About two years ago I was mildly obsessed with this song – ‘You! Me! Dancing!’ by Los Campesinos. And you gotta say, the music video (more futuristic animation) is smashing.
You! Me! Dancing!
Writer, publisher & arts producer
Writer, publisher & arts producer
About two years ago I was mildly obsessed with this song – ‘You! Me! Dancing!’ by Los Campesinos. And you gotta say, the music video (more futuristic animation) is smashing.
Tom Chivers
Dear Chivers.
Swift did not publish this reply to your analysis opf the geo-political hoo ha a few thousand mioles from London where the British and Americvans have no real claim to be interested in apart from their own selfish interests dressed up as some Freedom bollix – imho, and thus the reason for sending it to you here.
Sincerely
Stalin was Georgian. They have a statue in Gori.
Have you been there?
I cannot claim to know anything about this conflict, and am commenting from the perspective of an armchair observer and the *bad guys* in the world at the mo, are the Americans and the UK, as they went into Iraq based on at worst stupidity, and perhaps even outright lies.
The history of the CIA is that they import drugs traditionally and agitate to ov erthrow regimes that do not agree with their own policy, often democratically elected ones and as in Pakistan, support dicators opposed to democracy.
As oliver north proves and in many black ops and we only have to look at to know and also in how cynical the republicans are in their election campaigns built on smearing the person and avoiding talking of any real isseus.
Look at Afghanistan’s drug crop as soon as the Americans and UK went in and got rid of the Taliban, it shot up 900%, and they didn’t find Bin Laden and now are *slotting terries* with the help of His Highness, the selectively bred fella who has a very nuanced grasp of Roya;ty and it’s purpose in the UK. Or that other part of the UK that is really irish and that was cordoned off and until very recently in the nearly two thousand years of written history of the European island i live on, operated a policy of aprtheid with the natives and whose British citizens still refuse to want to pass an act whereby the gaeilic language is officially recognised.
grasp.
Have you heard of Michael Ruppert, the ex la cop with three generations of intelligence officers in his family, who explains the drug links and his
interesting take on 9/11 here
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8797525979024486145
The fact is Chivers, if you only get your news from Murdoch and the billionaires, you are getting very few people’s version of what’s happening in the world today.
From my angle it appears the UK seems to think it is the world’s copper, when – i think – it is just a bully and lapdog of darker forces.
If you haven’t been to this balkan enclave and lived there, our opinions are equally valid as each others, and purely armchair ones and from the recent track record of the UK, it looks to me that they will find any excuse to start gobbing off so they can tell their citizens they are kicking ass for the *good guys* who struck the first blow and started moaning when the ruskies hit back and then try to treat us as though we are thick by inflating it to the lastest world crisis, which is only a local row thousands of miles away from us and dickheads lioke Cameron and the other labour mong start posturing the hard man act.
Georgia shelled Ossetia first – fact – and when Russia goes in based on this very real event, the people thousands of miles away start going on about principles when really we both know it has sweet FA to do with any human concern, but oil and energy.
If the USA and UK are so arsed about freedom,. how come they didn’t stop the Rwanda stuff and how come they don’t go kicking ass in the places where a lot more people die and their is far more unfairness than what is – in the grand scheme – a few people.
love
Caoimhghin Deasmhuman
(Hello again)
“the geo-political hoo ha a few thousand mioles from London where the British and Americvans have no real claim to be interested in apart from their own selfish interests dressed up as some Freedom bollix”
Fair enough. Although I don’t support isolationism per se, particularly not in the current global climate. There must be a very fine line between the duty of the international community (and us as humans) to come to the aid of oppressed or vulnerable people anywhere, and “some Freedom bollix”. I guess that line equates to intention, and you follow the polemical line (although I’m sure you wouldn’t consider it polemical, just ‘the truth’). I’m suspicious of overconfident judgements.
Do you believe in the need for any international cooperation? Do you support the role of the UN as global policeman? Just curious… where does your argument end?
For the record, I haven’t yet been to Georgia, but I’ve long wanted to and have read several books on the history and culture of the region. But yeah, I agree – we’re both just armchair critics, of course.
Hi PMT
(only joshing)
thanx for publishing this, i was not expecting you to, and really it is just a flight, extemporised semi-rant and parts of it, less precisely expressed and with a fair degree of what may be construed as vulgar and somewhat ill grasped and self opinionated resonance about it maybe.
i am only regurtitating what i have read and seen on the alternative media i suppose, and as my main interest in my capacity as a human being in dialogue with you, is what has turned into a pretty obsessive interest in the mechanics of language – like you i imagine – and it is only recently an ability to detach the ego in a way which feels right, has happened, so please forgive any uncouth ineloquence.
..the questions you ask, unless we turn into politicians instead of poets, can only ever be academic, i think and what i find interesting is yr use iof language, and yr willingness to go beyond the stage other online participant-poet stakeholders (that’s the current term innit?) of the international community unable to with me personally as a fellow colleague in the Human race claiming a serious interest in Poetry, which i find interesting, as it seems from this distance, to reflect broader underlying uk societal force my critical intelligence contextualises as an unfortunate cul de sac trap the (what increasingly appears will be) the New UK guvnors (neo-con cameron et al) are setting for the rest of US my mind has it you mean by *the international community*, the 99.99999% of the people affected by the decsion of these few men who start wars but do not fight them, primarily – it would seem – for totally selfish opportunisitc reasons of self advancement in their political *careers* really.
A sort of pretend We are more Human than you, who is inevitably a concept transferred onto a mass of people in other countries who *we* do not know and have no personal truck with, and it is only that these neo-cons who seem to have problems with their leaders, as *we* the 99.99999% of human beings are pretty peaceable people needing only food, shelter and if it comes, Love and for many, Beleif in something. It doesn’t really matter what i think, as we as a sepcious seem hard-wired or certainly pre-disposed to a state of believing in whatever it is we choose to accept as truth.
We hear a lot about God and traditionally what happens is that there is one person, prophet, saviour say, Mohammed and Christ being the main two now, whose lives are used by men (it is mainly men) who distort their teachings in an effort to convince us that believing in the teachings means we must transgress their basic tenets of Love and peace. that we must kill in their name, which is patently ridiculous, but which seems to work, in the sense that *we* the human race, the one consistent pattern of behaviour, is to find reasomns to kill each other on the flimsiest pretexts, and now, my fear is that we are getting collectively brainwashed in an era when a sizable minorioty of *usd* the human race (in the west) have never had such a matrially comfortable existence.
My mother’s great grandmother, told her as a child, about her mother being slung out onto the roads of Bohola as a very small child in county Mayo, by agents of Lord Lucan, because her parents and two million in the same boat, were too poor and impoverished to pay their rent to people who had only been p[art of their two thousand year old ancient culture, for a very short time relative to those in their own culture , which as you probably know, is the only one in Europe in which language was recorded straight from oral to page and without interruption for 1200 years or so, and which the colonists thought uncivilised through ignorance and an inability to speak a foreign language essentially. truly tragic, and an nartural disaster which shaped the history of irish culture to its present state.
My mother’s family was very lucky, as they managed not to starve to death, unlike the million who did die then, only 150 yrs ago, five generations ago and the weight of this Sorrow, some claim, is still carried psychically around by millions here as a silent force rather than anything that explicity lends itself to immediate, rational and detached articulation.
Maybe this is all a load of codswallop, maybe not, i can only claimn to speak for myself and try and do the right thing as my instinct decrees, as poetically and coherently as possible, and what interests me in the wider sense, is my language and how it manifests in me and in differing cultures and people/s, and the UK neo-con rhetoric, i am deeply suspicious of, as we seem to be playing the same old games of demonising entire peoples, involving ourselves in the hocus pocus and plain false assumptions that the way to solve a crisis is to stop talking to one another and as human beings and collectively entrench ourselves into a war footing, on the basis of what a few rich politicians say about other rich politicians. the Rumour speech from Hnevry five part two comes to mind.
Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
I, from the orient to the drooping west,
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth.
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
I speak of peace while covert emnity,
Under the smile of safety, wounds the world.
Exactly how it works, the talk is of saving people and freedom, but really it is all geared towards having a war.
At this point in our collective history i think we have a real chance for genuine liberty and democracy, or at least the tools to express ourtselves to the rest of the world, literally as individual huiman beings, what with the amazing and waht would be considered magic only five genrations back, all this IT technology which for the first time in human history, means we can have our say and not be silent pawns in the game of kings and queens we traditionally killed and died for, even though they would have been all but personally unkown to us.
If politicians want to fight, let them. Have slug outs to settle it. Gte Dave in the ring with Putin would seem fairer than Dave whipping up less intelligent, fitter fighting men to do it on his behalf. A lauighably situation and one which few politicians would take seriously, not because it is an unintelligebt idea, but because it would expose their rhetoric for what it is, lines delivered by actors doing what Performance theorist Erving Gioffman called, *deep acting* sort of living a role, like fireman and nurses do when they are at work.
there should be a UN rtype body doing the work of spreading genuine freedom, but not as a rubber stamping council for acts of one countries aggression.
And srticking with the ossetian thing, look how it was twisted by the western media, that the one who started it was somehow entirely innocent, that the Russians, an entire people of howver many millions, are all bad people, just because a few of their soldiers – from their point of view – did what people like Thatcher did in the Falklands, and what popularity it brought her, made many British ctiizens feel good about themself, kicking ass a few thousand miles away.
I don’t have any answers to the world politics, as a poet i can only plea for love and peace and hope to express it sincerely and what got me about the whole reaction by the press and politicains to ossetia, is how quickly the posturing happened and the idea that *We* the british people have to *punish* Russian people in some way, just because local row was handled – from the russian point of view, quickly and efficiently, and made me think that perhaps the assertive respeonse was more to do with the UK trying to reclaim their moral authority after it being proven disastourously wrong over Iraq, have a new war to forget the mistakes of the old one. feel good about being the good guys for a change.
The danger is i think, that soon there will not be anyone around who remembers WWII and so that collective wisdom born of bitter tragic experience, when it is no longer alive, the people charged with running the human movie, will end up feeling they have to have a big set piece and as is often the case, like Iraq, it is all based on the bullshit of a few rich men who aint interested in the me and you *we*, but the me me me WE bores who pontificate they are right, proven wrong and then faced with the enormity of their stupidity, naturally refuse to face up to it. Maybe on their death bed admit they were not so Great after all and their words and action perhaps not that fantastic a judgement call, when it si all too late for the rest of us paying the price of having Civilisation wiped out because a few bad men stopped talking to the Bad guys because fo some personal power trip they are on and which is as much about making themselves a huge pot of cash, as about serving the best interest of the human beings they are elected to keep safe.
This ossetia thing, we are really getting sold it asd something we should all be concerned about, not because it is that important in the grand scheme of contemporary existence, but because traditionally, BVritain and increasingly since WWII, America, have been nations who love going outside their borders, telling everyone else how to behave, trampling all over other cultures and peoples and displaying a very pronounced superiority complex, reflected in the class system as i experienced it as a british native. The sense of entitlement to something, just because of who we are, because of how we speak, because we are the child of a King or Queen, and which operates totally silently, deeply embedded enough that to evben recognise and articulate it, is a very difficult thing to do.
And it is silence, not speaking to one another, which creates distrust, division and wars. Hitler was a nutter, and clearly needed stopping, but Putin? I don’t know enough and really have no position on it, as i do not know enough to form one, but Cameron i think may enact a New conservative con, as he is an aristocrat, a proper blue blood and at the end of the day, who will he be serving? You and me, the *we* 99% of british people who are not born as classy as Dave, or his own class of people?
So far the signs are that he is very willoing to launch into war as eagerly asd the last fella did, and i sense he is actually rather keen to get on with the business of directing a real llife theatrical set piece, get the flags out and go kicking ass. a different, New version of the same old con, that he will kick it off, look good talking and not actually fight himself. which will be fab for Dave, being on the telly, signing autographs, all that power, it”s great innit?
But basically as long as we keep talking, even if we hate each other’s guts, that is the most cicivilsed and sensible way i think, and the refusal to even acknowledge the other position, being very eager and quick to demonise it, is always a bad sign.
in dublin there are plenty of poets and people in Poetry who can not stand me, some for legitimate reasons linked to me being a bit of messer who has made a right royal dickhead of myself when drunk, insulting people and generally ruining the odd vibe (not so much now but when i first came) and one of my fiercest critics who openly states a deep hatred for me (which is a general feature of poetic life the globe over i think, poets hating poets) to my face, taught me a valuable lesson, stating that even though s/he hates me, we should not let it affect our good natured conversation whenever we bump into one another.
S/he reckons that two irish ppl, the worst thing they can do, is stop talking, as this breeds enmity.
“as long as you’re talking, you have a chance” s/he says, and i think is right, and soemtimes in the odd moment, think s/he may actually harbor the odd enthusiastic view of me, pretty much like Cameron’s posturing with the bad guys (boo, hiss) but he will clearly respect Putin as a fellow leader, for the Russian people generally being sdupportive of him.
It is easy to jusge everyone by ouir own standartds and interpretation of what Democracy is, and forget our choose to airbrush out any negative historical impact we created, settling for a one sided vioew of things. Cromwell being the perfect example. In English sensibilities he is usually painting as one of the top best brits, whilst in Ireland, he is remebered with the fondness of how the Poles remember Hitler, and if we read his rants it is clear he was prettyy disturbed, what with hearing God order him to do stuff, which we can guess in hindsight, was the self-protection mechanism of a mentally ill person, and most of us are lucky enough not to have the burden of guilt he must have carried and many do. look at Blair, going Catholic, what’s that about? could it have anything to do with him feeling builty about Iraq? who knows, he is the one living with it and really, all he wanted to be was Bono, as we alldo i suspect, at some level. the good guy who gets by on his music alone, helpiong the world in his won way, which is all we can do as poets Chivers, so thanks again for engaging with me on a human level and not treating me like a mentally ill dickhead as s/he who hates me for being me and would exclude me and paint and poo poo me, just coz s/he got jealous when it all kicked off in our own private, pretend poetry war, and who i know if i met, would love, hate or be indifferent to me as a human being, but as poet, respect.
Love
Desmond
Desmond,
Sorry, I don’t have time now to respond fully to your piece. Codswallop or not, it’s honest and human, which I respect, if we might disagree on some of the issues. Thank you for taking the time to post it. I will try and come back with something more substantial when I’ve got a mo.
PMT 🙂
Chivers
(don’t worry, my surname is desmond, my christian name is kevin and my mother’s maiden name is swords. i called myself it after finding there is an author of the name my family call me by, who writes about speedboat engines, and as a sort of ha ha ha, i aint lying jag which meant i could pretend to be serious, coz after all, if yiz wanna get took serious, surnames are dare rigour innit?)
i have recently entered the end of seven yrs full time addiction to the noble art of talking blather, which in the bardic system relates to going from one grade a year for six years (grade six Anruth – ridgepole) – to the final five yr stretch which formally ended in yr 12 when one became an Ollamh – poetry professor.
The nuts and bolts of this course, boiled down to one six month term a year Samhain to Beltaine or October 31 to May 31, halloween until traditionally breaking up for the summer when the first cuckoo was heard in the woods were these schools were located – and the main meat and two veg of the course was a corpus of 250 *primary* learned in the first seven years, and a 100 secondary ones which only those who progressed to the Ollamh stage were taught.
Of these, only 200 or so exist now in print, all primary, and which make up the four cycles of Irish myth – Mythological which deals with the five fictional races of gods in the pantheon, from Parthalon the first person to come here, through to the Tuatha De Dannan, the penultimate wave of takers of the island as outlined in the Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland) tales which form the ancient canon and which a bard had to fully learn to earn the title of fili – poet.
Each grade had so many tales to learn and so many meters to learn how to practice in, which are the most formally complex of any poetical system in literate history, and everything had to be composed without the aid of quill and ink, before it was committed to parchment, and when i started, the mad dream i had – knowing nothing of Irish history apart from the Wolfetone’s rebel songs – my whole rationale was, that in the world of contemporary poetry, the biggest obstacle seemed to be, there is no base line agreement between many of the various factions and individuals, about what Poetry is and how to recognise it, and soon after beginning writing and being lucky enough to fall into third level education – almost by complete chance it seemed – studying a writing and drama degree in my home town of Ormskirk Lancashire under the premier Concrete heir to Bob Cobbing, Robert Sheppard – and making my first forays into who i am and where i come from culturally as an individual human being whose folks just happen to be Irish; i discovered this are of bardicism, and it soon became clear that here was the ultimate test.
The one way, i reckoned, to be accepted as an undisputablely genuine bluffer in the rhyme game, would be to learn what the bards did. At the time i started, i had not a clue and looking at this gear was like banging one’s head against a tea straineir to filter it into coherency and it is only in the last year or so, the jigsaw puzzle that was the whole mass of this learning, has started to firm up and as we only have our own history in the biz to measure ourself by professionally, i can see it was not an entirely silly daft dream to pin my critical colours upon, as i am still only just over half way into my training, i can claim and especially now with all the new medias, the need to schmooze and get bummie chums annointing us in their online gulags and poem rags, is far, far less and – it seems – an increasingly redundant one the longer our IT age embeds us newbs into who and whatever New voice cliques are coming out. We can now do it all alone.
I discovered today, Roger McGough has five agents to handle the various business arms of his one man poetry corporation. Five of the effers, to do what?
And having taken my cue from the Paddy Kavanagh’s of this planet, to learn the final simplicity is not caring if one appears foolish or not, we can now go and flash our nickers worldwide on the GU BB say, and over time learn to see through ppl like that fella from the Institute of Ideas, the eye eye mob of Ms Debnt et al, the rotweillers who talk like they are from the house of Windsor, but really are just like me and you, their we’s a con. Shirl and her class is plastic paddy, an Islington scuffer who loves a ruck and the learning to detach, to outfox the mass of critical gobs who would box us off as being too, blah blair yeah mate, are yiz really Queen B or King Geoff’s heir to cleverness hinting and adopting verbal accented masks of plummy yahs when really, yiz are same as moi, a human being and pretending that speaking such a way is the one silent measuring device society polices itrself so we can all do as marm says, is cobblers Tom lah.
I am just a bore addicted to chatting and trying to make linguistic shapes, patterns and poetry, so no need to feel you gotta come back about aowt deep, just chat anything you want, have a larf and get me blurbed into that rumour hole my two very bezzie mates mod on behalf of saving the planet, sacraficing themselves and working only for others, s/he who i need in my life, to tell me off and what to do, the island ladzees in the UK Rainbow zippy and bungle mental astro-turf outs.
only joshing, i love them really
D