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GEORGE FORMBY - Its turned out nice again

"Not stuck up or proud ,Im just one of the crowd, a good turn I will drop when I can". The preceding words spoken by the man himself could sum up Formby's oeuvre, only when a person dies do we learn the exact truth about our feelings towards someone. When George Formby died in 1961 ,allegedly over 75,000 people attended his funeral, a staggering amount, i'm sure you might agree.
He was one of my first introductions to nostalgia, to another age, another time, a place of innocence , innuendo. The one quality I keep finding in Formby is passion and devotion,to his people, to his music, to his beloved wife Beryl. I am  currently listening to a  compilation of Formby's greatest hits, absolutely corking stuff .Once I hear his nudging , winking voice on the stereo I am hooked.When I listen to the Beatles, I hear his echo, ( They were fans you Know ).
Born in 1904 in Wigan he was famous for playing the ukelele, a banjo like instrument.( popularised today by the ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain,check out fantastic post of their recent concert at the proms, over at the excellent  ROCKET REMNANTS blog. I
believe the ukelele owes its modern survival due to George,he played it with virtuosity and style , he played the peoples instrument, he was a peoples star.A cacophony of twangs and twiddles, its an awesome sound, primitive yet modern.
I believe he was one of the last centuries first genuine folk stars singing in his own voice,to the people for the people.Like today he sang in a time of austerity and depression, his spirit lifts us , releases us , comforts us. When Formby went to Apartheid era South Africa in 1946, he could not understand why he was playing only to white audiences, he decided to refuse to play to racially segregated audiences, and went to the townships to play to the black populations in their own villages. They loved him for this , cheering him on. The National party leader at the time Daniel Malan berated him for this , eventually expelling Formby from the country. Beryl told Malan "Why don't you piss off, you horrible little man".( can you imagine Saint Sir Cliff Richard, having this experience) .
In 1944 a Russian poll showed George to be the most popular figure in Russia after Stalin. What I believe binded Formby with the people is that through his songs, there is a sense of community and solidarity, laughter can be such a powerful weapon.For me he seemed to sing for the people , all the people. He may not have sung about injustices, but he sang to all as equals. Ordinary people were his lifeblood.In his films ( over 20 blockbusters) he always seemed to play the underdog, who succeeds in the end, in a Formby film the toffs are seen as bad tempered , idiotic, bullying, and small minded.In the Second World War he reached out to the troops,fighting the nazis on a propaganda front, the British troops loved him, he was one of their own. George Formby one man and ukelele anti fascist machine.The upper classes might have been running the show, but it was the ordinary man who like today had to fight it.George in his own style reached out to them with humour,always looking on the bright side of life.
The class struggle is, as always fought most fiercly in the realm of language, and George never lost his voice. Here was a man who stayed humble to the end. "We dont become stars.You people make us stars. We could not be anything without you.And if they believe in anything different they are crazy."
Nearly 60 years after his death (March 6th 1961) people still pin the performer to the tune, when his records are played. He came partly through familiarity, partly through loyalty to the public, to transcend comedy. A unique voice. George Formby I salute you, a genuine working class hero. " Its turned out nice again, hasn't it ."

THE JAZZ sound ,turns on and on and on and on

Charles Winick had a theory that in jazz, the kind of stimulant or depressant chosen by an addictive personality has been connected with the kind of music he plays.New Orleans jazz e.g," was generally outgoing and aggressive " and " alcohol has the effect of facilitating aggressive tendencies ,"When jazz became more light and swinging,alcohol began to give way to marijuana"
The post-World War 2 development of a more detached and cool jazz was simultaneous with the great increase in musicians use of junk ,which makes the user seem more cool and detached. Jazz for me takes me far out , fast and bulbuous one minute slow and cruising the next.When Jazz kind of became cool in the late 40s early 50s ,im sure it was because most of the more inspiring musos of the day were out of their minds,Miles Davis,Dexter Gordon, Gerry Mulligan and of course the late great Charlie Parker.
Perhaps it was the end of the second World War, old paranoias and inhibitions were swept aside.Hipsters verses squares,straights verses daddy cool,the birth of rock and roll,jive talking , do you get my drift? Today i have had a couple of joints and a couple of glasses of wine, i feel free and less inhibited,more relaxed.In the end surely the drugs dont really matter ,its the notes and the music that become part of creation,preserved and saved.
Not all far out music was,is created by the use of drugs. Perhaps its because jazz comes from the soul ,from a pulse, a rythym,a sense of space,from another galaxy.Jazz touches me intensely and i can not play a damned note.It is immediate,direct in the right hands downright sensational,inspiring,intense. Some like to prolong the ecstacy ,some want to come down, relax ,be easy. I dont know but I believe in its power its unaccountability, its blue notes ,its rebellion, its intoxicating force.
Charlie Mingus,Jack Kerouac, sweet Bessie Smith ,the lord John Coltrane,Sonny Rollins,Frank Zappa, Fela Kuti,Sun Ra .The dreamers,the players with innervision. It can be crazy out there, let it flow,connecting the primitives to the masters.And the moon I forgot to mention the moon,its difficult, if not impossible to explain the pull.It can feel like love,like validation,like the sweetest medicine,put the needle on the record ,let it feed you ,soothe and heal.
Be nice,Pull the shades down.Turn off the lights.Shut your eyes..................................................

Kenneth Patchen - God Help us All

Human! Dont be fooled!

The world of automata and robots contains an area of illusion and fraud which presents many traps for the innocent.The vaucanson duck might have seemed as miraculous in its performance of eating and digesting as the chess-playing Turk at chess, but wheras the mechanism of the former was available for inspection, the von Kempelen chess player could only be examined under certain conditions, and that is being demonstrated by von Kempelen himself.
Comments on commercial exploitation ,mans desire for magic and instant solutions , as well as creduility can be found in literature through the ages.Remember Golems,this term is used in the Bible and in Talmudic literature to refer to an embryonic or an incomplete substance. In the creation of Adam ,at the third of the seven stages ,before he finally came to life when God breathed into his nostrils, his state was described by the rabbis as that of a golem, i.e a shapeless, unformed , substance.There have been , since the middle ages , many stories about wise men who made human effigies from the dust of the earth and then brought them to life with a shem or charm.
From the Greek automatos , acting of itself .Automata, often highly decorative , are mechanical artifacts which tend to imitate things from real life.Encyclopedia Brittanica omits robots from its definition of automata because robots are defined as functional, which automata are not.
At one extreme , in fiction , a robot can replace man and even better him. Although robots are not supposed to have feelings they often manifest them and insist that they are human, or at least that they are not machines.
In robot lore , truth as a concept may not seem the most relevant or vital criterion, but fraud in automation is worse than human deception becuse its association with science makes it seem impervious to corruption.
In a society of the future described by Phillip K Dick, there are so few animals left that these ar highly prized and kept as pets.Since pets represent the most important status symbols anyone can possess, those that cannot afford real animals have battery-operated artificial ones ,which to all intents and purposes are indistinuishable from the real thing.Only the owners are keenly aware of their inadequacy.Meanwhile , the only beings on earth which in all respects are no different from humans,except that they have no empathy with animals are Androids. They are hunted, retired or killed.The only way one can tell an android from a human is through very complcated psychological tests. Men tolerate artificial animals but cant abide artificial human beings.Elsewhere, Dick says that sometimes the androids themselves do not realise they are not human, even though they seem to lack proper feeling,human traits like love, kindness empathy.Yet scientists could no more find humaneness in the circuits of a robot than the soul in the body of a man.
I feel they deserve some kind of respect,what makes them seem unpleasant and unhappy is the fact they are given human traits by man playing God.For these reasons alone I urge caution!What would happen if robots themselves thought they were God and declared absolute power.
Noam Chomsky talks of man being preprogrammed for the accomplishments which he is able to attain. He suggests that for the aquisition of language there is no other explanation,He puts forward an idea ,that all languages have basic structure in common .The genetic program which establishes set of constraints is what provides the basis of our freedom and creativity.Yet preprogramming limits our imagination.
The difference between a robot programmed by man and man programmed by God , is a robot can be given a number of programs which one can change, but man has been condemned to one set of programs forever. Am only sayin.,to be continued

NONSENSE -anon

Upon a dark ,light,gloomy,sunshine day, As I in August walked to gather May, It was at noon neer ten a clock at night, The Sun being set,did shine exceeding bright, I with mine eyes began to hear anose, And turned my eyes about to see the voice, When from a cellar seven stories high, With loud low vice Melpomene did crie, What sober madness hath possest your brains, And men of no place ,shall your easie pains Be thus rewarded? pasing Smithfield bars, Cast up the blear-eyed eyes down to the stars, And see the Dragons head in Quartile move, Now Venus is with Mercury in love, Mars patient fages in fustian fume, And Jove will be revenged, or quit the room, Mild Juno ,beautuous Saturn,Martia free At ten leagues distance now assembled be; Then shut your eyes and see bright Iris mount, Five hundred fathoms deep by just account And with anoble ignominious train Passes flying to the place were Mars was slain Thus silently she spake ,whilst I mine eyes First on the ground advanced to the skies, And then not speaking any word replied Our noble family is neer allied To that renowned peasant George a Green, Stout Wakefield Pinner, he that stood between Achilles and the fierce Eacides, And then withstood with most laborious ease, Yet whilst that Boreas and Kinde Auster lie Together ,and at once the same way flie, And that unmoved wandring fixed star, That bloody peace fortells, and patient war, And scares the earth with fiery apparition, And plants in men both good and bad conditions: I ever will with my weak able pen Subscribe myself your servant French Ben

THOMAS DE QUINCEY and his phantasmagoric dreams.

I have often been attracted to dreamers and outsiders,with a romantic bent.Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) is one I admire. A prose writer of astonishing virtuosity, in a kind of rambling disjointed way. Born in Manchester, the son of a successful local business man, he went to Manchester Grammar School, which he ran away from, sleeping out and causing havoc in my beloved Welsh hills, he was caught and sent to Eton and later found himself in Oxford where he started taking opium at the age of 28 for stomach ulcer pains.(which incidentally did cure him of his ailment). He got himself a bit of a habit until he reched a peak of 8000 drops of laudanam (opium tincture)a day, normal recomended daily dose was recomended at 80 to 120 daily drops, so dont try this at home folks!
Basically today he would be called an addict, which he was, like many literary figures of the time who had become accustomed to taking what was then legal drugs for medical reasons.
He settled at Grasmere to be near his prophet Wordsworth, and his admired Coleridge.He is best known today for "the Confessions of an English Opium Eater" but I feel lesser works have same indefinite power and romantic impulses -The afflictions of Childhood, The flight of the Kalmuck Tartars, The English Mail Coach, and of my favourites Dream -Fuque.
Phantasmagoric is the word for his more typical prose.One minute his emotions are all solemn the next his narrative takes flight, gettin higher and higher, beyond yonder, a vision of something, forever flying ,forever escaping ,space swelling,time expanding!
Sometimes his rythym feels like music - various and indeterminate, closer to the infinite of pure feeling, taking us far out ,then even further.This is the problem, in his case what seemed favourable to single hours of miraculous exaltation of mood, was fatal to the completion of great artistic wholes.It leaves us with unfinished symphonies which tantalize us with their sense of loss.However not everyone likes magicians and their spells.
Amazingly he lived on in contentment until his death from natural cases at 74.Like a modern junky, William Burroughs he often voiced complaint against his addiction, but there be perhaps theatrics at play, with him almost boasting about it.
Anyway he left us a body of work that has to be admired.Sometimes it seems if one reads his works he seemed ,to have lived for 70 to 100 years in one night,he experienced "the reawakening of a state of eye often times incident to childhood...a power of painting ,as it were ,upon the darkness all sorts of phantoms...at night,when I lay awake in bed,vast processions moved along...a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour" "I was stared at, looked at , grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquats, by cocatoos.I ran into pagodas , and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms, I was the priest, I was worshipped, I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia, Vishnu hated me, Shiva lay in wait for me,I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris.I had done a deed,they said, which the ibis and the crocodiles trembled at.I lived and was buried in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids "
Imagine that every night, Opium for the people,anybody! Floating Anarchy ! Not sure myself ,pass me a can of tennents extra, or even a cup of tea and I think I will sleep allright,and not walk amongst nightmare corridors.Happy dreaming now, sleep tight.