The Sunday Ishmael - the longest day, 21st June in the Year of Ruin 2020

The Caption Contest
Thank you for your entries. The Dodo's Verdict: Everyone has won and all must have prizes. Especially mr verge.

The News 
There isn't any good news. There isn't any new news. There's lots of same old, same old, news, dressed up in new clothes.  
Surprise! Rich man allegedly attempts to corrupt the planning process.

Covid -19 remains a Bad Thing. People continue to die. But shops and restaurants must open. People must spend. How do you eat spaghetti in a face mask, by the way?

The Party and Event scene crowd in Stuttgart got drunk and abusive. More than a dozen police officers were hurt  during rioting and looting by an indeterminate number of up to 500 people.

The man responsible for a terrorist stabbing in Reading was known to MI5. The fourth suspected terrorist knife attack in recent months followed November stabbings at Fishmongers’ Hall, HMP Whitemoor prison in January and Streatham in February.

And as America's Civil War, commenced on April 12th 1861 and now in its 159th year, continues with burnings, murders and rioting, here's a note from mr ishmael:

I was reading in my apparently uncancellable Time magazine subscription about Hillary Trousers' encounter with a small group of  Black Lives Matter activists in New Hampshire. Yo, bitch, was your ole man, Spunky Bill, introduced this Tough On Crime shit, which means, trouserlady, that black folks, walking down the street, mindin' they own business,  can just get their nigger heads all blown away by any redneck cop who feels like doin' that shit; wochoogottasayboutthat, bitch?
Time magazine, ever gracious to Power, did not report the fleabitten old buzzard's response; we can, however, frame it for ourselves, from our own experience. Aw shucks, I'm just poor Southern trash, jes like y'all, an' it don't mean shit that me an' Spunky Bill done raised a billion dollars in bribes fer ourselves, we's still poor at heart. Y'know, friends, I'm kinda like the Dolly Parton a politics, I came from nothin' to bein' First Lady, an' I done it on my own efforts,  an' by standin' by my man. (sings) sometimes it's hard to be a woman.......
catcalls: Yeah, bitch, stand by yo' man even when he's noncing an intern, Way to go, DykeLady. Pure feminism, that is

The Art Appreciation Pages

The Balinese say: We have no Art. We do everything as well as we can.

  I read those words years ago, decades ago, in McLuhan's Understanding Media, and they are always around, somewhere, on a shelf, a mantelpiece, not prominent but never out of sight.

The intrusiveness of the TeeVee arts presenter has been a regular theme, hereabouts;  recently, we have  focused on Dr Tubby Ramirez, punk-Goth arts historian, and the grotesque Simon Russell Beale, a man who would talk-over Beethoven at prayer,  but we have looked at lots of them, socialist peer, Lord Belbin Bagg, pension fiddler, Alan Yentob, dunderhead Mark Potato, the PBC's cawing Kirsty Wark and many more; it is a  self-ordained priesthood of gabshitery, a predatory band of media-hedin; 

holypersons, wise ones, explaining to us the sacred mysteries of architecture, painting, writing, even of trashy pop music, 
Yentob, in all seriousness, taking us on a tour of Mark Knopfler's expensive guitars. 

Well, essentially, viewers, Fender only make about a quarter of a million of these per year.  And not all of them are in pink. So that makes this one very rare. A work, in fact, of art; given sixty years of production, there can't be more than  a few million of these in existence. In fact, viewers, I am so up myself to be holding this that I might just piss.  Mmmm, smell the garlic; sometimes I think my bodily functions are a work of art. 
But just mine, not everyone's, obviously.

Yes, Alan, that's so deeply, profoundly, shockingly correct; when I am taking a dump, after a night of delightful pasta and Chianti, purchased for me, naturally, by the license-payer, I think to myself, Simon Russell, these are maestro turds, it is philistinism that they are flushed away.

They belong in the Louvre, my droppings. Where ordinary people can appreciate them

This pseudo-arts-crit posturing has gilded not just  arsehole presenters such as those above  but also his or her - chosen field of arseholery,  creating a Synod of Shit, in which clerics and laity joyously fellate and cunnilingualise one another, rather, one suspects, as happens in Synods and conclaves proper.  Private Eye has at least one regular cartoon devoted to Britain's growing smarmyarmy of artfucks; critics and collectors who compel us to believe that this stinking heap of shit, fag-ends  and condoms

is art.

We were talking a while back about the contradictions of creativity and decay inherent in curating and conserving works of art.  I wouldn't want to be the curator charged with looking after Tracey Emin's bed, dirty fucking slut.
I'd just set fire to the fucking thing.

And her bed, anyway, looks different each time you see it.

In this new church there is no  heresy, no penance to be served, however grave the sin; however disgusting the scandal, there is no excommunication. The charmed circle of celebrity knows no shame, sins are airbrushed away, by the hand of Entertainment's Dark God. And those who have lived a life of criminal debauchery are Hosannahed by people like this prat,

into superstar glory.

As in  most things, with art, we are dictated-to by those who have, by fair means or foul, acquired a lot of money,  people like these,

art collector Saatchi and his coke-snorting ex-wife, Lawson, seen here enjoying an artistic moment.
 Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, doncha just love 'em, love what they've managed to get away with, sharks and shitty beds. No business like showbusiness.

And then there's this numbskull and his tedious, domestic architecture schtick. I know that house-building's not art but Kev and his producers attempt to make it such - cliff-hanging vacuously through each episode,  will the maniacs  finish in time, will the money run out - but Kev always manages to make each madcap project sound as though it has added to the national landscape, is a Versailles, a Castle Howard, just waiting to be discovered.

Zen in the Art of BreezeBlocks

Tarquin and Jocasta really have succeeded in creating a unique home which sits with great integrity in the landscape. (No, Kev, it fucking doesn't, it should be demolished) It may have cost them and their over-indulgent parents an arm and a fucking leg but they and their children, Shelby, Dimitri and Francesca, will enjoy it for many years to come. Or until the hideous, preening, facetious morons turn on each other and divorce, probably next week. 

I wish I could find a phrase for this thing that's happened, whereby art and culture and craft and trade have been NutriBombed, blended into homogenised televisual product, squirted at us by pushy, shameless nobodies.

All I  know about Assyrians is that they  came down like a wolf on the fold. Other than that, until life-long socialist, Sir  Tony Robinson 

I'm only accepting it on behalf of my profession. Archaeology. Not showbusiness.

and his grave-robbing scruffs do a Time Team feature on it, Assyria will remain in a mental file marked Look-up On Wikipedia When You Have Absolutely Nothing Better To Do, i.e. never.

I am surrounded by stoney old shit,  here.  Much, much older than the Tower of London or Kenilworth Castle, some of it is supposed to pre-date the pyramids in Egypt, being five thousand years or so old.  I have seen it all:

The Standing Stones at the Ring of Brodgar

Skara Brae

Maeshowe

I once crawled through the Maeshowe tunnel into the burial chamber. Once was enough, maybe once was one time too many.

 

Dark and painful, half-stooping, half-crawling, arriving in an empty space, five thousand years old, vandalised in the 700s by my Viking ancestors who left graffito such as Sven wuz 'ere, honest. 

There is an enforced  reverence which hangs in the air of all these places, you get a blast  of it when you buy the tickets. I do wonder at  stuff, when I visit these places, but only for a while.  I repaired one of the floors, here, at home, last week, varnished it all up again, and one of the boards I removed was laid well over two hundred years ago and grown some time before that; it had some man-made marks on it which I have yet to decipher but this old bit of pine is as much a link to dead hands as any of the piles of old stones, what am I to do with it? Start a museum? Hang it on the wall? Can't just throw it out, can I, put it in the fire. The place is filled with stuff, one, two, three hundred years old; it is, I sometimes feel, just  a fucking tyranny, the past and its fucking stuff

Doesn't matter where the historic sites are, Lindisfarne is plagued by old biddy Godlessheathenbastards  from English Heritage, tut-tutting their shrivelled,  verminous lives away, watching you suspiciously, as you try to think yourself into the minds of Bede and Cedric; they call Jarrow Monastery BedeWorld, honest, straight-up. 

I had a row at Lindisfarne, with one of the custodianati.  mrs ishmael's grandson, six, was climbing on the walls and this old boot freaked-out. Alright, i'll get him down, I said, screech-screech-screech, she went, he shouldn't be on there in the first place.  He's a little boy, little boys have been climbing these ruins for a thousand years, and he's about the weight of a coupla seagulls. She had, being a minor curator, completely lost perspective - on the building, on history, on God.  I wound-up snarling at her, at her veneration for rocks, at her snooty, violent sense of ownership.

  Every stately home in England is icily guarded by regiments of  these vindictive, blue-rinsed volunteers in  mean, sensible shoes and support hose, daring you to cross through the blue ropes keeping you from contact with the Chippendale,  as though dining chairs were holy fucking relics, as though the cruet sets were silversmithed by God, Himself. It's all Canticle for Liebowitz stuff, this insane reverence for the mundane, and it all keeps us, even today, in line, obedient to fuckpig Dukes - Dimbleby minor, on the radio the other night, YourGrace-ing some arsehole descended from the Duke of Wellington, I nearly crashed the fucking car -  Noncing Monsignors and ancient WiseMen, all the PowerFilth, all the elites, mumbo-jumboing, droit de seigneuring, excommunicating, human-sacrificing, all those rotten bastards who have besmirched human existence; the monastery, the stately home and the stone circle, all remind us that there have always been bastards to lord it over us, keep us off the grass and charge us for entry to our own fucking property, often upon pain of death, torture or both.

And now the keepers of Subservience's Flame have gone global;  we are all supposed to lie awake at night worrying about some old rubbish in Iraq.

God only knows what kind of arseholes built these Assyrian towns, over which everyone has their knickers in a twist but civil liberties and equal opportunities won't have figured at all in their civic ordinances. Boiling in oil, decapitation, flogging  and being pulled-apart by horses was probably the usual drill for freethinkers like us and we may also be certain that health and safety issues went unrecognised - there would have been no hard-hat areas.

 
I should think that most people in the world have never heard of these artefacts and that only a handful will have visited and in any event, all of it - or enough of it - will have been digitally archived, accessible to scholars and other layabouts with nothing better to do.

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If I could Sing Only One Song

I don't do that much talking, these days - doctors, tradesmen, people like that and those conversations are actually a constant negotiation. I might have a chat with someone I bump into, Uptown, hoping it will end very quickly,  but sitting down, drinking and rabbiting is hard going. And the telephone is worse, talking to someone whose face you can't see is like taking a piss wearing gloves.  I am out of practice, therefore, in the art, if such it is, of small talk, I can only do big talk. It's all your fault, for reading this stuff and joining-in; blogging, it is the other woman in my life.

Such conversations as I do have take the form of a quick blog post, not that I do many of them, and are shaped, unknowingly, really, to be completed before being commented upon. It is not quite, Shut Up and Listen, but there is a cadence which beats-out, saying This Is Where I'm Going, This Is Where I've Been, Right, Now We're There, WhaddaYouThink?    

I think it is more respectful and purposeful to communicate thus and maybe those better educated than I have always done so but for me it is relatively novel.

mr ishmael's essays are taken from 2015:

White Folks Do this Shit, too                                drafted 19/7/2015

Trouser Woman Unbound - Black Lives Matter   drafted 29/8/2015

If I could sing only one Song                                drafted 20/7/15 

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Advertising Break

Gardening Corner

Some garden portraits I promised you in the Garden is Bent, passim:

 eschallonia as a specimen, which does like to be beside the seaside:

And golden elder:

On the night of the 20th/21st June, the sun sets at 22: 30 and rises next day before 04:00 . The after-glow and the crepuscular light between them ensure that on a cloudless night there is no dark. I took this photo at 11:40 on Saturday night.

Music and quaint folkore page

Richard Durrant - now, I've skipped a few of his virtual gigs, but here he is at Sherwood Forest. Fun encounter with Friar Tuck, and some seriously weird English folk and Morris music. mr ishmael, the musicologist, who revered the Copper Family, and the Incredibe String Band, would have liked this. Me? I like Meatloaf.