my life as a artist
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Friday 26th December 2008 7:40 PM
The akashic records, as described by 19th century theosophists, is a compendium of mystical knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence, which contains all knowledge of human experience and the history of the cosmos. Imagine my girlish yelps of delight therefore, when last weekend, at Rufforth car-boot sale with my mum, amongst the unwanted warped frisbees of the disappointed, I came across a second-hand akashic record player, that looked in reasonable condition for its obvious age. The bloke who was selling it wanted a tenner for it, but he said because it needed a new pineal gland, he'd give it to me for £8:50.
When I got back to the caravan, Mark the farmer was hanging round looking for a couple of lost old English bantams, so I invited him in and showed him my latest car-boot triumph. Farmers are good at delivering bad news, and there was a noticeable wrinkle of compassion around his eyes when he pointed out that the akashic record player I'd bought was actually a Bush Dansette, circa 1964, with 'akashic record player' written on it in black felt-tip, and if the same bloke was there next week, I should go and ask for my money back.
I then knew that when the car-boot man told me that I could probably buy a used pineal gland on-line, at 'chakras-r-us', he was pulling the wool over my eyes, but among the inter-weaving threads of that too big bobble-hat of lies, I've since come to realise that in a tricksterish sort of way he'd given me a subtle teaching, part of which was not to be so stupid.
When I googled (there's no noun that can't be verbed) 'pineal gland', I found out that it's the term used by Richard Dawkins for the third-eye. Apparently, it's a little sack, shaped like a pine-cone, about the size of a pea, and hides out in a tiny little cave above and behind the pituitary gland, more or less in the centre of your brain. One half of the sack has the complete structure of the human eye, including photo-receptive retinal rods and cones, and the other half is water.
Zaf, the smiley owner of the local Indian take-away, whose knowledge of the world obviously extends beyond vegetable dansak, says it's some sort of inner plasma-screen, hi-definition, dig-it-all TV, (that receives channels from goodness knows where), with an in-built akashic record-player. He tells me that operating manuals for it have been available in his home country, India, for thousands of years, but most people still don't even know how to turn it on, never mind operate it. He tells me that 'akasha', the root word of 'akashic', means 'sky' in Hindi, so I imagine you probably need a dish for it.
Posted 7:40 PM | 4 Comments | Permalink
bhang out of order
Sunday 21st December 2008 10:08 PM
There's this plant. It grows easily in a wide variety of climates, doesn't need pesticide or herbicide (or homicide or genocide beside, he sighed inside) and leaves the soil aerated and nourished. Its seed provides nearly complete nutrition, with all 10 essential amino acids and all 4 essential fatty acids in the ratio recommended by health experts (like me, my mum and Doctor Dolittle), and over 30% protein in its most easily digestible forms, making it an ideal food for human consumption.
You can make bio-degradable plastics from it and non-toxic paint and sealants. You can wear it, you can draw, paint and write on it, or feed it to the cattle. You can camp in it. You can use it as medicine or for skin-cream and lip-balm. If you're bored of Delia, Jamie and Nigella, there's an ancient recipe for holy anointing oil, recorded in the Old Testament book of Exodus (30: 22-23) that includes over nine pounds of its flowering tops, and as Messiah means 'anointed one', it was probably used by Jesus.
You can make hard-board homes out of it, and varnish them with it, and use it for carpets and nappies and CD sleeves, or you could sail away and use it for sails and ropes and hammocks, and I'm not taking you for a ride, or wiggling your todger, when I tell you that seventy per cent of Henry Ford's first car, the Model T, was made of it, and it was also the main ingredient of the gasoline it ran on. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Unfortunately, this plant is now illegal, and I can't mention it by name, otherwise I'll never get offered any work on Radio 4 again. What's that you say? Oh, I see your point. OK then, the plants name is hemp.
For a two hundred year period in USA history, it was legal to pay taxes in hemp, and for a brief period in the 1600's it was illegal for a farmer not to grow it. In the 1930's the rising industrialisation of hemp threatened the businesses of certain Messrs Lammont Dupont and William Randolph Hearst, owners of the largest chemical company and newspaper, respectively. Hearst, an arboricidal maniac, was big into tree-killing to make paper to print lies on, and Lammont Dupont, whose name is also the first line of a French nursery rhyme, had just got the patents to make plastics out of oil, so they declared war on hemp. Harry Anslinger, son-in-law of Duponts main investor and head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, declared that 'marijuana was the most violence-creating drug on the planet', and Hearst's newspapers reported it. At the time, the main recreational users of cannabis were black people and Mexicans, and the slander had distinct racist overtones to it. Marijuana was a Mexican slang word previously unknown to the US public, and before the American Medical Association even realised that the madness-inducing killer-drug 'marijuana' was the same plant as hemp, a law went though congress banning it.
Before it was outlawed, hemp was predicted to become the worlds first billion pound crop, and from where I'm sitting, which is, admittedly, on the sofa in a cloud of aromatic smoke, it looks like it could save the world. Tomorrow, or possibly the day after, I'm going to invite all the G8 leaders round to my caravan for hemp tea and hemp biscuits, and over a few games of petanque I'll try and put a few ideas across to them. All I really want them to do is legalise nature.
Posted 10:08 PM | 1 Comments | Permalink
dogs willy sausage message
Monday 8th December 2008 8:23 PM
Last weeks blog was gratuitously football orientated, and I'm sorry for the obvious distress that I know this will have caused some people, but I make no apologies, and I'm sorry, but it's just that amidst the rampant injustices and routine atrocities of the every-day global meltdown, sometimes I find the struggle a struggle. Football can be a refuge, and because it offers a microcosmic world of idealised conflict, also a teaching.
The referee, as God, is omnipotent, and his ineffable whistle is Gabriel's horn, blowing its message of judgement and dread to the people, and sometimes those pronouncements can be inscrutable and mysterious. This morning, after I'd fouled him and surprisingly won a free-kick, the combative Sherburn Carnivores mid-fielder, Billy, in the pain and despair of his own isolation, couldn't help but lift his voice to the heavens and cry out, 'That's billy bollocks ref!'
Later, while I was marking Billy at a corner, I agreed with him that the decision had indeed been 'billy bollocks', but suggested to him that rather than railing against the implacable will of God, he'd be better off directing his dissent at the corrupt governments and corporations that are the real enemy. I told him about Henry David Thoreau, the ex-Blackburn Rovers full-back and natural philosopher, who in the nineteen-sixties, after writing a seminal essay on the duties of civil disobedience, added a new dimension to his game and won a couple of caps under Ron Greenwood.
At the next throw-in, Billy and I reminisced about the extraordinary energy of the sixties, the optimism and the fearless exploration of inner and outer universes. We remembered John Lennon's last-minute hat-trick and Ringo's toothless jig in 1966, when the Beatles won the World Cup at the Shay Stadium, in Halifax. We remembered the immortal words spoken by Thor Heyerdahl, after his successful completion of a journey to the moon on a balsawood raft in 1969. 'It's one small step for a space-rocket' he said, 'but it's a fuck of a long way on a balsawood raft.'
Despite the last blog being essentially about football, all the comments seemed to be centred on the post-match dog's-willy sausages. Tij wonders, possibly with a certain amount of projection, if the message of the blog was 'consumption of the odd sausage occasionally is OK for the soul'. Well Tij, while I can't honestly say that that was the intended overarching theme of the piece, I'm nevertheless really glad you found a message of some sort in there. Personally, I think of a sausage as undifferentiated dead animal in an edible condom, and haven't eaten one for over thirty years. However, I used to think of cheese as the congealed mammary fluids of a cow I'd never met, but that didn't stop me from whacking a wedge of wensleydale onto my Dr Karg's organic wholegrain spelt muesli crisp-bread last night. (On frosty mornings, not only do I find this extremely robust brand of crisp-bread delicious, but also an ideal tool for scraping ice off the car windscreen). Drinking poison is a famous yogic party-piece, so I suspect at the end of the day, which at the moment is about half-past three, that the only corrupt stuff must be what comes out of your mouth, not what goes into it.
Posted 8:23 PM | 291 Comments | Permalink
by dint of smig
Tuesday 2nd December 2008 1:30 AM
Copmanthorpe 3 Corinthians 2
Despite the freezing conditions and the high tog-rating of the modern duvet, the Corinthians played in front of their biggest crowd of the season, with nearly eight people squeezed into the impressive Copmanthorpe Big Field. With both teams having a combined age of over a thousand years, the game fizzed with experience, and in a bright opening, Copmanthorpe saw the better of the early chances.
Maybe unnerved by the big crowd, or by playing in the shadowed and still frozen left-hand side of the pitch, Evans squandered a couple of chances, his shooting proving to be much tamer than his inner life. Coming into the light from the shadows, to defend a corner, the wily number seven remarked to Butch, Copmanthorpe's lively mid-fielder, that being caressed by gentle sunshine made him feel like a gorgeous butterfly. As the vegetarian dynamo went on to explain how the life cycle of a butterfly could be analogous to psychological transformation, or the awakening sexuality of adolescence, Butch scored with a bullet header from three yards out, despite little, if any, indication of having an inner life.
Although a workman-like performance from Evans, he had the wrong tools with him when he went to meet a teasing cross from John at the back post, electing to screw it wide instead of drilling it home. Soon afterwards, Copmanthorpe went two up and then, incredibly, added a third just before half-time, creating a score-line that was as flattering as Colin's new Billy Idol/El Hadj Diouf hair-do.
At two and a third nil down, away from home, in the seething, hostile atmosphere of a place like the Copmanthorpe Big Field, most over 35 teams would be dead and buried, but most teams aren't managed by the inscrutable Brianio. In broken Portuguese, the Selby maestro directed Evans to go up front with Brian, as a sort of 'meat and one veg' option, giving Ian and Wayne the fluidity in the attacking third to be gravy. With Andy Simmo as a tablecloth, Matt as mashed potato and Bob as Yorkshire pudding, and using Derek, Jack, Nigel and Rudy as cutlery, with Colin as a decorative candle, the Gordon Ramsey of the over 35's league conjured up a delicious forty minute feast of football.
With ten minutes to go of this pulsing encounter, Ian pounced on a loose ball, took it by the scruff of the neck and told it, in no uncertain terms, to loft over the keepers head into the top corner of the net. 2⅓-1! Brianio, although often incoherent after sunset, at this time of the morning was bright and alert, and in his self appointed free-role as a sachet of Bramwell's brown sauce, brought a spicy inventiveness, and much needed moisture, to the smorgasbord of the midfield. Five minutes later the Corinthians were walking in a winter wonderland, after Wayne Fontana crashed a mind-bender into the top left-hand corner of the Copmanthorpe goal, the bumper crowd gasping as the net bulged like an excited underpant. 2⅓-2!
Now displaying sumptuous skills, as mouth-watering as the post-match dogs-willy sausages, the Corinthians purred like a well-oiled metaphor. One suspected that the referee, bravely playing through the pain of a chronic moustache injury, was giving decisions against the Corinthians out of sheer jealousy. With two minutes to go Wayne Fontana released another smash hit, which only failed to chart by dint of Smig, the spoilsport Copmanthorpe keeper.
In the last minute Wayne released Evans, a novelty single, who when he joined the club was a scratched 45, spinning on a broken dansette of lost dreams, but was now bearing down on the Copmanthorpe goal with the ball at his feet, a song in his heart, and the hopes of his fellow Corinthians weighing on his shoulders like a huge anvil with a Saturday Guardian on top. Smig made himself big, but the rangy ex-vegan clipped the ball tantalisingly towards the top right-hand corner of the net, and in keeping with the last minute of an over 35's match, time stood still.
Somewhere, on the other side of the Eagle Nebula, new stars were being forged in the pillars of creation. Somewhere on the other side of the world, the liquid chaos of a cocoon was miraculously pupating into an iridescent butterfly of hope. Somewhere, on the other side of the six yard box, Brian was in space, waiting for a simple ball for an easy tap in. Quite soon afterwards, before you could say 'Why does Lee Dixon always say 'tattle' instead of 'tackle?', time started up again, and disappointingly, for the Corinthians, and lovers of justice and romance everywhere, the ball sailed over the bar. Evans pleaded with the referee to add a couple of minutes on, for when time had stood still, but the man in black he say no, and with a manly puff of his vein-popped cheeks, the officious official blew the whistle for full time, officiously. Afterwards, the mercurial Brianio was defiant in defeat. 'In a game like this' he said, his grey eyes twinkling, 'there's no winners or losers, only celebrants.'
Posted 1:30 AM | 10 Comments | Permalink
