Be sorry
I'm sorry,
he she or it is sorry,
we're sorry,
they are sorry
He will be sorry
And amidst all this public shaming, sorrow, cancelling of TV series for what was always bad taste, here's some thoughts from mr ishmael, who's not sorry:
Look, mate, yer music as you call it, is shite, and so's yer thinking, you pathetic little faggot. Just because a geezer has his meat an' potatoes hollowed-out and has a make-believe vagina constructed out of the poor mangled, butchered flesh; just because he gets himself some plastic titties and wears dresses, staggers about in fuck-me heels and makes up like some old slapper; just because he finds some batshit crazy screwball to fuck him in his phoney fanny, or up his GaryGlitter, more like, doesn't mean he's a proper woman, does it? I mean, how can it? He's a geezer, right, who's had himself all fucked about with just because he thought he'd been deliberately given the wrong chromosomes; trust me, y'little fat freak, he was born a geezer and he'll fuckin' well die a geezer. I mean, stone me, you can't have people just deciding they can be whatever gender they wanna fucking be, can you? It's like all those second marriages, where the poor little kiddies're told to call any old bastard their Daddy or Granddaddy or Nana, when the fact is those fuckers're simply not related to the kids at all, thay just have step-relationships. Same with blubbering old transwomen, they're not women, they'll never be women, they should just call themselves step-women. 'Strewth, I couldn't give a rat's ass about who fucks whom or how or in what orifice, and Sheila, formerly Gordon, he or she can bang like a shithouse door in a gale, but it don't make him a woman. Fuck me Jesus, wanting something doesn't make it so. All these fuckwits wanna do is whine about shit being fair, how it ain't fair that they were born with a cock and not a cunt and that the fucking health service, groaning at the seams, has gotta spend thousands on some sixty year old tranny lunatic so's he and his wife of forty years can now live as two women. Even though they can't, the mad bastards. What was it that Polish bloke stanislav used to say, up against the wall motherfuckers?
Nah, fuck 'em all, the lezzies and the faggots and the madbastard genderbenders.
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The Sunday Travel Pages
Went to Orkney's old, Norse cathedral to see Haydn's Creation; didn't
know it but figured it would be worth the journey and the ticket price
and it was. A big, accomplished festival choir, a trio of
professional soloists, a wizard organist and the high, ancient, sandy
stones; rudimentary by the standards of our Southern and European
cathedrals, stark and unembellished, even before Presbyterianism wrought
it's charmless, nit-picking, pinch-faced, Godless, heathen bastard
iconoclasm, the architecture of the North is bare-boned, testament to
dark days and cruel winds, an empty landscape and very limited
craftsmanship; neither Romans nor Italian Freemasons crossed Hadrian's
Wall, much less the Highlands and the Pentland Firth and Saint Magnus's
sons of catholic toil built his cathedral to a barren, Nordic
template; no statuary friezes surmount the oaken doors, the squat, rude
building has no finials, no gargoyles, no flying buttresses, this is
not Yorkmister or Bath and Wells;
there are no splendid oak or pine choirstalls or pews, rows of drab, utilitarian chairs cudgel devotional buttocks and it is easy to imagine some poisonous minister lambasting his Sabbath Day congregants for displaying a little joy or vivacity, his especial, shaming, macho vilification reserved for the woman taken in sin, the Jezebel, the temptress. They had, until relatively recently, a shaming stool, on which the slatternly were abused by their betters.
On one of Orkney's islands, a long way from anywhere, in a bog, is the lonely grave of Betty Corrigal. Betty was a lass seduced by a sailorboy; made pregnant and deserted, Betty endured the shaming of the bullyboy Presbyterians, the elders, people like Gordon Brown and his Da and his brother, until she could endure no more and made an end of herself. In Death, though, she and her child were considered too impure to lie with good Christians and she was thrown into this dire, unconsecrated bog, lest her strumpet bones tempt the dead neighbours, with whom, but for the minister's watchfulness, she would have shared the subterranean kirkyard. Even in Death her sin segregated her, what sort of charity visits the Presbyterian conscience, what forgiveness softens the wrath of sons of the fucking manse ? Her grave, really miles from anywhere, impossible for relative or friend to visit, was unmarked for years until some Outlander grew enraged and made a facsimile tombstone,
God bless him, of fibre glass; her lonely grave, now a tourist attraction, should rebuke the believer, but we know, don't we, what they are like, doing the right thing, for the country; contemptible bastards, Presbyterians. I come of a long line of them - B Specials, Shankill Butchers, Masons, Missionaries and Orangemen.
But the cathedral of Earl Mungo, anyway - once catholic, then Presbyterian and now repellently ecumenical - rocks; the sound is fantastic, unique, beyond synthesis and somebody told me the other night that the organist, wise to the sandstone acoustic, played a little behind or a little ahead, I can't remember which, of the conductor's tempo, so that either the organ would catch-up with the vocal waves as they ran down the cathedral, or vice versa.
It was a tremendous performance, comparable, in my experience, to similar events at Birmingham's acoustically perfectable Symphony Hall and London's Albert Hall; in an archipelego population of about twenty scattered thousands, the Saint Magnus Festival Choir numbers about a hundred; like a dog on his hind legs, a miracle that it happens at all, never mind that it is so accomplished; vast English counties would love to have such a creative whirlpool. But in Creation - in life, as in myth - lies Ruin.
Malawi is big, so to speak, in smart, successful Scotland. It is not so because parts of Scotland share the same mortality rate -male death at 52 - as parts of Africa, nor because twenty per cent of its children are illiterate and innumerate but because it is a charitable posting for Virtue's sinecurees.
Jack McConnell, former Labour First minister,
ousted by the Jock tribesmen, is set for a retirement post in Malawi, as though the poor natives were insufficiently battered by Life's storms; to Disease and Poverty and Deprivation must now be added the self-serving platitudes of the gabshite, Jock career politician. McConnell, a man useless beyond description, was promoted, miraculously, by Chance. The skinflint Donald Dewar's croaking prematurely, probably from parsimony and folie de grandeur, saw the elevation of Henry McThief and his almost immediate resignation on a pension of a grand a week, following him having done, as is usual with politicians, absolutely nothing wrong. With two First Ministers lost in a matter of weeks, JockLabour was not yet sufficiently desperate to anoint Wendy Halibut Alexander and so Stupid Jack found himself, incredibly, in charge at Holyrood. God help the Malawians that he should go, now, among them, blethering and gabshiteing. Massa McConnell, yo mouth, him all brown. Others, les totalitairianistes jeunesses, go out on what we now call their Gap year, pompous little darlings and some, even more ambitious found, as people will, given half a chance, foundations.
The Musical Director, the other evening, had just returned from a worthy year in Malawi, founding things to make her feel virtuous and she trumpeted her charitable achievements for about a quarter of an hour. The performance was in aid of Malawi, we should reflect about Malawi. And send money. And while we were at it, since this piece was about Creation, we should reflect on what was happening that very day in Copen fucking Hagen. We could all, by vapidly ticking the right boxes, be as seeming virtuous as Madame. I guess it happens everywhere, this preachy shit but I had come to this stony fastness to hear some sacred rock and roll and let God look after the Malawians; waddatheyfuckingwant off me, what does this whining, preening bitch want? I had come to the fucking concert, paid for the tickets, her job was not to improve me but to fucking well entertain me.
And I looked around and did a head count and I thought, well, on a good day my young friend, stanislav, used to get a bigger audience than this, much bigger. And he was blessed with the ability to make people laugh, not to feel artificially virtuous but just to laugh, out loud. He certainly made me laugh. And now here I am, sat on this fucking stool of torture and some snotty bint is trying to make me feel bad but only in comparison to her own Goodness, I might, diligent at her feet, better myself. What is this impudent shit? I was tempted to shout Get Yer Tits Out For The Believers, you know, ironically tempted. And I thought, sometimes Call Me Ishmael gets this big an audience and I have never met, seen or spoken to one soul who visits here, there's no advertisements, no fucking tickets and no proceeds to go to Malawi. Cyber-street entertainment, that's what happens here, evening dress optional. Here is no assumption of GroupVirtue. It is a Blairism, this caring, virtuous self-appraisal which people now routinely, shamelessly undertake in public; a new dawn of moralising vanity.
I have been on drugs and I slept through the end of the conductor's self validation and through part of the first part of Mr Haydn's Creation but when I awoke I became fully engaged. It was very, very good. All that repeated, four-part, declamatory piety - And His name shall be magnified among the Nations -I'm a sucker for all that stuff. The choruses were all, it seemed, head-banging, full-on, hard-core and the choir seemed utterly enraptured to be singing them but the solo recitatives overlong, turgid to my ear. I don't know much Haydn and much as I enjoyed the concert I haven't yet been tempted to look for The Creation on YouTube or Spotify, although I might in a moment.... .
At the end of the performance of The Creation, the usual formalities were observed - soloists, organist, choir and Miss Malawi all took their bows to huge applause; they all clapped each other in turn and then finally, as now happens, Obamaesquely, they clapped us as we were still clapping them. I don't know who among us, if any, was thinking of the wee Malawians and the charitable musical foundations we were giving them but the whole place was reelin' and a-rockin', clapping like happy penguins.
This mutual applause finale was the arrival of Reality's descant and effectively torpedoed the self-aggrandisement of the Musical Director's ruinous, introductory vanities. Children In Need is bad enough but at least you can hide from those bastards or, on occasion, hit them, but we shouldn't be subjected to cheesy charity banditry on such an occasion as a concert of sacred music, not when we have have already paid once, to get in; this was Paisleyite braggaddacio, cheeky cow. This new convention of artist clapping audience/employer/patron underscores the mutuality of the event, makes all present valid and deserving, undermines the preachy bully-pulpit formerly afforded celebrity.
People often write graciously of these commentaries, as though they were mine, as though I had ownership of the event of their reading. I usually remark that - as with the performance in St Magnus' Cathedral, or anywhere else - it is the audience to whom the credit must go, the audience brings itself and enables the event as surely as does the most inspired virtuoso; this would be as true of a Pablo Casals performance as it would of a Kylie Minogue concert. If there is no audience there is no entertainment, no art - does a tree, falling unheard in a quiet forest, actually make no noise? And is it not the essence of quantum physics that to measure by observation is to change that being observed? The performers bring only their performance, more or less rigidly rehearsed, concerted; the audience, disparate, inchoate, brings an arena in which creativity may flower. A hundred and odd people would not for months rehearse a lengthy and difficult choral piece were it not for the assumption of audience; it is the audience and not the performer who catalyse creativity; that each now applauds the other is right and proper, the one rewarded for technique, industry and invention, the other for attendance and validation and comment.
All the comments, sixty-nine of them, on a previous post, therefore, are a little unnerving. All I do is write this stuff. There is a book's worth, here and at other places; maybe several books' worth. I don't know. Regulars will know I keep no archive, of this or of my young friend, mr stanislav's ouevre. It is not a book, you see, or anything which I regard as complete or -with the odd exception - especially worthy; it is just commentary and it would not exist if nobody read it. In that sense, therefore, like the performance of Haydn's Creation, it is a joint effort, vague and anonymous
.................................................................
mr ishmael's thoughts on surgical re-gendering were extracted from
Ending with Richard Durrant's third imaginary concert - in Edinburgh - bit of chat, and sublime guitar. 
there are no splendid oak or pine choirstalls or pews, rows of drab, utilitarian chairs cudgel devotional buttocks and it is easy to imagine some poisonous minister lambasting his Sabbath Day congregants for displaying a little joy or vivacity, his especial, shaming, macho vilification reserved for the woman taken in sin, the Jezebel, the temptress. They had, until relatively recently, a shaming stool, on which the slatternly were abused by their betters.
On one of Orkney's islands, a long way from anywhere, in a bog, is the lonely grave of Betty Corrigal. Betty was a lass seduced by a sailorboy; made pregnant and deserted, Betty endured the shaming of the bullyboy Presbyterians, the elders, people like Gordon Brown and his Da and his brother, until she could endure no more and made an end of herself. In Death, though, she and her child were considered too impure to lie with good Christians and she was thrown into this dire, unconsecrated bog, lest her strumpet bones tempt the dead neighbours, with whom, but for the minister's watchfulness, she would have shared the subterranean kirkyard. Even in Death her sin segregated her, what sort of charity visits the Presbyterian conscience, what forgiveness softens the wrath of sons of the fucking manse ? Her grave, really miles from anywhere, impossible for relative or friend to visit, was unmarked for years until some Outlander grew enraged and made a facsimile tombstone,
God bless him, of fibre glass; her lonely grave, now a tourist attraction, should rebuke the believer, but we know, don't we, what they are like, doing the right thing, for the country; contemptible bastards, Presbyterians. I come of a long line of them - B Specials, Shankill Butchers, Masons, Missionaries and Orangemen.
But the cathedral of Earl Mungo, anyway - once catholic, then Presbyterian and now repellently ecumenical - rocks; the sound is fantastic, unique, beyond synthesis and somebody told me the other night that the organist, wise to the sandstone acoustic, played a little behind or a little ahead, I can't remember which, of the conductor's tempo, so that either the organ would catch-up with the vocal waves as they ran down the cathedral, or vice versa.
It was a tremendous performance, comparable, in my experience, to similar events at Birmingham's acoustically perfectable Symphony Hall and London's Albert Hall; in an archipelego population of about twenty scattered thousands, the Saint Magnus Festival Choir numbers about a hundred; like a dog on his hind legs, a miracle that it happens at all, never mind that it is so accomplished; vast English counties would love to have such a creative whirlpool. But in Creation - in life, as in myth - lies Ruin.
Malawi is big, so to speak, in smart, successful Scotland. It is not so because parts of Scotland share the same mortality rate -male death at 52 - as parts of Africa, nor because twenty per cent of its children are illiterate and innumerate but because it is a charitable posting for Virtue's sinecurees.
Jack McConnell, former Labour First minister,
First Minister McConnell on an official visit to New York, honest, not invent.
ousted by the Jock tribesmen, is set for a retirement post in Malawi, as though the poor natives were insufficiently battered by Life's storms; to Disease and Poverty and Deprivation must now be added the self-serving platitudes of the gabshite, Jock career politician. McConnell, a man useless beyond description, was promoted, miraculously, by Chance. The skinflint Donald Dewar's croaking prematurely, probably from parsimony and folie de grandeur, saw the elevation of Henry McThief and his almost immediate resignation on a pension of a grand a week, following him having done, as is usual with politicians, absolutely nothing wrong. With two First Ministers lost in a matter of weeks, JockLabour was not yet sufficiently desperate to anoint Wendy Halibut Alexander and so Stupid Jack found himself, incredibly, in charge at Holyrood. God help the Malawians that he should go, now, among them, blethering and gabshiteing. Massa McConnell, yo mouth, him all brown. Others, les totalitairianistes jeunesses, go out on what we now call their Gap year, pompous little darlings and some, even more ambitious found, as people will, given half a chance, foundations.
The Musical Director, the other evening, had just returned from a worthy year in Malawi, founding things to make her feel virtuous and she trumpeted her charitable achievements for about a quarter of an hour. The performance was in aid of Malawi, we should reflect about Malawi. And send money. And while we were at it, since this piece was about Creation, we should reflect on what was happening that very day in Copen fucking Hagen. We could all, by vapidly ticking the right boxes, be as seeming virtuous as Madame. I guess it happens everywhere, this preachy shit but I had come to this stony fastness to hear some sacred rock and roll and let God look after the Malawians; waddatheyfuckingwant off me, what does this whining, preening bitch want? I had come to the fucking concert, paid for the tickets, her job was not to improve me but to fucking well entertain me.
And I looked around and did a head count and I thought, well, on a good day my young friend, stanislav, used to get a bigger audience than this, much bigger. And he was blessed with the ability to make people laugh, not to feel artificially virtuous but just to laugh, out loud. He certainly made me laugh. And now here I am, sat on this fucking stool of torture and some snotty bint is trying to make me feel bad but only in comparison to her own Goodness, I might, diligent at her feet, better myself. What is this impudent shit? I was tempted to shout Get Yer Tits Out For The Believers, you know, ironically tempted. And I thought, sometimes Call Me Ishmael gets this big an audience and I have never met, seen or spoken to one soul who visits here, there's no advertisements, no fucking tickets and no proceeds to go to Malawi. Cyber-street entertainment, that's what happens here, evening dress optional. Here is no assumption of GroupVirtue. It is a Blairism, this caring, virtuous self-appraisal which people now routinely, shamelessly undertake in public; a new dawn of moralising vanity.
I have been on drugs and I slept through the end of the conductor's self validation and through part of the first part of Mr Haydn's Creation but when I awoke I became fully engaged. It was very, very good. All that repeated, four-part, declamatory piety - And His name shall be magnified among the Nations -I'm a sucker for all that stuff. The choruses were all, it seemed, head-banging, full-on, hard-core and the choir seemed utterly enraptured to be singing them but the solo recitatives overlong, turgid to my ear. I don't know much Haydn and much as I enjoyed the concert I haven't yet been tempted to look for The Creation on YouTube or Spotify, although I might in a moment.... .
At the end of the performance of The Creation, the usual formalities were observed - soloists, organist, choir and Miss Malawi all took their bows to huge applause; they all clapped each other in turn and then finally, as now happens, Obamaesquely, they clapped us as we were still clapping them. I don't know who among us, if any, was thinking of the wee Malawians and the charitable musical foundations we were giving them but the whole place was reelin' and a-rockin', clapping like happy penguins.
This mutual applause finale was the arrival of Reality's descant and effectively torpedoed the self-aggrandisement of the Musical Director's ruinous, introductory vanities. Children In Need is bad enough but at least you can hide from those bastards or, on occasion, hit them, but we shouldn't be subjected to cheesy charity banditry on such an occasion as a concert of sacred music, not when we have have already paid once, to get in; this was Paisleyite braggaddacio, cheeky cow. This new convention of artist clapping audience/employer/patron underscores the mutuality of the event, makes all present valid and deserving, undermines the preachy bully-pulpit formerly afforded celebrity.
People often write graciously of these commentaries, as though they were mine, as though I had ownership of the event of their reading. I usually remark that - as with the performance in St Magnus' Cathedral, or anywhere else - it is the audience to whom the credit must go, the audience brings itself and enables the event as surely as does the most inspired virtuoso; this would be as true of a Pablo Casals performance as it would of a Kylie Minogue concert. If there is no audience there is no entertainment, no art - does a tree, falling unheard in a quiet forest, actually make no noise? And is it not the essence of quantum physics that to measure by observation is to change that being observed? The performers bring only their performance, more or less rigidly rehearsed, concerted; the audience, disparate, inchoate, brings an arena in which creativity may flower. A hundred and odd people would not for months rehearse a lengthy and difficult choral piece were it not for the assumption of audience; it is the audience and not the performer who catalyse creativity; that each now applauds the other is right and proper, the one rewarded for technique, industry and invention, the other for attendance and validation and comment.
All the comments, sixty-nine of them, on a previous post, therefore, are a little unnerving. All I do is write this stuff. There is a book's worth, here and at other places; maybe several books' worth. I don't know. Regulars will know I keep no archive, of this or of my young friend, mr stanislav's ouevre. It is not a book, you see, or anything which I regard as complete or -with the odd exception - especially worthy; it is just commentary and it would not exist if nobody read it. In that sense, therefore, like the performance of Haydn's Creation, it is a joint effort, vague and anonymous
.................................................................
mr ishmael's draft essay
Normal Service will be Resumed was written 23/12/2009
THE SUNDAY ISHMAEL, WITH HUW WELSHMAN posted on 8/11/2015
.....................................................................
7 comments:
Uplifting.
I'm glad you liked it, mr bb - gets us away from the daily horrors that we are seeing on the news. I'd no sooner pressed the publish button and gone in search of a cup of tea that I noticed my kitchen TV telling me about raves in Manchester and the rape of an 18 year old at one of them.
Plus stabbings and a drugs death, Mrs I. Betty Corrigals in every age.
Sex and drugs and rock 'n'roll.
It's all gone to hell in a hand-cart, mr bb. Mr ishmael used to say that individual consciousness is an evolutionary dead-end. Maybe we're colliding with that dead-end now. From what I see on the TV, I'm actually sympathising with the cops - they are experiencing extreme and dangerous provocation.
I suppose there must be an escalation in police/military response in order to take back control of the cities.
That's a nice cathedral you have there, mrs i. As I never tire of telling the mongoslings, they are (almost) all Catholic churches and cathedrals. Although there are some wonderful especially Georgian and a few Victorian chapels and such. There is a Friends Meeting House hereabouts - just an empty house shape really - that stages music. No Quaker me. And every time I go to hear soemthing, I want to steal it, dismantle it and take it away with me.
I am currently entertaining all of the mongoslings here at Rodent Towers. (Bedlam! Say a little prayer for me.) I am taking many pains to present the alternative case, the unlooked at data, with regard to our current upset. I think we should all ask the eternal question: cui bono?
Up all night, leaning on the window-sill, mr mongoose? I suppose you had to wait for the early hours to get some headspace, with a houseful of offspring. Best of luck with laying out the facts - the propaganda strafing has been so comprehensive, in respect of both the virus and the blacklivesmatter movement, that a dissenting voice is regarded as an enemy of the state, no less. And who does benefit? Follow the money. Tell me, what is the deep script?
Unlike Rodent Towers, it is very quiet here, with empty rooms and coffee spoons, but I am warmed and entertained by my virtual friends, and, of course, by Harris, who has just disembowelled Rabbit (a soft toy, I hasten to add), for the fourth time, pulling out stuffing onto the hearth rug to get at the squeaker, in order to kill it. So I will insert a new squeaker and sew up the wound again.
Yes, St Magnus' Cathedral is a bit special. The most northerly cathedral in Britain, it was built for the bishops of Orkney in the Romanesque style when the islands were ruled by the Norse Earls of Orkney. Building started in 1137. It is owned not by the church, but by the burgh of Kirkwall as a result of an act of King James III of Scotland following Orkney's annexation by the Scottish Crown in 1468. It has its own dungeon. A little old pink and yellow sandstone cathedral, it has none of the fineness and grandeur of your English cathedrals, but it does well. It is part of a complex of buildings for the rich and powerful, the church and state, hugger-mugger together - the Earl's Palace and the Bishop's Palace, both now ruinous, stand just behind it. There was a castle, as well, down below the Cathedral, the few traces of it remaining in the street name: Castle Street.
Fine buildings and hovels for the people. Twas ever thus. Jesus kinda endorsed it: "the poor you have always with you."
Pretty much, mrs i. I worked out long ago that shouting at them to get some peace and quiet was not really fair but when they were in bed by 7:30, the problem went away. Now they go to bed at 2am. I just need half-an-hour to turn my brain off.
Cui bono and the deep script, eh? Now you're asking. I shall think upon it.
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