A NOTE , BEAUTIFUL IMAGES,LEARNING TO COPE
Three separate things to read
A PERSONAL NOTE TO MY READERS
*Next Saturday I’m creating a pay wall, not initially for my weekly essays but for a number of longer pieces of writing and for new monthly podcast interview with artists lasting (so far) from 18 -35 minutes. They are fascinating to listen to the beautiful and thoughtful things people have to say about life and art as composers, painters, performers, directors, and artists as aid workers.
*I am putting a minimum subscription fee (according to Substack) of £5.00 per month or £50.00 a year. I have been told by numerous readers that having published over 150 essays since February 2022 for free, by now I should be asking for support as it is occupying an increasing amount of my time.
For any of my students or young friends I have worked with, let me know if it is too much to add to your monthly costs and I will provide you a free pass.
And at this moment I want to thank those people who have taken subscriptions
without me having asked…I have appreciated the kindness.
*Soon I will offer a series of chargeable online ZOOM discussions based in my past essays and about the content of the longer essay that begins this week below about Neoliberalism, all of which will be free for subscribers.
*Subscribers will also have free access to various films and stills that I am producing as well as to heavily discounted access to a new novel, poetry and other works.
*For those interested in photography and the arts in particular, I will be offering a series 12 episodes of illustrated videos called THINKING PHOTOGRAPHY which will be released late spring, and will also be available for a large discount to subscribers.
In the meantime, below are some wonderful images to consider.
SAM BIRT’S BEAUTIFUL IMAGES
Sam Birt, “a collage artist, video maker, choreographer and dancer is originally from London but has a diverse cultural background with roots streaming from India, Canada and various European countries. She has lived and worked in several cities around Europe and now is currently based in Lake Como, Italy."
Sam is a dear long time friend whom I have had the luck to see develop over many years. She sent me the three images attached to this essay, asking me what I thought about them. A fair, honest and brave question.
I wrote to her that there is a dream-like rationality in them. They are images of manufactured materials and objects which seem knowable both in form and also in alluding to objects as a bathroom mirror, a vaulted ceiling, a celebratory arch, but at the same time the objects assembled in their seductively satisfying compositions and colour harmonies are also irrational…they confirm that they are from dreams and visions rather than from architect’s or designer’s studios. They ask unreasonable perhaps disturbing or provoking questions of us, as artists should.
Now especially we need to dream, to hope and to aspire. Her collages help us to enter the world more capable to cope because she provides breaths of fresh air through our daily struggles. She encourages us to look at things differently.
Yes, what is an artist’s role? There is always the barbarous rightwing bloody thorn that scratches ‘art is nothing of importance because it can neither feed us nor stop wars’.
But indeed, it can touch people’s souls, convince us of the importance of the beautiful dreams and help us to re-engage our humanity. Once that happens we will be less likely to want to kill another human being on the basis of their approach to their Gods or to their skin colour and perhaps we will be less willing to exchange our visions of goodness, beauty and truths for the rotting puff of the bloviated old men who are emotionally ignorant, uncaring and filled with greed for land, trade, wealth and power.
I love Sam’s work, I have loved it for years…..and here in these images there is such a calming embrace of colour and tones, I am soothed for a moment.
See her work here: https://sambirt.wordpress.com/
TRANSFORMATION TO THE NEXT SYSTEM:
A PROCESS DEPENDENT ON CREATING AND WINNING CULTURAL STRUGGLES
by Robert Golden
The whole of this essay of 9000 words is a précis of a 36,000 word essay I wrote across about 10 years. Several publishers acknowledged the rigour of my research but unfortunately not being a known journalist nor an academic nor a ‘personality’ and having written something so clearly an exposition of the terrible flaws of neoliberal capitalism and its attack on democracy (with the neoliberals behind the media curtains plotting their slow and steady proto-fascists political ideals to smother democracy with oligarch rule) which we are seeing playing out at this moment in the Musk-MAGA-orange moves to tear apart the American constitution and the Bill of Rights. The essay begins below and will continue for many weeks with me publishing digestible bits by bit.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
To transform Western society, we need a clear analysis of the present; a clear vision if not how the state will be but at least the values we wish will serve as guardrails for a kind, educated, cultured, well cared for population living within blind, empathetic justice, fairness and universal in its distribution of its wealth and care; and we need a set of practical systemic plans to move peacefully from the present into that future.
Facts will not entice nor convince people; we need to be approached with empathy, care and understanding, we need to be invited into creating the new culture with agreed values based entirely on kindness rather than materialism, power and wealth. The only tools to accomplish this are found within the arts.
I. THE PROBLEM: THE RISE, SCOURGE AND FAILURE OF NEOLIBERALISM
For these last forty-five years the vast majority of human beings
have suffered from what has become an endless night. It has darkened all of our lives and the lives of our children while it continues to destroy our precious planet.
Within the darkness, we have lost sight of our moral compass.
It is no surprise that day became night following the settling ashes of World War II. We, and in particular the thoughtful, reading working and middle classes, have overseen the delirium of avarice and greed, and the reigniting and on-going disdain for other races, creeds and cultures. As the Neoliberals have no economic answers to offer those they steal from, they engage in simplistic culture wars on Wokeness, human dignity and kindness. These are easy enough to stir people’s unthinking prejudices while also giving them someone to blame for their frozen wages, reduced benefits and failing schools and hospitals.
These distortions of our collective values have taking hold and swept away what we should have learned from having survived the horrors of fascism, Nazism, Communism and all the slaughters of the East.
Since the early nineteen-eighties, bonded by their wealth and desire for greater wealth and power, two inhumane ideologies - Neoliberalism and its bed-mate, Neo-conservatism, have halted our species from morally evolving.
The Neoliberals conceived a new economic plan to turn the state into a conduit for big business while removing all oversight and installing politicians into power who would service only their corporate needs, as they believe a ‘free market’ should determine its own levels and construct its own guardrails’ to service maximum profits
While Neo-liberalism has proven to be responsible for increasing inequality, it has led to the almost total collapse of the financial system in 2008. As a smokescreen to hide the reality of their own incompetence they convinced many of us that we were somehow responsible for the failure and therefore must withstand years of austerity. This was imposed as an ideological device rather than an economic necessity. Meanwhile few political leaders have yet to offer alternatives. We have seen the centre and centre left political parties bow down to new restrictions on our freedoms and to the mesmerising glitter of chandeliers. Once people began to take notice of the fallacy of austerity, the neoliberals and their political puppets used the economic troubles of the worldwide pandemic (failing supply lines, supposed increased costs and higher interest rates) to convince us that increased prices were the burdens people had to pay for the illness.
These Neoliberals, whose narrow polices gained political ascendency in the US and the UK in the early 1980’s, enriched the .01% beyond the boundaries of past wealth, while they destroyed the post World War Two progressive visions of a farer world. The briefly kindled American Dream and the British Spirit of ’45, along with the rebuilding of a crushed and forlorn Europe were contorted into a glib, infantilised fable of consumerism, celebrity, globalisation and ‘fair’ trade.
The Neoliberal’s had a fevered desire to “defend American capitalism” by repressing the nineteen-sixties’ wave of what one of their spokespersons referred to as “an excess democracy”.
Their real agenda was to transform social democratic, somewhat socially fair-minded Capitalism into wealth machines for the super rich individuals and corporations to become even more wealthy. Their plan from the beginning was to crush the trade unions which would help to lower all worker’s wages; to freeze middle class incomes while making certain they did not unionise the newly evolving white collar industries; by using taxes, interest rates and the commoditisation of everything while decreasing that which the state had previously provided. All of these ploys contributed to shifting wealth from the average working family to the wealthy; and by creating consumption led economies financed by the invention and use of paying on the never-never with the new credit cards.
All of the above can be seen being played out under Musk and orange and their MAGA minions.
Next week : CHANGING PEOPLE’S BELIEFS
They found a way to rule by convincing people in an entirely new system of ‘ME’ centred beliefs, explaining oneself via individualism and psychology rather than by history and one’s own family and place in society, and in convincing people that what one consumed and could display was more important than what on makes and contributes to society. They also pounded away at describing how free one is to be able to choose which brand, colour or concept to see oneself a part of, rather than to appreciate true individualism in the context of a neighbourly world
of collaboration and caring.
