danse macabre

Zig and
Zig and Zig and zig,
tapping out the rythym on a tombstone
with his heels
Death plays a dance at midnight.
Zig and zig and zag,
on his violin...

Hebri Cazalis, from Danse macabre


It's all's hallow eve so thought I'd post something kind of in tune, hopefully of some interest maybe!
Satan and all that malarky gets good airing at this time of year,and some say he plays all the best tunes,and is drawn to the fiddle to make his music.As a former angel why not a trumpet, surely it would not burn as easy.Why not the drum to beat time with?
The answer is simple enough. With a lot of us Satan needs a little preparation,a little prescription maybe:he must lull us, woo us, lead us down the garden path that he revealed to Faust's Gretchen- surely these are not moments in which to sound trumpets or to frighten us with dearth's loud cadences.Here our dubious friend is the master of those soft modulations that a flute or a fiddle might convey.But even the flute favoured by cloven-footed satyrs of old - is limited largely to life's peaceful and pantheistic moments.Yet after a love song has worked its magic a violin can start its great betrayal leading to incendiary brilliance - towards the flame, into the heat, with dizzying speed and awfulness. This is what a fiddle can do, as long as those who play it can summon up its magical properties.
Anyway Satan did not pick the violin himself. We did though. From myths that Nero fiddled while away while Rome burned , we have placed this instrument in the hands of our own imaginations.For Ambrose Bierce, at least, the fiddle was an annoyance- " an instrument to tickle human ears by friction of a horse's tail on the entrails of a cat".Bierce famously dissapeared into the wilds of Mexico never to be seen again, perhaps he should not have made fun of Satan's preferred musical toy. Others have been more respectful, not only towards the instrument but also to its makers.The worship which has indulged Stradivari and his " secret formula" for varnish is only one example among many.Are these modern attempts to recreate a magical liquid coating so different from a medieval alchemists attemts to turn lead into Gold?
Guissepe Tartini and Antonio Vivaldi were early masters. Each in their own way profiting from the violins mystique and aura. Tartini actually composed a piece now known universally as the " devil's Trill", thus identifying himself for all ages with Satan.Appropriately , Vivaldi sported a head of red hair and became forever known as the Red Priest.And what of Paginini,not only did he conquer Europe but also convinced her that the Devil stood unseen at his side while he played. Paginini's "Caprices for solo violin are testament to his uncanny abilities, and among the great admirers and transcribers of those works have been the composers Robert Schumann, Franz Lizt and Sergei Rachmaninov. Paginini became a mystical cult figure for the musical world, and no violinist since has escaped a confrontation with the devilish configurations that his long bony fingers appeared to grasp with such ease.Rachmaninov, whose own technical secrets may never be revealed completely to pianists of a newer era , was not wrong to have woven the "Dies irae" into his "Rhapsody on a theme of Paginini".
It's not all too devilish though there are friendlier spirits? Take Grieg's Puck,a mischievious soul out for a good time , and William Bolcom's "Graceful Ghost".At least if we don't trist them completely at least we don't fear them.Perhaps it is us who have created these otherworldly spirits- both good and bad.They are part of us -and perhaps we are partially responsible for what they do. As Bierce said, "To Rome said Nero:If smoke you turn I shall not ceases to fiddle while you burn".To Nero Rome replied: "Pray do your worst,'tis my excuse that you were fiddling first."Rome had her own problems apparently and remained unmoved by the concert. Not so the little goblins of fire and destruction, who took full advantage of the occasion.
Anyway it takes a kind of wizard to play Wizard's music.My grandad was a fiddler and I have seen the powers unleashed with his bow ,enchanting and moving.Anyway have a good evening, me I'm going out, found out their are some Welsh fiddlers playing in a village nearby. As autumn is glowing I'm of in search of an inspiring reel.Peace to all.Happy halloween/ Samhein.

...The winter wind whistles
through the shrouded night;
the lime trees groan, and blanched white
skeletons flit through the darkness-
leaping and scurrying about
in their shrouds

Zig and zig and zig,
each one jigging away.
One hears the rattle of dancing bones.
A lasciious pair sit together in the moss
as if to taste again
the soft sweets of life.

Zig and zig and zig
what a sarabande!
What deathly rounds, all holding hands!
Zig and zig and zag
Ah, what a splendid night for our poor world.
Long live death and equality!

Freefall

free fall
80s party theme
smoke gets in our eyes
tequila shots for a pound
180 Beats Per Minute
2 days of white lines

You spin me round
like a cash machine
what time is now
cheap flatulant excesses
and a dozen whispered excuses
record revolves,jumps and skips

Autumn rain
spits its breath
Soon it will be difficult
to remember anything at all
the day after tomorrow forever nightfall
dance not angst, the burning lamp fades



Eveybodies out
everybodies in

in the garden
winter grows

breathalysed cars
with slashed tyres

a 1000 camouflauged soldiers murmour
looking up angry rumours

angry language
a little coarse

the sun is concealed
we call out

flesh of the ivy
the moon is low

the wind is green
sea is monotone.

Everybodies in
eveybodies out

WILLIE DE VILLE (August 25, 1950-August 6, 2009)Rock and Roller

Just found out Mr de Ville has recently passed away in New York of cancer, that old chestnut again.Another true original now sadly gone. Known primarily for being in the band Mink de Ville from 1974- 1986, houseband at legendary CBGBs.He went on to release a load of highly regarded solo albums, though critically recieved, did not sell in the bucketload. Nevertheless Willie was a true original, playing styles ranging from Cajun,blues, latin, primitive rock and roll,through to doowop and cabaret.He had a problem with drugs and lost his wife to suicide,but is remembered foremost for his individuality and raucous style. Sadly he will probably sell more records now, now that he is dead.Willie de Ville R.I.P

Comfort eating

It's the time of year when my cravings for certain foods run amok. What follows are a few of my favourite recipes. Quite cheap to make in these credit crunching times. Enjoy , their tasty, very very tasty.

CREMPOG Cymreig

Make a batter with 1/2 lb of flour, 1 oz of sugar, 1 tablespoon of baking powder, a pinch of carbonate of soda, and sufficient milk to make it the consistency of cream. Beat well. Lightly grease a hot girdle and drop a spoonfull at a time of the mixture on this, turning as soon as one side is lightly coloured. To serve do not fold the pancakes. They are eaten with jam and butter.Delicious!


LOBSGOWS( Stew)

Put 1 and a half pounds of neck of mutton in a saucepan with just enough water to cover, bring to the boil and skim. Then add 2 coarsely chopped onions,half lb of carrots, cut in dice,half lb of turnips, also cut in dice, and 1 small swede. Season with salt and pepper, simmer gently for another 3/4s of an hour. Coarsely chopped cabbage i like to add. Fantastic

ERIC DROOKER- No words are necessary!

7 POEMS BY R.S. THOMAS

DEGAS- Musicians in the Orchestra

Heads together, pulling
upon music's tide-
it is not their ears
but their eyes their conductor

has sealed, lest they behold
on the stage's shore
the skirts' rising and falling
that turns men to swine.

RENOIR- Muslim Festival at Algiers

People: their combs and wattles
rampant upon a background
of dung. The dancers silently
crackling on an unquenced hearth.

A mosque, a tower as deputies
in the clouds' absence; and gazind,
as at a window, the detached
ocean with its ceruean stare


MONET- Roen Cathedral, Full Sunshine

But deep inside
are the chipped figures
with their budgerigar faces,
a sort of divine
humour in collusion
with time.Who but
God can improve
by distortion?
There is
a stonre twittering in
the cathedral branches,
the excitement of migrants
newly arrived from a tremendous
presence.
We have no food
for them but our
prayers.Kneeling we drop our
crumbs, apologising
for their dryness, afraid
to look up in the ensuing
silence in case they have flown.


GAUGHIN- Breton village in the Snow

This is the village
to which the lost traveller
came,searching for his first spring,
and found, lying asleep
in the young snow, how cold
was its blossom.
The trees
are of iron, but nothing
is forged on them. The tower
is a finger pointing
up, but at whom?
If prayers
are said here, they are
for a hand to roll
back this white quilt
and uncover the bed
where the earth is asleep,
too, but neare awaking.



DEGAS- Absinthe

She didn't want to go;
she couldn't resist.
It was an opportuity
to be like other women,

to sit at an inn table,
not drinking,but repenting
for having drunk of a liquid
that made such promises

as it could not fulfill.
Her clothes are out of the top
drawer, the best her class
could provide.The presence

of the swarthier ruffian
beside her guarantees
that she put them on in order
to have something good she could take off.




ROUSSEAU- The Snake Charmer

A bird not of this
planet;serpents earlier
than their venom;plants
reduplicating the moon's

paleness. An anonymous
minstrel, threatening us
from under macabre
boughs with the innocence

of his music. The dark
listens to him and withholds
till to-morrow the boneless
progeny to be brought to birth



RENOIR- The Bathers

What do they say?
Here is flesh
not to be peeped
at.No Godivas
these.Thet remain
not pass, naked
for us to gaze
our fill on,but
without lust
This
is the mind's feast,
where taste follows
participation. Values
are in reverse
here.Such soft tones
are for the eye
only.These bodies
smooth as bells
from art's stroking, toll
an unheard music,
keep such firmness
of line as never,
under the lapping
of all this light
to become blurred or dim.

Ideology tries to integrate even the most radical acts

Dada embodied both the consciousness of the crumbling of ideology and the will to destroy ideology in the name of authentic life. But Dada in its nihilism sought to constitute an absolute – and hence purely abstract-break. Not only did it fail to ground itself in the historical conditions by which it had itself been produced, but, by deconsecrating culture, by mocking its claims to be an independent sphere, by playing games with its fragments, it effectively cut itself off from a tradition forged by creators who in fact shared Dada's goal, the destruction of art and philosophy, but who pursued this goal with the intention of reinventing and realizing art and philosophy – once they had been liquidated as ideological forms, as components of culture – in everyone's actual life.

After Dada's failure, Surrealism for its part renewed ties with the older tradition. It did so, however, just as though Dada had never existed, just as though Dada's dynamiting of culture had never occurred. It prolonged the yearning for transcendence, as nurtured from de Sade to Jarry, without ever realizing that the transcendence in question had now become possible. It curated and popularized the great human aspirations without ever discovering that the prerequisites for their fulfilment were already present. In so doing, Surrealism ended up reinvigorating the spectacle, whose function was to conceal from the last class in history, the proletariat, bearer of total freedom, the history that was yet to be made. To Surrealism's credit, assuredly, is the creation of a school-for-all which, if it did not make revolution, at least popularized revolutionary thinkers. The Surrealists were the first to make it impossible, in France, to conflate Marx and Bolshevism, the first to use Lautréamont as gunpowder, the first to plant the black flag of de Sade in the heart of Christian humanism. These are legitimate claims to glory: to this extent, at any rate, Surrealism's failure was an honourable one.

Dada was born at a turning-point in the history of industrial societies. By reducing human beings to citizens who kill and are killed in the name of a State that oppresses them, the model ideologies of imperialism and nationalism served to underline the gulf that separated real, universal man from the spectacular image of a humanity perceived as an abstraction; the two were irreparably opposed, for example, from the standpoint of France, or from the standpoint of Germany. Yet at the very moment when spectacular organization reached what to minds enamoured of true freedom appeared to be its most Ubuesque representational form, that organization was successfully attracting and enlisting almost all the intellectuals and artists to be found in the realm of culture. This tendency arose, moreover, in tandem with the move of the proletariat's official leadership into the militarist camp.

Dada denounced the mystificatory power of culture in its entirety as early as 1915-1918. On the other hand, once Dada had proved itself incapable of realizing art and philosophy (a project which a successful Spartacist revolution would no doubt have made easier), Surrealism was content merely to condemn the spinelessness of the intelligentsia, to point the finger at the chauvinist idiocy of anyone, from Maurice Barrès to Xavier Montehus, who was an intellectual and proud of it.

As culture and its partisans were busily demonstrating how actively they supported the organization of the spectacle and the mystification of social reality, Surrealism ignored the negativity embodied in Dada; being nevertheless hard put to it to institute any positive project, it succeeded only in setting in motion the old ideological mechanism whereby today's partial revolt is turned into tomorrow's official culture. The eventual co-optation of late Dadaism, the transformation of its radicalism into ideological form, would have to await the advent of Pop Art. In the matter of co-optation, Surrealism, its protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, was quite sufficient unto itself.

The ignorance that Surrealism fostered with respect to the dissolution of art and philosophy is every bit as appalling as the ignorance Dada fostered with respect to the opposite aspect of the same tendency, namely the transcendence of art and philosophy.

The things that Dada unified so vigorously included Lautréamont's dismantling of poetic language, the condemnation of philosophy in opposing yet identical ways by Hegel and Marx, the bringing of painting to its melting point by Impressionism, or theatre embracing its own parodic self-destruction in Ubu. What plainer illustrations could there be here than Malevich with his white square on a white ground, or the urinal, entitled Fountain, which Marcel Duchamp sent to the New York Independents Exhibition in 1917, or the first Dadaist collage-poems made from words clipped from newspapers and then randomly assembled? Arthur Cravan conflated artistic activity and shitting. Even Valéry grasped what Joyce was demonstrating with Finnegan's Wake: the fact that novels could no longer exist. Erik Satie supplied the final ironic coda to the joke that was music. Yet even as Dada was denouncing cultural pollution and spectacular rot on every side, Surrealism was already on the scene with its big plans for cleanup and regeneration.

When artistic production resumed, it did so against and without Dada, but against and with Surrealism. Surrealist reformism would deviate from reformism's well-trodden paths and follow its own new roads: Bolshevism, Trotskyism, Guevarism, anarchism. Just as the economy in crisis, which did not disappear but was instead transformed into a crisis economy, so likewise the crisis of culture outlived itself in the shape of a culture of crisis. Hence Surrealism became the spectacularization of everything in the cultural past that refused separations, sought transcendence, or struggled against ideologies and the organization of the spectacle.

A pamphlet published on 7 June 1947 by the Revolutionary Surrealists, a dissident Belgian group, had issued a salutary warning to the movement as a whole. Signed by Paul Bourgoignie, Achille Chavre, Christian Dotremont, Marcel Havrenne, René Magritte, Marcel Mariën, Paul Nougé and Louis Scutenaire, it declared:

Landlords, crooks, Druids, poseurs, all your efforts have been in vain: we persist in relying on SURREALISM in our quest to bring the universe and desire INTO ALIGNMENT... First and foremost, we guarantee that Surrealism will no longer serve as a standard for the vainglorious, nor as a springboard for the devious, nor as a Delphic oracle; it will no longer be the philosopher's stone of the distracted, the battleground of the timid, the pastime of the lazy, the intellectualism of the impotent, the draft of blood of the "poet" or the draft of wine of the litterateur.