever more certain that people will have topped themselves in that queue! It’s beyond fucking unbelievable.
Having got the ‘art’ bug again, as well pursuing Abbie and Dan’s commission, I’m trying to pick up where I left off. Here I’m attempting to resume my Manolo series.
The left sketch is his face, melting ever further into abstraction. At right it’s the backdrop again. The cloudscape. This time the yellow is overstated. And some former parts of Manolo are introduced, via masking off the background.
One thing that bugs me about my methods, is how, in trying to superimpose layers, things often get too busy, and something breaks down. The above would be a case in point. Trying to combine the figural abstraction and the background, somehow neither seems right.
This frustration prompted me to further ‘worrit’ these ideas. But now in black and white only. It’s another way of trying to reduce and knock back the noise! Of the two I think the pastel effort, at left (and below) is the better.
Running the same ideas through all these iterations allows me to explore different ideas via varied mediums.
Ultimately I’ll probably explore these ideas further – or not, if I abandon a vein, thinking it a poor prospect – in one of two ways: black and white prints, or full colour paintings.
Esp’ with the latter, whether it’s going to be acrylics or oils, the opacity of the medium adds yet another different facet to the process. And I can of course do monochromatic paintings and colour prints.
The permutations are endless!
This little series of miniature abstracts was born of spell of mental ill health. I hate that phrase, and I don’t think it really accurately captures what I was going through. But anyway, whatevs, as they say these days!
I was, rather amazingly, prescribed a short series of therapeutic art classes. As is so often the way with me, ornery curmudgeon that I am, I didn’t play by the rules – adopts Saxondale manner – this lone wolf rides to the tune of a different drummer (face-slap!).
My raison-ing was that, given I’m already a trained, even professional (occasionally!) artist, I didn’t need to do the ABC type stuff my group was doing. I just needed a quiet corner in which to pursue already established trajectories. Fortunately I was allowed to do just that.
The net results were this little serious of four mini-abstractions. They began life as an evolution from sketches of a stained glass window. In fact somewhere I’ve got an image I really like, showing how these little artworks evolved. I’ll stick that up here if I can find it!
To those with a bit of art or art history knowledge, some of my influences might be discernible? Perhaps ironically the single greatest influence on my own art isn’t really obvious in these series. That’d be Picasso. More on his influence to follow!
Some of the major influences on this approach, however, are Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and to a much lesser extent, some of Brice Marden’s linear stuff. There’s even a bit of Georg Baselitz in there (thanks to the influence of an old – and much missed – pal, Ben Carter). And then there are less obvious folk, like Turner, and even Caspar David Friedrich.
These aren’t the best photos. You can see the shadow of my head on them! It’d be nice to have much better lit and positioned photographs, but these’ll have to do for now!
I hate Toryism, Conservatism*, Capitalism, and their rabid pooches, aka the right-wing media.
[* Small ‘c’ conservatism is fine. I’m all for preserving what is good. Ironically large ‘C’ Conservatism, far from conserving what is good, takes a wrecking ball to it.]
It is my firm and unshakeable belief, based on the evidence of just over fifty years on this planet, that the Tories have presided over (masterminded is just plain wrong, in such instances) a sustained campaign, not just of thievery – the ‘plunder of the commons’ that has always been the m.o. of any rapine ruling elite – but vulgarisation.
Toryism not only takes from the many to enrich the few, it also seeks to destroy the very soul of any cultures not wholly compliant with or supportive of their base greediness. Modern mainstream TV and the commercial Muzak Industry are typical exemplars.
Some of the many other ways in which all of this is apparent are: the growing ubiquity of gambling, the wall to wall encroachment of advertising,* the disintegration – dismemberment is a more accurate term – of public institutions (be they councils, schools, the BBC or NHS), and the shifting of care off government shoulders on to those of the charity sector.
[* Sadly adturds.co.uk has stopped. That was always a good place to have a laugh about how ghastly contemporary ad culture has become.]
[* Orwellian times, indeed, when a soul-less parasitic money making machine spends millions (whose money are they spending on this, I wonder?) lying to its victims, er, sorry, customers, to persuade them they are our friends. Appalling!]
Descartes ‘I think, therefore I am’ has been replaced by ‘I shop, therefore I am’. Even healthcare has its own dedicated lottery. And of course more and more people are ever more reliant on charity, because our government clearly doesn’t give a f*ck.
Most government policies are nakedly self-interested. That’s the whole raison d’etre for Brexit; escape EU control, deregulate, and pillage.
And if it’s not brazen greediness, it’s pandering to their Daily Mail reading zombie supporters. Examples of this range from their attitude towards immigration and refugees, to protests, the homeless, and the recent introduction of ‘antisocial behaviour’ legislation to stop the recreational use of laughing gas.
Regarding Tory pandering to the gammonry, it’s blatantly clear they don’t care one jot about expert opinion – from the laughing gas ban to their ‘plans’ re energy and the environment – or the fact that their moronically myopic policies are far more likely to damage more lives than they’ll benefit.
It’s not just that no cost to the plebs is too great. It’s that naked self-serving egotism, elitism and greed are so central, so fundamental, to the Tory outlook (I nearly said mindset), that no cost to the masses will ever be enough.
With record numbers of millionaires alongside record levels of food bank usage, and declining life expectancy amongst the poorer, the sheer existence of billionaires, whose wealth is beyond obscene, shows us that ‘western man’, so to speak – at least in the ruling elites of the UK (and US) we’ve been subjected to since the ‘80s – is a morally bankrupt species.
And it’s a horrifically all pervasive and highly corrosive form of chemical cultural warfare that has long been being waged, not just via the murderous eugenics by neglect of things like ‘austerity’, but in allowing mainstream media to be nothing more than another opportunity for rapine commerce, dumbing everything down such that nowadays celebrities frequently take obvious pride in being pigsh*t ignorant. Even a modicum of intelligence is something to sneered at and derided.*
[* ‘This is the first period in my life where ignorance is something to be proud of’ said Mary Beard, in relation to Trump vs Hilary Clinton. For the hoi polloi this translates to celebrities on game shows revelling in their own vacuity.]
One of the biggest ironies in amongst all of this is that it’s Capitalism with a rod of iron for the lower orders, but Socialism for the best off. That’s what Tories and their ‘neo-liberal’ allies have done time and again: nationalise loss, and privatise profit.
Bail out the fat cats with public money, and let Tory MPs charge £10K a day for their privateering, whilst denying the sick and elderly due care, because ‘we can’t afford’ £7K per annum for those oldies, who worked all their lives propping up the ‘trickle down’ empire of their betters.
These entitled right wing parasites have been rubbing their hands with glee at Covid: more chances to steal from the public. And even better still, they can sit back and enjoy the ‘culling of elderly dependents.’ Hitler called such folk – the human cattle elites so happily consign to poverty, suffering and death – ‘useless eaters’. Our current day capitalo-fascists are cut from the same cloth as Nazis. That’s not hyperbole.
Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS was absolutely right when he said that Tories are ‘lower than vermin.’
A Guardian headline I saw recently seems apt for recording here: ‘In the post-Brexit wreckage, just one Tory strategy remains: the theatre of cruelty.’ The article (which I didn’t read in full, btw) appears to take issue with the current Tory efforts to deflect the public’s attention from their catastrophic misrule by kicking the helpless in the teeth. Nothing new there. Yet the Gammonry will fall for it. Again.
On a different yet related line… Quora seems like a cesspool of mainly right-wing dumb-shittery. But I did see one post, click-baitingly titled along the lines ‘Is the Left responsible for the decline of the UK’*, which was actually quite good. In it, someone going under the name Sage, says, quite rightly:
‘The British class system and anti intellectualism (my italics) are major reasons for Britain’s decline in the 20th century.
Take the example of Frank Whittle. He published a paper in 1929 outlining the design of the jet engine. No one took him or his idea seriously because he had not been to a public school (curiously this means a private, fee-paying school in the U.K.) and had been a mere RAF apprentice. Even when he produced a working prototype many years later, no one listened. (“Not our kind of chap…a bit of a one-off boffin”).
Eventually, when it was clear that the Germans had two flying jet planes about to enter service, the Ministry for Aircraft Production got the message and invested in Whittle’s idea. However they basically swindled Whittle out of his invention. The British post war aircraft industry could have been world beater but the Americans weren’t hampered in the same way. They didn’t mind Whittle one bit, and saw only his genius.’
I have a book I have yet to read, pictured above, about the intellectual lives of the British working classes. Must get around to reading that. Oh, and then there’s also The Plunder of The Commons to be read as well.
* What a preposterous idea! In a virtual one-party Tory state for the best part of 75 years, in which for Labour to get in they had to become ‘Tory-lite’ (under Blair) (before going beyond Tory, under ‘Broon’), such ideas are beyond risible. Out of reach even of satire.
Akin to the infamous oxymoronic (or rather just plain moronic) ‘left wing economic establishment’, such ‘ideas’ display so stunning a degree of obduracy to facts and intelligence one would have to conclude the Tories relentless dumbing-down had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. So much so that in a moment of mental or philosophical acid reflux they themselves are swallowing their own bile, and believing in it.
The most corrosive form of Tory Rot really set in and bit deep with Thatcher. An appalling excuse for a human being, whose two key achievements, in the words of Reuters were that ‘she crushed the unions and privatised large swathes of industry.’
Thatcher’s legacy, again, acc. to Reuters: ‘The woman who became known simply as “Maggie” transferred big chunks of the economy from state hands into private ownership.’ That’s Plunder of The Commons, right there.
To my mind, the short answer to the question posed in the title of this post is a short and resounding yes!
However, apparently much of the science says otherwise: ‘Fundamentally, the idea of a general addictive personality is a myth. Research finds no universal character traits that are common to all addicted people.’ [1]
Anyway, I’ve suddenly collapsed into a near vegetative state of depression, over the last few months. Some of the reasons are perennial (lack of money), others more singular (least said, soonest mended).
Amidst all of this, I’ve relapsed into few behaviours (I’m sounding like an amateur naturist, er… naturalist, now) that seem, outwardly, very aulde. One of the common denominators to all these behaviours, is addiction.
And some of the things that characterise the kind of addiction I’m talking about: firstly they compel one to act in ways one knows are foolish and high risk, and two, there’s a kind of hollow joylessness to whatever the indulgence might me.
On that latter point, it has to be said that things aren’t really as cut and dried as that idea might imply. Pleasure can be and is taken in the addictive behaviours. But there’s an underlying sense, sometimes even when unquestionably enjoying the addictive behaviour, that one is acting foolishly.
Why should it be this way? And what makes certain things so compelling that they hijack one’s better judgement? This post isn’t an attempt to really answer such questions. In truth it’s more the sudden realisation that I’ve got some possible addiction ‘issues’ I need to acknowledge and work on.
Looking at all the textual images in this post, which I pulled from the Google image search results for ‘addictive personality’, they almost all apply. Perhaps unsurprisingly?
I’d say that for me there are two or three chief drivers when it comes to most of my addictions: pleasure, relaxation and escape. And the leaning into these behaviours is exacerbated in times of high stress – such as presently – by the desire to reduce or mitigate it.
I like to use my blog as a somewhat candid journal. But it’s neither an outright confessional, nor the best place to air dirty laundry that might best be addressed professionally.
On this last topic, however, I feel I’m being let down in a pretty big way, by the alphabet soup of acronym-heavy mental-health organisations I’ve been alerted to. It’s all pillar to post Groundhog Day assessments, and nary any actual support!
Having inferred above that here is not the place to go into the gory details of specific addictions, I will use one relatively innocuous seeming but actually very insidious example, namely spending.
My re-formulation of Descartes famous dictum, for our times, runs thus ‘I spend therefore I am’. One of histories’ greatest dictators, the unholy axis of capitalism and materialism, has marched into and annexed almost every conceivable aspect of modern life.
And I will often attempt to spend my way out of obscurity and depression with anything from a Gregg’s pizza slice to a book, CD, clothes or shoes.
Anything pleasurable is a form of therapy right now. Model making and little toy soldiers are, on and off, areas of hobbying that I have enjoyed.
I have a ’mini-military’ blog called AQOS (link!). But I’ve kind of petered out posting on there. Partly ‘cause of tech and software issues, and partly just going completely off the boil on that front.
I’m thinking I might concentrate all my blogging in the one place, here. But I’m at a loss how to manage or incorporate the various strands.
Having yet another very rough episode of psychological weather. We were at my sister’s again this weekend. And for the first time my depression was so intense it confined me to the bedroom, and stopped me interacting much with family.
Fortunately Teresa was their to ‘carry the weight’. And dad, bless ‘im, also stepped in, bringing over lunch for everyone, and hanging with Sofi and Ali through a marathon game of (Spanish!) Monopoly!
[* But a pretty amazing book, in terms of the actual content. Part of a series by i Fabre, of which I currently have three out of four.]
I’d taken a book on Picasso, an Airfix model (1/76 88mm gun and half-track!), and was mostly watching snooker, or sleeping/trying to sleep.
Snooker is one of my chief therapies right now. It’s also something bordering, I suppose, on addiction or compulsion. I particularly love the longer games (19+ is a minimum, ideally, but 25-30+ frames? Even better!), like the semis and finals of the World Championship.
Over Friday and Saturday I watched the intense 2022 World Championship Final. O’Sullivan was beating Trump mercilessly, initially. Trump fought back. But ultimately, whilst it was a bit one-sided, with O’Sullivan dominant overall. Nevertheless, it was still a great match, and an interesting watch.
The end was pretty weird, esp’ so in our buttoned-up conservative British culture. When O’Sullivan clinched the deciding frame, equalling Stephen Hendry’s record of seven wins, he went over to Trump, locking him in a close embrace.
It was clear they were talking to each other, as well. It struck a lot of people, myself included, as rather awkward… almost sexual!? I think that’s a sign of how appallingly neutered our outward emotional lives are.