Tuesday 26 July 2016

Bones



Poem written after visit to a First World War exhibition in Vienna, Austria.


on mounds of earth
blackened sticks stand

crossed
and aslant


the bones the sticks mark
are not

the bones
to be handed in

along with kettles
and pans

candlesticks
and lamps

doorbells
and plates

by widows
and children in dutiful queues


the bones
in the earth

are not the bones
for the making of soap

and candles
and glycerin

spodium and lime
or dung


they've given their bones
for the emperor's
war

today they are making
     new shoes
     out of straw








Assange: Why I Created WikiLeaks . . .




This video is published here courtesy of Democracy Now! in the public interest and by way of an introduction to Democracy Now! - an independent, investigative and truthful news source.

There is a permanent link to Democracy Now! at the foot of the page.







Monday 25 July 2016

Wunderkind



wunderkind
him with his foot in his mouth
the expelled    youth

  killer in the rain

odour of chrysanthemums 
terra incognita 
the beast in the jungle 

  a breath of lucifer  

through the wall
the gifts of war 
the magic paint 

  lunar caustic

red rose 
white rose 
dear illusion 

  the colour out of space

children on their birthdays
the living daylights
the delicate prey
  
  flypaper

babylon revisited
the machine stops





A poem made from titles of works by Carson McCullers, Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, Raymond Chandler, D H Lawrence, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, R K Narayan, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Margaret Drabble, Primo Levi, Malcolm Lowry, Eileen Chang, Kingsley Amis, H P Lovecraft, Truman Capote, Ian Fleming, Paul Bowles, Robert Musil, F Scott Fitzgerald, and E M Forster. 



Friday 22 July 2016

Tunnel of Love



Old friends meet again  . . .

"Hello friend, is this the way to Paradise?"


Wednesday 20 July 2016

this is not a milk jug



An Evening Outdoors


The end of day


and in my chair

reclined


the orb going down

and the mind at ease


idly watching

shapes in clouds


first the slight -

 then the great


and musing

on the changing shades


first the white -

 then the grey


and for the moment

unaware . . .


of darker clouds

 beyond this place











Monday 18 July 2016

Sunday 17 July 2016

Brave New World?


What a day!

At last the arrival of the long awaited 14 year old top secret 28 pages which the White House assures us contain sufficient information for relatives of the 9/11 victims to sue the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Scrolling through the 28 pages on the Guardian website and on other websites and finding the unclear text a bit too much of a strain for my tired eyes I decided to print the pages and study them later. 

When the first three un-redacted pages, that is to say  the first three no-longer-censored and no-longer-top-secret pages, were in my hand I stopped the print job.  

Here's why!

Brave New World?

Turkey Shoot



Europe: in context


When I was a small boy and beginning to read juvenile material such as the Dandy and Beano comicssomebody gave me an atlas and suggested I learn the names of some of the world's countries. I treasured this atlas for years. 

I was immediately fascinated by the shapes of the continents and the oceans and saw that the atlas was not unlike a jigsaw puzzle. It was amazing for a young boy to discover, for example, that Africa was the same shape as South America - if there were no sea between them they would fit nicely together just like the continents of Europe and Asia.

There were many countries with strange names: Belgian Congo, Papua New Guinea, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and so on. The last mentioned was a huge green coloured country stretching two-thirds of the way across northern hemisphere of the world. 

At that time many countries dotted about the world were coloured pink. I was told that the pink countries, places with names like Canada, India and Rhodesia were parts of the British Empire on which the sun never sets.

Naively I imagined that Hungary was called Hungary because the people who lived there had not very much to eat. And I imagined that Turkey was a country where there were lots of turkeys. And I thought, if the people of Hungary are always hungry maybe they should go and live in Turkey.

At that time I didn't know anything about turkey shoots.  But I knew about explorers and adventurers.  I knew for example that explorers who ventured  into darkest Africa had to wear khaki shorts, bush shirts and pith helmets and that they ran the risk of painful death. 

If they weren't being eaten by lions or crocodiles they risked being boiled in a pot by a black man who went about naked, except for a grass skirt and a bone through his nose. 

At this time the black people were portrayed with low foreheads and thick lips and were known in Britain as savages.

Before I was much older  I discovered that there had been two world wars involving Britain in the years before I was born, and that many of my relatives had been soldiers and airmen called up to fight in these wars for "King and Country". 

From my relatives I soon got to know about cannon fodder, trench knee, gangrene, bombs, poison gas, prisoners of war, the Battle of Britain, medals, tattooed numbers, strange diseases, mental illness, shell shock and lingering or sudden death.

In the 1950's a boy at my school informed me that his house had been bombed during  the war. He asked me if I wanted to go with him and see his new house. The new house turned out to be a prefab, a temporary dwelling not much bigger than a shed. It smelled of boiled cabbage and cats. 

He lived in there with his grandmother who lived in a bed, and with his parents. It was a gloomy, suffocatingly hot, but interesting place for him to live I thought at the time. 

One day my mother said that the Prime Minister had told us that we had never had it so good. Then she  laughed. 

Suddenly, almost overnight it seemed, the prefabs were gone. Vanished into thin air.

The Charge of the Light Brigade was my first turkey shoot I heard out about. How gloriously and fearlessly they rode into the valley of death with cannon to the right of them and cannon to the left of them according to the famous poem we were made to read at school.

Some other turkey shoots are Operation Mole Cricket, Pearl Harbour, and the Highway of Death. 

The Globus is a polyester and steel artwork (1964) by Josef Seebacher (1918-1981). It is to be found today in the Vienna Prater outside the Planetarium.

In Turkey more than 6,000 persons have recently been arrested in connection with a failed putsch. The Turkish leader President Erdogan is quoted as saying: This attempted putsch is my gift from Allah. 

The Sultan will now do whatever he likes. 


Europe: viewpoint 1


Europe: viewpoint 2


Europe: viewpoint 3






Friday 15 July 2016

Meeting in Woods


An old man runs on
A woodland track.

Sharp crack of a twig -
And the man stops dead.

Two beings now still
Each close to the other.

The man sees only
 The eyes of the deer.

The deer sees only
 The eyes of a man.

Something connects?
Something's exchanged?

The deer relaxes -
Finds the green shoots.

The man runs on
 And out of sight.






Thursday 14 July 2016

READOUT (Triptych)









For best effect try clicking on the pictures. It's possible they will be enlarged and you will see more detail, for example that the person in the birdhouse is Chinese artist Ai Wei-Wei, a man who can turn anything into cash. His most recent exhibition, or the one he is working on, involves lots of life jackets abandoned by boat people on reaching Lampedusa.

The readout of the title is a stock market ticker. It is is always running somewhere in the world and it affects all our daily lives, hence the bloodstained banknote, a much redesigned Andy Warhol work, now complete with people running away and the value and serial number (both meaningless to the people) appropriately blacked out. 

I've said too much already. I'll leave the rest to the viewer. After all, everyone views a picture or interprets a poem in a different way. 






Tuesday 12 July 2016

the Other the All


to 
the people 
     now singing
   
and praying 
for 
the Other 
   
     the holder
     the keeper
     the creator of the All 

living 
perhaps up there 
      in the featherlight cloud

or beyond faraway 
in the night's 
      unseen stars 

to do something 
and 
      end something 

or 

to do something 
and 
     begin something

       now

take time to listen 
to the song
       of the Other

the song 
      for the dawn 

here we are going 
 
and
                    here we are doing

in our space
          in the All

where the All
         is
         the Other  

and the Other 
         is
         the All

and
the day 
        is an ousel 
on a telegraph pole




Monday 11 July 2016

Contempt of Parliament


Blair's illegal crusade is the greatest war tragedy since Vietnam. In Iraq alone the death toll is 1.5 million. Maybe it's even worse. This is a war crime of unspeakable magnitude.  And yet he justifies his devious call to arms, his moment of glory, his wish to be seen as the knight templar who saved the world, a modern day slayer of the dragon. "I would do the same again," he trumpets from his pulpit in the saintly heights. Netanyahu smiles. Bush winks. And the rest of the world weeps. 



" . . . speaking the language of the will directly from the deep source of Being, its most elementary manifestation . . . he now became an oracle, a priest, or more than a priest - a kind of mouthpiece of the absolute, a telephone line of Transcendence. God's ventriloquist . . . " 

 Friedrich Nietzsche - The Genealogy of Morals




Sunday 10 July 2016

the land of the free


the land of the free

(land is what we think it is)

how is this free land?


Hitler Ghost Town


In 1876, that is to say 3 years after his wedding to Anna Glassl, Alois Schicklgruber (29) changed his surname to Hitler. The couple had no children and in 1880 they were divorced.

Three years later Alois married Franziska Matzelsberger. They had two children: Alois and Angela. Franziska died in 1884, the year after Angela was born.

Alois Hitler married for the third and final time in 1885. His new wife was a second-cousin called Klara Pölzl. They married after obtaining special dispensation from the Roman Catholic Church.

The couple had 6 children: Gustav (died in his 2nd year), Ida (died in her 2nd year), Otto (died in his first year), Adolf (1889-1945), Edmund (died in his 6th year), and Paula (1896-1960).

The Schicklgrubers who variously used the surnames Hitler, Hiedler, and Hüttler are of the parish of Döllersheim in the north of Austria not far from the Czech border.

In 1942 the people of Döllersheim were ordered to leave the area and disperse. This was in order that the parish could become part of a large military encampment.

It was from this conveniently situated military base that the German invasion of Czechoslovakia was launched.

Other parishes in the area were in like fashion abandoned in the years between 1938 and 1942. Most buildings including the cottages, businesses, schools and farms, and also the public records were destroyed.

Recently I visited the ghost town of Döllersheim - the ancestral home of the parents of Adolf Hitler, German Workers Party member nr. 555.

The burgers of Döllersheim, including the Schicklgrubers, Hietlers, Hüttlers and Hitlers prayed in St. Peter's Parish Church in Döllersheim over the centuries and there performed their rituals and confessions.

A lot of good it did them.

Post Scriptum -
Adolf Hitler renounced his Austrian citizenship so he could fight for Germany in WWl in preference to Austria. Born at Braunau on the border of the two countries he saw Germany as his destiny - but only after he failed his entrance examinations in the subject of art at Vienna University.  His childhood ambition was to become a famous artist. The best he could achieve was painting picture postcards of buildings in Vienna city centre, such as theaters and opera houses.
He never renounced his Religion and his best selling book written in prison following the failed Munich putsch was never placed on the Vatican's banned books list. Hitler himself was never excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church who owed a great debt to Hitler's ally Mussolini for giving them their own sovereign territory.

Döllersheim Parish Church prior to 1942

Döllersheim Parish Church today 

Sign dating the original building to the 12th century

Döllersheim Parish School 

Graves in Döllersheim

Döllersheim Graveyard and the Church of St. Peter.

The road to Döllersheim 

This post is linked to Inspired Sunday


Friday 8 July 2016

Prophecy?



Art from a subway wall
 

US President Obama is in Warsaw just in case anyone in Dallas where 11 police officers (4 killed) and one civilian have been shot by triangulated rifle fire, a method reminiscent of the JFK assassination, was wondering why he was conspicuously absent.

Mr O, winner of the devalued and irrelevant Nobel Peace Prize, is planning to put NATO troops on the ground in countries near to the Russian border. There will be 4,000 troops. We can assume the number 4,000 is just for starters.

Obama seems intent on provoking the Russian Bear whenever and wherever he senses an opportunity to do so. The lame excuse is that the Russians 'seized' the Crimea with their 'illegal' referendum in which Crimea voted for an Ukrexit.

One part of Obama's grand plan to take over Europe involves the stationing of missiles in Rumania, a poor country with borders on the Black Sea.

Do I feel safer? The answer is definitely NO.

Germany and Russia have an historic agreement that there should be a buffer zone with a policy of non-interference from Germany et al in territories in the Russian area of influence.

I believe it was Mr Gorbachev who signed on the dotted line for the Russians. Mrs Merkel and the EU Project appear never to have heard of it.

Could it all end like the Cuban missile crisis . . . only worse? YES.

It requires one idiot to give the order and a second idiot to obey it and we're all in the smelly stuff here in Central Europe.

Back in Dallas the police death toll has climbed to 5.

Go home Mr. President.

Your own country needs you.








Wednesday 6 July 2016

Essl Era Ends



A museum during the days before it finally closes its doors to the public is an odd place, not least because hundreds will suddenly arrive, as if to bear witness to the end. 

A number of these people are known in Austria as Lit. trans. Schaulustige - show-onlookers.

"Where have you been for the past 17 years?" I mutter under my breath. 


Maybe I should have voiced my feelings a little louder. But clearly it's not good for me to feel like this. A financial axe is destined to fall. And that's that. 

Before leaving The Essl for the final time I decide to record something of the last of many visits, if only for the sake of my own posterity. And so I do. 


Here are the works I have chosen to remember. 



Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Lower Austria


Grand Papillon D'Ete (1954) Corneille


Woman Power (1979) Maria Lassnig


Kreuzwegstation (1990) Hermann Nitsch



Tuesday 5 July 2016

Glaslyn Ospreys Live Webcam Stream


Glaslyn Ospreys Live Webcam Stream


Best to watch in the evening when the sun is behind the webcam. It's not always streaming in the morning from what I can make out. Perhaps they switch it off when the picture is too bright due
to the sun's position relative to the camera. In any case the birds are very active in the evening before settling down - more entertaining than watching football.