Category Archives: Blog
WOOD
How tired and grumpy I am right now, like a battered old shoe still thumping along with a ragged foot inside. If only I could pass out and sleep for one hundred days, alas, no, I am still up and writing. It seems much more important that I relay the experience of the weekend past [...]
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Hold Everything Dear
After a long run of Huxley novels, I’ve finally broken the chain with John Berger, recommended by one of the Dark Mountain founders. The book Hold Everything Dear by Berger is a collection of essays on resistance and survival, which opens with the following poem. It struck me as acutely relevant, so sad and beautiful, [...]
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Secret Cinema: Wings of Desire
The weekend just past, the band and I were booked for Secret Cinema. As the name suggests, it was supposed to be all very hush hush regarding the details of the event. Now it’s all over I can reveal what actually happened.
Secret Cinema puts on classic films in unconventional venues, then themes the night around [...]
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Small step forward for mankind
So Obama has cut Nasa’s budget and shelved any plans for putting a man on the moon by 2020. Across the political spectrum the press are calling it a travesty. Some wildly, some barely, but there is at least a hint of dismay in all of it. America will fall behind, China will overtake them [...]
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Power Down IX: Save the Islington Arts Factory
My dear friends,
It is with great sadness and much irritation that I bring you news that the Islington Arts Factory, Power Down’s birth place and home, may be forced to closed. The fire brigade dropped in on them before Christmas and told them that unless they upgrade their fire safety stuff, doors, alarms, who knows [...]
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Clarification of Division
The last post about division being the basis of evil, is a little confused, I admit.
When one looks at the alternative to individual expression, it’s herd mentality, do nothing original, raise no objection to the status quo, to follow others blindly. Not the most attractive of ideas, nor realistic. It works as a successful meme [...]
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The basis of evil
As if to confirm my previous rant about the evilness of individuality, Huxley comes along in the final pages of Eyeless in Gaza with the same sentiment:
“Evil is the accentuation of division; good, whatever makes for unity with other lives and other beings. Pride, hatred, anger – the essentially evil sentiments are essentially evil because [...]
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Civilization and Sexuality
Taken from Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless In Gaza, Anthony Beavis explains at a party in London in 1926, the correlation between sexuality and civilization. Much food for thought here:
“Civilzation and sexuality…there’s a definite correlation. The higher the one, the intenser the other…
“Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First class [...]
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In the name of vanity
What have we done with ourselves? We have destroyed the very heart of our being, in the pursuit of what noble cause exactly? What in the world could justify such a destruction?
The pursuit of specialist knowledge, the pursuit of personality, so unique on the surface at least, yet hollow as a rotten oak one hundred [...]
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If this is civilisation, I want no part in it