From a Recent OxfordSEO Literary Representation Press Release:09/23/2022.
A lot of people don’t like our resident unarmed poet Igor Goldkind. Although hard pressed to detail exactly what the source of their antipathy is, when asked most people who’ve met or know him agree on one thing:
Igor is a pain in the ass.
Some would go as far as to say a Royal Pain in the Ass; although any association with the recent demise of Queen Elizabeth or the Royal family in general, is merely conjecture.
When asked about his reaction to this near universal judgement, Igor Goldkind tends to shrug his shoulders and agree:
“Sure, I’m a pain in the ass, especially to anyone wedded to static protocols, conformist mediocrity and any rule that should be followed blindly because ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it'”.
Let’s look at a recent example of his ass-painery. Due to enormous stress and harrassment inflicted by certain individuals (to remain nameless until the court dates), Igor was recently diagnosed with a minor heart failure. After initial panic and a visit to the ER, the initial diagnosis, although precluding an imminent heart attack did necessitate a referral to both cardiology and vascular specialists to eliminate possible causes.
Both were seen and a routine series of tests were scheduled for this week including a Stress Echo Heart test, a heart monitor and a spectogram. Igor called his daughter and without freaking her out, brought her up to date and then gladly picked up the dice to his destiny and gave them a roll.
3 tests were scheduled for this past Monday, Tuesday and then tomorrow. A hectic week to put one’s heart through the paces.
On his way to his first appointment for the monitor last Monday, Igor was surprised to receive a text cancelling the appointment 45 minutes before hand. This was followed by two more text messages cancelling all of his heart monitoring tests without explanation apart from the fact that his insurance provider Molina Healthcare had denied them. Pulling his Thunderbird to the side of the road in Mission Bay, Igor proceeded to telephone his consultant and then his insurance provider to determine the cause of the cancellations.
As light transpired the insurance company’s independent arbitrator had determined that the tests were unnecessary as Igor had never had a pacemaker or open heart surgery. An insurance company administrator who had never even met Igor Goldkind, much less examined him, could overrule the expertise of his health provider and two consultants he was referred to who had examined him.
Hours of being placed on hold, waiting for supervisors, lodging complaints, grievances and appeals, Igor was able to get a call back from a Molina administrator who apologized for the last minute cancellations and reinstated the tests, albeit now delayed by two weeks.
However, our resident pain-in-the-ass wasn’t satisfied with his own private victory. Now that he has a member of the insurance company’s management on the phone, he demanded to know why Molina could adopt this absurd and potentially life threatening policy of over ruling of health specialists by a bureaucrat intent only on saving money?
A grievance was filed on his behalf and this morning he received a telephone call from an executive VP of Molina, once again apologizing for his treatment and then assuring him that based on his complaint, Molina had reviewed its approval policy and would from now on no longer deny a test recommendation without first consulting with the specialist who had recommended the test in the first place….across the board for all members!
This is the benefit of being a pain-in-the-ass, when you’re acting not solely out of personal interest but out of precedent and principle.
So like him or not, Igor Goldkind leads his life based on George Bernard Shaw’s Maxim:
“A reasonable man expects to adapt to the world. An unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to him. Therefore, all human progress is made by unreasonable men”.
NOTHING
of the memorable crisis
or might
the event have been accomplished in view of all results null
human
WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE
an ordinary elevation pours out absence
BUT THE PLACE
some splashing below of water as if to disperse the empty act
abruptly which otherwise
by its falsehood
would have founded
perdition
in these latitudes
of indeterminate
waves
in which all reality dissolves
EXCEPT
on high
PERHAPS
as far as place can fuse with the beyond
aside from the interest
marked out to it
in general
by a certain obliquity through a certain declivity
of fires
toward
what must be
the Septentrion as well as North
A CONSTELLATION
cold from forgetfulness and desuetude
not so much
that it doesn't number
on some vacant and superior surface
the successive shock
in the way of stars
of a total account in the making
keeping vigil
doubting
rolling
shining and meditating
before coming to a halt
at some terminus that sanctifies it
All Thought emits a Throw of the Dice.
From Collected Poems (University of California Press, 1994) by Stéphane Mallarmé. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
I’m a Poet, a Producer and lately a Publisher of aesthetic, sometimes eclectic content that speaks to the truth of living your life in today’s moment of existence. Beyond the Real World is the Actual World, which I prefer to inhabit. There really is only one world but social delusions, language and mathematics make us concoct a duality between the “Real” and the “Actual”. It’s just a trick of the light on our senses.
Oddly and recently, I’ve received a lot of flak and unarticulated hostility from people who just like the way things are. Either they get some advantage out of our current state of disconnect or they’ve become so habituated to futilely struggling, to being dehumanized that they prefer what they’re familiar with rather than facing the unknown of change.
Having a back ground in ‘technology’ I do know one universal truth about ‘systems’ and that is ‘systems’ can always be improved upon. In fact if ‘systems’ aren’t being perpetually improved, they fall by the way side and become impediments to useful change.
As is with technology, so it is true of the human community and its social structures. My father was an anthropologist and a sociologist at a time when the very word ‘society’ was being challenged as having no meaning.
My work is about returning meaning to the term “society”. to the set of complex interactions we consider collectively as the norm and worth compromising our individuality for. Society is us and what we make of it, every day of every interaction you have with another human, either well known or a stranger to you. How you treat others out of fear or openness is multiplied by millions and the sum total consists the society we are all part of and are all living in.
No man is an island and no woman can be exiled to one.
This is not about politics or ideology, this is about awareness and mindfulness as to how each of us is as part of a whole. There’s only one race, the human race and you are part of it. The only question is with what degree of awareness are you running in the human race?
Looking backwards, in hindsight, I now realize the the steady stream of anonymous antagonism and threats I’ve received over the past year all started when my album BREATHLESS – A nostalgia for Oxygen was released last year on Bandcamp by my spoken word producer Frédéric Iriarte and largely composed by my art brother Jair-Rohm Parker Wells.
I believe it is the most popular track from the album, I CAN’T BREATH, the last words of George Floyds recited as a spoken word, ‘found’ poem by a ‘white’ voice that triggered the attention that all to soon became menacing and I have had to take unprecedented steps to protect myself from.
It is a tremendous album and well worth the free fee by which you can listen to it. I assure you that you’ve never heard anything like it before although I’m sure you’ve heard Ornette Coleman, Laurie Anderson, Willian Burroughs, David Byrne and Anthony Braxton. If not, you should listen to them too as they are the inspirations for our album.
Thank you for your attention, it’s the most precious commodity in the universe: your attention.
The month of January was silent due to my having accused a local mask-denier of demonstrating “a lethal stupidity”. 30 day suspension for “bullying’. I assume based on her complaint that I was telling her not to spread misinformation.
My latest trespass, again for another 30 days (first 7, until I appealed the decision), was for taking issue with a Trump supporter on one of Alexandra Cortez’s threads.
The woman was claiming that AOC had made up her account. A Portuguese participant commented in AOC’s defense whereupon the virulent QAnon proponent told the Portuguese national that he was a foreigner and to mind his own business, going back to his own country. I immediately responded in his defence by inviting him as my guest, to comment on anything he wanted to in the land of freedom of speech and then chastised the woman to stop being an ignorant American.
She complained that I was nationally slandering her for being an American manifestation of supreme ignorance. I was again suspended from using Facebook for 30 days, 27 more.
My appeals have been well reasoned and completely ignored.
I am awaiting the moral judgement of the algorithmic overlords by which human employees make decisions at Face Book. Repeatedly, I have been censured and censored for challenging misinformed comments that Facebook itself, if it contained one iota of the moral standard it claims to hold, should have caught in the first place!
If challenging and taking issue with those who question the legitimacy of the election, the validity of the pandemic or its remedies and continue to spout dangerous, Trump inspired, racist and and anti vax madness goes against Facebook’s Community Standards then those standards and their deployment are in serious need of actual public review and scrutiny.
In the meantime, I shall wallow in the righteousness of my exile. Dostoievski won’t be drinking alone tonight in the Facebook Gulag.
San Diego poets are wet gutter snipers Taking pot shots at frivolous affluence and misspent eternities From the street corners and back alleys of our prematurely grey dementias.
San Diego poets cast lines like fishing reels Screaming curses at angels in heels while Humming blues tunes to the damned, under our breaths.
San Diego poets spit surreal spiels into ribbons of unfurling images That rain down like bright pathetic confetti Against a blank horizon of an empty human empathy.
San Diego poets slide their wild, horse hair bows Across taut, tied strings that sing Above a psychedelic landscape of the gradually worsening human condition
You and me are not blind instruments of self-immolation. We do not have to sit at the center of the fire to make it our home. We can play our songs on sad air violins And dance in the rain to drown our sorrows in the sea of greater uncertainty.
San Diego poets press our runny noses against The pained windows of badly lit coffeeshops and crafty bookstores, Hosting poetry readings for the over groomed; Those educated only in the blind arrogance of their own judgements.
San Diego poets litter the streets with our menial typewriters Preaching doomsday fire sales to tourists and Liberation to those still hounded by carnivorous ambitions In the current climate of fear that tries to pass itself off as survival.
San Diego poets never have enough money to buy you a drink But will spare you a cig-regret – –if you’re willing to spare the change you need you to make –to make your tomorrow just a little bit better.
San Diego poets are all clowns, fools and charlatans Keeping ourselves amused on the ragged streets of cold hangover dawnings Whilst skipping around and dancing through the circus of mediocrity that pervades us.
San Diego poets migrate like flocks of hummingbirds Seeking warmer climes and heartfelt compassions. Blurring our wings the whole distance in getting there.
Go Fuck Yourself, you pathetic failure. Leave the arts to the poets, the dancers and the painters Go get yourself a real job, a real vocation. Fuck off and leave those of us who fight for our culture alone. Fuck off and stop leeching the creative spirits of the secular martyrs who have sacrificed their lives on the holy altar of Art, Truth and Freedom. Go Fuck Yourselves! And each other in your sleazy stinking orgy of self-gratifying bigotry and weeping pustule aesthetics.
Go Fuck Yourself in the Ass With Your Own Extended Nose Go let yourself get fucked in the ass by all the bogus arts nonprofits that pocket tax money to further their own finances while cheating artists and reviewers out of their livings.
Go write yourself a grant.
Write up your mission statement in day-glow gold-gilded writing. Put on your ‘supporter-of-the-arts’ makeup Keep counting the coins in your bookseller’s till While prescribing the rules that determines who is in and who is other.
Go Fuck Yourself and try reading a book for a change. Go read Whitman, Bukowski, Anais Nin and Henry Miller on art. Let William Burroughs into your dreams. Go get yourself a self education. In the meantime, shut up, sit down and just listen: You are the enemy of art, the enemy of poetry, the enemy of life. And we’re coming for you. Because all you are is in the way.
Existence is a limitless screen of emptiness Vibrant with jubilant celebrations. And gratitude for the joy in rolling a boulder blissfully up this steep hill. Tripping over our own thoughts like loosened cobblestones, We no longer see the reality directly in front of us.
The truth is a truce we struck with certainty ages ago. After losing the desperate struggle… To cling to some kind of hope buried deep beneath the root of ourselves. I am fearful of fully failing myself and yet I love myself best when I am alone with eternity.
I’ve started this post after returning from a 60-day ban from Posting, Liking, Communicating, Joining, or Connecting with anyone else in the Facebook Community.
Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are “offensive,” happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. ~ The ACLU
What Was My Crime?
My posting one of my own published poems from my bookIs She Available? that had been posted in Facebook at least thrice before without repercussion. and is currently available in dozens of libraries and bookstores throughout California and soon to be released in the UK. The visual interpretation of a love poem by the Designer/photographer and internationally renown artist/typographer Rian Hughes entitled:
I Missed Your Scent in Paris
Although his image was a black and white stylized photograph of a woman where if you squinted and looked real close you could make out the shadow of half a nipple showing, (which is exactly what a Facebook employee would have had to have done in order to render judgement that Tian and my work contravened Facebook’s community standards.
Words by Igor Goldkind – Image by Rian Hughes Censored by Facebook
The Poem and Rian’s photo interpretation of the poem were not obscene, disgusting nor gratuitously offensive in any way. Unless of course, you consider the human body in itself to be obscene, in which case I strongly suggest you seek therapeutic help as you clearly entertain unhealthy, self-hating, anti-social thoughts.
Instead, if not the poem, then certainly the photograph of the semi-nude woman is a work of art. It is obvious to anyone who reads and looks that it had no other intention. Not being able to distinguish between pornography and erotic art is one of the great threats Facebook’s dumbed down lack of discernment poses to the thriving of a culture. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Art is the science of culture. Both are experiment–driven. ~ Igor Goldkind ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– As community-oriented and community-sounding Facebook professes to be (in its language and self-justifications of its censorship), Facebook is the enemy of culture. As well as the enemy of the community of humanity that shares the values that a free society comes hand in hand with expression free from censorship; as long as the expression poses no harm. Otherwise, it is not a free community.
“To destroy a people, first destroy their culture. ~ Mario Torero
What is it exactly about the half shadow image of a woman’s left nipples poses a threat to anyone? The last time I checked, a woman’s nipple is the source of nourishment for all of us, male and female at one time or another.
To censor the image of a human nipple is to censor the truth of what it means to be human. How can I prove this? Look for yourself! Apart from a minority of our fellow hairless apes who have lost them in accidents or horrific burns, we ALL OF US HAVE NIPPLES! It is the truth of who we are and as an artist, as a poet, I am only interested in the truth of who we are. Not the twisted Calvinist attempt at reversioning a reality where angels never fart and genies have no belly-buttons.
We Must Protect You From Yourself
I know for a fact that genies do have belly-buttons, I’ve seen them with my own eyes! And as far as angel farts go, they smell better than your own.
Article 10 of the United Nations Human Rights Act protects our right to hold our own opinions and to express them freely without government or private interference.
This includes the right to express our views aloud (for example through public protest and demonstrations) or through:
• published articles, books or leaflets • television or radio broadcasting • the internet and social media • AND WORKS OF ART • The law also protects our freedom to freely receive information from other people.
The US The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment’s protection of artistic expression very broadly. It extends not only to books, theatrical works and paintings but also to posters, television, music videos and comic books and personal social media pages including FACEBOOK — whatever the human creative impulse produces.
The right not to be censored by an arbitrarily superimposed moral hypocrisy of a minority…. is articulated in the Human Rights Act signed by the US as treaty and thus bound by US federal law in 1964. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the United States renewed its commitment to the international human rights system by signing, though not yet ratifying, several major human rights treaties.
Including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS (ICESCR).
Liberty, Freedom & Justice But Not From Facebook
These are the laws of the land that FACEBOOK has violated in unceremoniously and without warning censoring my work. Judgement without respite and only the cosmetics of appeal.
Facebook is not a community in any shape or form as long as its private owners impose their narrow, petty, puerile, and juvenile morals on us without listening to everyone, not just the complainers, who make up that community. That includes us good for nothing, when-are-you-going-to-get-a-real-job? artists.
There is no one to talk to at Facebook. No one to appeal to; no one to reason with and no one that takes responsibility for its actions. Human beings wrote the algorithms, built the servers and the browsers to increase the human bandwidth, not to distance us from ourselves!
There is no reason to fear the takeover of robots, algorithmic judgements and machines, for we have already surrendered.
Please repost this in part or in full on your wall and please share with your friends across all social media. Maybe Facebook will recall what it means to be a human with nipples one day and stop emulating the machines (who have no nipples).
PS You think that I’m overreacting? Just another crazy, good for nothing artist making pointless noise? The Modigliani nude, the Picasso, the Rubens and all fell foul of Facebook and are all pictured as depicted after being defaced by Facebook in the name of their hypothetical Community Standards.
In the end, it was the numbers that did us in.
They lined us up into military rows
And assigned us all numbers
One after one after one after one after one….
How many, nobody knows.
You see, it’s a numbers game
It’s all the same
You’re not your name
You’re your numbers.
Let me explain how it’s done,
And how this game can never be won.
See, there are good numbers and bad numbers
High numbers and sad numbers.
Sometimes high numbers are good and low numbers are bad
And sometimes low numbers are good and high numbers are sad.
It all depends on who is counting.
Not you or me
Not the numbers either.
They don’t know, they’re just numbers after all.
Although…
The numbers are counting on each other.
Just not you or me
Because we will never be free
Of Big Numbers and small numbers,
Negative numbers and imaginary numbers,
You see, it’s a numbers game.
It’s all the same
You’re not your name
You’re your numbers.
Let me explain
How it’s done.
And how this game can never be won. Prisoner number…
Credit Score number
GPA number
SAT Number
Zip code number
Blood pressure number
Heart rate number
DOB & TOD numbers
House number
Gas number
Phone number
Electricity number
Room number
Water number
Dog tags number
Social Security number
Bank account number
Table number
Sibling number
Temperature number
Flight number
License number
Vehicle registration number
Alcohol level number
Height, weight and age number
I hear you scream:
“I’m not a number, I’m a human being!!”
Sure you are,
Now take a number.
It’s for your own protection
There’s safety in numbers.
Numbers can answer all of your questions:
How far, how long, how deep, how high, how many,
How often?
Just not ‘how come’?
Anyone can count,
But you can’t count on anyone.
See, it’s a numbers game
That can’t be won
It’s a numbers game
It’s just how it’s done.
It’s all the same.
You’re not your name
You’re your numbers.
Now count to ten
And start all over again.
For Rob Thompson who asked me if Numbers occupy Space.
Yes, indeed that’s a provocative title; but this ain’t click-bait my friends.This is the real deal.If Thomas Paine were alive today, he’d be in the nation’s capital with a pistol waiting for the selected president.Of course, he’d be waiting a long time considering as far as he knew, the capital of these United States was in Philadelphia.I have a vision of old globalist Thomas standing outside Ben Franklin’s door, knocking as hard as he could, shouting
“Benjamin!Benjamin!Come out, our nation’s in trouble and its much worse than the British.Forget the kite!’’.Kind of like the scene in Street Car Named Desire where Marlon Brando is standing outside Stella’s window in the pouring rain in his soaked white T-Shirt.
Marlon Brando would have made a good Thomas Paine in the film, the graphic novel and the computer game but this doesn’t answer the question embedded in the title of this diatribe. Why would Thomas Paine if he were alive today,track down Donald Trump and put a bullet in the back of his head? In principle this would require Donald to be on his knees, facing away from Thomas with his tiny hands wrapped around the back of his head.I suppose you, dear reader, are ‘en-titled’ to an answer as the to why and the wherefore; but stay with me as we savour the moment.The ultimate retribution of history: to be shot in the back of a head by one of the Founders of this revolutionary nation, ironically with a pistol no less.One that Thomas didn’t have to register or submit to a background check to acquire from the antique pistols and muskets booth at the gun show a couple blocks away.
So before Thomas pulls the trigger and the tiny lead ball propels from the pistol’s mouth through his dense skull and lodges somewhere in the soft tissue that Donald referred to at his “brain”, let’s pause and assess the situation. Let’s skip over the time travel details as to how Thomas Paine got from the late 18th century to the early 21st.We’ll leave it to the graphic novel to explain that bit; him jumping a little over two centuries in time.Although we really don’t have to figure out anything at all.Thomas Paine’s words, his ideas and his rebel spirit not only jumped but survived intact more than 2 centuries and the soul of our national sovereignty. So if Thomas Paine were brought back from the dead by some mysterious force, it could only be due to his words, his ideas, the nation he fought for being under threatened.
And that, my reader, is precisely the point being made by my title and the words you are reading now.Today, not 2 decades into the 21st century, the essential values that built this nation, this American experiment by a motley crew of post-enlightenment landowners, orators, tradesmen and inventors is at risk of being destroyed.Not by Trump himself, you realise.But by Us, by We the People in our impotent complacency to stop him.
We are not revolutionaries, we are the revolution Thomas and his friends dreamt up, drew the blueprints for, and built on the hot blood that soaked the green countryside of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Carolinawho’s names are only possible because of the stubborn bravery of these idealists, these socialists, these men of vision that had the hubris to build a nation founded not by the right of kings or church or even the wealthy, but by the enlightenment values of Liberty, Justice and Freedom.
These values, of course, aren’t just American, although they are the foundation stones of our democracy.Thomas Paine author of Common Sense, The Age of Reason and the Rights of Man who’s title alone reveal the nature of his philosophy:to build a nation on Reason, not religious superstition.It’s not that Thomas Paine didn’t believe in the Divine, he just believed in Reason more:
“It is by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything.”
Later, a member of the French Senate, he would lend his hand to writing the Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, along with Thomas Jefferson.Rousseau’s Rights of Man became the basis of the UN Human Rights Charter as well as the EU Human Rights initiative.So next time you hear some jackass complaining about Liberals going on and on about Human Rights you might want to mention that they’re disrespecting theFounding Fathers, two of whom (Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine) contributed to the declaration.
In fact, Universal Human Rights is the soul not only of our Constitution but the Declaration of Independence, the UN Charter and the adopted law of all members of the European Union.Human Rights is the one thing that Donald Trump can’t abide because he has dedicated his life to the accruement of power, power for its own sake.Trump really isn’t that bothered by actual money in spite of his public persona.What he is dedicated to is what money buys:people, power and governance; and this is exactly where we have gone astray from the origins of our nation.We have handed our own governance over to banks, corporate interests and the uber-affluent who can afford to buy a Congressman or a President.
Mueller’s investigation will very shortly reveal the origins of the money that bought Trump his presidency.We know already that the NRA contributed 30 million dollars early in his campaign.Do you remember that lie about how Trump said he was incorruptible because he could afford to fund his own campaign?I know, I know, it’s hard to remember all the lies Trump has spouted.
Do you know why the Truth is better than a lie?
Why? Because it’s easier to remember.
But going back to the pistol Thomas Paine is holding against Donald Trump’s head; no, I didn’t forget my premise.Imagine it with me.There’s Thomas Paine, his hand steadily holding the cocked pistol, fully powdered and loaded with a small lead ball.Tiny, but big enough to leave a good sized hole at such close range.And there’s Donald Trump on his knees, shaking.He’s already wet the pants of his the suit he’s wearing.He tries very hard to hold back his urgent need to defecate and fails.
Now Donald Trump is soiled.Soiled himself the same faeces he’s been feeding to the American voters for years.Soiled by his indifference, his empathy deficit, his reckless, unfeeling impulses, his sociopathic disconnect from the human race.Remember, Donald, to say ‘I hear you’.It fools them every time and leaves plenty of time for self-gratification at the expense of others.Trump is soiled by his own inhumanity, his unbridled carnal greed to accumulate, wealth, power, women.He assaults women not because he can get it up anymore but because they have power which he needs to dominate.
Look at his wife.I haven’t seen such a blank dead look of a hostage to circumstance since Patty Hearst.It was the money that bought her and (like some particularly gruesome episode of Back Mirror), she got exactly what she paid for, with her integrity her and self-respect. Imagine the morning she awoke to the dawning denouement. Sure she could leave any time, with her child.But where would she go?What would she do?In the afterlife of existence everyone writes a book and sells it.When things go badly; when the world seems to be against me; when I lose; I always remind myself – it could always get worse and at least I don’t have to fuck Donald Trump.
The thought makes me feel better but my heart tears up when I think of her suffering.It is the suffering of the affluent.The ones who have accommodated everything they were told they needed to be happy.Everything they worked hard to acquire in lieu of happiness only to find that very objecteluding them. That’s the horror of the denouement, you reach the summit of your life’s ambition and now the only thing left to do is jump off.Because Happiness is not an object or an objective.It flits effortlessly in and out of our lives like a butterfly, briefly lingering on a flower and moving on.Ever try to chase a butterfly? Exactly.
Back to Donald Trump having shit and pissed himself while one of the Fathers of our country held a pistol to his head.Perhaps at this point Donald would beg for his life.Like the scene in Miller’sCrossing.“Please, Thomas, Please.Look in your heart, look in your heart.You don’t want to do this.You’re not that kind of man.Look in your heart, for godssake !”.
God is a natural place to go to.After all, the divisions we are now facing in our country are by no means recent.They’ve been brewing for decades.The divisions are not entirely geographic although the 3 states that assured Donald of his electoral victory does have a concentration of post-calvinistevangelicals.No are they solely cultural; after all, Donald Trump is the epitome of the urban gangster.A smooth talking, wheeling dealing property developer soaking in the comfort of Manhattan luxury.He should be anathema to his base of supporters.But he’s not, instead he speaks their language; the language of PT Barnum and Charlie Chan both as fake as a wooden nickel but master showmen to a ’T’ (Only white actors played Charlie Chan which ironically was invented by Earl Derr Biggers asan alternative to Yellow Peril stereotypes and villains like Fu Manchu).
And Trump talks about God.He doesn’t so much talk about his beliefs (if he has any), but about the threat that nonbelievers and other religions pose for Christian Evangelists, particularly targeting Islam.Trump runs his own Circus of Fear and the punters are more than happy to pay to be scared or at least have their irrational fears affirmed. Donald Trump should be played by the late Robert Mitchum (if he were still alive. Hey, we brought Thomas Paine from 2 centuries ago; a zombie Robert Mitchum should not pose too many difficulties).To be exact, Robert Mitchum in his role as the greed-laden preacher in the class American Gothic The Night of the Hunter in which he plays a psychopathic man of the cloth bent on money and murder (in that order).He pursues two children who hold the secret to a hidden fortune down a river in the south, riding a donkey and singing hymns.A fake, a demon, a creature of merciless malice.
So is Thomas going to shoot Trump in the head for using religion to accumulate power?Of course not.Thomas was a believer but not in God, in Reason.“It is by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything.”The reason Thomas Paine is holding a cocked pistol against the back of Donald Trump’s head is not God; Trump hasn’t blasphemed against Faith; he’s blasphemed against Reason.Trump has spent his entire career disseminating the appearance of things, not the truth.Truth is the enemy of Donald Trump, because in Truth, he is an insignificant man in the scheme of things just as we are all beholden to the significance we manufacture and some of us have made peace with that.Donald Trump has not. Like a Hungry Ghost Donald is compelled by desire, call it lust, a lust for significance.This is why he builds towers, not to house offices or hotel rooms, but to prop up as high as he can his name: Trump.
At the start of this year, we had a crisis
in authority due to the steady lies being pumped from the Whitehouse by Tump.The first rule of autocracy is to shake people’s belief in authority so that they only can believe in you.Donald Trump is attempting to destroy the pillars of the 4th estate.Now we’ve entered a period ofcrisis in competence.When the very ability to address real-world problems by Trump and his stooges is dubious at best.
Remember that the balance of powersin the Constitution is all beholden to having a Free Press in which people can report the truth and express their opinions of their government.That’s what Thomas Paine counted on in drafting our rights.Each right has a corresponding duty. Paine said our first duty is to be kind to others. Paine also said that a person’s corresponding duty is to allow the same rights to others as we allow ourselves. From this basis we can use our abilities to promote mutual understanding. These expanding circles of reciprocal duties and rights weave a tapestry, built on democratic norms, of liberty in the context of societal interdependence.It’s called a society based on equality.
Did you know that Thomas Paine was the very first American abolitionist? In 1775 he wrote “To Americans: That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of justice and humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men, and several late publications.”
“Our traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!)must know the wickedness of that SLAVE-TRADE, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts; and such as shun and stifle all these willfully sacrifice conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden idol.”
Thomas Paine was the first white citizen Member of Black Lives Matter.He and his pal Thomas Jefferson originally included an amendment to the Constitution ending slavery.They wanted to create a revolutionary society in which ALL men are created equal.As usual, women would have to wait. Ofcourse this amendment was vetoed by the southern slave owning states.The same states suspiciously from which Trump derives the concentration of his base support.
But the point being that the Founding Fathers, if not all, enough wanted to establish an egalitarian society in all respects.Paine referred to this, as did the other Framers as ‘the common good’ something the alt-right abhors the notion of as they translate it into control by some body that isn’t them.Nonetheless, contrary to Constitution literalists the “common good” involves a mental posture taken by citizens in their deliberations where they account for, yet transcend partial interests to look at the good for each and all in their decisions.
Even in business, Trump’s claimed turf,the right of commerce was seen as transforming the mind-set of feudal, dependent relations between men and their government. It helped transform subjects into confident citizens. Trade was viewed not as laissez-faire, but in a web of social interdependence. It was seen as a major modality for individuals to use their Reason (not Faith), to develop better mutual understanding of others interests in society. While aware that too much indulgence in commerce could lead to the decline of spirit and patriotism, making reason subservient to commercial interests, Paine felt that man would use his religion of reason to place commerce within a broader quest for lifelong education in the arts, sciences, engineering, and philosophy in order to progress to a universal society and universal happiness.
Paine believed that man’s highest spirit of reason in its motives and applications such that it does not have to be concentrated solely in pursuit of commercial interests. Art, science, and commercial enterprise can be placed in service to humanity and universal happiness.Moreover, each individual deserves minimal dignity and a minimal economic base to pursue their natural rights. Like Paine and Edward Bellamy advocated two hundred years ago, some form of guaranteed minimal annual income ought to be adopted for each citizen, regardless of wealth or other distinctions. Imagine what Thomas Paine would make of the modern day commercialized medical establishment!
Sounds like a socialist that Thomas Paine, don’t he?Not at all really, just your average post-Enlightenment philosopher and thinker.Or only as far as Socialism is dedicated to the fairer distribution of resources so that everyone might enjoy Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness more equally.“Some men and women, through greed or disproportionate natural or social advantages, will contribute to others being systematically impoverished in the imperfections of manmade civilization”
”The earth is the common property of the human race”; thus each human being is equally entitled to have dignity and minimal share of the earth’s bounty, including clean water, air, and access or rents from landThus, men and women must discover those laws operating in society which will create a greater harmony of overall interests. Democratic communities will have to choose to redistribute some minimal baseline of societal resources to those at least most vulnerable not as charity, but as a right in the name of social harmony.”
Paine conceived of autonomous democratic nation-states forming alliances of mutual aid. Mikhail Gorbachev has said that we ought to have a balancing of interests, not a balancing of power on the global stage internationalization, with the primacy of nation-state alliances, is a major alternative to the trends of corporate economic globalization. In the myth of a “flat” world of economic globalization, where the world is made safe and frictionless for capital expansion,
Citizens and nations do not vote for corporate influenced governmental-military-industrial-media alliances and trade agreements which establish “the rules of the game” subtly conditioning the thinking of the masses.
These are not ancient words.These are the principles America was founded on and without which we would have early on taken the road to the same form of despotism and autocracythat Donald Trump is trying to lead us into. Trump only wants power.Power to control what is true and what is not.Power to determine the fates and existence of as many people as he can.This is why he loves the idea of a wall, the decoration of undocumented long term residents and the border checks at airports that targets people of the Muslim faith, as well as people that white people think look like Muslims!
In his own way, from his visionary perspective, Thomas Paine was what the right wing calls a Globalist or even more bizarrely a statist.Of course the founding father were statists, they constructed the blueprint for the United STATES.
Bernie Sanders was right. Trump isn’t Conservative or moderate, much less liberal; he’s an autocrat who has no respect for the Constitution and has failed as commander and chief to protect this country from a foreign antagonist.
Back to the curb where Paine is holding Trump hostage to the imperatives of history and the gentle squeezing of Thomas’s trigger finger. Because Donald Trump is a traitor to his state. He has been under the influence of a foreign antagonist Vladimir Putin since at least 2014, shortly after he first announced his attempts at the Presidency. He needed money to run a campaign for President and he didn’t have any.No bank would loan him money because Trump always welched on his debts. So he had to turn to Deutsche Bank, the same bank that Putin and his oligarchy use tomake money disappear and reappear wherever is most expedient.In this case it was the Presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.
This will all become very shortly apparent as soon as the next wave of indictments are issued by the DOJ. Trump is in a jam that he can’t get out of. Mueller’s investigation on behalf of the federal department of justice is very far from being a witch hunt. Read the indictments, all the evidence is published there, enough to hold up in federal court. Mueller, if you recall, is a conservative Republican of impeccable integrity.
BTW, I don’t detest Conservatives; some of my best friends…etc. But Trump isn’t really a conservative, he’s a con man playing the GOP for whatever he can get away with. I don’t hate conservatives, I hate liars who shamelessly lie every day they open their mouths. I hate incompetents who can’t even keep one national security advisor on board during his first year and whose family and campaign advisors were meeting with Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign.
At this point in the event, Donald Trump moves his head slightly.Thomas steadies his hand.Testing Thomas, Trump slowly turns his head enough to glimpse Thomas’s steely stare.As unflinching as Mueller’s investigation.Once again Trump pleads, begs for his life.“What do you want Mr. Paine?I’ve got money tons of money.What about women?I can get you the most beautiful models in the world.What about an audience with the Queen of England, she’s easy.” Thomas pauses and for the first time speaks to Donald J. Trump:
“I want my country back.I want the nation myself and my brothers built out of Reason, Compassion and Equality back.I want what this nation is meant to be, not what you have defiled it as.”
Trump knows his goose is cooked.He can’t repair the damage he’s caused.It will take others, long after he’s gone to rebuild our country.Others who are younger than a 70-year-old patriarch.Others who have grown accustomed to being one nation in a physically interconnectedworld.Others who aspire to rise above the fumes of spiritual superstition to the level of what Paine himself called “our living awareness of the Infinite Presence.” by means of Reason.Science, the Arts, the cooperative nature of our fellow hairless apes.The high school students who have stood up and proclaimed “enough is enough”The women who no longer cover their mouths and stifle their words when being subject to interpersonal tyranny.These are the children of Thomas Paine.These are the people he fought for and wrote for.
As a species we survived and dominated this planet by virtue of our complex means of cooperation, not competition.That complex is what we refer to as a Society and those who reject the notion are, welljust anti-Social.
Donald Trump speaks to Thomas Paine one last time.
“Please Thomas, I promise to be better, I promise to live up to your virtues, I swear I’m a changed man.Look in your heart Thomas, look in your heart, Please!….”
He speaks hislast four words to the man on his knees in front of him:
Has been entered int the Realistic Poetry Contest and thus is no longer available on my blog as it is defined as non-exclusive or previous publication by the contest rules.
Who knows, I may even win.
Either way, it returns once the contest is over in February
Tune In.
Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror is really the best TV on your screen. It quite literally holds up a black mirror not just onto our society but to each one of us as components, now data-cogs, of the society we can no longer see anymore without the aid of mirrors. We are like goldfish in a goldfish bowl kept rotating by the shortness of our attention spans and never even realising the wetness of our environments.
Charlie Brooker, his cast, co-writers and the producers at Netflix are doing us the moral service of reminding us of the remnants of own moral outrage and how our own ethical boundaries have long since been trespassed by the dark consequences of convenience and more efficient processing.
The machines never took over, we just surrendered.
We are like commuters stuck in traffic complaining about the traffic that we are actually both part of and complicit in. Even though from our subjective vehicles, we cannot see it. Traffic controllers retain the power however it is a remote distributed, bureaucratic, systemised power that is no longer subject to one human’s judgement. Who do you alert when the traffic lights stop working? You don’t have to, they already know.
I have as of late, paraded the term Speculative Realism, borrowed from the French post-idealists. Who understand that the only way to view ourselves clearly is no longer as mere individuals but as components of a larger neuro-ecology that contains, constraints and ultimately defines us. We are the furniture that a system beyond our own subjectivity keeps rearranging “on our behalf”, “for our own safety”. “for your security”.
I have only slightly re-engineered the term in the context of a literary genre, of storytelling, perhaps the sole remaining respite of human freedom. A story is a purely human phenomenon untainted by machine efficiency as machines don’t need to tell each other stories. But we do, and in doing so we may be flexing the last quiescent muscle of our humanity. A story is comprised up 3 interlocked elements: The storyteller, the story and the audience (or to whom the story is told). At least two of these components are human, subject and object; the rest is merely synaptic grammar.
When a story is told and heard, a condensed complex of information, human knowledge and near spiritual wisdom is transmitted in a compact instant well beyond the speed or circuitry of a microchip. Remember, we are the minds that created and defined data. It is that creative mind that is both alert and receptive to the information that is vital to our survival, as a species and as sane human beings. Storytelling is our salvation and Poetry is better than prayer because you don’t have to pretend that someone is listening.
Speculative Realism is just my tag for vital, survival information being conveyed by storytellers. As essential as where the next herd of buffalo might be. Speculative Fiction has here to provide the luxurious canvas for our imaginations to ponder possibilities. But Speculative Realism is not what you might do ‘if…’ but what you will have to do ‘when…’ To survive, to retain your own identity and perhaps even your sanity. Speculative Realism is imperative, it carries the mental equipment we need to survive.
Black Mirror is a series of short cameos of Speculative Realism. The term is beginning to gain traction since I first observed the emergence of this genre in film, fiction and screen entertainment. I have since read a reference to Neil Gaiman‘s work described as Speculative Realist in his use of double vision, (the seeing of two apparent contractions as one), in his characterisations. I don’t know if he thinks that, you’d have to ask him.
Cyberpunk auteur Bruce Sterling, in Wired, refers to Speculative Realism as Philosophy Fiction,which is as good a handle as any because Speculative Realism defends the autonomy of the world from human access in a spirit of imaginative audacity.
In his recent Edinburgh University Press publication Speculative Realism and Science Fiction, Brian Willemsuses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism to develop the Speculative Realist position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in identity formation and the differences between metamorphosis and modulation.
These are useful critical and academic insights. But the real meat is in the eating and Black Mirror takes you to the centre of the Speculative Realist banquet, piling your plate high with outrage, moral panic and cautionary tales of horror. I suggest tasting a sample as we’re all going to be eating from this same table for the very foreseeable future, the future that has already arrived.
Last night was kind of my XXXmas eve, being a Saturday night, with no ghosts to placate until Monday morning. So I took my Victory out for a long ride, 46 miles down to Chula Vista to drop in on my drunken-angel-poet-brothers Alex Bosworth and Chris Vannoy. As I told them, I’ve never stopped in Chula Vista before, only passed through it; well on my way to crossing the border between Mexico and Madness.
Back in the Beatnik Days, when America was still a Great Shining Beacon of Golden Intentions and jail-breaking freedoms, going south of the border was a euphemism for leaving the straight rational world and exploring the psychedelic corridors and hallways of the unconscious mind, where the muses played poker to the sound of Gabriel’s saxophone under a streetlamp, playing for spare change, playing for the end of time. Kesey, Cassidy, Timothy Leary had all spent time south of the border, hiding from the authority.
But I wasn’t going all the way south or crossing any borders. Instead, like a Boddhisatva practising the discipline of worldly compassion, I was riding south on the great American highway stopping just short of going over the edge. Stopping long enough for the rest of my sentient species to hop on board and cross over with me. How long I gotta wait? The blur of the wind in my eyes transforms Inter-state 5 into a two-lane river of white headlight diamonds on one end heading towards but past me and on the other end, a torrent of glistening rubies speeding with me, flowing around me, carrying me forwards in one high speed direction.
I was carried on a slipstream of glistening rubies last night. Chilled legs wrapped around my angel in flight, carrying me aloft above all thought, beyond all hesitation, in that dangerous living moment when every half second of thought is solid and real with consequence; and any distraction is a trap door thumping open under the hangman’s rope.
That is the fury of mediation. That is my arrival in this moment that we all share. The calm at the center of chaos. Join me, dear reader, at the centre of chaos.
So I’m heading south armed with an unopened bottle of rye, the spirit of the season travels with me. Good whisky is about as spiritual as I get these days. It is my usual Xmas tradition to grab a bottle of good booze and head down to the Greyhound station, or the street corner, outside a homeless shelter or an alleyway or anywhere I can find and join a cluster of the disaffected, the homeless, the pointless, the ones left out of family portraits. Just to share a drink, a joke and the dregs of our mutual humanity.
But this year, not particularly in contrast, I’ve chosen the company of Deadbeat poets, failed self-construction workers, mental hospital misfits, suicide skippers and gravel-voiced prophets capable of predicting the present with uncanny accuracy. Cassandra’s children muttering under their condensed breaths, scratching their prophecies from the oracle down for the benefit of anyone who still remembers how to read; or how to listen. Tonight these are my brothers (and sisters), in arms. Raging against a sea of struggles, believing that by opposing them, we will end them and wrap our soiled blankets of peace around this cold, shivering world’s shoulders.
Dead Beat Poets
I make it to Main Street much too early and agree to meet my comrades in a bar called Sanctum. I have no currency apart from my still untried bottle of rye so I stand outside on the pavement near but not too near two young women smoking butts and laughing. ‘Merry Xmas’, I venture.
‘Merry fucking Xmas to you too’, is their reply. So I listen. A skill I am still mastering. The raven-haired beauty of the pair is recounting her love life to her friend. Telling her how she had met her intended’s eyes at work, a burning penetration in time and how happy she was that at least she knew, that she knew that she knew that there was an unstated passion, thrilling at the unstated, as yet unenacted attraction between them.
The bittersweet anticipation of passions yearned for but still yet to come.
I wanted to tell the dark-haired young woman how lucky she was to be free to express such yearning to another woman. Jealously, I wanted her to pity my poor lame masculinity and the political mindfield I had to traverse to even come close to sharing such a pure moment of true emotion and affection. But I didn’t. Who wants to hear another pitiful man’s story anyways? This was the year of raised female voices. Voices raised in anger, in righteous retribution for all the wrongs accrued., in demand of recognition. Voices of freedom insisting on justice, insisting on equal treatment without unwanted trespass.
Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink. . . .
So instead I pulled out my weapon of virtue, my great equalizer of man and woman, my bottle of rye from my bag and asked if ‘You ladies would like a drink”. “Hell yes”. And for a brief instant, I felt just like St. Peter patrolling the earth and giving comfort to lost souls.
This murdered the time until my wordly brothers finally arrived. We poured from the bottle into bright red dixie cups, swigging them down in the parking lot before entering the warmth of Sanctum Ale House to talk poetry, performance, and what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. This was beginning to feel a lot like a rendezvous of fallen angels pausing for a drink and brief reflection before hitting Hell.
Beatnik Approved!
There was no reason to take a picture or a selfie or even take note of the time. We drank, we talked, we tried to make each other laugh and we indulged in our common humanity; a focus on what we shared more than what we didn’t.
My mind spun back in time to the many drinking conversations I had with my late great friend, the writer David Halliwell. The only man I had ever met who had got drunk with Sam Beckett. So David told this story of buying a bottle of good Irish whisky and taking the train to London, from Yorkshire. Easily a 4-hour journey. On the trip, David got nervous opened the bottle and drank half the contents on the way down arriving completely cut up the King’s Road party where San Beckett would be. He did find Beckett apparently and immediately sat down to finish the rest of the bottle he’d brought. David got so drunk he couldn’t remember a word that Sam Beckett had said to him.
Last night, I told Chris and Alex about the year that David called me up to join him for a Xmas drink and The Bull Tavern in the little North East Oxfordshire village of Charlbury, whose village council insisted on calling it a town because it had 4 pubs, a pharmacy and a post office.
I walked down the unpaved bumpy road to the tavern, past the Egyptian cottage with the papyrus reeds of Isis, the Goddess, not the terrorists. I reached The Bull pub and Inn, Opened the heavy oak door and walked into a movie. The pub was nearly empty save for the bar that featured David on his bar stool holding court with his mates. Only his mates were images burnt on my retinas since childhood: John Hurt, Ben Kingsley, David Warner, Freddie Jones and his son, then unknown now better known than him, Toby Jones. I remember blinking in disbelief. I might as well have walked in on Lewis Carrol, Tolkien and CS Lewis downing pints all who had also frequented this pub some hundred years previously.
I remember David smiling, laughing his phlegmatic cough and motioning me over to introduce me to these faces from the screen. “This is Igor, he’s another writer; he’s a Yank but he’s alright”. I was just another writer in the company of actors, everyday workers taking a break from toiling in the star-maker factories behind the popular film. I was handed a bulbous goblet of glowing ruby wine and the rest is hard to remember. But I do recall making them laugh and David Warner towering over me and reminiscing about his one appearance in a two-part Star Trek opposite Patrick Stewart that had earned him enough to comfortably return to the stage for 7 continuous years. Apart from young Toby, these were board strutting actors; indifferent and virtually contemptuous of their movie work save for the vast sums Hollywood paid them for peddling their trade of packaged emotions.
The next year most of them would be dead, David Halliwell included. I would empty his cottage with a Scottish actor of his while his Yorkshire sister wept inconsolably on his stairwell. In England, people let you weep and leave you to the dignity of your grief out of respect for the exceptional display of emotion. If you openly weep in England its because the pain is so hard that you really can’t hold it in.
Back in the Sanctuum, I explained to my companions how David had taught me the true meaning and value of the literary arts, which for David included actors who tell stories with their faces. Storytelling’s place in the human universe, keeping the stars locked in their firmament and the cosmic spheres in perfectly balanced and meaningful rotation. David Halliwell wasn’t famous. He died a virtual pauper, alone, estranged from his sister, a Yorkshire man with an RSC accent from wanting to be an actor, who wrote every day of his life before heading down to the pub to argue with me.
But he was a great success, albeit not by any kind of American Calvinist standard. Rather he succeeded in staying true to his art. He never sold out to better-paid mediocrity. He stayed true to his art, to himself and he survived with the respect and admiration of his fellow artists. When he died, I wrote and read this eulogy at his memorial, after Harold Pinter came up from Hampstead to say a few words about his departed friend. As did Stephen Frears and Scott Hampton (author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses).
I read this poem to David to my friends Alex Bosworth and Chris Vannoylast night. And in my mind, I went hunting and visiting my own xmas ghosts to remind me of the true joys of this season.
Daedalus Afraid to Fly
David, you bastard, you’ve left me
Understanding here alone,
With only these words falling out of my hands
When it is yours I want to hear again.
Words of your mastery, not mine.
So what was all the swearing about then, David?
What were all those Northern fumes really burning from?
I told you the songs of Yorkshire would never play in LA
Or London for that matter):
Two cities equidistant from your Yorkshire mother.
Tell me, David, why didn’t you just sell out?
You could have bought yourself a much better pint of beer
With all that money for old knotted ropes and
Still, have coughed up the phlegm to laugh at us all.
Is death your idea of some kind of joke?
Did you finally track down the film rights to Malcolm, David
And cash them in?
Are you really, secretly living in Barbados,
Making beautiful women miserable?
To think of all this wasted sorrow and
Empty glasses of beer.
You did say that you always wanted to visit other places.
But Daedalus, you were afraid to fly.
If you had been born upside down in America
You would have been a southern writer living in some Northern town.
Spilling your southern drawl over a rum and coke in a New York City bar.
Sitting elbow to arm with Williams, O’Neill, Baldwin and them all.
Your America was always an America of the mind.
So why fear the flight?
Your America David was where Charlie Parker
was forever sharp shooting pool with Humphrey Bogart
in some room behind a neon-splattered bar
Where Chet Baker never jumped or fell but flew, man!
He just flew away.
Just like you.
So you’re off then, David?
Back up the bumpy road,
Turning the corner around the Little Egyptian cottage
Navigating the reeds of Isis, Long past the close of time.
A brown duffle coat ship, bobbing on an unpaved surface,
Weaving a few well-spoken thoughts into your
Captain’s cap.
Can you tell me, David:
Were you X-Centric, or
Merely Eggs Essential?
How about this time I tell you, David:
The spark was always there.
But not like Daedalus, like Prometheus.
The living punishment of Truth,
Chained to your bar stool,
That eternal pint of Carlsberg lager gnawing at your liver.
Like Prometheus David,
The spark is always here.
For the late, great David Halliwell; poet, playwright,
Recent rewrite. When I first wrote and posted it, no one seemed to know what I meant by it. But now it’s becoming a favoured read aloud piece:
Insomniac Awareness
We who are hiding in our second bedrooms,
Licking the silver from the backs of our screens,
Are living in a different time zone
Of Insomniac Awareness.
Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes four or more
Lives are lived and lost each night.
In our rooms, by ourselves
Sitting precariously on the edge of our beds.
This is our legacy
The lasting perpetuity of our sensory species:
The glow that contests the light that once shone from our eyes,
Right up to the surface of our understanding.
What is not yet known.
Or what was known and long since forgotten.
Dances across the screen you stare into.
Tripping over your coded memories; in Real Time.
Who are you reading this?Do you know
What perturbs your sleep-walk into the night?
Or are you merely waiting for the screen to pull you through?
Into your own quiet world,
Where things that count never change.
And no one is dreaming you but your mother,
Who has left you now for another child.
NOTHING has prepared you for This. Nothing ever will.
Because whatever is happening Now has never happened before.
This is a web-nurtured collaboration with 27 artists, sculptors and musicians from the world of Comics, Fantasy, Fine Art and Jazz, including Bill Sienkiewicz, David Lloyd, Liam Sharp, Glenn Fabry, Shaky Kane, Lars Henkel and the cutting edge sculptural typography of the highly acclaimed book designer Rian Hughes.
This illuminated book is a contemporary Dante’s Divine Comedy; a journey through the confessional landscape of a masculine identity. It uses poetry to construct a narrative that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love, and the modern American and Jewish identity design: by the UK’s eminent graphic designer, typographer, illustrator Rian Hughes.
The music is composed and produced by iconoclast, ex-Israeli, Middle-Eastern jazz virtuoso Gilad Atzmon, along with five other jazz artists.
Written by San Diego native Igor Goldkind, this illuminated book will revolutionize the way you view poetry by meshing comics, art, music and animation in a truly unique way. It uses poetry to construct a narrative that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love, and the modern American and Jewish identity. The book is available for download on the iTunes Store andGoogle Play, as well as in a 166 page, fully illustrated in colour hardbound edition available ORDER HERE.
The eBook edition pushes the edge of what is possible with present EPUB3 technology. It is not an App, it is a true book that marries pop art, comics, avant-garde, jazz, spoken word poetry, video and animations, and type design in a manner that we have not seen before IS SHE AVAILABLE? has the feel of an artefact from the near future – a seminal work of a new genre-fusing poetry, graphic art, music, and animation.
Sample interior pages:
IS SHE AVAILABLE? RRP is $34.95, SHIPPING INCLUDED Educational Discount for Students and Teachers:$29.95
Both deluxe hardcover edition PLUS animated and musically scored eBook App edition of Is She Available? bundle: $39.95
Shipping included in orders within the US and its territories.
If you are in Britain and/or Europe, please contact my European wholesaler Fanfare Productions who will take your order and dispatch to your address the same day: stephen@fanfareuk.demon.co.uk
Reviews ? Sure We Got Reviews. Why You Wanna See Them? Be my guest.
“Igor’s “Illuminated Book” is like a new genre.It is a wonderful ekphrastic expression; a fusion of the arts.” — Poet Mel Takahara
“His collection Is She Available? has the feel of an artefact from the near future – a seminal work of a new genre-fusing poetry, graphic art, music, and animation.” —(San Diego’s) City Beat
“Is SHE Available?” is an experiment, and reading it feels more like an act of discovery… nonetheless there’s a thrill to scrolling through its pages. It’s an ambitious step toward what digital media can (and will) be.”—The Chicago Tribune
The166 full colour, fully illustrated hard cover deluxeedition is available in discerning and eclectic independent bookstores everywhere.Including Fahrenheit 451 in Carlsbad, Soulscape Bookstore in Encinitas, the Upstart Crow in San Diego, Verbatim Booksand Mysterious Galaxy also in San Diego, City Lights and the Cooperfields chain in Marin County and Sonoma County, amongst a growing number of independent book stores.
Order direct from PayPal and shipping is included!
You don’t need Seymour Chwast, Chip Kidd and other designers to tell you that cartoons and comics are vital sources of creative inspiration (although they do that here). So maybe you’re thinking about exploring the graphic novel realm, but you’d like something more exceptional than usual, more out of the ordinary. Well, here’s the first of a series of suggestions that either defy or disregard categorization as comics. And the first, Is She Available?, is an eBook that also challenges conventional book classification in the process.
As you scroll through, you hear 1950s cool jazz in the background. Then gunfire blasts out of nowhere. A choir sings. Dogs bark. Bombs drop from the sky. And all the while, letterforms unexpectedly appear, tilt, transform, and vanish while spoken words interweave with the music and sound effects. Is She Available? is a trans-media poetry collection, one that pushes at the limits of eBook technology. It’s also comics, kind of.
Its author, Igor Goldkind, is a 2000AD comics sci-fi writer. He describes his 50 or so poems as “a contemporary Dante’s Inferno… that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love.” He’s included a couple of standard, panel-sequenced comic book narratives, including one rendered by V for Vendetta’s David Lloyd. But the bulk of the book is enlivened with music and other effects that enhance the moody illustrations and minimalist animations from a diversity of other skilled artists. The lineup notably includes Judge Dredd’s Liam Sharp and Shaky Kane as well as Bill Sienkiewicz of Daredevil/Elektra fame. Most impressive is the overall design, by accomplished comics illustrator and self-described “commercial artist” Rian Hughes. With graphic flair and acuity, Hughes proves himself to be a worthy digital age successor to Stéphane Mallarmé and Robert Massin.
If you’re interested in comic books, chances are you’ve heard the names Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. After all, their partnership paved the way for the Golden Age of comics beginning in the 1940s. With The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio by Mark Evanier, learn more about the duo who invented noteworthy characters like Captain America and Sandman, conceived the idea of romance comics, and created a new standard for the genres of crime, western, and horror comic books. Take a look inside the various aspects of their career, and see some of the works that defined them.
Death protects us from burning in the Sun
Light that surrounds our momentum,
Or from drowning, faces upturned in the rain.
Decades like minutes whip us by.
But Death will protect us from the sting in the wind,
She’ll huddle us close in the folds of her midnight dress.
And when it’s time to go; 12 bells the toll,
She’ll insure that all her children are aligned and tenderly accounted for.
But I was, Between 11 and 12. I was a Vulcan Ruled by Logic Disdainful of the soft, mere humans Who surrounded me.
Who had invaded my planet Polluting my atmosphere with emotions, With indomitable desires, With their fear and their envy And their illogical conclusions.
THIS IS THE HOLDING PAGE FOR THE OFFICIAL IS-SHE-AVAILABLE.COM WEB-HUB LAUNCHING DECEMBER 6, 2014
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THIS IS THE COVER ILLUSTRATION FOR THE BOOK AND THE POEM THE DARK CLOUD
Basking in the Broken Down Casino of Americana the grated dead reside in.
Reading the Bones of old contentions…looking up at primary school-lights; the ones that never change…looking down at the floor tiles; an endless sea of wrinkled faces….too many people to breathe in…
where’s the Exit Jean mentioned?…
Sound…check…test…test1…test2…test3…
Now!
Go You Sun of a Gun!
Locomotive train thunders through your head…groping… stumbling…tripping forwards into that warm glowing rush of the great unknown. There’s a tunnel!… there’s a tunnel…there’s a tunnel up ahead. We’re goin’in…we’re goin’in…we’re goin’in.…watch your head!
Watch: Your Head.
Gone! Washed away under the Lowest Bridge:
The consummation of illusion onto the lockjaw of your reality.
Still falling forwards…forwards with time…moving…with no body…no mass…no mind…beating…truckin’…making that Bend-On-the-Road…past the Dooh-Dah man….Right turn….left turn…back turn…back-where-you-started-from turn…It’s happening man…all around you…all the time…with you…without you…no-you..no- more…no-you-no-more….KNOW-MORE-YOU!..Don’t look left…don’t look right…don’t get scared…
Dawn follows the Night…head straight into the Light… up ahead…right where you came from…another train comin’ down your track…Head On Tight!
One More Stop….
Farther Down the Road.
Just keep on truckin’… don’t fall ahead and do not fail…one…two…onetwo…want-to… want-to …onetwothree..….chugga-chugga-chugga-chew-chew…One-Two Three….chugga-chugga-chugga-chew-chew
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future.
We have no present.
Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation.
I first met Liam Sharp in the editorial offices of 2000AD when he was a young jobbing artist. He had hair back then. He also had a journeyman’s attitude that stood out and distinguished him from the parade of amateur portfolio-ed artists who regularly hung out in the 3 floor reception of Greater London House, in the Camden of early 1990’s North London, where comics were being published.
(We all worked in the neighborhood that Amy Winehouse grew up, sang and died in.)
Liam made his debut in the late 1980s drawing Judge Dredd for 2000AD, where I was working as the marketing manager in order to promote 2000AD and launch 3 new comics titles onto the newsstand market. These were the days that a comic like 2000 AD sold 100,000 copies A WEEK. (80% newsstand sales!) I met many of the young guns at the time like Liam who later, established a deservedly high reputation in US comics. At the time, I had the fortunate vantage point of being a “suit” that actually valued the artistry and narrative of the work being produced for a mass-market audience.
When Liam came to Greater London House, both Richard Burton, the then editor of 200AD and Alan Mackenzie, his deputy would meet him at reception, usher him in and introduce Liam to others and myself. This was, I observed at the time, special treatment I only saw on display for Grant Morrison on his frequent visits and Alan Moore on his less frequent ones. So I knew that editorially, Liam was a VIP and it was when Richard gloated to me about Liam’s apprenticeship with the British comics industry version of Jack Kirby: Don Lawrence that immediately drew my attention to Liam.
When I met and had a pint with him, (an essential communications tool in Britain: the pint), I discovered a young, working class man with a gift for art who had won both placement and scholarship in a reputable middle class school; and who had then chosen to askew an equally merited University placement in order to work instead, as an apprentice to Don Lawrence.
Don Lawrence was admittedly considered the finest British comics artist of the time, but still! This was not so much radically different as radically traditional. Liam chose his own path as a student and as an artist. Regardless, one thing was crystal clear to me: Liam Sharp had balls.
Liam later moved to Marvel UK, where he drew the best-selling Marvel UK title ever, Death’s Head II. Liam then was at the crest of the wave of British artists and writers invading the offices and comic book shelves of the US comics industry with books as diverse as the X-Men, the Hulk, Spider-Man, Venom, Man-Thing (for Marvel Comics), Superman, Batman, and The Possessed (for DC Comics and Wildstorm), Spawn: The Dark Ages (for Todd McFarlane and Image) and Red Sonja for Dynamite comics.
The pre-comics-fame Liam I met was a young, muscular Northerner from Derbyshire with a broader-voweled accent than his southern, countrymen. Liam and his ilk (English people from anywhere north of Birmingham; or as we used to call, the rest of the country) had a different style, a different way about them. More plain spoken, self-modest and more eager to share a laugh, than their southern counterparts, the Northern British seemed to have crossed a border from another country, sitting in the reception area of Greater London House on Euston Road.
It was a different time:
Alan Moore was still talking to people; Neil Gaiman was in perpetual leather-jacketed, Lou Reed mode, Grant Morrison was shy and Warren Ellis actually seemed scary to me. And everybody seemed to be on the same side: you were either publishing comics or you were writing or drawing (or both) comics.
Hard to describe to comics fans these days. Comics writing, drawing, publishing, selling, collecting has always been about
money. But in London, because of it’s New York-density, spread out over the land area of an LA; everything wound up affecting everything else. Comics did become the new rock and roll. Comics’ design and styles infiltrated the print media. Comics characters costumes, the street fashion scene, comics stories (Halo Jones, Watchmen, Judge Dredd) were injecting the music scene and this was 10 year before the comic book movies.
I first met Liam in the wake of what seemed, to all of us at the time, a unique cultural explosion. Comics had infiltrated every corner of popular fashion. Just as in the 60’s, London record companies were overwhelmed by young English songwriters and bands; the office of British comics companies in the at least the first long train journeys from Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham and of course Derby hoping for a commission. It was in the middle of this flurry of excitement, 3 new weekly and monthly comics being launched and work was on offer. It was the comics equivalent of a gold rush. The impact was also felt in the aesthetic migration of artists from all media to the sequential, to the narrative textures of images.
Painters like Simon Bisley and mixed media artists such as Dave McKean were pushing the envelope on what was considered acceptable art for comics. I remember pages of artwork that were so densely painted or mixed up with objects that the printer could literally not bend the page around the drum needed to shoot the film. Layers of film had to be shot to turn these new, thickly, painted canvasses into comics pages. Experiments were being tried and barriers were being broken.
But 20 odd years later, Liam is still a working artist. More importantly, he has mutated into that essential modern mold, that survivalist camouflage, of entrepreneur. The smart businessman/artist/producer, all artists working in the popular arts, (not just comics), need to be in order to earn a living with their craft.
Liam Sharp is again at the crest of a new wave of artists who understand the entire cycle of creation, production and dissemination of a creative product to a market.
With the founding of Madefire.com in Berkeley, California, in 2011, Liam took his Northern English, working class creative drive to the edge of the medium again. Motion books are moving narratives, in both senses of the term and Liam continues to further his artistry both visually as an artist and producer, but also as a writer in his current ground-breaking Motion Book for Madefire.com “Captain Stone is Missing” written with his wife Christina McCormack.
Liam Aliens graphic novella Aliens: Fast Track to Heaven for Dark Horse, which he both wrote and illustrated, has been critically acclaimed.
Liam Sharp is not just a successful artist, producer and now publisher, he uses his expertise and now sizeable experience to not just accumulate money (and rare bourbons), but to generate new work, to create value that engages; which is after all, the duty of an artist, is it not?
If it is an artist’s duty to advance the medium they craft in, then Ladies and Gentleman I present Liam with my imaginary, CGI Medal of Valor beyond the call of duty in the field of creative endeavor.
“For Chrissakes, Liam! Keep your helmet on; that’s live ammo they’re using out there!”
The last we knew of our hero, J.R Protagonist, he was trapped in David Cameron’s constituency in NW Oxfordshire, trying to find a pub to celebrate New Year’s in that hadn’t turned into a private party with pre-sold tickets. Newly determined to have a pint (regardless of the fact that only moments before he realised he couldn’t have one), he wasn’t really bothered, our hero treads the wet pavements on the outskirts of Witney manor. And lo and behold his stubborness is rewarded with the only open pub in Witney: the New Inn, the town’s biker pub of course.
But the door is always open in the most unsavory of haunts to the most unsavoury of clientele and our hero is guided through the door by a vision of badges of real ale casks as surely as his vessel is guided by the north star, across the lounge to the wooden bar propped up by the bent elbows of bikers .
The Liverpool Organic Brewery stout looks familiar and tempting but he settles on the Doombar ale from Cornwall where the pirates call you lover before they slit your throat and burn down your cottage rental. The pint is poured by a young raven-haired barmaid, still enough to be preoccupied with her own presence and thankfully largely oblivious to the rows and sets of cartoon eyes leering at her every move from my side of the bar. “You’re the only pub in town that’s open to anyone without a ticket”, I volunteer, as a way of saying something somewhere more than a grunt upon getting my pint.
“I know, it’s a shame”, Millie answers; as I later learn her name to be.
“It used to be nice when the parties were just parties, you know and everyone was welcome. These days, it’s got so, much more . . .” “Exclusive”, I finish her sentence.
“Exactly” is Millie’s reply and under her raven hair I detect the universal youthful look of recognition that bleats: ‘help me, I so hate my job; I am bored out of my mind’.
“Where I’m from, a party is more of an inclusive idea”. My remark is punctuated by a sharp elbow in the small of my back as one of the regulars takes off his jacket. By accident, intentionally.
“oh sorry, mate, did I get you there?’ The long haired man snorts as if he were Stephen Frye. Our hero shrugs to cover the offense as much as the pain form the jab and now that he knows he’s trespassed this far, he strides ever forwards.
“Yeah, last year you see, I was in Barcelona”, he lies. In fact he had returned to Liverpool before the New Year, but time means nothing when plotting revenge. “Now Barcelona knows what a party means”. Millies’ pupils widen.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Barcelona, you know I’m doing my degree in art and design and I just would love to see the streets, the museums”. “But of course!”The rest of the conversation is a series of holiday snaps as I cover the ground between La Rambla and Quartier Gothica. By the time I wax lyrical on Gaudi
“Who is Gaudi?! “You must go to Barcelona right now just to find out. You cannot understand design if you haven’t seen Gaudi”, the daggers streaming from the sets of eyes on my side of the bar have become sharply deadly. I realise that not only have I trespassed, I’ve pitched a tent and am selling sausages. I smile at Millie who now tells me her name and I wish her a Happy New Year.
“Oh, what are you going to do now?” she asks a little emphatically,
“I’m off shift now”, she adds
” and if you’ve got nothing better, why not tag along to this party I’m invited to, just over the road”. I fix Millie with a smile and a gaze that I only blink once during as I know my life is now at risk from the eyes at the bar. Like some kind of twee but pregnantly lethal episode of Doctor Who. I must beg off,
“Oh, thanks; that’s ok, but I think it’s an early night for me. You go on and have some fun”. Millie extends her hand across the bar.
“My name is Millie”, Millie says. And I am catapulted to the purple heathered hills of Snowden in the presence of my now gone friend Millie, the nun’s company, stradling rocks and mine entrances and talking about God and Man and Being. I smile again at raven-haried Millie and squeeze her hand knowing that age is not just a matter of a number.
Age is where your mind dwells.
Where you’ve spent your time. Whilst Millie’s mind races ahead to the parties she should and would go to, mine is perched on a Welsh boulder in the past: the memory of my noble seated Millie framed against the wet green and purple hills, surround me. I smile my good bye to both Millies and the eyes on the bar surrender and disappear.
I had recent occasion to make public comment (below), that was taken slightly the wrong way by someone close to Alan Moore, with whom I had worked briefly with back in the early 90’s, promoting his seminal mainstream work: WATCHMEN. In fact, it is not bragging too much to say that I played an instrumental role precisely in making WATCHMEN a mainstream success. (Note: ‘mainstream’ means not just in comics shops.)
But that’s not the point of my comment.
I have had good cause to stay out of the comics industry over the past 21 years and it is with extreme caution and trepidation that I re-enter this particular snakes bit of malicious gossip and traitorous greed. And look, I’ve already put my foot in it!
I’ve had to raise my voice because I have wares to sell to the comics audience. But not just the comics audience. What I do want to at least try is to let comics afficiandos know that the medium is capable of greater things beyond which revamp of which new animal-totem character is about to appear from which of 2 or 3 media companies.
I really don’t like comics, as they are and were. But I do love comics, telling stories with pictures, for what they could be . . . in the right hands, with the right voices.
Alan Moore is one such voice; and at times appear to be the only voice working in comics that isn’t hampered by its own sore throat.
I’ve generally avoided talking about Alan directly or publicly up til now mainly for two reasons: I worked with him only briefly in the early 90’s and although we weren’t ‘friends’ so to speak, we shared friends and I very quickly developed a great personal admiration, not just for his writing but for his human nature.
So I guess discretion is the sincerest form of respect.
Secondly, because the myriad of interviews and gossip orbitting around Alan, the man as opposed to Alan’s work, really reveals the bitter face of the comics industry.
Much has been made in the comics fan press of Alan’s apparent self-exile and alienation form previous colleagues and people he has worked with. I count myself among them; but that’s an issue of personality and disposition. Alan’s behaviour and response to the commercial machinations of the industry is no more bizzare’s that J.D. Salinger’s or Picasso, for that matter. Both of whom openly despised the commercial aspect of their art.
In another sense, who cares?
What I care about is what Alan writes next.
Because that’s what he is: a writer and damn good one.
In print however; Alan’s remarks regarding his experience at the inception of the ‘new comics’ of the early 90’s did cause me to take issue with some of the nuance he conveys in his acount of the inception of the Graphic Novel and I take no umbrage at his avoiding referring to me by name in his interviews when commenting on the integrity of the term and concept of the Graphic Novel, as it manifested in the late 80’s. Not all of us were on the Time/Warner payroll
Hence my blog entry http://igorgoldkind.com/ entitled CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY, the title taken from a verbatum quote of Alan’s that I read recently.
My aim was get the recounted record straight; one that was brought to my attention by a proffessional in the business asking me my opinion of Alan’s printed comments regarding Graphic Novels since, I was (supposedly) there.
But in doing so, I may have provoked a misunderstanding as to my intent.
So, equally to set the record straight, let me make absolutely clear that when it comes to the oeuvre of Alan Moore, both in comics and out, no other single writer to date has made a bigger impact not only in the comics medium but in drawing attention to the value and merit of the medium than Alan Moore. Without Alan Moore, I literally couldn’t have done my job back in the late 80’s Or at least it would have been a lot tougher without the evidence he backed up my hype with.
However, I do not consider Alan Moore to be a comics writer, although that’s how he started. Alan is an auteur with not only an incomparable mastery of the horror, fantasy and SF genres; but effectively a game changer, in persistently pushing the evelope artistically, always rattling the cages of convention. In fact, I would not be at all surprised to find that some of his worse experiences in dealing with the American comics publishing industry has been due to ideological differences as much as financial ones.
When I knew him, Alan Moore was an avowed Socialist/Anarchist, who has no truck with the contemporary power structures that feed us information and entertainment (as well as food, water, fuel and employment, btw). And he’s right and if it ever comes to it, I’ll be standing on his side of the barricades. But I wonder if Alan’s reputation comes under attack
not so much because he’s an Socialist/Anarchist who threatens the status quo, but because he’s an extremely articulate Socialist/Anarchist which is even more threatening to the status quo.
I have never really heard anyone, much less a N articulate the reasonable necessity of a socialist state in common sense terms better than Alan Moore, (with the one exception of the late Tony Benn whom I also had the good fortune to hear articulate his politics in a social setting).
But I’m meandering off topic now.
I recall in the early 90’s, speaking to the editor of the Economist when trying to pitch him a feature on WATCHMEN, I compared Alan Moore to Charles Dickens.
Not in terms of the craft of his writing, but as someone who had seen the implcit value of a neglected medium (Penny Dreadful, newstand periodicals in the case of Dickens; comics, in the case of Moore), exploiting the social tendance to overlook ‘trash’ culture to deliver new, revolutionary work.
My work in the late 80’sand 90’s in the British publishing industry led to the engineering and successful marketing of the Graphic Novel genre; a new format of hardcover and trade paperbacks of graphic fiction that bookstores would stack on their shelves. It was my job at Titan Books to do so, for which I was paid some £7,500 a year by my employer Nick Landau, to do.
After I was given a raise by Titan Books to £8K per annum , I learnt solely by chance, that my work had increased the revenue for my employer by some 7 figure sums and that the rest of the publishing industry were all cashing in on the work I was doing in promoting 9-5, the new publishing category. Cashing in, but not adhering to to the implicit quality standards the likes of Moore, Gaiman, Morrison, Speigelman and other auteurs were actively pursuing.
The Medium, as we used to call it back then, had failed to live up to its own promise.
So I got out; for that and personal reasons.
Now when I read the interviews with my former partners in CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY crime in the press complaining that the industry had failed and that the term Graphic Novel was just a manipulative tool wielded by the Moloch of Comics Publishing
(Batman in MOLOCH! Wonderwoman in MOLOCH! The Avengers, the Guardians of the Galazy, Superman and the Xmen are all drowning in the vomit of MOLOCH!)
Which I believe, the premise of the new cross over series written for DC by Grant Morrison.
The most admired (and crafted), writer in comics ever, in particular; (someone I worked with closely with on the presentation of his seminal forensic crucification of the American superhero genre to a mainstream audience, refrains from even addressing me by name in print when he lambasts the CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY that still pays him a living), has repeatedly condemned the publishing category Graphci Novel, as effectively, just another CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY from the publishign industry.
I have news for the revered scribe: you may have relegated me to the dark side, but take a look in the mirror, man: you’ve been here with me all along.
[Added 9.18 for context], I realise now that the above might be interpreted as some kind of opening volley against the distinguished author. Far be it. I will always both personally and publically assert that Mr. Moore was the change in comics back in the late 80’s. No single other artist in the medium at the time was so intelligently treating the medium like a literary and artistic platform for expression. Most craftsmen (and women), I met at the time were desperaely trying to hustle their next wok commission. Not Mr. Moore. His posture was different: he related to editors, collaborators and others as an auteur sans pretension. Intelligent, articulate and demanding of ones wit and focus. And from I observed, never intimidated or swayed by the money or more often, the promise of money from publishers.
Just to make absolutely clear about my statements regarding this author: I learned everything I know about comics by just listening to him, during interviews, casual conversations and direct discussions. A the time, this man was a walking sandwich board for the the new comics, the Graphic Novels, chiefly because it was only his writing (and that of a handful of there), that even came close to qualifyng as a novel or even literature. I never was nor have ever been a Comics Fan (Senator and members of the committee), but I have always been a fan of literature, drawn or undrawn. Which is why I cntinue to read, enjoy and learn from Mr. Moore’s work.
Although I do take exception (mildly, not really that seriously), to his most recent public damnations of the Graphic Novel, and it’s origins; it’s not that I object to his opinion as much as I question the accuracy of his recollection of events and of the times that he was actually there. I don’t take issue either with Mr. Moore’s take on the industry and publishing in general; in fact the more experience I gain the more my views align with his.
But regardless of the vocabulary used (or the fact that I was being paid a paltry wage at the time), I accomplished my task to his and his collaborator’s direct professional and financial benefit. Not to mention the real world benefits: the successfull dissemination of the term Graphic Novel into the mainstream brought to literally thousands of other free lances in the form of royalty checks for the graphic novel edition of their work; a now standard of the comics industry throughout the world.
I do not benefit from the use of the term of from the money generated by its use.
But I do not regret not hiring that CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY lawyer that would have secured my trademark on the use of the term and perhaps a penny off of every new Graphic Novel sale; which is what the business side of the industry tells me I shoudl have done.
I did not “create” the term graphic novel; as an outsider to the industry, I found the term on the back of a Will Eisner book and used it as the keystone of a campaign to bring new comics, well written, adventuerously drawn comics. But yes, I coined the term Graphic Novel; having borrowed it from the back of a low print-run Will Eisner compilation of The Spirit. His clever NYC publisher was struggling to get Eisner’s work into the bookshops too and had tried the term connotating Literary fiction: a novel. My use of the term was different as messieurs Gaiman and Moore can both attest to; Grant got it about the same time but more remotely, in Glasgow. Graphic Novel was meant to mean NEW Graphics, new graphic literature, new comics.
Coining, (in the sense of creating common usefulness; IOW: monetizing a vocabulary term into the common currency of language of transactional communication). It derives from the coining of money by stamping metal with a die. Coins (also variously spelled coynes, coigns, coignes or quoins), were the blank, usually circular, disks from which money was minted. This usage derived from an earlier 14th century meaning of coin, which meant wedge. The wedge-shaped dies which were used to stamp the blanks were called coins and the metal blanks and the subsequent ‘coined’ money took their name from them.
{Coining later began to be associated with inventiveness in language. In the 16th century the ‘coining’ of words and phrases was often referred to. By that time the monetary coinage was often debased or counterfeit and the coining of words was often associated with spurious linguistic inventions; for example, in George Puttenham’s The arte of English poesie, 1589:
“Young schollers not halfe well studied… will seeme to coigne fine wordes out of the Latin.”
Shakespeare, the greatest coiner of them all, also referred to the coining of language in Coriolanus, 1607:
“So shall my Lungs Coine words till their decay.”}
The NEW comics of the late 80’s and early 90’s that derived from Moore’s early work for DC, Spielgelman’s dabbling at biography in NYC, Miller’s pushing the edges out on Dare Devil and most of all (for me), Bill Sienkiewicz’s explosive rendering of ELEKTRA ASSASIN! I had never seen anyone take the convnetions of comcis illustration like Faugere Egg and take a sledge hammer to it the way Siekiewicz did, literally splattering the edges of the pages and frames with the remnants of comics conventions. Sienkiewicz brought commercial art and later fine art sensibilities to Graphic Novels, something his admirer and pioneer in his own right Dave McKean would further in his career just like in a real popular arts medium.
These were the Makers of New Works. I’ve forgotten everyone: Brendan McCarthy, Jamie Delano, Pete Milligan, Frank Miller, Joe Sacco, Harvey Peckar, Gilbert and Jamie Hernandez . . . . they all were making, new different work outside the stulpifying conventions aesthetic conventions. So like superheros, they need a new name and Guardians of the Galaxy was taken, so instead you got Graphic Novelists.
I resent nothing.
It was my own fault for being more naive and less carnivorous than my employers.
So instead I have to work for a living; for which I have no complaint as at least I have work to do.
I did learn something valuable (whenever someone fails, they always say that they learnt something valuble), and that is to sell a product whatever it might be, you have to create a place in people’s minds and desires where they want that product. The most intimate and subjective of products: the books we read, the music we listen to , the films we watch: you must give people a reason for looking an understanding for what they may see.
That is why a coded term like Graphic Novel works; it’s a cut through, short cut signifier that puts anyone who wants to know or needs to know in the picture immediately: you know what you know and now you know what it is.
In the case of Poetry, we have a different problem.
Everyone knows what Poetry is, right ? It’s that stuff you had to memorize in school and analyze with Mrs. Humphries who always crossed the naughty words out like ‘sweat’ and ‘blood’ and ‘toil’ with a thick, black, fascist marker pen.
Or it’s what you penned to your wife when you were courting her; or received form your husband, your boyfriend, you lover. Anyone one of those people in your life who felt such passion, such ardour for you that they could not tell you, they had to find words from some magic place to convince you, to persuade you, to seduce you into the beauty of the passion they could see in you.
Perhaps a Poem was the only form your shattered thoughts could take at the loss of someone so precious to you that you would choose the pian of being hewn by swords than endure the truth of their permanent absence from this world.
Perhaps you have nearly gone mad and found Poems, like steps out of the abyss of self-loathing into the stark light of realisation and hope for your self.
There is no greater hope to lose than the Hope for Yourself.
So Poetry has a signifier, a pretty universal one; unfortunately it doesn’t point towards anything like what Poetry actually is.
Poetry is an art form, not a craft.
Poetry an aspiration to derive music and pattern from our deepest thoughts, the language of our dreams and the whispering, the lamenting, the singing, the moaning and the laughter of our souls.
Poetry is Liberation. The words will set you free.
I am a Poet and to sell my ware (my GRAPHIC POEMS ;~), I must show people what it is that I do, that others do that is so far removed from the common currency of the term Poetry. So this is not only a CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY, but a sinister sales strategy as well! To get you to read my words, I must first who you what they are ouside the barriers of your preconceptions.
So, come to a picnic and hear what Poetry is and the vital importance it has always played in our social and political lives.
September 27th, 1 pm Balboa Park, World Beat Centre/ El Centro Cultural de la Raza
Come One and All, Come All in One, Come to the 100,000 Poets-for-Change Marathon! (Picnic & Reading)
This is from my upcoming collection of poetry, art and music entitled IS SHE AVAILABLE? (Chameleon; October 31)
Artwork by the incomparable Liam Sharp (an ostrich, a rhino? a toaster? a xylophone? See, you can’t compare him.)
This image, conjured from his reading of the poem below, is Copyright Liam Sharp 2014.
The poem GRAVITY’S CONQUEST may be reproduced widely without restriction, as long as it is intact, attributed and appears in a place likely to incite civil and/or psychological unrest. Please write it on lavatory walls and biology school books.
Don’t fall too far from your self.
Who else is going to bend over to pick you up?
GRAVITY’S CONQUEST
You know, you’ve already seen the inside of your guts Looking for a way out. You know, you’ve already seen what you’ve seen: You know what you know. You know the truth like an elder brother.
You know, it’s usually right ‘there’, The last place you looked. The last place you wanted to forget: Your bare feet, Pasted against the concrete; Gravity’s Conquest.
Nailed through the heels. Poised, Gracefully On the precarious cusp Between this death and that life.
Last Minute Re-Versioning. I think it works better now. Soon we will be launching the animated version of the illustration for the piece by the intensely wonderful and visually lyrical Jeff Christenten. Thanks to Evan@Madefire. As well as an original composition for the entire multimedia piece from the intense genius of Gilad Atzmon. Please stay tuned. Please enjoy. Please comment good or bad. What’s the difference ?
THE REVOLUTION IN ONLY 2 DIGITS
Home again.
Thomas, you were wrong to doubt it:
You Can Go Home Again and
Bask in the healing sun of Osiris
This isn’t home
This is recovery.
From the fevered scurvy of my own forgetfulness.
I eat limes for breakfast, lunch and dinner now;
My bowels move regularly now.
And I feel just like Thomas Payne
His bursting desire to model the ideal citizen
Not our uniforms, but our blood, sinew and muscle.
To present to the Crowning Glory and
To the Revolutionary Congress and
To the Revolutionary French Senate
Thomas and his Pain made the American struggle a personal fight:
The universal pull of the upright ape on the chains holding him down.
Chains forged by the forgetful hairless ones.
The ones we will overcome.
But we are not revolutionaries!
We are the Revolution.
We are what happens next.
The R/Evolution of our Selves: the inner/outer seeing through Alice’s mirror
Into mindful awareness
Into homage to our honored masters and their children:
The ever loving human race.
We have already won the revolution.
We have already won the revolution.
2 Shots were fired from far, far ago:
One from Lovelace’s boudoir,
Another from Giordano’s spinning wheels and the memory of his funeral pyre.
And from the bit of the apple Alan choked down,
We have already won the revolution.
We just need to take charge.
We have already won the revolution.
In only 2 digits.
THE REVOLUTION IN ONLY 2 DIGITS
Home again.
Thomas, you were wrong to doubt it:
You Can Go Home Again and
Bask in the healing sun of Osiris
This isn’t home
This is recovery.
From the fevered scurvy of my own forgetfulness.
I eat limes for breakfast, lunch and dinner now;
My bowels move regularly now.
And I feel just like Thomas Payne
His bursting desire to model the ideal citizen
Not our uniforms, but our blood, sinew and muscle.
To present to the Crowning Glory and
To the Revolutionary Congress and
To the Revolutionary French Senate
Thomas and his Pain made the American struggle a personal fight:
The universal pull of the upright ape on the chains holding him down.
Chains forged by the forgetful hairless ones.
The ones we will overcome.
But we are not revolutionaries!
We are the Revolution.
We are what happens next.
The R/Evolution of our Selves: the inner/outer seeing through Alice’s mirror
Into mindful awareness
Into homage to our honored masters and their children:
The ever loving human race.
We have already won the revolution.
We have already won the revolution.
2 Shots were fired from far, far ago:
One from Lovelace’s boudoir,
Another from Giordano’s spinning wheels and the memory of his funeral pyre.
In the trees, in the trees
I can feel them in the trees
The Gods, that is;
The ones who prepare us for tha PASSAGE out of Time.
We are Osiris, you and I,
Scattered fragments of longing
Long covered by the deserts shifting sands
One hour glass at a time.
We are nothing but our longing, my friend.
We are merely the sum and
The cost of our yearning
To be tethered to the Whole.
Isis resembles our Selves
Pulling back intact, like magnets
The fragments of our lives.
One puzzle piece at a time.
Poem 2: NAMING THE DIVINE
There exists no firmer affirmation
Of our direct connect to the divine
Than can be found in the reading of great poetry
Or in the eating of ripe, seedless-sweet
Watermelon.
David Kirke is also highly outspoken about Israel and the Jewish people, in particular. He heard at a small grocer near Summertown in Oxford, openly proclaiming how “Jews are responsible for all the troubles in the world.” Proclaiming that “Jews are innately aggressive and like to argue; ‘it’s in their blood'”. several witnesses in the grocer at 2 North Parade who were customers waiting to be served during his outburst, including the assistant proprietor himself. Customers stood in shocked silence as David Kirke continued to denounce Israel and particularly Jews for having transformed “Palestine into a concentration camp”.
“Not all Jews support Israel”, proffered one Jewish American customer. “Oh, an American Jew! You’re all rich, you Americans, why don’t you buy the whole cheese”. David ranted indicating the organic cheese wheel the customer has having cut to size by the assitant proprietor. Kirke continued, “Tell you what, I’ll buy you the whole cheese and then take half of it just like you Jews stole have of Palestine!” The other customers began to exit the grocer. David Kirke had the audacity to leave his business card with the proprietor proclaming that “I’m treated like a King in Oxford; I work with Nasa scientists and ministers; I’m famous, you know.”
It was clear from his beaviour that David Kirke is not only a proud racist and anti-semite but he appeared to be unable to function in public his former reputation as a bungee jumper and dangerous sports fanatic. The only dangerous sport that David Kirke seems to be practicing now is the threat he poses to civil British society and the public good with his eccentric and offensive behaviour.
Prisoner number…
Marlon Brando would have made a good Thomas Paine in the film, the graphic novel and the computer game but this doesn’t answer the question embedded in the title of this diatribe. Why would Thomas Paine if he were alive today,
God is a natural place to go to.
We are like commuters stuck in traffic complaining about the traffic that we are actually both part of and complicit in. Even though from our subjective vehicles, we cannot see it. Traffic controllers retain the power however it is a remote distributed, bureaucratic, systemised power that is no longer subject to one human’s judgement. Who do you alert when the traffic lights stop working? You don’t have to, they already know.
Black Mirror is a series of short cameos of Speculative Realism. The term is beginning to gain traction since I first observed the emergence of this genre in film, fiction and screen entertainment. I have since read a reference to 
These are useful critical and academic insights. But the real meat is in the eating and Black Mirror takes you to the centre of the Speculative Realist banquet, piling your plate high with outrage, moral panic and cautionary tales of horror. I suggest tasting a sample as we’re all going to be eating from this same table for the very foreseeable future,
Do you know
If you’re interested in comic books, chances are you’ve heard the names Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. After all, their partnership paved the way for the Golden Age of comics beginning in the 1940s. With The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio by Mark Evanier, learn more about the duo who invented noteworthy characters like Captain America and Sandman, conceived the idea of romance comics, and created a new standard for the genres of crime, western, and horror comic books. Take a look inside the various aspects of their career, and see some of the works that defined them.
~ Alan Watts
igorgoldkind
The Poesie of Igor Goldkind – Reciting Truth to Power 
Coming Soon!
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January 9, 2021 | Categories: art, book launch, books, comments about poetry, digital insurgency, Existentialism, Faith, Healing, literature, Meaning of Existence, Meditations, mental health, Mindfulness, new poetry, Paper Bag, physics, poetry, Poetry as therapy, Poetry Therapy, politics, Self-Therapy, spoken word, story-telling, Suicide, Therapy, Zen | Tags: Democracy, Donald Trump, philosophy, poetry, Poetry Therapy, Therapy | Leave a comment