Words of Fire, Ink of Blood

What Beauty Lies in Wait

2011-05-04T07:24:00.004Z

A Cover I did for a friend's collection of Horror and Fantasy Sampler.

Double click on the image to enlarge.

Quite pleased with it, hope it does what it was intended to and shifts a few copies for him.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Richard Newport White, Rest In Peace

2010-06-15T15:11:00.011Z

Captain R.N. "Dick" White in the cockpit of a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter

Richard Newport White: 21st May 1924 - 5th June 2010

My Eulogy for my stepfather Captain R.N. White:

"It is few men indeed that are offered the chance to help save the world.

And it is fewer still that have the courage and conviction to seize that moment.

Having both, Richard, rose and looked into the blackest parts of the twentieth century, for his family, for Ireland, and for us and did not flinch.

Richard, for those of you do not know, saw active duty with the RAF in the fight against Japan during World War Two.

He joined to fight the Nazis, whose dark cloud he watched, as it engulfed Europe, as entire peoples disappeared, and did not stand by.

I think Richard, and the Irish men like him, who fought against the Axis, redeemed this country in the annals of history for it's inaction in the face of Nazi and Fascist conquest.

Ultimately I think, what propelled him into history was love.

And that is what I and my family feel for him, whenever we pass a place we have spent time with him, wherever we are in a place he has spoken of, whenever we are doing something that he advised us how to do.

A deep, and overwhelming love.

Richard first came into my life twenty years ago, when he met my Mother at a lecture in Trinity College.

If any of you have ever discussed the reality of "love at first site" debate no more, for it truly was and continued to be. Both I and my sister feel privileged to have born witness to their unconditional and incandescent love.

As for myself, it is hard for me to put into words what he meant to me, let alone what his life signified to others.

Richard had managed to fit at least the substance of 10 lives into his one, and was something of a polymath.

His quiet, noble, and dignified manner taught me something new every single time I encountered him, which is something I can say of no other person,

We also never had an argument, again, something I can say of no other person.

I loved him, my family loved him, we lived in his light.

And now he is gone.

No more Heroes anymore.

Goodbye Richard."

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Our Lady's Corpse

2009-10-05T20:22:00.001Z

Untitled by Unknown

Medium: Clay

Date: Unknown – Found Our Lay's Mental Hospital Cork, 8^th September 2007

Image © FatherCrow 2007

WHEN fishes flew and forests walked

And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

Then surely I was born;

With monstrous head and sickening cry

And ears like errant wings,

The devil's walking parody

On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.

by: G.K. Chesterton

A grey stone spine, five stretched stories high and a street long lies driven heavy into the hillside in the city of Cork, the exposed spine of a twisted monster that ate human souls for over one hundred years.

Men live in the corpse of the monster.

Women live there, children too. They go about their daily business unaware that they live in a murderous psychic cadaver that stares down forever from the hill on the people of Cork. These people, natives of the city, can't look up at the grey geometry of Our Lady's Mental Hospital for fear of raising a scream of torn bloody memory, of raising the faces of friends, relatives and neighbours who were committed there.

You won't hear a Cork accent in the new apartments they made out of half of the main Mental Hospital building. When they finish the second half, you won't hear a Cork accent there either. You see, they the people of Cork more than know what it was. They know what it did to them, what it did to the people they love.

None of the out of towners seem to mind, to them, it's just a building, not a maw that devoured their people. So long as they don’t turn around, who’s to notice the cold necropolis that rolls up the hillside behind them.

The jaw of this monster weakened and started to fall silent in the nineteen eighties. The place was built in the 1840's. No one wants to remember this institution, if you go looking on the Web for trace records of it's passing, trace records is what you will get. A wilful amnesia seems to engulf anyone close enough to tell of it. There are one or two passing mentions, a record of one of the employees in an epitaph here, a few mentions of its governing board and the occasional brief Dail (Irish Parliament) questions between 1925 and 1970 about overcrowding there, other than that nothing.

That’s Precious little information for an institution that, like a psychic Grendel, ate the people of Cork's souls for a century or more.

Did I write of all the web records? no, not all, there was one extended question made by a Mr. B. Ryan of the Irish Senate in 1988, now preserved online, and with that one question, Mr. Ryan gave voice to a multitude, as you read you can hear thousands of men and women, over a hundred years, all join in this one time, this one place and scream their pain and accusations at every fucking one of the good people of Ireland for what was done to them. He speaks of the monster, and the souls trapped in it’s swollen, lightless belly. Part of the questions conclusion reads:

Seanad Éireann - Volume 119 - 01 June, 1988

Adjournment Matter. - Our Lady's Hospital, Cork.

An Cathaoirleach An Cathaoirleach

“The people in Our Lady's Hospital are guilty of nothing. They are vulnerable, innocent and, in the old Irish phrase, in the area of the country that the Minister comes from and that I have close connections with, they would be described as “harmless”. They do not deserve what is being done to them. They are victims of misfortune; they are victims of illness and indeed, tragically, of abandonment. They deserve our best. They have got our worst. Instead we lock them up in a vermin-infested — not my conclusion, but the inspector's conclusion — unsanitary — not my conclusion but the inspector's conclusion — dirty, dark confinement. It is a disgrace”

Even in print his words shine with the blinding white heat of outrage, and they reflect in their terrible luminosity only a tiny proportion of what might constitute a true understanding of what these poor lost souls underwent.

Unless of course…..

You actually went there, actually stood in the yawning darkness of a long dead planet of suffering.

I did.

I went to bear witness, to listen to the voices of the silence.

I was first told about The Hospital by K. K was present for a time in one of the last buildings to be closed down in the complex, again, as is usual in this country, the building was swiftly suffocated by a cessation of funding. K. had long wanted to gain entrance to the dead city that stretched its granite and brick fingers down the hill culminating in the buttress like form of what would be known in a Report to the Minister of Health by the Inspector of Mental Hospitals as “The Grey Building”. We had talked and decided it was important to gain entry to these buildings, we did not talk of reasons prior to the attempt but there was I think an understanding, that the purpose was one of exploration and preservation. Much later I was to find, how much there was to preserve and how little the rest of Ireland seemed to want any of it to survive.

A date was set.

We arrived to witness The Hospital. After first seeing “The Grey Building” from the front with it’s new people busy inside scrubbing the floors clean, all the while cooing yuppified at the bare brick walls. We could have made it in from the front, only a fence, no security, could have made it round to the undeveloped side in a second, but we decided to eschew any potential hubris and approach from the back.

The Sun hit down hard from above, still not managing to beat a clean line through the dust cloud thrown up by the car as it ground to a halt. The shapes of the buildings ahead gradually emerging like signal through noise as the light breeze did it’s work. I was glad I brought my hat, as being pale skinned, without it…….well, think acid guy at the end of RoboCop. Jesus this place was big, she’d mentioned something about a complex and acres all right, but this place was like a city unto itself. When the air had cleared I saw nature had begun to reclaim the whole place, grass kicking canyons through the concrete paths and bony, knuckled vines that if given the opportunity, and the time, would reach up and drag the whole place back into the earth, Stand still long enough and the planet will eat you. The protective antibodies of humans had been gone from this place for years now and the place made you feel that it had reached out and desolated the planet so that everywhere was like this, dead and yawning.

Report of the Inspector of Mental Hospitals on the conditions in Our Lady's Hospital, Cork.

read at

Seanad Éireann - Volume 119 - 01 June, 1988:

“St. Ita's 1, female with 20 patients; the enclosed courtyard attached to the ward was littered with old clothing, toilet rolls and plastic bottles which had accumulated over several months. We were informed that patients [1935] do not get out of doors in winter time.”

We didn’t say much, this whole place silently screamed “Shut the Fuck Up” at the top of its emptiness at the two of us. We complied, after all, if we were going to tread on this place’s dreams we might do well to tread softly. We walked forward, and thinking that some of the buildings on the extremities of the complex might still be used for storage, moved swiftly on down the cracked concrete path underneath the first serious sun of the summer.

On rounding the first corner a figure moved toward us over a grassy hill we were approaching, we kept walking, all the time I was formulating my responses to any difficult to answer questions that might be thrown my way and hoping my heart would stop beating like a fucked metronome. I needn’t have worried, our greeting party was “Our Lady” or at least “Their Lady” herself. God damned religious statues always seem to be fucking doing something scary, be it bleeding out their stigmata or leaping out at you every corner you round. I was still pumped by the time we moved past the first boarded up building to the granite tunnel laundry’s that led us gradually down through a breach in itself to the building beyond, which housed the St.Kevins wards. Up to that point we were really just exploring the grounds, and trying to get far enough into the complex so that if we had to tear off one of these boards, we’d be far away so that the noise wouldn’t be heard.

As it turned out, St. Kevin’s just invited us in.

One of the wooden panels in a basement door had been torn out, and through that half window space we hefted one leg up and then the other, pulling ourselves through the small square with our hands. The building swallowed us in a suffocating absence of light. I went in first, K passed the pack and lamp we had brought through and then followed suit. To the left of us, wall, and to the right rectangles that stained the darkness a hissing deeper black, above these rectangles white timber window frames, looking onto nothing but brick.

We moved on, lamp on, suddenly coming upon a false dawn as we passed under a part of the roof that had rotted clean through. But soon enough we passed back into the darkness. Then another door, we passed crab style through it, as this time, the bottom half was kicked in. Then upwards upon concrete stairs we moved toward another brief oasis of light. A porch leading into an atrium, this time through a broken window in the door still jagged with glass. We managed to keep its teeth from spitting the hospitals infections through our derma and into the rivers within. The pink flesh of peeling paint dripped in tongues from the ceilings and walls in this Victorian reception area, but still the pink peeling skin was more inviting than the darkness beyond, around that corner, and deep into the creatures dead entrails. From here on in, all the windows were probably boarded up, that’s the way it looked from outside, save two up on the fourth floor. A deep breath and the decision is made, we offer ourselves to the corpse.

Report of the Inspector of Mental Hospitals on the conditions in Our Lady's Hospital, Cork.

read at

Seanad Éireann - Volume 119 - 01 June, 1988:

"Five beds were placed along one wall while on the opposite wall a structure had been erected in which five patients were separately incarcerated. Each unit was roofed in the manner of a stall and each door was closed by three farmyard bolts. Mattresses were generally on the floor. These units did not have external windows or fresh air. There was a padded cell with a mattress on the floor of this ward. Toilets had no seats and there was no soap available to patients."

There was nothing else for it, I had to turn on the lamp, the florescent tube cast a pale and ghostly grey light that diffused into black within a few feet. High ceilings above our heads and dust, dirt and clag under foot. From this point on we hardly spoke and for a while, with every passing footfall my gut grew ever tighter. Thrown across the corridors were swathes of light here and there where windows remained unboarded but grilled and barred, descending down a skewed perspective to the nadir of the corridor, Beside and above me the whispering of the tongues of paint moved in the slight breezes that made their way through broken windows and cracks in boards. I was waiting to hear the tinkling of a ghostly piano somewhere out there in the darkness.

First we came across the Nurses station records of long ago prescribed medications then on to a dead baby blue wash station and beyond to a yawning open space. We moved onwards.

This was a place where towards the end of its life there were too few nurses to run the wards, there had been cutbacks in staff and many of the carers took early retirement, glad to be rid of the cracked minds and window panes of this under funded Bedlam. They left, and the cutbacks took their toll. But then something strange happened, the wards that should have been closed when the staff left, remained open. I can picture the patients, wild or vacant eyed, fat or thin, young or old, wandering like marie celestes in this place, locked up for the entire wintertime, playing riddles in their own heads and left to their own devices, people so lost in their own inner worlds that they abandoned their external to rack and ruin. Being brought milk in buckets and having their food stored in bins, treated like cattle but with less attention.

Report of the Inspector of Mental Hospitals on the conditions in Our Lady's Hospital, Cork.

read at

Seanad Éireann - Volume 119 - 01 June, 1988:

“Earlier redundancies among nursing staffs were to have coincided with significant ward closures. The redundancies happened but the ward closures did not. The result is that the remaining staff are spread thinly over too many wards. It is not possible to establish cogent reasons why the ward closures did not go ahead as planned”.

They started wiping this stain from the collective consciousness of the City of Cork back in 1988, but until the thin light of my lamp illuminated the four thin pillars that stretched across this room, and outlined what I at first took to be a piece of patients art, I had no idea when precisely this section was closed but as I moved towards the "art", it gradually took a fuller and more defined form.

It was a poster and it wished me Happy New Year 2000, so, at least seven years dead, at least seven years since anyone lost control within these walls, seven years since anyone was sedated or electro shocked or frozen, or therapized with anything, be it psycho, gestault, interpersonal, art or information. I could hear that piano again, this time nearer, I could almost feel them dancing around me in this ghostly and perpetual gloom, whispering squeals of nonsensical delight in my ear.

We moved upward, again.

Christ’s face, empathic of all our pain, followed us around this place, it appeared on our left and on our right, staring at us from walls peering at us from discarded cards on the floor. We passed the pale white coffins of the patient baths and still the face of Jesus followed, perhaps in sympathy for what had happened which was never fully explained outside the unread pages of the confidential report.

Report of the Inspector of Mental Hospitals on the conditions in Our Lady's Hospital, Cork.

read at

Seanad Éireann - Volume 119 - 01 June, 1988:

“ This is most notably evident in the illegal opposition to the transfer of patients from Our Lady's to Sarsfield Court. This was a disgraceful episode which reflects no credit on anybody and exemplifies management's inability or unwillingness to direct the service in the interests of the patients.” I want to emphasise that. The Inspector of Mental Hospitals clearly identified the responsibility in this matter as a responsibility of management. It reflects managements inability or unwillingness to direct the service in the interests of patients.”

Nothing more is said, at least in text, but I could hear the protests that day in the empty husk where it had all happened, however it evolved. Scratch and scrape their bodies, scratch and scrape their souls.

Another room, a white board, and a poem, some kind of lesson perhaps for the patients, never erased and left to hang forever before an empty room, you know the one, it told the patients of their birth when the moon was blood. Which I am sure helped them all a great deal.

We made it to the third floor, avoiding the sharpened detritus scattered all over this place. Each floor was slightly different, but each floor had those main spaces, each one slightly different, some had the remains of curtain rails, some had wooden frames arranged in odd patterns across half of the space. The best and most beautiful rooms of course, the ones that had four windows looking over the grey of the city and the green of the county had been used as store rooms. Another seemingly deliberate insult by the carers to those in their care.

However long we’d been in the place, it didn’t prepare us for the fifth floor, of which there is no mention in The Reading of The Report.

Another long dark claustrophobic tunnel of a corridor and then a shock of green and blue assailed my eyes, lit from above a whole wall shining with life just at the corridors seeming terminus. A mountain-scape on a glorious day, families lying in the grass appreciating the all the joys that life bestows upon them through the rays of the sun and the gentle fingers of the breeze that nature envelops them with.

A man struggles as they put the electrodes to his temple, his eyes widen and his pupils shrink to dots as the lights assault his face, he screams, I shocked leap an inch within my skin and a bird flies out a hole in the fucking roof. Christ, mustn’t let my imagination get the better of me in this place, the old heart won’t take it. But at least there’s light.

So comfortable in our false sense of security we walked on. The murals extended down a corridor to our left and our right, here and there a voice from beyond, screaming in its own isolated rage scrawled over a placid view of a beach and endless calming blue ocean beyond. A rage consumed by a madness that they hadn’t yet locked the author up for. It was like being inside someone else’s head, that of a confused and violent child spitting blood over the pretty pictures on the walls of his playroom.

We went forward and then to the left into the first room of this demented theatre set.

It’s dark, save for the occasional shaft of light thrown downward by a hole in the roof, gloomy, enough to keep the lamp on. Its quiet for a long time before we enter the room so the crunch of sand underfoot echoes through the room and in our ears like a gunshot. Sand is out of place here, as much as a gun at a wedding, what the fuck? I look down and spread out around my feet, about two or three inches thick, is a bed of sand, a sand pit in fact that covers just about half of this large room. On the walls are painted a verdant lush forest green, creepers a creeping up the walls and around the park benches put up against the wall in the vast adult playpen, between them thrust paintings of trees, your gaze runs the rest of the length of the room, and no matter how you try you cant seem to make out what that dark humped shape crouched in the shadows at the end of the room is.

It turns out that the further you get into this floor the farther outside it takes you.

The dark shape is a mock waterfall, nestled among the trees, I’m unsure as to whether there was actual flowing water in it at any point, but when I saw it there were brown pools of dank brine in the creases of grass coloured plastic. Around this mock waterfall, rocks were scattered, big ones, some you’d need two hands to pick up.

And one lonely bony knuckled branch.

Outside, Inside.

Couldn’t have been a locked ward here because as K said, you leave material like this around in a locked ward and you have yourself a bunch of armed and disruptive patients. No, it wasn’t that. This was different, this must have been for passive patients that just couldn’t face, or as the report says, we not allowed, to go outside. So they built

Outside, Inside.

To our left, some violent uncontrolled rage had kicked, or used a tool to smash, gaping holes in a passive vista of hills, seas, and a running iconic theme of this hospital, horses. In the next room we were confronted with an eight foot tall cage with a wooden frame and sealed with chicken wire. Behind the door, which hung by one tendon like hinge were murals of parrots
...

K had heard rumours from some of the staff that used to work there about this kind of thing, environment reversal and even some talk of keeping animals indoors….That’s what they did here. This I am sure housed parrots. And to our left.

A collapsed wall about three foot high, shaped like a square in the corner of the room, one side left free for a gate, all collapsed. From the look of it, parrots weren’t the only animal that they kept indoors in these dark claustrophobic rooms this could have been a sheep, or a pig, perhaps a deer. Who knows, but it wasn’t for a dog, that much was evident.

And the mewling of animals rang through the madhouse every night.

Beyond these grotesque curios and through another brutally attacked mural on a partition wall someone waited to speak with us.

It was K. who found it. It lay on its back, lonely on the dusty floorboards in the centre of the room. It was a pottery figure of a woman, one tiny pupil, one huge with some unknown madness, who fought to claw her way out of, what looked at first glance like a bowl, but then my stomach sank as I remembered all the tiny cramped cells we passed by, cells that got smaller and smaller the further down you went, until down in the basement, well…..you can see it at the top of the article. Beyond it was the wall and its cryptic, panicked waving of hands, smearing of understanding, scouring of reason and the blinding of sanity. Desperate stabbings at a blank wall. Sound and Fury, signifying nothing? Or everything? I favour the latter, it was just so big and refused to stay still none of these desperate swipes at a blank wall could capture the enormity and speed of it, taunting them at their incapacity to express themselves. Manic Phrases repeated again and again, like the Birthday Party wailing “express myself??! EXPRESS MYSELF!! Say something say anything, express yourself” but always elusive, ever maddening.

Other art, other lines of confusion, hate and fear. Leading us straight to the Sunshine Café, shot in the face by the boards nailed across its two broken eyes that looked back down over the county of Cork. More horse motifs, now starting to follow us in stop motion animation wherever we crept in this cadaver. There was nowhere to go but down, and we moved, thankfully unbarred, toward the still visible exit signs at the periphery of the lamp light. We had little more than an hour of daylight left, and it was best not to get caught in this husk without any light helping us from the cracks. We decided to start the journey back down toward the wound we came in by. We took a while to find the right stairwell that would lead us down to our departure point, at this point I could almost feel the buildings architecture creakingly rearrange itself so as to confound our exit, its laughter implicit in the creaking timbers and dripping faucets in the impenetrable darkness of this hidden underworld. We passed a mural of the liffey and the stern unforgiving grandeur of the Four Courts on the way out, a reminder I am sure of who may have been complicit in both their confinement and abandonment.

The Sun split the firmament when we emerged, the sky wider than it had been for weeks, and the plants breathed life into my lungs, within seconds cleansing me of the damp decay of forgotten madness, pain and suffering.

As the man says, lest we forget.

Seanad Éireann - Volume 119 - 01 June, 1988

Adjournment Matter. - Our Lady's Hospital, Cork.

"Mr. B. Ryan: When you consider that we make them all, old age pensioners, pay for it. We take most of [1940] their income, the best part of £40 a week from them. They pay for that confinement, that locking up in dirty unsanitary conditions. We have to and must make very fundamental choices. It is a disgrace that people have been paid large salaries, salaries twice and three times the average industrial wage to manage such an institution of confinement. Those people have failed to discharge their duties. They should resign or be sacked. Messrs. Denis Dudley, Donal O'Sullivan and Pettit should either resign or be sacked. They are unfit for their job. They are a disgrace to their profession and they should be dispensed with.

An Leas-Chathaoirleach: In fairness, would the Senator withdraw those remarks? You cannot name people if they are not here to defend themselves.

Mr. B. Ryan: I have named them and I make no apology for naming them. They are not accountable to anybody I know for what they do. Tell me where I can make them accountable?"

Where indeed?

A FLICKR SLIDESHOW OF PHOTOS TAKEN ON THE DAY, click on the "i" that appears over image for image comment.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Testament of Storms

2009-01-08T11:40:00.024Z

The following work of fiction, was written quite a few years ago when I was drowning in Faulkner, Unforgiven, Preacher, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Harry Crews and a bunch of other ostensibly Southern Gothic Writers and Artists. It wears it's influences on it's sleeve, but I think, suffers little for it. Please forgive any odd formatting or spelling errors as it was scanned in via the typewritten page, and then converted to text.

Now Pray to your Gods and experience "Testament of Storms":

Testament of Storms.

by FatherCrow.

Dedicated to Angela, with thanks for everything.

Rainsville was a rotting corpse even before I arrived, the name was
an appalling twisted joke that made the idiots laugh, the humour
of the sick. It never rained.

Time was, I was somewhere else, but now the Station is home to my
habitual walks. The Rainsville Station had seen better days, back
then, in the eighteen hundreds, the city was in boom, Most every
kind of man came to ply his trade, tanners, carpenters,
slaughterers all arrived. The narrow streets rung with the clammer
I of a thousand voices, the clatter of a thousand tools and ran with
not a little blood.

Rainsville was a stop off to all points west, the stitches of the
railroad rattled all the way from New York to California, and all
the engines screamed and whistled to a halt and spilled out their
passengers into the dusty streets. The trains had to fill their
thirsty bellies with water and fuel for another six hundred mile
leg, and hereabouts was the only place on the plains with any fresh
water.

Out of every train that pulled into the place, a few souls stayed
to brave out the wind, biting dust and the emptiness of the plain.
All those folks that wandered the alleys and the taverns with the
eyes of hungry strangers had to be catered for, and that’s what the
citizens of Rainsville did best, in fact it was all they did, The
taverns of the whorehouses and the Gambling palaces grew forever
outward. Some said at the time of the boom that the Devil _
created America and on the seventh day Rainsville was where he
rested.

When a train ground to a halt in the black heart of the town, the
folks on board had three hours to kill while the engine was fuelled
and the water pumped into the engines stomach, the drivers and the
stokers would change and exchange gossip, smoke cheap tobacco and
bend to the work at hand. All the travellers could do was move
out into the stifling heat, shirts sticking to their backs, and
pull their hats down and their collars up to protect themselves
from the stinging sand. then like the trains themselves they would
puff and wheeze through the night air to fill themselves with
liquor and empty their pockets into the callused hands of the good
citizens of the town, they would get a razor smile and their balls
drained by some painted whore, then feeling like the men they were
not, they would swing their shoulders and head for the taverns
where the whiskey was. Then there would be laughter and songs and
fights that would travel out past the McMurtry's bar and the
“pool hall" bordello then twisting round the narrow alleys and
streets would slide away into the desolate emptiness that was all
that lay beyond the limits of the town.

Upon occasion the town would have a murder, the rape of a woman or
the stealing of horses, perhaps some boys would fill themselves
with Roadhouse corn and shoot the place up a bit, These things all
were all dealt with in turn, by the firm hand and deathly
countanence of Sheriff Backrickson, a Polack but a good lawman. See
since Rainsville wasn't what your would call your big city, with
all the stuff happening like I said before, well we couldn’t allow
ourselves no liberties with the law. So when the town was
roaring, which was most of the time the Sheriff would take it upon
himself to execute the law, and keep us entertained, though the
latter was not his purpose.

Backricksom was not a big man, he came out of the war without his
wife or his Child and fate, well it dragged him clean across some
of the meanest placed on God's earth. Now I didn't know then what
Backrickson seen or what he did (fact is most everyone in Town
talked stories, but they was all works of fancy). The man, the
man would rise at dawn and tie the black lump of Iron he always
carried to his hip. When you was walking by roundabout that time
you would hear the sound of leather upon britches and the creaking
of rotten wood as he moved slowly toward the door of the jailhouse.
He would always know who did it and like a dark deadly Saint
Nicholas he would be at the foot of the outlaws bed before the man
had time to s hake the sleep from his eyes, Sometimes the man was
foolish and the townspeople would get no show, just the distant
muffled shot of pistols. Then Doyle the balding hawk faced
undertaker would do his taking and the town would pay him well.
But most times we was lucky, Backrickson being a man who liked to
drag these things out to their proper and lawful time. The outlaw
would be dragged out of whatever of Rainsville’s dens of vice he was
sleeping it off in. Then to set example would be kicked and
punched and pistol whipped up through the pre dawn, filthy horse
shit strewn main street. All of us would be up, jaundiced eyes
peering from behind thin parts in the drapes, some laughed softly,
few cried some prayed to the lord as the man was taken to the
Jailhouse to await trial by jury, always the same one.

I always, each time, every time, visioned myself as the condemned
man, mouth bleeding and full of grit, hands bound behind my back,
falling and rising and stumbling, beaten all that way, all around
seeing the eyes and the distant twinkling of lanterns and the
rotten wooden crooked buildings of the town lurching side to side
pealing with mocking laughter. And I thought then it would not be
a bad way to die, so long as you didn't scream or cry of holler but
just followed the path dear Jesus did. By suffering what he
suffered I have written in my Bible that you shall join him in
heaven, And this is what I always shouted from my doorway, just
before the man mounted the creaking scaffold and the lynching rope
snapped taught. Should have given the miserable sinner some small
solace, I think, yes I surely do. Doyle got his comfort either
way, go quiet or screaming like an infant Doyle always got his full
payment.

Aside from that Rainwater continued without much of what you would
call difference, babies were born, men died, fortunes lost and won,
dust blown in from the west blinded us all to our fate.
Then as the months crawled on the beast of winter stirred from its
lair. and the people sighed in hope as the clouds day by day
grew blacker and spread themselves across the horizon, people
prayed for rain, for respite from the heat and the stinging
blindness of the sands, the death of horses from thirst and exhaust
ion, the endless retreat behind the whiskey bottle. A little rain
and all these things could come to an end.

We had to wait a week, seven days passing like seven months, time
stretched on the rack, but then the black clouds started bunching
together and hovering over the town they named home. For most of
the day there was crackling electricity dancing in the air and the
distant rumbling of the beast, people went about their business
with an eye on the heavens, whispering prayers under their breath
for the storm to break. It was around eight that evening when
finally it happened there was a great roar and forks and spears of
lightning tore the night asunder, the few trees burst to flames
showering the town with savage light and they burnt even as the
storm started pissing down upon our heads. And the rains drilled
down upon the town, on our roofs through the cracks in the
ceilings, and onto our faces and into our beds.

My position in Rainsville was one of respect, I was the Preacher of
the town and starting with the Bible and a sturdy pair of boots I
had walked the length and breath of this land , from the swamps to
the deserts listening to ever word that the Lord bid me to do,
living in holes that the lowest of the low would not have inhabited.

I spent much time alone in contemplation for the Lord would send
his masses unto me when he knew I was good and ready to receive that black wave of filth, misery, sin and despair. During those months as the blackest winter that had every been heard of in those parts dragged its belly across the plains toward Rainwater, I slaughtered a goat in the holiest of ways, with a knife washed in holy water then plunged, like the avenging sword of god into the beasts
belly, tore a slit that a man could put his head inside across its
width and spilled its innards across the slaughterhouse floor.
Then stripped the skin in swathes from its carcass and set to work
drying it for my divine work. The skin was ready to use by the
time the first streets overflowed I was ready to commit to the
skin, now bound in book form the words of the Lord, I spent most
of that winter in Rainsville hunched over the skin of the lamb
delivering the first words of mercy that the world had heard from
Out Lord God Almighty in over two thousand years, and his voice in
my head comforted me in my labours and spurred me on to ever greater lengths of concentration and vision, and all of this beauty and
vision and teaching, I, night by night, darkest hour by darkest
hour diligently committed to my Lambskin bible.

While I wrote, Satan howled and shook and whipped the trees around
my holy sanctuary into a frenzy and beat my church almost into
submission with his black claws, but the Lord was with me and I
endeavoured to persevere, persevere I did I knelt and I prayed for
my deliverance and by the grace of the Lord the timbers stood firm,
though they creaked and groaned in protest of the war being waged
over them. Unearthly shadows played over my narrow windows and
danced in the ways of devils over my holy sanctuary much like the
trees danced outside, I near ground my teeth to dust and near wore
my knees away, but yea I persevered, three days I persevered.

Much of the town was washed away by the deluge that Winter, the
streets became rivers, broken wood and buggies and the rotting
carcasses of Mares swept by my Church in a hideous bloody parade.

Many of the towns people had lost their last provisions in the
flood and few had houses left standing. I prayed to the Lord in
thanks for keeping me, and a further one for the citizens, all the
while oiling my gun, barrel and chamber, barrel and chamber.

ALL thanks to the Lord, he told me what he done for me, how he
changed providence.

Backrickson the Sheriff, a man of little faith, all of it in
himself had the strength and the foresight to make for the little
high ground that was nearby, a huge stone which he fixed to climb
and there with some provisions and many cartridges, he waited out
the worst of the flood. Unlike myself he was not a God fearing
man, he was just stubborn and was so filled with the fire of
vengeance against all of man, against all of nature, he just plain
refused to break, ever. So he fastened himself to the rock with
leather straps, pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes and
with pure bull strength, and god knows what kind of will, hung on
through it all until the fire and the rain and the mud grew tired
of beating his body and even Satan rested.

A fearful sight he presented, hat still pulled down, garments
torn and body bleeding his left hand gripping his iron with
knuckles of white as he waded through the swamp of the main street,
stepping over corpse after corpse calling with that grinding hell
and cobweb voice he had, to every motherfucker that was still able,
to raise a shovel and a bucket and be out on the main street in
five. Any man whom he considered able that was not there was
setting himself up for the gallows again and again he shouted
"Survival, Survival, Survival, you want to die, do you, do you??
pick up your shovels, show me you really want to survive. show me!"
We all came, the young, the old, carrying tools, buckets, Hell
whatever we could find, even the whores made it out of their
stained beds. Sinews stretched, ball and socket near pulled asunder
but by god we worked, we hammered those timbers in as far and as
hard as we could, we fenced from one to the other we
circumnavigated the whole town, and then boiled the pitch and
scalded ourselves in wiping it on the rough timber, with old
toothless brushes. Our sweat must have contributed to the swamp
slowly rising around our loins, twelve hour shifts each hour
seeming to be as long as a season we toiled, with a break of four
for sleep. In our dreams, we still worked knee deep in blackness,
pierced by splinters, and burned by pitch. Then woke to continue
our labours. The rain had again increased in ferocity and sections
of our makeshift defences were already beginning to creak and crack
and break asunder with the strength of the endlessly, pushing
monster. The wood needed to be reinforced or it would split like
babies bones in Ghenna.

Backrickson had not slept in eighteen hours and had been working
here and there repairing, punching, urging and threatening the
toilers like a man possessed for every minute of ever one of those
hours. Only once did I see him falter and then only for a minute.
It was the only time that the weight of the Walker Colt he carried
ever seemed to force him to stoop.

It was a little girl barely out of her communion dress, even
through the dirt you could see the light reflect off her twisting
blond curls. He saw her running away from the barricades, it was
night and the air was thick with the rain and smoke and stench of
pitch. he raised the gun and screamed at whoever it was to ret urn
to their workplace at the barricades, but the girl kept running.
There was a sharp crack as Backricksons gun jerked and gunpowder
mixed with the stench of pitch filled the air. It was only after
the tiny corpse was brought to him by two of the fatigued and
filthy whores that the awful realisation seemed to hit him full
force in the stomach, driving all of the wind out of him, his
shoulder tilted downwards and his gun hand hung limp and useless by
his side, a sigh escaped from his lips and the weight of what he
had done forced his eyes closed. To support his weight he slumped
on a stake. Fifteen seconds later he was ordering for the body to
be disposed of and his granite persona had returned as if nothing
had happened, again he began screaming orders and pushing us ever
onward. I prayed for him then, but it was not the time to mourn
for the child, for there would be more deaths caused by the
foolishness of burial and mourning, so we made do with a few
whispered prayers and quicklime.

Harry the bird collapsed an hour later, he worked to his last
energies, Backrickson ordered him to be dragged towards the remains of the town hall and laid on its marble table, the table that had stayed firm since the walls had been dragged away by the tempest. He was to be given bread and water and when any of his strength returned he was to be put back to work. Harry's fat ungainly sixty year old body was dragged away through the mud, moaning softly, toward the waterlogged foundations where the table tilted sickeningly as the ground shifted and turned to sludge. As I worked I could see Satan in everything, in the moving shadows upon shadows, in the bruised and battered clouds and the faces of those who strained and swore around me in this oily ugly night. I held on to my fear and turned its destructive energies to work. All the while hating the tattered clouds that were slowly moving seemingly in circles above my head in the bastard sky.

Took more than another three or four days to stem the tide, but
stem it and divert it we did. And here we realised was where our
troubles began. The rains and the mud had swallowed the tracks, and
as far as folks could see there was no way and no how that any
train would make it through to us. There was the foreboding problem
of food. Nobody was leaving and nobody was coming, we was on our
own and it looked like it was going to stay that way. No use
trying to dig the tracks out, would have to dig half way to new
York to do any good. So we just had to make good. Beaten and
aching I moved homeward, footfall after heavy footfall, the cold
ground sucking at me trying to drag me down. It took me a good
fifteen minutes to make the thousand or so meters back to the
Chapel where I prayed kneeling in front of a bench then still
kneeling sank into a deep sleep.

Hard echoing footfalls made me stir, their cessation struck me like
an open palm and I jerked back to wakefulness. He stood over me
obscuring the makeshift altar, the noise of the rain on the
stretched hide roof should have been deafening but all I could hear
was the sandpaper rasp of his breathing, All light seemed to be
sucked into the vacuum of his silhouette.

"How can I ........ ?"

The words failed, his face was that of the little girls, shattered
bone and broken sinew, but still the rasp of his guttural breath
betrayed him.

"Listen, nothing more."

He spoke and I had little choice but to listen, beginning with the
broken doll of the child, moving back through the years, to a
landscape and a time of massacre, when murderers who became legends walked our lands, one by one as death claimed them and all the blood that the spilt soaked into the dusty earth, their slaughter dimmed and through the telling of tales, again and again, the blood and the dirt was washed off with the imagination of the people
revealing the stuff of myth. This man had lived through that, had been one of the smoking guns, and in a tearless confession described how day by day the circle of blood he had spilt, had become a noose that tightened around his neck, the men who had
died, looked at him broken and shattered in dreams, asking why? why? and he had no answer for them. I coughed and spluttered all the way through this history of slaughter and come the finish all I could manage was a weak "may God have mercy on your soul", then all there remained was silence and the creaking of leather. "I ain't
looking for forgiveness" He knelt in a blade of golden twilight and crossed himself, something I feel that had not happened in many years and I knew that no citizen of Rainwater had witnessed such a sight. Then as suddenly as I had been awakened, he left, soundlessly.

Days past and as I crushed the wings of the insects I had so
fastidiously collected and dipped my quill in the thin dark liquid
that was to become the new teaching of God the "Cambionicon" as I
called it, the book of change and put pen to lambskin the Lord
spoke to me through dreams both waking and sleeping and my hands
would dance the shapes of the new teachings in the damp warm air of
my bed chamber. The Lord cast sleep over me but the air had grown
so heavy and oppressive with moisture that it would stick in the
townspeople’s throats so that sleep was impossible and they would
take to braving the street to gather like a gang of thugs to talk
of the food shortage and the shortening of the days the rains that
were heavier and greater in strength with every passing hour, the
trains that no longer groaned an pushed through town on the steel
spine that somewhere under all this mud burrowed to California.
All this they thought could not be the occurrence of random
coincidences, there was a pattern, their small town rain sodden
minds screamed to them, to each one every single minute of every
day, and now for the first time all of these small voices, full of
fear joined as one, into a fearful clarion call of panic, There
must be a reason, there had to be a wrong that had caused God to
bring down this endless tattoo of rain and woe upon the heads of the
young and old alike. And so like ants they moved as one to the
chapel door and prostrate themselves in the mud, weeping, wailing
and roaring at the heavens, calling to God and the Devil, all the
angels and demons to cease the Torture of the people of Rainwater
and deliver them from the pit.

The cries of the cursed shook me from slumber and I rose, and
donned my ceremonial robe, opened my ears and heart to the
whisper that beckoned me to preach, the first sermon and the first
teachings of the Cambionicon. Moving slowly to the door of the
Chapel a power seized me and forced my eyes to roll back so that I
was watching the world with the whites of my eyes, I was taken by a
great strength ad threw open the doors to the waiting writhing
masses and the word was upon me and upon the people, with
dreadful power and clarity.

There was nothing in the air save the all consuming voice of the
one true God, people froze in the middle of their self
castigation, silence, blue and brown unblinking eyes gazed upwards
at the light of knowledge and began to weep. They were told of the
lies of Eve and the truth of Lilith, the presence of God on Earth
and the transubstantiation of Holy Spirit into Holy Flesh, how God
now walked the earth in human form limiting his omnipotent vision
to mortal perception and how he could only receive three prayers at
a time because of the limitation of the flesh, then I told them how
if we were without sin, repentant and pure we would one day meet
the flesh and be transfigured with the rapture. My voice had the
beauty of blades in an alley, the rains still hammered down and so
I was forced to beckon the throng into my Chapel, as many as it
would hold, the rest stayed outside to hear my voice carried
through the rafters and down through the portal and onto the
street, and there in the chapel, fruit of my hands and the Lords
instruction, we gave thanks to the one loving god for the food that
he had allowed us to receive, how little of it there was and we
begged him all at once as one, to intercede and drive Satan from
our homes and streets, there was a stronger chance if we all
prayed that one of us would be heard and the Lord would intervene,
my blessing was to receive but not to send.

The food that was left was tinned beef jerky, that we had in
plenty and there were the last remaining supplies of salted fish,
and of course water, seeping into every rend in the wood, every
damp floorboard, soaking into the fibres of every bed and every
sheet and pillow, but most of all there was hope, hope remained,
and even though the rain still fell there was the joy that hope
brings on the stretched skin faces of the towns people. The yellow
pallor seemed to almost have been given a healthy hue by it,
undaunted by the seemingly endless work that lay ahead of us.

This new hope enabled the burden Backrickson carried to be relieved
as the town council once again regained its power as an
organisational body., he fear of death that caused us to work on
the dams and the manufacturer of sandbags was replaced by a
community concern for the town as a whole and not just by the
mortal terror of the individual, we fought as one body for the
survival of that body and its way of life.

Backrickson removed the extra weight of the lump of iron that had
never seemed to leave his hip. He had no use for it now, as it
slowed down the work of life. Those who would once have been at
the end of that threat of lead, left their petty opium and child
prostitution for the work of life and these sinners were always the
loudest in their wails of repentance at the twice daily prayer
meeting in the chapel.

But as I was the beacon that showered these wretches with hope, the
burden was as heavy as that of the lynching rope of blood that
Backrickson bore, and it was taking its toll. The clouds and the
rain were bunching like a thick black murder of crows, and my
resolve was strong but my body was failing.

Twice during a prayer meeting some days later, I stumbled and had
to be raised shaking to the pulpit by members of the congregation.
The work of the lord was still with me, in fact had the night
before appeared to me in the form of a fish, while distant thunder
rumbled and cliffs were torn asunder. It hung before me,
suspended, its maw opening and closing, senseless words, no they
made sense it is just I had not the wit to arrange them to form the
holy truth. This was distressing to me and to my mind because the
doubt weakened the power of the Lord within and pushed my body
further along a stony road sprinkled with shards of broken glass to
the madhouse of ruin.

I held fast, it was all I could do, for the rain, impossible
though it seemed hammered down with renewed ferocity, worse than
ever before. I gathered the townspeople together and we
slaughtered one of the few surviving cattle and offered it up to
the Lord to placate his anger, everyone on my word joined together
and beat one another with the weed of the Birch, so as to drive the
sin from us, it weakened the people further and scarlet tears
rolled down our backs, but I ask you, what else could we de fer the
sin was in one of us and had to be driven our past the boundaries
of the town, And then once mere fatigued and bleeding flesh
hanging off our bodies like torn sheets we returned once mere to
work. We were forced to smash most of the few remaining structures
in Rainwater fer the purpose of reinforcing the dykes and the dams
, the longer this biblical deluge continued, I feared that seen
there would be none of Rainwater remaining to salvage, but as a
symbol of our indomitable spirit and our defiance of the savagery
of that bitch mother nature, the Chapel which I had struggled fer
se long to build remained untouched.

It was at this time that Mrs Heken, bereft of her husband fer six
days new, like me was given the gift of visions, and dark and
terrible the visions were that she was gifted with, they echoed
through the town on everyone’s lips spreading terror and panic.
Hers were like the visions of Satan, dark and huge demons of the
apocalypse stalked through their nightmarish landscapes, things
that slid en their bellies and lived in the earth awaiting the
redemption and salvation of all their kind.

I feared that though the Lord was strong within me I was a vessel
too weak for the holy strength thrust within it. As the word came
to a pitch within me, sores and cankers and calluses burst forth
upon my flesh and as I wept in pain the sores wept, mocking my
suffering. The crucifix in my chamber looked at me new with
reproachfull not forgiving eyes, it hung there in anger as if
blaming me fer its torment. As the long nights passed and the
remaining firm ground turned to swamp I grew to live in fear of its
unblinking gaze. It was on one of these nights after a day of
soul destroying labour and two soul sucking sermons, that seen
after drifting into an uneasy sleep, I was awakened by the
shattering of glass and there at my window, framed by glittering
shards against the night, a seemingly possessed Mrs Heken steed,
her face contorted and her eyes wide, lit by lightning spitting
and screamed blasphemies at me, naming me as the whore of Satan and the servant of his legions. I was frozen beneath the damp sheets that were pulled up to my chin. She was attempting to climb through the shard ridden frame, with no regard for her own safety in her frenzy to get to me when the goodly McCraken and Mage pulled
her, flailing like an epileptic from the ledge, though it took what was left of their strength the restrain her, they finally ended it with a sharp blow to her face. Then dragged her to the jailhouse though it pained them as good Christian men to do so. It was over an hour before I could move or even speak to offer them my t hanks.
It was only then I realized that the sun had not touched Rainwater
for over sixty hours.

Though I was not the first one to realise this I could have reacted
with more decorum than I did, I called with a mouth full of spittle
and venom in the Lords name for something to be done, I thought
that I was harking to the command of the Lord but I realize now
that perhaps, with my wild eyed commands my own voice drowned out the out that of God. I connected Mrs Hoken's Blasphemous visions and her recent attack upon my person with the disintegration that was day by day effecting both myself and Rainwater and in the fire of fear and anger I could see no further than removing her from
this earth so she could take her curse back to the nether world where it could do not harm in the realm of the living, because the dead are not effected by this form of mortal torment. The town harkened as I called with all the fervour I could muster for
Backrickson.

Backrickson was at the Chapel doors by the time I found the
wherewithal do don the priestly robes, his Iron had returned to
his hip and as to be expected of the executioner he spoke not a
word. The people of Rainwater all spoke at once, in a great
cacophony trying each and every one to explain to the silhouette
of Backrickson how salvation was going to be delivered to them.
Backrickson fired his pistol in the air and it was as thought that
one bullet had killed every man and woman in the room so great and
sudden was the silence.

"Reverend you called me here, speak up"

Still confident that this was going to be the greatest moment, the
moment that would be remembered forever by the town, I spoke to him of the Devil that had possessed the town and how Mrs Hoken with the blasphemous acid her tongue had spilt and her lust for blood must be the conduit for the evil that had engulfed the town. He was silent and still till the seconds ticked by for twenty then turning on his heel, walked into the darkness, it was not long before I found that this man of blood with no faith was growing some small weak tissue of misguided good in his stillborn heart, the little theology which he had picked up during the last few days had planted the idea of an exorcism in his head, so the circle of blood would grow no tighter lest it had to, and so he made his way to the brick house of detention where he awoke Mrs Hoken with cold rusty water and had me brought to him so I could perform the deed. I protested but the death in his eyes and the iron in his hand left me little choice, right up to the click of the hammer I reasoned and convinced and begged him to see the futility of the exercise and all over the renewed cursing and screaming of Mrs Hoken pulling at the bars. But it was all to no avail and I began to give instructions for the preparations that the ceremony needed to be carried out.

I called for the men around me to again restrain her, It was
disturbing for them all because Mrs Hoken again began to wail and
thrash as the first hand touched her sallow skin, she tore a gash
in McHughs face, that glowed a ghastly hue of red in the dim light
of the cell. Mr. Yuan approached her from ahead and paid the price
of Hell in the groin for his troubles. Many more of them were at
this time moving in on all sides. Backrickson must have sensed
that it could turn into a bloodbath at any second for he came up to
the rear of Mrs. Hoken and sharply twisted both hands to her back
and with one snap of his sinews had raised her off the ground.

"Where you want her?"

"the Station"

Backrickson either trusted me or just assumed I was in fear of him
enough to deny my instincts and hold my hand, let the demon live
and perform the exorcism. I could hear the lord banging his fists
in the inside of my skull trying to stop me but the still cocked
hammer of Backricksons gun kept me walking on ahead of that
blasphemous procession.

The rain it was still hammering down calling for every bit of
strength the earth had in it to suck us down into the mire and stop
this holy rite being performed on a creature that that had no more
right to live than the bastard child of a thousand heretics. The
rain stung our faces and a sudden fog obscured our view, the houses
on either side of the main street slid into a ghostly netherworld
leaving us alone on the black swamp of puke that was all that
remained of Rainsville. Not a pistol nor a fist or boot did
Backrickson raise to Mrs Hoken. Her body had withered down to a
skeleton with a loose dirty cloth of old flesh badly draped over
it, her flower patterned dress was torn and spattered all over
with mud and blood, she stumbled and fell every couple yards or so
and had to be dragged from the sucking mud to her feet, and through
all the filth that covered her face those pale blue diamond eyes of
hers now all shot to hell with red cracks, did not blink once.
Everyone in that procession was silent, only the smoke of their
breath could be seen and the protesting of their lungs could be
heard over the torrent of rain. Footfalls heavier and heavier fell
as we put more and more of the three miles to the station behind
us. Once or twice the fog got so bad that we actually lost
ourselves in the streets of Rainwater that we all knew so well.
The Lord was trying to divert us, but again and again the sure eye
and steady hand of Backerickson was there to guide us onward to our
doom. We moved hesitantly and with and awful sense of finality
round McKendrics leather and grain store and finally came within
sight of the imposing brick structure of the station, looming like
to great ancient tomb or shipwreck from the murk.

Now Mrs Hoken seemed to sense that whatever was about to engulf her was dreadfully close, she began to renew her feral screaming and thrashing, in an effort to save her miserable wasted carcass she cursed me and babbled schoolgirl Latin, repeating her blasphemies, lies and poison again claiming that it was me that had the Devil
within. All knew it was lies for when her cursing reached a fever pitch she again lashed out and Mr Bishop lurched to his knees and began scrabbling about in the mud as if he had lost his pocket watch. We were about to continue on without him when like a stake driven into the earth he short bolt upright hand to his eye grasping his muddy glistening trophy , pushing and prodding it against his face, a face that ran with blood. Backrikson dispatched two men to take him to the doctor and it was then I realised that not a body was pressed to a windows nor a drape drawn back.

The high roof of the station flung our echoing footsteps crashing
back to ground and only the Torches we carried gave light of out
passing. Mrs Hoken's legs gave way and she had to be dragged face
down, belly sliding across the black tiled floor, leaving a trail
of mud behind her like a snail, the blood on her hands still
glistening in the stations pale light. The three platforms
counted down to her destiny, it would have to be here that the
exorcism was to take place, for here was where the life blood of
the town of Rainwater was spat out to regions beyond, and it was
from here that Mrs. Hoken's demon would be, I hoped, cast to the
black winds that even now swept through the mud spattered streets
and alleys of the town, it would be fire putting out fire. I would
use the evil in Mrs Hoken to rid the town of evil. I
commanded the clothes to be torn off her body lest the fires of
Hell that would surely arise with the exorcism ignite them and burn
the body of the woman within. I then instructed that a circle be
formed and that all the men remove their shirts and use the red wax
from the torches to daub themselves with the sign of the cross. I
remained in my holy vestments, in the hope that its power and its
power alone would be my rod and my strength in this time of need.

I began my intonations, bidding the men in the circle to move
around Mrs Hoken's writhing body in a clockwise fashion. The
intonations I used were not prepared, but rather flowed through my
veins and out of my mouth, I had become again, in my helplessness a
conduit of Holy Power for he who has many names. The words dripped like fire into the inferno of Hoken's heart and ran like wild beasts away from me as my eyes rolled back and all the hairs on my body stood on end as if charged by some strange form of
electricity, my muscles jerked spasmodically beyond my control in the drumbeat of exorcism. I twitched and leapt across the cold floor. The circle widened, the light of twenty torches dancing on the roof some thirty feet above my head.

The mud of the town in a vain attempt to stop me, bubbled and
frothed its way meter by meter, inch by inch into the Holy
cacophony of the Station. Out of the corner of my eye even during
my divine rhapsody I could see it, evil and thick, making its way
steadily, moving up slowly and determined toward me. Mrs Hoken in
response to this Holy of Holy ceremonies whirled like a dervish
still vomiting forth a stream of holy inventions of which she
did not even know the meaning. The faces of the men of Rainwater
glanced first toward the mud and then at myself and Mrs Hoken, they
were white as funeral sheets caught in the maw of this titanic
battle and even Backrickson's now at the time of testing, looked
no different from the r est. Around the walls of the station, the
frescos, primitive and simple, seemed to dance with us and all the
time the pitch of our babbling increased like the whine of a
behemoth steam engine. The shadows shifted up and down, echoes
seemed not to stop but to dance with us, as if drunk. Something
snapped and baubles of turquoise rattled across the tiles gleaming
like moonlight on a lake until finally they were sucked in and
engulfed by the oncoming mud.

Mrs Hoken jerked and her head shot back, mouth open and heaved
thick semen like ropes into the air, something milky forced its way
into my mouth, filling it, then pushing its tendrils down my throat
and into my stomach. My body rebelled and all my muscles jerked
and twitched of their own accord, dropping me like a mad rag doll to
the black tiles. I lost control of my bowls and with a wet
surgical sound the sickly smell of excrement rose from my loins and
into the ocean blackness of the night. A ghastly and unholy sight
it must have been to behold and hear, for my prayers and chanting
were now but a baby's scream upon being shat from the womb into a
world of horrors.

Then the suffocating darkness.

I was pulled from every inch of my body by the vomit which swarmed
and polluted every vein, every artery and orifice and threw me
skinless and screaming into the putrid air. Blackness and then the
filthy sound of a woman screaming and screaming. Then wrapping
itself around me I felt flesh, as if I was being sucked into a
cadaver whirlpool, a stinking sucking swirling bloody bath of
entrails, gristle, twitching and writhing nerves all shot through
with needle pain which gradually became part of me.

I saw my own body standing over me, garbed in black flowing robes,
its head hairless and its face a drawn yellow jaundiced mask, blue
veins dancing down each side of its head and a darkness in its
sunken eyes, a thin smile slashed across its face, as if by a
knife. The shoulders were hunched, the hands joined and playing
with a silver crucifix. Behind it a mass of black shapes rolling
over one another, moving in and out like some unnamed creature from the bottom of the swamp, struggling to breath, having just dragged itself out of the quicksand.

Something caught in my throat, and fearing that it may be the ropy
tendrils, I raised my hand to my mouth. It was frail and old veins
like straws swept across it, the skin was like paper, a ring
glinted on my left hand and when I realised it was not mine I
screamed and the scream was that of a woman.

a huge hand seized me by the hair, and jerked my head back, my old
woman’s naked body went taught, tendons leapt out like wires from my jaw to the top of my breast. A cold black metal serpent was forced between my lips and down into my throat, I vomited but the vomit had nowhere to go and spewed back into my stomach and lungs burning like hemlock. My eyelids were like steel traps and all I could do was stare, nothing was within my power any more, not even the power of speech. The legs and arms that were now mine kicked and scrabbled in a last fight for life were held firm within seconds. Backrickson's gun loomed over me all hard and greasy and vicious, there was deadness in his eyes, that deadness finally triggered by
my male corpse, animated now with Mrs Hoken's madness behind the eyes, he, she whispered a blessing and with a lie of a compassionate look, made the sign of the cross, and then nodded to Backrickson. My ears stabbed with a thousand needles and the explosion of whiteness across my vision, these were the last terrible living moments of my Heretical existence.

The wicked are punished and the righteous rewarded. Oh how true it
is, how true, the wicked are punished and left screaming in the
void, God waits long and punishes well. I have not seen heaven
nor seen hell but have been left to wander eternally in a city
that has had the marrow sucked from its once healthy bones and the
life thrown to the winds these fifty years. After the flash of my
own personal apocalypse I stood above the lifeless shell of
flesh and scattered bloody matter that was all that was left of the
body of Mrs Hoken and screamed to the halls of heaven why hast
thou forsaken me! I had not just the bone and blood taken from me,
for as I gazed at the woman’s corpse and across at the milling
filthy bodies, I saw with disbelieving horror my male body among
their throng, still with that wound like smile, grinning like a demon
and receiving congratulations.

The scene seemed to swing into reverse, the unstoppable filth that had driven me to such a course was being sucked back into itself, and out into the street once again, the rain had stopped beating its fists on he roofs of the town, the Sun, for the first time in days gnawed its way through the clouds and began its long task of turning the swamp back to terra firma once more. The people rejoiced and turned to the bawdy houses and saloons once more, full of life and revelry. Some more community spirited ones had already started on the mammoth job of digging the tracks from the grip of the drying mud.

And I, why was I still here? why had the salvation of the town
rested on my death? did the almighty need a blood sacrifice of one
of his own to save a flock as small as Rainwater? and why in such a
bizarre manner? Then it was that the laughter started, the voice
was the same as the Lord but the tone, well how can I describe it?
rotten with madness and evil, never stopping to take a breath and
never ceasing, all consuming laughter, I heard it then and I have
heard it ever since, and I knew then, I knew my fate. I knew that
as sure as my body was walking and my soul dispossessed that I was
here at the crossroads stick within the boundaries of this maggot
ridden station, perhaps for all time.

A Many years have passed since then, the Highway came and stopped
the trains, the laws were brought in with regard to prostitution and
gambling, the town dried up and collapsed in upon itself. the
roofs fell in and the walls fell apart, the town grew old and died
save for the stone buildings, like the station, the tracks long ago
rusted almost to dust, the tumble weed dances across the horizon
and the sun beats the remains of the town of Rainwater like it does
any other part of this barren plain. Now there is only me, the
dusty wind and the wild dogs. I am still paying for my follies and
I feel I will continue to until every last vestige of the town and
the memories of all the families whose ancestors once lived to
witness the deluge have turned to dust, the perhaps, that most
merciful God will grant me rest.

had they another choice, for I had to wash myself of sin and the
only way in which to do it was to suffer, to use the birch and the
snow and the deserts of this savage continent and it was in one of
these pits that the lord first revealed himself to me, ah cannot
describe the holy rhapsody of that first encounter, it was like
birth only full of light and knowledge. From there I followed every
word that was whispered to me, telling me how life should be lived
in this screaming land. So I preached and I preached and changed
and chopped the Bible according to the divine words that were
spoken to me. the day I wandered into Rainsville I could feel the
blackness of its soul and was told to stop and lay down the goods
and chattels I carried, and watch over this ever changing never
changing flock. in my left hand the Bible and in my right the
vengeful tooth of the Lord in the form of a gun.

My church in the beginning was little more than a shack, made of
nothing but rotten planks a and stretched hide to serve as a roof.
It took me some months to fell the trees and hew the wood, then to
buy and slaughter the beasts in a holy fashion, took the same time
again. I painted me a cross with white wash upon the door, and
fixed a crucifix upon the table that served as an alter. Then I
laid down some hard wood benches and used the rest of the
whitewash upon the walls inside to make it pure and holy.

In the first months few but the devout passed the threshold and
there was precious few of them, I figure that the words of the Lord
was hard to hear over the squealing of the harlots and the clatter
of the dice. Whisky forced a few filthy and penniless to my door
and I welcomed them in, for every man is evil and every man a liar,
and they can only be purified by the arms of Christ, in his book a
drunk is just the same as a rich man clothed in finery. Those
that came to me wicked left bathed anew in the Almighty’s holy
light, and with every sermon, with every whisper of the Lord's
confirmation prayer, recently transcribed by myself, with every
furtive movement of their lips they dragged themselves further out
of the scum and nearer to paradise.

© FatherCrow 2009

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

My Dear Brother and Sister. Bear witness: World War I

2009-01-06T18:56:00.026Z

Above: page 1 of the letter.

A few weeks after the anniversary of Armistice day in 2008, I was sitting in my library scanning the shelves for something to read, as the weather was inclement and I was alone.

This was before Christmas and I had just exhausted the last page of the last book that I had in the house that was of interest to me as a reader. I scanned the shelves, my gaze eventually coming to rest upon several volumes of Shakespeare that rested on their sides, one upon the other, on an upper shelf.

The volumes had been left to me by my departed Grandmother Elisabeth and over the years there have been several times when I lifted them from their resting place and read one or other of the great bards plays. There had always been one volume which I had avoided perusing, due to it being a collection of his lesser plays, and he did write oh so many plays.

I slid it from its place between the other six volumes and began to read.

There is no publication date on the hardback books, but inside a clue to their antiquity. Photographs, or what I had always assumed were photographs punctuated the volumes every thirty or forty pages. One night a year or so ago, I had grown curious as to the origins of the books, as the actors represented were dressed in a manner I would normally associate with the 1800's. So, I looked more closely at them. After some study, they revealed themselves to me, not as photographs but daguerreotype, a photographic etching process introduced circa 1853, almost akin to etching The daguerreotype is a unique photographic image allowing no reproduction of the picture. The daguerreotype ceased its brief life of popularity by about 1900.

So, lifting page after page, and passing daguerrotype by daguerreotype I eventually settled on Henry III, and began to read. I turned the page, and before me lay, not the bards prose but scrabbly handwritten pencil, on what appeared to me at first as traditional school jotter paper.

At this point I assumed that I had discovered a fragment of ancient family correspondence.

Perhaps between my Grandfather Thomas and another relative, or perhaps even one of my Grandmothers letters. I turned the fragile sun bleached pages gently in my hand. At first glance the letter was indecipherable, but pushed on by a hand reaching out to me from the past I began to examine the letter in detail.

The first page seemed to have no date on it, nor a return address, or even a name of a person to whom it was addressed. What it did have was seven digits placed neatly in the center, at the top of the initial page, at first I thought they were a date. The digits were not. They were an unknown quantity.

The letter was addressed "To my dear brother and sister" and for a date, the page simply noted in its painstakingly neat, though time faded handwriting "Tuesday". It started traditionally enough thanking these faceless, most likely long dead, siblings for their delightful Christmas presents. The next few words were bleached by time and sunlight eventually becoming legible in the first odd statement that gave birth to an odd feeling of excitement deep in my stomach, the letter said how the presents the unknown author had received were greatly enjoyed by "the boys" who had a great laugh at them. The first page ended, leaving me with none of my preconceptions witch which I began reading.

The letter went on, overhead looped l, followed by underline looped p's and f's. The second page was a little clearer having been spared the sun, but oddly enough had not been spared the touch of water.

My eyes grew slowly more accustomed to my ancient friends hand. He began to tell me, that he had managed to keep himself fairly clean. At this juncture I had little place or time for the letter, for it neither corresponded to my idea of a Christmas thank you letter, nor had it fallen into a rhythm of any other letter that I recognised, yet. Two lines down was the killer sentence. Our confidant revealed to me that they had managed to keep themselves fairly clean, compared to.

Compared to what?

Compared to the Germans.

And here in my hand lay a bullet of information, that had travelled through time and space until finally reaching me, here in the placid hills of Ireland, far from the poppy strew killing fields of France which lay dormant for the author and men like him, for just less than a century.

I rose to my feet, unable to remain at my chair with the burgeoning excitement that was rising from my stomach to fill my chest and then spread outward to my arms, legs and their digital extremities.

Who was this man, who is this man that speaks to me from the mud and death of the killing fields of World War One, who is he, a random particle caught up in the winds of history the last evidence of whom had somehow ended up in a volume of Shakespeare my Grandmother had bought in some 2nd hand bookshop, or perhaps a friend of her's as many of her Irish Protestant generation had died in the vain hope of birthing home rule in their native land as a result of the urgings of Redmond, whose plaintiff cry to the British of the loyalty of their Irish subjects, who would fight for them in this great conflict if only they instituted a modicum of self-determination back home? A sacrifice that was stricken into redundancy as the 1916 rising attempted to wrest the island back from it's conquerors and into the arms of the natives.

This soldier may even be a distant family member whose sacrifice was erased by a refusal to talk about his involvement in the British Army, a taboo in Ireland after the war, even with thousands from this island dead upon the rotting flesh pile that once was to hold the great libertarian torch of home rule.

We Irish are great at the art of forgetting, we are the comforting voice that draws the anesthetic blanket over the eyes of a history which we do not want to confront.

I turned to the last page.

I stared at that last page for some minutes, unable to acknowledge the blow that fate had piled upon me. It was not the final page of that letter, and no signature, no evidence of who this solider, this person was, this man who spoke to me out of the nightmarish industrial butchery that was the first world war, the first science fiction war to be fought on this planet, with its wings of death, air of poison and asphyxiating subterranean living.

There was no name, no signature, no mark to bear witness to the name of he who had passed.

Except the strange six digit number on page one of the letter, the number that was not a date.

I thought that it might perhaps be a personnel number. The man who scratched this letter from the trenches, in rain and shine, bombardment and uneasy silence (witnessed by the severe change in handwriting evidenced throughout the letter) deserved to be given a name.

My first port of call was the online edifice of the Imperial War Meuseum. There, after minor perusing, I found a contact email for queries about the lost sons, and abducted children of Empire where the "Sun never sets" . An empire which now, like the author is deep in darkness, but the letter is here yet.

In less than two hours I received a mail back, advising me on books to reference, and even an online database of soldiers that had received medals in the war. I was advised that several different sections of the British Expeditionary Force, as it was then named had their own personnel numbering systems, an that the one number might apply to more than one soldier.

I entered in the number into the database and from its cold digital annals came four names, the names I have listed below:

Medal card of Corfield, William J
Corps: Royal Field Artillery
Regiment No: 170950
Rank: Driver
1914-1920 WO 372/5

Medal card of Salt, Fred
Corps: Labour Corps
Regiment No: 170950
Rank: Private
1914-1920 WO 372/17

Medal card of Jackson, Alfred
Corps: Royal Engineers
Regiment No: 488569
Rank: Sapper...
1914-1920 WO 372/10

Medal card of Quinn, William
Corps: Army Service Corps
Regiment No: DM2/170950
Rank: Private
1914-1920 WO 372/16

At this juncture, I have yet to determine for certain, and perhaps I never will determine for certain, which of these men the author was, but this task is not limited to my own efforts, I invite you, the reader of this piece to review the letter, my partially complete transcript of which is included below, as this blog post serves only as an introduction to the primary historical source of the text itself.

I am sure that I have made errors, and in fact will be reviewing my transcription of the letters pages to clarify and replace possible mis-transcriptions, but it is my fervent hope, that you see the value that I see in the ancient communiqué, and see fit to read and transcribe it yourself, forwarding me on any alternative interpretations you have of its text. It is the least we can do for this man, and for the men of his time, on both sides that fought and died in this "Great War to End all Wars".

The Letter:

PAGE 1

1 (70950?)

Tuesday.

To my Dear brother and sister.

Please convey my best thanks for your extreme kindness in giving me such very nice presents. It would have done for both of you to hear the boys laugh, (when I have/has got out?) the "CamelChaser" (I mean? ) the fine (coat?) as a matter of fact (the/for/ _ _ of my F _ _ _/ ten of my friends?) if I first don't get them.

PAGE 2

out but on the whole we keep ourselves fairly clean but perhaps it would shock you a bit to hear the chaps offering to exchange two little ones for one big one. but I think that we keep ourselves wonderfully cheery. compared to the Germans for they are very filthy. The (s a/u la p/g/y? f i/e ant) of which is really dirty is our clothes but then for (safh r/n?) to see the state of the fields out here (your? for? from?) one (nip? rip?) to (f/y l? a/u? i/r/n/m? flair/flour/four?) knees (in?) (/had/mad?) (fear/fean?) scarcely started on (form? from? four?)

PAGE 3

feet and the cold is awful but withal we are cheerful but it is quite a (con y/j ier? conjure?) to try and get your clothes dry (when you're only?) (poss e/i? ) (what for?) stank up in one (fenh? k?) the most convenient method is to let them dry on your (Shg __/shoulders?) been one of lucky ones out here and am still going strong but (rye/try?)(harder?) a good year. (ren/men?) fallen in our section (since?) we came out. We got a new sergeant recently as our old

PAGE 4

one (went?) die. He is a very nice fellow one of the sort who gets the name of (shit/shil/hit??) - a - (lus/us) out here which means brave as a lion (him/lion??) we get on very well together one officer is also a very brave fellow, in fact it would be hard to beat them as a pair. But the section as a whole are a set of devil-may-care fellows the more dangerous the job the more merry (we?) are about it. We got one of our fellows back yesterday who has (been?) in hospital for some considerable time

PAGE 5

and he was jolly glad to get back amongst us again. So we cannot be such a bad lot. I don't know if I told you that the section is almost all post office chaps (operators/operations?) a much superior fellow to the ordinary Tommy we are part and parcel of the intelligence department and our particular work is keeping the lines of communication open at all costs for (may?) perhaps have noticed them at home where we were to (blue/dlue/have?) (white?) bands on each arm so that everyone

PAGE 6

may know also that they will clear out of our way when we are working (also we?) can generally give information if required. The worst job our fellows (get is?) being chosen in a (listening?) party if you are chosen for that duty you have to go out in front of the trenches a good (way?) to (report?) what (we/au/the?) guns are doing needless to say that is a right job and the darker the night the better for the purpose and if a sniper happens

PAGE 7

to see you he gets very busy. but on the whole (my/our) work is very interesting and we have done our bit towards taking the back of the "aliman" as the French people call the Germans. I can tell you for a fact that the particular fact that we are in (________) (whacked?)) hell out of them. If we knew (then?) half what we know

PAGE 8

about their actions in towns we have chased the germans out of you would not have an atom of pity for them when I tell you what the (very?) children of ten years of age suffered at their hands. fancy a mother of a child of that age telling you such a frightful tale I

(have?)

PAGE 9

know it to be true that is one reason why we have very little pity for them again they have treated our wounded (wounded was underlined twice) scandalously but but this takes little effect on us we don’t feel the least bit downhearted as a matter of fact if it were possible I should like to see some of the

PAGE 10

grumblers out here if only just to see us go up everyman including officers is singing some of the latest songs "when Irish eyes are smiling" or some other good chorus song and chipping one another as to what the result will be but when we start (work?)

PAGE 11

all the fun stops and nothing remains but that grim determination to do our bit and do it properly and our officer is the sort of man to see it properly done and if he finds anyone neglecting their duty he's just the sort to make them remember it but we are with him to a man (and/as?) we

PAGE 12

are with our sergeant for of course we have more dealings with the sergeant than with our officer but as a matter of fact I am generally chosen to go on jobs with our officer one of our last jobs was right up in front of the guns but he paid not the least bit of attention to them

PAGE 13

needles to remark I couldn't as I had to get on with my work. it was a case of some (grieves/graves?) had been smashed. I had to be joined up well. I got my job done to the satisfaction ("as a matter" crossed out) I might say I am quite an expert lineman now the work itself is not very difficult it is the

PAGE 14

conditions under which we work and the great thing is to be sure your (joints/points)? Are absolutely correct. but linesman going out in the dark to look for a defect in the wire have to be very careful that some of the aliman are not waiting for them to put his lights out. now I think I have given

PAGE 15

you a fair idea of our work and it has taken me several days to write this letter. Please ask Hannah to excuse me not writing her direct but I will do so the first chance I get. What I want you to send me is a small glass for sharing with

PAGE 16

3 sides which folds up into one. (the next four words are underlined) It does not break. My wife sent me one but it lasted no time. I do not like to tell her it is broken. I tell her very little of what happens out here for she is very nervous and she would become more fretful than ever. I thought she would have been far more plucky

LINK to the original scans of the letter.

The Census that is referred to in the comments section:

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

The Deep

2008-06-29T00:05:00.004Z

Image: Fathercrow descends 2008

The Deep, it starts in your chest and then reaches down, plunging vertiginously down, into the acid of your stomach like a rock from above.

The Deep makes you blind, sucks all the colors from the spectrum and leaves you suspended, infinity above, infinity below,

Then wondrous.

Even as the sun is replaced by moon in a gloaming of such strangeness and smoothly knotted gelatin luminescence, you are almost transfigured by its impossibly radiant biological rippling.

Sky becomes Sea, Sea, Sky, roles reversed as suspended Kelp stares with you, amazed as the mountain sways gently, coaxed by the movement of the Waves.

It truly is another Planet.

One where you are Alien.

Peace and Hope

Fathercrow

Plagued by Plagiarism

2007-07-18T12:28:00.001Z

All:

Just a brief note to say that a fellow blogger "fowlerlennyjr" has fallen from grace into the deepest shit pit that can effect any writer and has debased himself by plagiarizing my article "away with the wookies" which can be found here

Fowlerlennyjr has cut and paste the piece, well most of it anyways, save one or two paragraphs, and he attempted, though not very attentively, to remove any mentions of my online handle from the article. You can read his clumsy piece of thievery, along with the textual rap on the knuckles I gave him here

I generally try to be understanding of my fellow web denziens, but this particular fellow, is just, not to put too fine a point on it, a cunt.

Feel free to drop over to his page and tell him what you think of people who steal others work.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Tree Penis, Berlin 2007

2007-03-14T16:16:00.000Z

(Tree Penis, East Berlin, 2007 Image © FatherCrow 2007)

All, I am away for a few more days, next post will appear this coming week. The posts are infrequent I know, but they're long, they have to be interesting to me, and they take some time to write.

Patience is a virtue.

By the way, the Tree Penis was autographed "Penis Crew" so props to them. Funnest piece of street art I've seen in ages. You think the damn thing is some kind of disease infected branch when you are walking towards the tree it's attached to.

Who says the Germans have no sense of humour.

I must away.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

AFTERWARD: All right, all right, I admit it, the above information ended up being a non intentional lie, I really did have an intention to write more posts, but damnit, real life and painting just kept getting in the way. This blog will kick off again soon enough, I can't give you all a precise date, in the meantime keep on keeping on, whatever that means.

Also if you want some blindingly sensible reading that is to do with our, how shall I say it, generative organs, you could do far worse with your time than go here

More Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

The Short History of our Future(s)

2007-03-09T10:13:00.000Z

(above: sand robot at "save the robots" exhibition, image © FatherCrow 2005)

When you think of the future, what visions do you see?

Does your vision create our future as one of benevolence, of technological aspirations? Of buildings rising through the firmament like modern day Towers of Babel, luminescent in steel and silvered glass, bulging in pregnant rotund geometry at points. Do you see these manifestations of human will linked by veins of suspended transport tubes that circle and join these great structures. All the while they rise and race the sun to it’s zenith with their promise of humanities potential? Or do you perceive our species breaking the fetters of Terra, constructing great galleons of the stars, sucking energy from the fabric of the universe and roaring like great beasts as their engines fight the oppressor gravity, pushing their leaden weight upwards through the ozone and the Van Allen belt and outwards toward new planets and new homes for our future evolution?

Or is it something grimmer, the fall of man perhaps, endless wars, precipitated by endless global crisis of fuel, water, food, minerals, nuclear technologies. Do you see our species fall, driven downward into the dirt and filth of this savage planet by the hand of God or Gods or even just blind fate. When the future of this world enters your head, are we in rags, scrabbling for food and guzzoline, reduced to mere beasts. Do we beat each other with bones before stripping the flesh so that you and your kin can live. Do we kidnap and rape and enslave women so as our bloodlines can continue to move into that amorphous and uncertain future.. Are we clothed in rags with sunken empty eyes dragging frightened children behind as we push carts full of filthy survival necessities across a ravaged, sterile and desolate wasteland?

What is it that you see? And where is it that you get your visions from? Do they filter in from the digital ether of television shows, Radio, Usenet and the World Wide Web? Or do they come from more time honoured sources; books, newspapers, conversations with your peers, even dreams? or a hybrid of them all?

Ultimately what is it that creates our future? Is it, as Giambattista Vico the 17^th century Neapolitan philosopher says in his verum factum principle that truth (in this case “future truth”) is verified (or in this case manifested) through creation or invention. And why is it that what awaits for us in this amorphous future is always changing, always mutating, metamorphosising into something that seems to depend on a cultures current economic, philosophical and technological zeitgeist.

How many futures do we have now? How many futures have we had in the past? How many futures that yearly are discarded as the present incorporates unexpected and surprising aspects of ideas turned to technology turned to societal change? How much turbulence on the crest of the wave form that lies between today and tomorrow?

The future isn’t what it used to be. It’s an ever changing multifarious beast that is constantly sprouting new limbs and discarding old ones. Has it always been like this though?

Have we always had a future?

I don’t think so, at least not in the way we envision the continuance of time today.

Back in ancient times, before the Renaissance, before the Reformation, before the Industrial Revolution we as a species had spent thousands of years as an essentially agrarian mammal. There were thousands of years between the advent of sedentary farming and mans imagination, ideas and vision coalescing into the iron, smoke, oil and grease of James Watt’s steam engine, Richard Arkwright’s water frame and the great belching blast furnaces in the Iron Foundries of the industrial revolution.

Agriculture first arose in Mesopotamia around 9500 BC and spread to Egypt by 7000 BC and from there across the world until the Industrial revolution which historian Eric Hobsbawm states 'broke out' in the 1780s did not completely establish itself until the 1830s or 1840s.

That’s a long time.

A long time where nothing much happened, save for the occasional advancement in drainage in the middle ages or of crop rotation in the Renaissance. I would say that it was easy to let the future take care of itself, as every day, every year, every decade was much like the last, save for the occasional change in King, Baron, Lord or whatever vicious bastard that had fought his way to the top using violence, guile and flattery. It must have been easy to view the only future as a personal future. A future filled only by personal relationships, and relationships between the individual and the land that stretched only as far as the coming harvest.

There were of course prophets and diviners, oracles and soothsayers, the like of the Sybilline and Delphic Oracles of Classical Greece, Zoraster in Persia, Nostradamus, while proto-sciences like astrology and sputtered into existence as well. These individuals who were viewed as instruments that could commune with powers beyond to divine the future were some what limited. Mostly they divined the personal futures for individuals who wanted to divine what would happen in their personal, near term futures, even the most expansive view of the future tended to be personal, the like of Kings asking what would the future of HIS kingdom be like within the years of his life? Those few diviners and prophets that went beyond the merely religious and eschatological, men like the French Nostradamus, wrote only in code and allusion, so that, I imagine, his “prophesies” would retain their applicability to whatever current situation happened to be in motion at the time. This may be the reason that Nostradamus’s Les Propheties have so rarely been out of print since his death in 1566.

However these visions of the future are so alien to our current view of it, as to appear comical, the stage set does not change, only the players do. The “future” always happens within the framework of the agrarian age. This does not seem to change until the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which as mentioned before did not step onto our stage of world history until the decade of their lord, the 1780’s. This is whe/n/re the future was born.

Mary Shelley's (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) books, among them Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826), were to initiate the age of Futures. These books were to influence the other founding pillars of Science Fiction, men like Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) who wrote a story about a trip to the moon, more and more examples appeared throughout the 19^th century spinning mythological tales. These stories were not about the past, but about our distant future where not only were the people different, but so was the landscape. No longer were people’s imaginations limited to the pedestrian tales of purely human interaction but those characters took flight into space, aided by the endless mutating shapes of nature and machine. Then as the Industrial revolution continued and new technologies like the telegraph, electricity, the steam engine, and even the car rolled over the face of the earth transforming not only the way we lived, but the environment in which we lived. Factories belched smoke and drew the peasants to the great new metropolises and almost overnight transformed them from farmers to workers. We had transferred our evolution from a species that evolves itself to deal with changes in its environment to a species that evolves its environments to allow for the existence of the species. And it was then at that time, at that fulcrum, that crux, that we essentially began to invent the future(s) that we imagine today and sometimes, experience tomorrow.

More writers such as Jules Verne (February 8, 1828–March 24, 1905) and H. G. Wells (September 21, 1866 – August 13, 1946) forged ahead and created the new environs of what was then known as philosophers of foresight working in the genre of what was then called “Scientific Romance”. These writers pollinated their ideas even beyond the intelligentsia of their societies and down, down to the average literate citizen who devoured these tales of the fantastic, and allowed these mostly utopian visions to first paint the walls of their grey industrial existence and then infect scientists, philosophers and sociologists with what would today be called memes. These men of learning almost like academic avatars of the ideas themselves set about seeing if these thoughts could be made concrete. Some succeeded more than others, and some not at all. Our species had taken a hand in it’s own destiny and had begun to manifest the futures of it’s own imagination.

Then as time progressed so did the ideas, which spread out across the planet with the increase of industrialisation, eventually making their strongpoint in the United States of America. America was then one of the greatest industrial powerhouses in the world. This was partly as a result of the savage futurist reality tunnel of “manifest destiny” where the white man moved Westward across America taking his God and his machines with him, exterminating and destroying any opposing views as he went, it being the will of God, in the view of the proponents of the theory, as the white man was superior and destined to improve this land by any means necessary. For God and Country and Commerce. In 1925 “Amazing Stories” magazine was founded by Hugo Gernsback who gave voice to a whole generation of people, mostly men, who looked to the stars, and to technology as a means of facilitating man’s future evolution. Then in 1937 John Cambell took over editorship of “Astounding Science Fiction” in New York and triggered what is known as the “Golden Age” of Science Fiction, he escorted writers the like of Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Donald A. Wollheim, Frederik Pohl, James Blish, Judith Merril and many others, they called themselves the Futurians. Other writers also contributed to the magazine, writers the like of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and A. E. Van Vogt. All of these men wrote and infected the men of science with their fevered and hallucinogenic visions of mankinds glorious and, for the scientists, an idyllic future. Everything from mobile phones, to weapons to our reach from the stars had their genesis in the realm of science fiction

But then, the Future changed.

And the Second world war began. A time of almost apocalyptic terror and destruction. A truly world war, from Europe to Aisa, Africa to North to South America the scream of children and the uproar and tumult of millions of guns and bombs.

Humanities second unsuccessful suicide attempt.

The world, save for North America was left in ruins and our glorious dreams of voyages to the bottom of the sea and flying cars temporarily crumbled to blackened brick and burnt flesh. It was then that our dreams of the future, became dreams of our survival as men and women wandered searching for family members, brethren that most likely lay as flayed corpses in the gutters of destroyed cities. It was then that science fictions future inventing twin, “futurism” was born. The term “futurology” had been coined in the 1943 by a man named Ossip K. Flechtheim, a German Professor. The term Futurology means, quite literally, “the study of the future”. Flechtheim developed a coda for the newly born Futurology, that of a systematic and critical treatment of questions that related to the future which would become a new science of probability that took in many possible permutations of many variables so as to come up with a probable view of what may happen. If it was to be for the good, it was to be encouraged, if for the bad (like for example the second world war) options were to be made available for its avoidance.

Also in the mid 1940’s various futurist consulting firms sprang up, that proffered their services to the American government, companies like the RAND corporation and SRI. These companies used techniques that they termed scenario development, systematic trend watching, visioning and long-range planning. These programs were first run under the auspices of the U.S. government and military and then for private corporations. It was not unusual for different corporations and think tanks to come up with different memes of the future that were to compete for the headspace of the public and the public’s leaders. That period of time, from the 1940’s to the 1960’s signalled the birth and then the honing of methodological and scientific attempts to measure future trends. Methods that continue to be used up until this day.

From the future of hover cars and robot butlers, to the future communist world takeover, from space migration to earthly bio-extinction it has literally been in the last 200 years that we first envisioned these technological and evolutionary heavens and these hells, 200 years since we worshiped the modern potential for the manifestation of them. 200 years since we began to watch the battle between mental abstractions and the manifestation of possible futures. 200 years since we began to learn that what is allegorical fantasy today can be scientific reality tomorrow. 200 years since we invented and began to disseminate a multitude of possible futures from the differing geographical centres of the creative imagination, and started infecting the minds of the scientific imagination. Thus in turn changing the physical and societal form of this spaceship earth. 200 years since we the people got to choose which model we, personally and individually would build our reality tunnels around, paranoid or positive, even before “it” happened. 200 years since the future invaded the present.

200 years since we began inventing the future(s).

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Berlin Impressions

2007-03-07T10:56:00.000Z

(top: The modern Televison Building in East Berlin, below: Untitled, Images © FatherCrow 2007)

With a sly grin,

And a mouthful of stars,

The above inspired the below.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Remembering The Reich

2007-03-05T10:04:00.000Z

(Image: Close up of one of the blocks that make up the Jewish memorial in Berlin: © FatherCrow 2007)

Introduction: This piece addresses but one aspect of my trip to Berlin, and a dark one at that. There were many aspects which fascinated me, writing, art, culture, clubbing, architecture, drinking and other intoxicants are among them. This piece represents only one aspect, please treat it as that. There may well be more posts on some of the other perspectives,, depending on the time I get to write over the next few days, which could be limited as I’m also working on a painting as well as actually “working”, so I’m not sure how long I’ll actually have for blog posting. This should keep you going for a while whatever happens though

"And the Germans kill the Jews
And the Jews kill the Arabs
And the Arabs kill the hostages
And that is the news" - Roger Waters

They hang above us all, silhouetted black against the blacker night, splinters of electronic static spitting and screaming at us in bursts from the needle straight ribs of the four P.A. speakers that loom above our heads.

The Germans as a people bend under the unrelenting and unforgiving weight of a history that shrieks and threatens us all with an extinction, which seems immortal and ever present.

And they listen, despite the pain, all the time.

This is the price the German participants children’s children have paid, are paying, and will willingly pay it seems, for time immemorial.

I had landed in Schonefeld airport tired from too little sleep, due to the sadistically early flight departure time of six am, that my delightful low fares carrier Ryanair had decided to inflict upon me. The only thing that was keeping me upright was a continuous blast of 80’s American hardcore punk rock that battered me into consciousness. I made it to the S-Bahn station and settled down on a bench to wait for the Alexanderplatz bound train. Wild and grey skies, wind and weak sunshine. I was almost alone on the platform, only the occasional businessman, standing scattered about the expansive platform like statues, negative shapes outlined black against the light. The train came on time, as expected, this was after all Germany. On the S-Bahn, Berlin’s suburban rail I began my journey into the historical heart of the 20^th century. A heart that was scarred and bled by two world wars, the holocaust of Jews, Gypsies, Socialists, Communists, homosexuals, the mentally ill and anyone else who disagreed with the sharpened bloody dagger of Nazi dualistic ideology.

There was much to explore, I was going to be here a week and though I did have significant other interests in the City of Berlin, the Second world war, and beyond that, the whole evolution of the entire poisoned Nazi regime was, if I am to be honest with myself the primary reason for the journey. My interest is not that of the visceral war movie fan, when I think of explosions I do not think of our much presented Movie Star™ leaping bravely from the edge of the screen to save his comrade from the collapsing building, I think only of the family that in real life would inevitably be trapped inside that building.

To us in the comfortable West, War has now become our entertainment, woven into the fabric of our lives, it has always been that way to some extent. But it is a long time since we whispered the mythic tales of warriors to each other around a campfire, a long way indeed that we have travelled. Now Edward Bernays’ Perception management techniques have evolved beyond even his wildest dreams. We sit in simulated rehearsal for the new technological war in front of our playstations and wii’s being groomed by first and third person shooters and military simulations for exposure to the repeated military movie blockbusters that grace our screens. Then, finally, we are gradually led like unknowing cattle to service in the military itself. The movies about war and the television recruitment propaganda that emanate from the actual military seem one and the same. Above this media drone of subconsciously absorbed memes of indoctrination, stand the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom, smiling shark grins, telling you this war without end on the amorphous beast of “Terrorism” will be over by Christmas.

We are daily being infected with a memetic serum that teaches us to love war.

In early 2003 when the United States the United Kingdom and Spain proposed what they called the “Eighteenth Resolution” which would give Iraq a deadline to comply with previous U.N. resolutions Germany along with Russia and France opposed it, and any military intervention. In the United States these countries were demonised for it in the major media. This hysteria was particularly pointed against France, bringing itself to an onanistic boil with the renaming of French fries to freedom fries. I think little thought was given in the U.K. and the U.S. as to the reasons these particular three countries were against the war.

One good way to find out that I would recommend, is a trip to Berlin.

The S-Bahn suburban rail whispered across the remaining few feet of track into Alexanderplatz station and shunted itself to a stop, I shouldered my luggage, made my way to the hostel and checked in. I have always preferred hostels to hotels. In hotels the social interaction generally involves listening to some drunk businessman whine about how his wife is cheating on him as he leans over the bar like a child trying to climb to the other side. Hostels, on the other hand, tend to have a more itinerant crowd who are more open to interaction and enthused about the novelty of it all. The Hostel was as I expected, large high roof, plenty of light, friendly staff, a clean environment and a nearby park where, it may appal you, as it did me, to know the demon weed marijuana is sold openly in the evening. So as not to keep you all in suspense the name of the Hostel is the St. Christopher, ask for Franz, he’ll take care of you. In fact he’ll even kick your ass at pool if you let him.

So my bags being stowed and my bed assured, I had time to take a breath and start to get my bearings in this great city of Berlin. My first move was to head out to the famed Potsdamer Platz, which was easy to find, once you concentrated on the expansive map of the city’s transport system that, though carefully thought out, was of such a size that unless you had yourself some good light to read it by, you may well be looking for one of the smaller stations for up to a half an hour. But you know, once you found the station you were looking for on the map it was really easy to get there. Such is the German reputation for organisation deserved. Everything seems to work in Germany and work well.

I was headed to Potsdamer Platz and so crossed the street markers of the Berlin Wall that scar so many of the streets of the city and down into Rosa Luxembourg Strasse U-Bahn (underground station), Rosa herself, a revolutionary, was one of the founders of the German Communist party who was captured by the German Freicorps during an uprising in Berlin in 1919, clubbed unconscious, shot in the head and thrown into a nearby river. Rosa, another martyr to another dualistic ideology. You’re wrong, I’m right, I live, you die. It always seems to be the same simple mathematics.

Rosa’s station eventually delivered me to Potsdamer Platz, the place is the architectural centre for the new Berlin it is also near the historical centre of Unter Den Linden (under the lime trees) in East Berlin which is where the 20^th century began to grow it’s arteries and pump the substance of itself outward, spreading across all the worlds terrain and filling the fibres of time, like ink would fill a sponge. I step out at Potsdamer and head to my left, as I walk around this city I find on so many street corners these little bronze cobbles small and lonely in a sea of concrete. They drop below your awareness, unless you actually lower your eyes to the pavement and begin to actively look for them. All over Berlin these cold little cobbles lie, just below your feet, whispering the eternal mute protest of ordinary people. Ordinary people who were taken from their homes and beaten, broken, tortured, shot, gassed, drowned killed by exposure and taken down many, many other brutal paths to extinction. A mother taken from this house by the Gestapo, fate unknown. Children taken to the concentration camps, never returned, Men executed. All over the city, every time you feel an uneven bump on the street, you could be standing in front of one of the homes of these victims of the Third Reich.

You are always near their cries, you have but to listen.

Look up however and you are surrounded by the geometry of success, these sharp edges that reach to the skies, so much more inventive, whimsical and creative than those plain soaring monoliths of New York and Chicago, here in Potsdammer Platz and beyond that, I later find, to the whole of central Berlin these buildings rise at odd angles, here a skyscraper designed to look like the top of the building is falling off, and there, a façade of an apartment block leaning to one side of the main structure, painted brilliant red and giving a diamond shape to the windows, and a star shape to the dimension of the whole building. It’s almost as if they have re-built the whole city so many times, and have gotten so good at it, that the Berliner’s are just doing it for shits and giggles. If you kept your eyes on the LCD Screen buildings that advertise Vanity Fair, you could almost become anesthetised enough to forget that history is filling your pores. Jumbotron in New York, eat your heart out, buildings as LCD’s.

Moving on from Potsdamer Platz, away from the Sony Centre and through the Tiergarten, Berlin’s green lung, soon the Soviet memorial to their war dead emerges, this monstrous thing squats, huge and heavy, guarded by two artillery pieces and two t-34 tanks. The huge arches are inscribed “Eternal glory to heroes who fell in the struggle against the German fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of the Soviet Union”. This memorial, with its armoury pointing out over the city of Berlin, whose arches are made out of the marble that once composed the walls of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery is a constant reminder to Berliners, at least four lanes of whom commute to and from work just in front of it, that, if the Germans ever behave in such a way again, another Ragnarok of the city will be upon them.

I walk onwards and through the Brandenburg gate, down through the thin February crowd and around to the left where I come across a field of grey stone cuboid teeth that tear through the ground of this prime real estate that lies in the centre of the cities financial district. As I walke into this field, it starts to rain, the beginning of what was to be several synchronous changes of weather that happened whenever I visited Second World war sites of particular emotional resonance, this was the first, the last was several days later in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. The Grey blocks begin around waist level and as you progress through the uneven ground that lies beneath these plinths, they gradually begin to grow and rise, first above your hips, then shoulders and then finally head. At any point you can see the way out, which is a reassurance that the Jews of Europe, to whom this memorial is dedicated, never had. The rain begins to pool into odd drops on the surfaces of these cold grey columns, a result of the graffiti proof paint which is necessary due to Berlin’s thriving tagging and street art life. The anti graffiti paint was manufactured by the people who brought you zyklon B, the gas that was used to murder concentration camp inmates. There was some consternation about this, but it was eventually decided that the majority of employees of the company now were not even alive when the holocaust happened and should be allowed to contribute to this act of remembrance. Below the memorial is a museum to all the Jews that lost their lives during the Reign of the Third Reich. Again, there were discussions as to whether the memorial should commemorate all the victims of the Holocaust, or just the Jews. It was eventually decided that part of the funds would be allocated to remember the others that fell victim to this terror, but no additional memorials have yet been build. It is said that they are on their way, but as I heard more than one person remark upon, no one is holding their breath.

Later when I was absorbing all this in the bar of the Hostel over a game of pool, I began to realize what continued to be reinforced over the remainder of my trip. Daily I explored all the aspects of Berlin I could, but this is about memory, loss and war. Daily I would encounter some aspect of either the Third Reich or the cold war. The day after my trip to the Jewish memorial I embarked on a street walking tour of Berlin, which encompassed many of the cities different historical era’s from Fredrick the Great through Bismark, the First World War, the Third Reich and the Cold War.

Sylvia Roberge of Brewers Berlin Tours was our Guide on that day, and I would recommend that if you ever find yourself in the city of Berlin, that you make a special effort to get on one of her tours, as not only is she educated and erudite, she also has a wonderfully humane empathy that brings all of these historical periods to life, and gives them a context and relevance to the situation that we find ourselves in today. So remember, tip big.

On that tour Sylvia (I hope if she happens to come across this entry, she will forgive me for using the familiar first name, but Ms. Roberge just sounds too much like a schoolteacher.) allowed us to experience, among other things, Goring’s Air Ministry, designed by architect Ernst Sagebiel, which is the single surviving piece of Nazi architecture within the boundaries of the city of Berlin. I would say fascist architecture, but the Italian version is far more, how should I put it, Romanesque. The Nazi version however, like all things Nazi, seems to be stained a wet grey, heavy, imposing with its sheer scale, and sunken into the Berlin soil. Concrete reinforced to last a thousand years. The Air Ministry was untouched by Allied Air Raids which levelled all around it, and left this, the then largest building in Berlin standing, fate as they say, is not without a sense of irony. When you stand before it, grey space yawns all around you. The building is now the German Finance Ministry.

Next to the Air Ministry building beside another seemingly vacant space stands the longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall, beside that, an absence, for here was where the headquarters of the SS (ShutzStaffel or Protective Squad) and the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, or secret state police) stood. The building was bombed during the final years of the war, and now only remains as an excavated basement and a long textual, audio and visual history of both the SS and the Gestapo which adorns the remaining walls of the excavated basement. It is appropriately named the “Topography of Terror” and is free entry. All the Nazi related memorials and museums that I visited were free, though some understandably asked for donations.

Travel across town as far as Zoo station, and you emerge to the sight of The Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church, a picture of which appears in the preceding post. This mournful towering gutted ruin has stood in a permanent vigil over the people of Berlin. Kaiser Wilhelm’s Church has been a constant memorial to the stupidity and brutality of war since it was bombed out in 1943. The spire is sheared off about half way up its length, as if pierced by the teeth of some giant winged predator, which in a way I suppose it was, all is metaphor. The Berliner’s with their customary dry humour have nicknamed the building the “Hollow Tooth”. Inside the Tooth, there is a recreated mosaic that has been painstakingly reassembled over visitors heads, partially to save a work of art, partially to keep the rain off of those who venture inside. Also inside is a wonderful golden almost art-deco cross that remembers Stalingrad and even more appropriately a cross made from the nails from the old Coventry Cathedral which was destroyed by Nazi bomb attacks during the war.

Move back into the center of Berlin and you come across the memorial to the Victims of Tyranny, an almost Freidrich the Great period style of architecture from the outside. A cube of a building fronted by six simple Doric columns, and two German Flags. This is the closest the Germans come to having a memorial to their own war dead. Which is understandable since they bear responsibility for the war, and so many in their armed forces were Nazi’s. The memorial to the victims of tyranny makes sense because it in essence covers all those within Germany and it’s fighting forces who as a result of the horror’s the Nazi’s brought upon Germany, were as much a victim of Tyranny as some of those in the occupied nations.

Walk through it’s Doric columns, after taking off your hat, you are confronted with a yawning, cold space. The building inside is one vast room, a massive eye like hole in the roof opens the room to the elements and you can hear and feel the wind that howls and batters itself off both your face and that of the building. The day I visited was a grey overcast afternoon in January and a light rain was falling. In the centre of the room a black bronze statue of a woman clutches, with a painful grief, her dead son to her breast. Her arms are locked tight, never prepared to let go, never going to let go. The woman is silhouetted under a column of rain, mist and light, which imprisons her forever in this ethereal frozen grief.

The list goes on and on, it is almost impossible to walk down the streets of this city without being constantly reminded of what they and their ancestors did. Even beyond the reminders that I have mentioned there are the ones that I have not, the concentration camps (one of which I visited), the Volkspark in Friedrichshain dedicated to the Polish soldiers that lost their lives during the war.

There is the memorial to the Aryan wives who were married to Jewish men, these women who the Nazi’s said were “race defilers”. These women who, just after Stalingrad were told that their husbands were going to be sent to the concentration camps, (men who up until that point had been “protected jews” and who were able to work and were prohibited from being deported). Many of these men were deported, but before all of them had been taken, the Aryan wives of these men, staged a protest outside the Reich's Chancellery from where Hitler ruled. It seems hard to believe but up until this point there had been no protest from the German people themselves, either about the war, or about the concentration camps, or other deportations, or the slave labour, there had been nothing. The Nazi government was at that point acutely aware of the public mood after the disaster of Stalingrad and were initially paralysed by inaction. They literally did not know how to react to a protest such as this by people who were considered “Aryan” and therefore people whose views mattered within the National Socialist Weltanschauung. Then the most impossible thing happened, the Nazis stopped all deportation of these privileged Jews, and even went as far as returning individuals even from as far afield as camps on the Ostfront. The lesson was not learnt then, despite the protests success, there were no others. No more people were saved. The memorial has a man sitting on a bench away to the side of the main sculpture, looking away, refusing to watch, or learn.

There are memorials to specific camps, and memorials at points that were used to deport individuals to the camps. There are memorials to bombing victims on the walls of neighboring, still standing buildings to the ones in which the dead met their end. The list goes on as the ghosts watch in mute agony.

Plaques,

Museums,

Memorials,

Cobbles,

everywhere.

Schools, Colleges, University level history education about the period, field trips to concentration camps, the Germans never let themselves forget.

And this may well be the the reason, I suspect, that the Germans, after having allowed themselves to almost be the harbinger of humanities extinction, will never, ever allow themselves to be reduced to that level of bestiality again. This is not just a German problem, as we have learnt many times since the Second World War, the Germans just seemed to have been the first to manifest the possibility for geonocidal mechanised extinction. Berlin now, seems to me, apart from the historical burden it bears on its back, one of the most liberal, artistic, tolerant and even humorous metropolises that I have ever been in. This seems to have happened as a result of the history, and an effort to remember it, rather than despite it.

Sadly the same lesson can not have been said to have been learnt by other perpetrators of genocide and horror upon the earth. I hear no apologies by the Hutu’s or Serbians for their respective Genocides. I see no tears on the faces of Russian Politicians to apologise for the massacre of many foreign peoples, then supposed “citizens” during the time of the Purges in the Soviet Union. No keening from the Americans over the men, women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities. Millions of civilians killed and maimed. No pleas for forgiveness from the United Kingdom for it’s gassing of Iraq, or Firebombing in Dresden. No cessation of the butchering of, so far, over 50,000 Falun Gong practitioners, harvested for organs with no anaesthetic at camps specifically tailored to that purpose by the Chinese government.

No Apologies.

My point being, is there a point to this? Well yes there is actually, the point being that the Germans and specifically the Berliners, remember. The fact that they remember, and do so constantly has allowed them to build up a liberal democracy, and prevent that liberal democracy from falling from grace. Precisely because of their memory they have learned that most rare of lessons. A lesson that is often spoken of by people and nations who have patently not learned the nature of the very lesson they speak of, that: “Those who do not learn from history, are condemned to repeat it”.

And perhaps we should thank the Germans for it. For they set an example many other nations could learn from.

Peace and Hope,

FatherCrow

Evacuation Celebration

2007-02-12T15:03:00.000Z

Above, Berlin Cathedral, preserved memories of horror.

Ladies, Gentlemen, Carbon and Silicon Based Life forms:

This is notification that I am leaving this fine land of Eire for a couple of weeks, and thus, the posting on the blog will diminish to but a trickle.

Berlin is first, to satisfy my historical hunger, and my desire to understand humanities second unsuccessful suicide attempt.

Then, well, who knows?

I may get around to posting whilst on my travels, but don't bet on it, possibly an account of said travels, but more likely just the odd photo or two.

Please content yourself with the archives until I return.

That is all my minions, you may now return to your duties.

UPDATE: MONDAY THE 5th of MARCH NEXT POST.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

Choke.

2007-02-08T11:29:00.000Z

(image: Tampera, Finland © FatherCrow 2006)

In a calm prophetic agony.

From the time when,

From the time when.

Persecution by mausoleum shipyard.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

Logos

2007-02-07T14:22:00.002Z

(this post has been reversed with the "kill your televison" post below. An additional new post "beyond belief" has also appeared since this was first published. Please scroll down. It's a long story, don't ask.

Also, I was asked recently whether the below art is my own, yes, it is. In fact anything marked with the © FatherCrow I've created myself, well the art and photography anyways. The writing is all my own, unless otherwise specified. Oh and one last thing re my all my art, painting, sculpture and drawings, for posterity, I sign my art under a different Nomme De Guerre, so for future reference, Eldar is FatherCrow and FatherCrow is Eldar. )

(image © FatherCrow 2007) Logos - charcoal & pastel

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Beyond Belief - Or How We Can Stop Killing Each Other In A Few Easy Steps (version 1.1)

2007-02-07T11:55:00.000Z

Subjective as Hell tract on the nature of religious belief.

Presented in E-Prime.

Belief: (bi'li:f) n. 1. a principle,etc., accepted as true, esp, without proof 2. opinion, conviction. 3. religious faith 4. trust or confidence, as in a persons abilities,etc.
( taken from the Collins Concise English Dictionary, third edition)

We all find it very easy to get into generalizations when we talk of religious belief. I have spent many years listening to people talk about how much carnage, hate, killing and suffering has been caused by Religion down throughout the history of mankind. Looking at it from one point of view, I have to agree with the statement that Religion appears to have caused more harm than good. Islam, Christianity and Judaism seem to me to be the main offenders, and all are monotheistic religions.

I spent a while thinking about this.

I came to the conclusion (again a vast generalization, but it seems all that we can use when speaking of such a broad cross section of humanity) that it all comes down to Aristotle's dualism. By dualism I mean, that Aristotle was one of the first to advocate the philosophy of yes/no (or in computer terms one and zero) and that objects had an inherent "essence" that was unchangeable. This train of thought inevitably leads you to simple answers, Christianity appears to be either True (completely) or False (completely) and the same with Islam, and indeed many other religions (or cults - I distinguish a cult from a religion by the fact that a Religion has political backing, whereas a cult does not).

This dualistic approach as many of you will have noticed does not really gel well with real life, there seems to be a considerable amount of gray in our daily lives, all does not appear simply black and white. If you take this black and white approach, then you are threatened by anyone whose "beliefs" (without proof, opinion, religious faith..) differ in any way from your own - the mere fact that they are viewed as different seems to some individuals to invalidate any model of the way Universe works that they use. All of these systems (religions) seem to have evolved from the same basic thesis of "what the hell seems to be going on in Universe" and used specific models (the scientific use of the word model) to explain "what the hell seems to be going on".

Differing peoples in differing areas of the globe from differing cultural, language and geographical perspectives have tried to use what they see around them to come to an assumption (or what they consider most likely) of "what the hell seems to be going on".

Some of these religions, have never really caused much damage in the world - Buddhism for one. Most of the "religions" that have not caused noticeable amounts of suffering and strife come from a quite mystical non-dualistic bent and acknowledge that depending on where you come from, you will generally have a distinctly different view of the world (take the Inuit say as compared with a tribe in Papua New Guinea as an example of differing perspectives) and relate to God, Goddess, Godhead, Buddha mind, whatever in a distinctly different way to groups that come from other Geographical areas or philosophical schools. These mystical groups tend to realize that different groups inevitably end up using different iconography, and have a habit as far as I am aware to respect any differences between "factions". None of these religions (with the one exception I know of being witchcraft) seem to come from the West, where Aristotle's true/false logic rules. This even goes so far as today's sciences (take the photon - is it a wave?, is it a particle? discussion - physicists had to abandon dualism completely to figure out what now seems like a simple idea).

The three options (atheism, agnosticism, belief in "God") that most people see as the only options seem to me to be a direct result of the education system in the West, or should I say indoctrination systems, in that these options, in most cases appear to be the only choices you are presented with.

By discarding any sort of spirituality or ideas about the nature of Universe, in my view you will limit yourself, and abandon a fun ride. Which oddly enough appears to be just what "they" (ah the omnipresent "they") want you to do, religion, the less organised the better, can be fun.

No model that attempts to take into account the "true" nature of Universe can be proved or disproved, we just don't have the information (as our brains reside within Universe, and a very small part of Universe at that, and to "understand" Universe we would have to have brains that are capable of holding "all" data in Universe which would take, well roughly a brain that would be equal to the size of Universe to contain all the information, which seems to be, plainly impossible).

Any model that YOU choose can also be a very effective form of rebellion - the biggest "fuck you" to all those people out there who try to program your brain for you. In my view, in the nature of religious models of all types, none can be empirically proven to be "true" or "false" but I find this the fun bit, so long as it works for you, does it really matter? You also don't have to stick to one model all your life, try out a few........see which one works best. To me it appears less a matter of what "is true" and what "is false" than primarily a matter of utility. Choose what you want to believe in and if it benefits you, than it has a certain amount of "utility" in your life, and if it has "utility" then should be worth keeping. Of course you should consider bearing in mind that what has "utility" for you might not have the same effect on others, or me, but that's ok...

Just for fun, why not try out Hanotheism, the belief that "there are billions of gods", pick the one you like best and have fun with it, and acknowledge that others do the same. Since no one knows everything, all models appear to be equally right until proven otherwise (which I can't see happening by next Tuesday). When you do that, it becomes immaterial whether the "god" or godhead or whatever specific model you have developed "is more real" than other people's. Science states that "religious" people live longer and are happier, so should that not be a reason in itself? You don't have to fuck with the beliefs of others to have your own.

The point being, that if you have a true/false approach to religion or spirituality, you will find that many ideas or opinions that you have, once contradicted by another group or person (even if they do not intend to criticize you or your beliefs) will immediately cause "you" (being a person who has a dualistic belief system) to feel that your beliefs "are being threatened" or invalidated by this other. Thus, you either have to convince him or her that you "are right" (convert them) or get rid of them (burn the damn heretic). Also this kind of thinking in my opinion tends to cause the individual to seek out more people that agree with exactly the same dogma as they themselves do, as a way of validating their own beliefs (This seems to lead to thinking that, the more of "us" there are the more "real" our Deity is.) When these groups form you tend to start to hear phrases like "Look all of these guys think the same way boy, and you're a long way from home." Then it tends to be in the interest of your own health to agree with them - or invest in some security for your home.

I am religious (or spiritual, it depends on your own definition) myself. My particular belief system (or B.S, as Robert Anton Wilson said) has been created as decidedly nonhierarchical, and as I am a solitary practitioner does not involve proselytizing. My form of occultism (as I adopt and incorporate aspects of various B.S.'s that have utility to me), Has been designed to skip over that wonderful gatekeeper, the priest or priestess that most of the organised religions use to establish control and place a filter between you and the divine.

Personally I worship alone, practice Magick alone, and really don't give a damn what people think. So long as their belief does not hurt anyone else or infringe on others belief systems (B.S.). My relationship with the infinite does not need the involvement of anyone else, it has been my experience that you cannot communicate with the divine via a moderator, however much fun it looks like to have a gatekeeper.

You are, of course, free to believe whatever you want. But remember as Timothy Leary said "any reality is an opinion" this just happens to be mine.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Dedicated to:

Dr. Timothy Leary

Dr. Robert Anton Wilson

Aldous Huxley

Dr. Christopher S. Hyatt

William S. Burroughs

Aleister Crowley

Dr.Israel Regardie

Alan Watts

Alfred Korzybski

Kill your Televison

2007-02-06T10:31:00.000Z

Yea, Brothers and Sisters, you know it to be true.

From the movie "Network"

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Lumps on your Head: Phrenology.

2007-02-05T11:16:00.000Z

Above: A phrenology bust. (image © FatherCrow 2007)

At the beginning of the 19th century things were very different from what they are now. Medical science had just begun to take the huge leaps forward in its capabilities that would forever change humanities relationship with it. The 18th century had been a time of reticent and spasmodic baby steps forward, hampered by not a small amount of quackery, much of the medical knowledge of the time advocated bloodletting and purging . The 19th century was to be different.

The Physical body, from 1800 on, limb by limb, organ by organ had begun to be tamed. Optimism that eventually all human medical ailments could be eventually cured was rife. Humanity would eventually be delivered from its own weaknesses. The modern era really launched with Robert Koch's discoveries around 1880 of the movement and infection of disease by bacteria, then the invention/discovery of antiboitics shortly afterwards circa 1900 really began to give both medical professionals and the hoi polloi alike the hope that we would eventually be masters of this biological form that contained "us". Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that washing with chlorinated lime solutions could reduce surgical deaths to below one percent. We had set foot on the first rungs of the ladder of immortality. No one could hear Jacob laughing.

As the physical sciences raced ahead with discovery after discovery the study of the mind and its ailments lagged sadly behind as mental disorders were still very much beyond the ken (as the Scottish say) of the medical profession. We had the potential to live forever, but we could not fathom the myriad sicknesses of the personality. We could not even measure them, or tie them down to a specific part of the body. And so many foolish and overtly optimistic treatments and branches of medicine were developed in an effort to even the physical/mental divide in the science of medicine.

In 1800 a man named Franz Joseph Gall was to attempt to change that uneven divide. Gall, (1758-1828) studied medicine at the University of Strasbourg and then went on to complete his degree in Vienna developed the ideas of Cranioscopy whereby he began to infer that specific brain functions could be identified by the outer shape of the human skull. Thus Gall claimed, you could discover the type of personality, moral and mental functions of an individual by examining the outer contours of the individual in questions skull. Gall listed specific personality traits that were linked to specific skull points with specific shapes. Though Phrenology has been discredited over the years as a science, it is still credited with being a "proto-science" as it first linked the brain to the mind and suggested that specific areas of the brain were responsible for specific aspects of what we now describe as the personality. Phrenology though is based on the misuse of the "causal inferences" of modern medicine and science. Modern medicine and Neurology have proven that the skull shape is in no way an indicator of behavioral patterns.

Cranioscopy eventually was renamed "Phrenology" by a follower of Gall's a man named Johann Spurzheim. Spurzheim was an assistant to Gall who so impressed the good doctor that he was considered the sucessor and torch bearer of the new science, Gall even added Spurzheims name to some of the books that he authored about his discovery. Spurzheim was the individual most responsible for the increasing popularity of the "science" but later had a falling out with his mentor but still continued to travel far and wide preaching his new gospel. Spurzheim died in 1832 on his first American tour. His brain, skull and heart were removed and preserved in alcohol, and then put on display for the public.

This new "science" of phrenology was not accepted without criticism, many religious leaders, the Catholic Church in particular regarded it almost as heresy. Some scientists, respected ones at that, were aggrieved with the spread of this particular medical meme, some said that they were reluctant to take Gall and Spurzheim at their words, as there was, to all intents and purposes no "proof" in a purely scientific sense. Gall tried to settle in a few countries, even France, where to his dismay his science was condemned by none other a historical personality than Napoleon Bonaparte. Gall still managed to curry favour in Parisian society and settled there until his death in 1828.

Though France did not accept his theories, they were not rejected elsewhere, in England and the United States his theories were repeatedly used to justify racial discrimination, as Gall had created a science that used the shape of the head to define characteristics there was of course a head shape that resulted in a well balanced and stable personality. Multiple measurements were used, pincers and strange mechanical hat like devices were developed to perform the measurements, busts were created to show the ideal shape of the head. The ideal shape, was, of course that of a geometrically balanced Caucasian head. In the United states Phrenology was used to justify racial segregation and the United Kingdom used it to justify the superiority of the ruling or "upper" classes. Phrenologists all through Victorian times were consulted on whether individuals would be appropriate employees or marriage partners. Even Lloyd George the British Prime Minister arranged a meeting with one particular writer on the justification that he had "an interesting shaped head"

Phrenology survived into the 20th century despite being rejected as a true science by the majority of 20th century physicians. It's use became more political then medical. The apogee of this political use manifested like a tumor within the already sick national psyche of Nazi Germany. It was of course used as a scientific basis for the upholding of Germans and Aryans in general as a master race. Himmler during his tenure as Reichfuhrer SS, dispatched members of his SS Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) department (which is worth researching yourselves) to various countries around the world taking, amongst other things, plaster of Paris head casts that were then shipped back to Germany and used as, you guessed it, Phrenelogical examples of the inferiority of other races. Most of us I think, are aware as to where this particular type of study led. The study of bumps on the head began to be a justification for the creation of them as the truncheons of the Nazi's fell on the heads of the untermensch.

I myself have a Phrenology bust on display in my home, purchased from an antique dealer with an unusual predilection for anomalies of earlier times. The bust is on display for one reason and one reason only. To remind myself on no account to take someone else's word for what is true or not true, no matter how apparently well respected or established they or their organisation is, but to do my own research and make my own decisions.

It's a surprisingly effective mnemonic device.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Freud, Bernays, and “The Language of Control.”

2007-02-01T15:00:00.000Z

Screaming in the streets, corpses piled upon corpses, burning buildings, wide hateful eyes staring down at bloodied and twisted bodies in the gutters. Before striking we make sure the "other" is less numerous than "us", then blow after blow is landed on the "other" who screams incomprehensibly as with each individual act of violence the humanity is drained from it. Guns are fired, punches fall upon the alien human, and the body politic twists and flexes in hatred. The violence then spreads like a dark stain across countries and continents.

All the while the fear grows in Sigmund Freud. He sees us all, he sees our movements, thousands of us, in thousands of places, running across public parks and streets, clubs, knives, guns in our hands. We chase those that we view as different, hunting them. We hunt them with the animal habits that we once thought only applied to our Primate ancestors. Hates consumes us and then, we land the death blow and take the new territory, their territory for our own.

Sigmund Freud did not believe in the benevolence of humanity.

After the first world war Freud retreated to Berchtesgaden (ironically the town was then also the Summer home of Adolf Hitler and later the home of his "eagles nest" where much of his war was planned from), and wrote volumes about how man was an evil, violent animal with animalistic passions that had not been completely restrained by civilisation. He believed that the first world war was, in effect a validation of his most pessimistic nightmares about the true underlying nature of humanity. He believed that governments had released the unconsious animalistic tendencies of our primate species and then found that they could not be controlled. Europe was laid waste, and, Freud believed that the 9,906,000 dead of the first world war (military deaths only) was the direct result of the failure of civilisation and it's leaders to control and manage the dark side of humanity, which psychoanalysis had been preaching about for several years. From Berchtesgaden Freud penned what was to be, for the twentieth century and beyond, his defining work "Civilisation and it's Discontents" which stated that Humanity was, in effect, a rampaging violent emotional beast that had to be controlled through the mechanism of civilisation in order to avoid a repeat of the first world war. This control he argued, was necessary and as a result of the suppression of the individual desire, would cause a perpetual discontent within the individuals that composed society. Thus it would be a necessary sacrifice to suppress the evil beast that he said, resided within all of us. In Freuds view, unhappieness was key to humanities survival, it was either that or extinction.

Across space and earlier in time, a man named Edward Bernays's parents had emigraged from Austria and traversed the Atlantic to settle in America. Bernays himself, though born in Vienna, was brought up in the American capitalistic environment. Bernays was Sigmud Freuds nephew. During the First World War, the war that stripped his uncle of the last vestiges of his faith in humanity, Bernays worked with the US government within the propaganda division of the US forces. It was at the Paris Peace Conference where Bernays first noticed the hysterical reaction of the crowds to President Wilsons visit. Wilson had been portrayed as an emissary of the individual in addition to that of freedom. The French viewed him as an almost messianic character after the regimented march of death that was the First World War. Bernays watched this adulation from afar, with the Presidents entourage and wondered, he wondered if the crowds in peacetime could be controlled as effectively as those that were controlled by Propagandistic manipulation during wartime. Bernays considered the word "Propaganda" to be tainted by it's use by the Germans, and so on returning to the United States, after some thought, he adopted the phrase "Public Relations" in its place. Bernays set up an office in New York and set to work. During this time, Bernays, still on friendly terms with his Uncle Siggy, sent him a box of Havana Cigars, Freud in response sent him a copies of some of his works. This gift was a revelation to Bernays, who then decided to use his Uncle's theories in furthering first his personal fortunes and secondly his thirst for power. Bernays himself would always maintain that he was at heart a democrat and that the use of his Uncle's theories were for the benefit of humanity at large.

Bernays first made an imprint on the fragile membrane of society’s collective unconscious by removing a taboo that was preventing America's tobacco corporations from making, to be frank, double what their collective earnings were at the time.

In the 1920's men, had effectively imposed a unspoken ban on women smoking, it was a male province and as far as the populace were concerned would stay that way. The corporations wanted women to smoke, and Bernays wanted to help them. So, in conference with the American Tobacco companies, Bernays asked permission to consult a psychiatrist in order to find out what cigarettes represented to women, so he could provide them with a reason for smoking. What cigarettes represented to women, according to the psychiatrist he consulted (for a very large fee) he was told, was the male penis. That year, at a parade in New York, Bernays, in what must be considered one of the first, and indeed most effective, public relations stunts hired a group of women. These women, at a given time, were to light up cigarettes. Meanwhile, Bernays had alerted the press that a group of suffragettes had, in a gesture of "freedom" lit up these cigarettes in protest of women being treated differently. The press went mad, the next day the women made headlines and Bernays was there to supply the phrase "Torches of Freedom" to the pictures in the press. What Bernays had done, was to take the fight against women’s oppression, and used the iconic image of the cigarette as a symbol that was only the province of men (the penis) and appear to wrest it from the hands of the patriarchy. Women smoking, were women that were individuals, that were free of the constraints that male dominated society put on them. The message said, you are free, you are equal, and you demonstrate this by acquiring your own symbolic penis, the cigarette. Soon enough women equalled men in their smoking habits, and Bernays was viewed somewhat as a miracle worker.

Bernays continued to exploit the buying public by associating the previously functional products with unrelated emotions. You do not buy this because you “need it” you buy it because it makes you feel good. Thus in a second, America’s fears of over production vanished as emotion took over utility and the practicality of products was replaced by the need to be happy which was reinforced by Freudian advertising. The products of course did not provide happiness but did provide the chase, which never ended, as product after products was consumed in an unconscious race for happiness. He had in fact invented the era of “consuptionism” which was later re-branded as they say today as “consumerism”.

Bernays, always the tireless self publicist began to write books promoting his ideas. He did this as many prominent political thinkers in America, had been terrified at the implications of the first world war. And as the popularity of Freud soared these political thinkers began to look at the masses much as he did. The masses were animalistic and the ruling elite needed a method to control them in order to prevent a second suicide attempt by humanity at large. Bernays wrote books like “propaganda” in order to argue that he had developed the techniques that would prevent such a thing from ever happening again. His theory was to actively encourage the association of products that constantly changed and updated themselves with emotions like love and happiness, comfort and contentment so that the worker, would in effect become the consumer, and the newly created “consumer” would be so busy pursuing products that they thought would sate them and grant their emotional desires that they would, in effect, avoid their bestial nature in the illusionary chase of happiness through products. The populous would also be so distracted that they would let the elite, who knew what was best for them, get on with the business of ruling. His policies were adopted, at home and abroad. Bernays was a self described democrat who was in fact, entirely undemocratic.

Joseph Goebels rated Bernays’s “Propaganda” as one of the most important and influential books he had ever read. So, in effect, whilst trying to avoid another “War to end all Wars” Bernay’s, the Jew, inadvertently contributed to, and facilitated it. Goebels gained much of his insight into the manipulation of populaces from Bernays, and in turn Freud. Freud meanwhile had been pessimistically watching the rise of the Nazi’s and shortly after the anschlaus or annexation of Austria had fled this new nightmare of the 20^th century and moved along with his daughter Anna to England, where on the outbreak of the Second world war in 1939, he died of cancer of the Jaw an old, broken and despairing man.

And so, after the Horrors of the mechanistic death machine of the second world war. The “consumer machine” went into overdrive for beneath the smiling faces on the billboards of fifties America were drooling, violent beasts that could only be controlled by the endless pursuit of products as a symbolic replacement for happiness. Which may have been the greatest subversion of the American Experiments Constitution which guaranteed it’s citizens the right of the “pursuit of happiness”.

Many years later, Sayyid Qutb, a young intellectual Muslim gained a position as a teacher in the Ciaro Ministry of Public Information, from 1948 to 1950 Qutb was sent on a scholarship to the United States to examine the United States educational system. What he found, almost caused him to despair, and was to have grave ramifications all the way into the 21^st century.

Qutb saw in the fabric of United States society something which he thought was a grave threat. That threat was the almost universal manifestation of the individual over the group. People, as a result of the consumerist society that was effectively invented by Bernays, focused solely on themselves and their own desires, and not as Qutb thought was healthy, the group, the city, the state, the nation. He saw a country of selfish people endlessly pursuing, as Bernays had ordained, personal happiness through everything from automobiles to haircuts. This he viewed as the beginnings of a failing society, as the cult of individualism was the origin of societal discontent as people were no longer concerned for the group as a whole, but only for themselves. Qutb viewed the race riots, increasing sexual freedom, triviality, the lessening of restrictions on divorce all as symptoms of a diseased and dying society that viewed through the precepts of Islam, would eventually cause its downfall. Qutb when he returned home saw elements of this corrupt and diseased Western Capitalist society infecting his own people of Egypt (which at that point was on a governmental level embracing Western values, and American money). In this germ of cultural infection, Qutb saw the end of Islam, and the destruction of Egypt. He vowed to fight this to the last. This fanatical (from the latin Fanum, Temple, or Chapel in latin, denoting a specifically religious fervour) Weltanschauung or world view culminated in Qutbs attempted assassination of Gamal Abdul Nasser an assassination that was intended to bring about the introduction of Sharia law and the triumph of the group over the individual. The attempt failed and Qutb was executed for his part in the plot.

Qutb was succeeded in his position in what was now viewed as the Islamist movement by his disciple, Ayman Muhammad Rabaie al-Zawahiri who then joined and eventually became head of the Muslim Brotherhood. He fought in Afghanistan with Osama Bin Laden, who was also increasingly influenced by al-Zawahiri’s thinking, and thus in turn by Qutb’s. The rest, as they say, is the history of Islams reactionary fight against the western cult of the individual, pioneered by Edward Bernays.

Bin Laden and al-Zawahari however were not the only ones who found that Bernays’s cult of the individual could end up being the death of society. Leo Strauss a German born political philosopher also saw the apparent gradual disintegration of society. He as a Jew had watched the terror of the Second World War from America and later watched in the 1960’s a society which was rife with civil conflict. White middle class terrorist groups had been founded, like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weathermen, meanwhile down south, the Ku Klux Klan were engaged in a murderous struggle to continue segregation, both with black people and civil rights campaigners. In California Black people had begun to form groups like the Black Panthers to promote civil rights and civil defense, primarily from the police. Violence and riots on the streets were everywhere, and Strauss saw this as a result of the erosion of the group concept of the nation and the accentuation of the individual (whether or not he connected this with Bernays is debateable). And thus Strauss began to formulate the system of thought that would eventually mutate into Neo-conservatism as we know it today.

For Strauss Politics and Philosophy were one, and he began to advocate the thought that liberalism led to relativism which in turn he insisted, eventually became one of two types of nihilism. The first of these types was “brutal nihilism” which he associated with the rise and acts of Nazi Germany. The second type was “gentle nihilism” of the types associated now with most western democracies. He thought this “gentle nihilism” involved the accentuation of the self and a kind of mindless hedonistic random individual wandering. This in turn eroded and would eventually lead to the destruction of society as the individual lost any association he or she may have had with the larger body politic of the nation. Then Strauss began to advocate what is termed the “Noble lie”. The Noble Lie involved uniting the population, and distracting them from their individual concerns with the mythic presentation of the nation in order to create and maintain a cogent, united civil society and give people meaning in their lives, meaning externalized to the other citizens of the nation, and not just restricted to the satisfaction of individual desires. The nation in this case Strauss insisted, should be America. America presented as the only great force for good in the world, a nation that should be presented to its citizens as one that eternally fought against injustice and oppression the world over, gradually transforming the world into its own mirror image, perfect and contented. This advocation of the myth that America as in effect, the worlds global policeman for good, was not for the benefits of the citizens of the world at large, but to unite the citizens of the united states itself. Paul Wolfowitz and William Crystol, two of Strauss’s students went on to become prominent Republican Neo-Conservatives and co-authors (among others) of the “Project for the New American Century” which, among other things manufactured this uniting vision of America as a force for good by advocating the toppling of Dictator du Jour Saddam Hussein.

Bernays has allot to answer for.

And so, as we dance through the threads of countries histories and individual personal lives I am led to the seemingly unavoidable conclusion that those who seek to save society through the controlling of it, eventually cause what they despise. A macrocosmic example of the principle that the more driven the effort to impose order, the faster the birth and exponential growth of chaos that is engendered within that ordered structure.

The only protection I see from it is arming yourself with the information that underlies the strategies of these people, you yourselves can choose to mutate into that seed of chaos. My own avoidance techniques have involved everything from Magickal practice, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Linguistic study, drugs, the techniques of Wilhelm Reich, Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson, plus many others. Once you realize the methods of control, and notice their uses on you, you become free to use precisely those methods, and many others (some mentioned above) to avoid being manipulated, maneuvered and controlled.

Good Luck.

All the above Key names and phrases can be researched, so please, don’t take my word for it, do your own research, and form your own conclusions.

Research references:

Wikipedia:
Various biographies

Victor Klemperer:
The Language of the Third Reich

Adam Curtis: Documentaries:
The century of Self
The Power of Nightmares

Edward Bernays:
Propaganda

Sigmund Freud:
Civilisation and its Discontents

Richard Wrangham
and Dale Peterson:
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence

and various other web pages

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

The Cosmic Trigger is Pulled and Robert Anton Wilson Departs

2007-01-12T14:18:00.000Z

above: Robert Anton Wilson recently.

Robert Anton Wilson, January 18, 1932 - January 11, 2007

Last night, as it said on the mans blog, Robert Anton Wilson Defied Medical Experts, who expected him to live for another two months, and left his body @4:50 AM on binary date 01/11.

Wilson was a driving force of energy and optimism, that even up to the transition of that energy to other form(s), never failed or weakened. Right up to the end he remained a force of love, humour, energy and perhaps most of all, intelligence.

Wilson was also, among other things a Mystic, Magician, Guerilla Ontologist, Activist, Libertarian, Drug Taker, Scientist, Joycean Scholar, Fortean, musician, stand up comedian and also, as described by himself and others, a philosopher. Over a forty year career Bob waged war against dogma, idiocy, fear and ignorance.

He was more successful on this mission than anyone else I can name. He wrote many books, including:

Prometheus Rising
Cosmic Trigger
Quantum Psychology
Sex, Drugs and Magic
Reality is what you can get away with
Ishtar Rising
The New inquisition
Everything is Under Control

These books, like Wilson himself, are all beacons of light, humour and a wonderful rationality, both mystical and mischievous, magickal and scientific. I could and will recommend them to anyone who is interested in the future positive evolution of humanity, from the macrocosm of the species to the microcosm of the individual. He educated all of us that came in contact with his work, that, as he said himself, “the universe contains a maybe.”

Wilson, I think I can say without doubt, was to me, one of the most influential and positive authors and thinkers, his ideas about what we as a species are capable of opened many doors that I would not otherwise have known existed, and put new light and a new way of perceiving on a few that I knew about already.

Wilsons last blog entry on January 6th of this year reflects his lifelong commitment to good humour and good sense, and is, a very great example to us all.

"Various medical authorities swarm in and out of here predicting I have between two days and two months to live. I think they are guessing. I remain cheerful and unimpressed. I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying.

Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd."

Of all the eulogies that I have posted on this blog, none has moved me more, or left me with a greater or more profound feeling of emptiness than having to write Wilson's.

I can only hope that anyone who reads this post that has not come into contact with his writings searches out and reads his books.

They will not tell you what to think, they will allow you to think for yourself.

Fnord!!

Take a trip to the Robert Anton Wilson homepage.

Finally, I would like to say, Goodbye Bob, and thanks for everything.

The most appropriate way to finish this post I think, is to leave you with two quotes that Bob himself attached to the end of every email, well those he was good enough to send to me anyway.

I think God is sending us a message: "If you can't take a joke,
go fuck yourselves."
--Woody Allen

Events which appear crude or offensive in the  instant
may become, with a change of perspective, somewhere between
droll and riotously funny.
Hannibal Lecter, M.D

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

Police State? What Police state?

2007-01-11T16:48:00.000Z

Reassuring isn't it?

As it says above, the image is an official British Government poster outside a London tube station. George Orwell, eat your heart out. I even bet he would have appreciated the quasi-communist-fascist 20th century poster art.

Actually, this might be a good time for us all to try an experiment.

Consider the following quotes from the book "1984" and see if you think them applicable in any way to current day life in the U.S. and the U.K.

Are you feeling comfortable?

Well then, we shall begin.

1. "“The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep the people frightened."

2. “The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.”

3. "And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

4. Referring to the Proles "Until the become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

5. "In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science.' The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc."

6. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”

Thats all for today, think about it tonight,

There will be a test.

Results may vary depending on the individual.

And Remember U.K. citizens, you are free. Free to do what they tell you.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

Travel Writing: The Leprosery

2007-01-05T12:47:00.000Z

Many years ago, when I was in College, I used to visit a friend who was studying down in Waterford town. The following is an account of a night I spent in the now demolished Waterford Infirmary (which in an earlier incarnation was a Leprosery, but mutated to a more mundane form of medical treatment when the number of Lepers in Ireland fell). The writing has been not been changed, leaving all the horrible boils and warts that were on it when pen first touched paper (as it was back in the day). The reason for this is so that the writing remains an accurate account of the way I thought all those years ago.

Enjoy.

The Leprosery

He opened the door, I smiled, it took him a second to recognise my face, and then he smiled too. I went into the house, and he made me a cup of coffee which I drank to the sound to Tom Waits. Mates hanging out. It was the best damn thing that had happened to me in weeks.

That didn’t happen, the last time we had seen each other must have been a month ago, and then we parted on frosty terms after knawing at each others necks ‘till they were red and raw.

This was to have been the joyous reunion. I boarded the train to Waterford at three O’Clock on a Saturday afternoon. I click-clacked across a patchwork of badly sewn fields for two hours. The side to side shifting of the train seemed happy with the promise of a great weekend to come. The bottle of Coke I’d brought with me grew less and less until finally, when I arrived in Waterford train station it vanished into a cloud of cigarette smoke never to be seen again.

Waterford, the sun had his hat coat and boots on, and a smile on his face. The river pushed itself dutifully under the bridge and out to sea. I took the easy way, over the bridge, and into the arteries of the town. Parched with sunlight I stopped off to drain a pint of Guinness, all the while thinking of his face - happy – disappointed – angry? All the things that I might have felt. I left the pub and walked down by the Market, the Dublin accents were still there, something I could never figure out. The reds, whites greens and oranges went well with the weather, almost hand in hand. I rounded the corner of Mall lane as the big hand rounded the twelve and still could not catch up with the little hand at the six.

Mall lane was always a country to itself, even on rainy days the houses always managed to steal some light from the afternoon. The front door was flanked by two eyes that only held a passing resemblance to windows. I knocked twice, rang four times. I stared in through an eye, his room was cleared, grey and dusty. The bed was in the front room, on top of the tattered sofa, the one which always hurt my back, everything was covered in plastic sheets, that final kind of plastic – not like a rain coat, more like a shroud – I hadn’t known about it but I’d kind of expected it. What to do? What to do? Have a cigarette for one thing, then try and figure it all out. The nicotine cleared my head of the fog long enough for the facts to start filtering their way through. No more trains and busses until tomorrow, that’s for sure, the last train was the one I came in on, and all the busses drew into their shelters an hour and a half ago. So – I could hear metaphysical laughter by this point – so, so where am I going to stay? Choices, choices, choices.

Two hours later and more phone calls than an operator on speed could count in a day, I realised I had but one option.

That option was stooped and rotting on a hill about two miles away. It was a leper hospital, a sanatorium, a placer where people had lived and died, and now it was dying itself. It’s skin was peeling like a leper, it’s eyes were bloodshot, the place was in a cold fever. Every major organ had one by one kicked in and died. The plumbing had rusted, the water, blood in the metal veins, had been cut off, and what remained was dripping out like tears of sadness. The power had been cut off and the synapses, the sockets, were scattered and shattered over the sandpaper concrete floors. The cancer of fire had licked and blackened the walls on most of the five stories.

I’d been there twice before, the first time was an adventure, with him and a few others, the second was scary, I’d been on my own. This would be the third – the last time I visited the virus of vandals had scavenged and plundered what was left of it’s dignity. Now there was probably nothing left to burn or break or steal.

I had about fifteen minutes of daylight left, to complete a twenty minute journey. It was dark by the time I got there, dark as it gets.

The rain began to fall as I arrived, a red and raw metal fence kept the hospital in isolation, away from the rest of the town. I struggled and stumbled over the metal spikes, and through the pale, streetlight yellow grass. I drew nearer to the concrete, metal and plaster corpse. It wanted to rest in peace. I was an invader here, an interloper, I was not wanted and the hospital told me so through the well water in the pit of my stomach. I struggled through a bush and over a moss covered stone wall which glowed phosphorescent in the faint and distant electric streetlight. But even that couldn’t wash the blackness of off my back. I waked round the rear of the hulking giant and then into its bowels, via a gash I myself had given it six months before. I was lucky, the gash still hadn’t healed itself up.

As I entered my struggle echoed like thunder on a quiet night. There was no light inside, no light at all. I found myself deep in an artery clogged with lime scale. Hands outstretched before me, I pushed metal creaky wheeled stretchers ahead of me and crunched old glass syringes below my feet. Five minutes, five hours….I don’t know how long it took me in that darkness to find somewhere habitable. I made my way towards the offices which I knew were two floors above. All the while trying not to look in the chambers and cells that I passed at the disconnected electroshock machines and the cat scans that had spilled their wired intestines all over the cold floors.

Finally I made it. The vandals had not been in the offices since I was last here. Papers were scattered all over the stained and ripped carpets. Strip lights hung in the orange gloom by single tendons, I had to duck to avoid touching them. Broken furniture lay splintered throughout the three rooms. The doors still doggedly remained on but opening and shutting them was impossible. The windows had seen too much and burst themselves all over the floor. I was told their story as they passed beneath my feet. Somewhere metal clattered applause at me. The echo took seconds to die away, having first to find its way out of the labyrinthine building. Cupboard doors that had been amputated from their housing were stacked against the far wall.

The newly born cold of the night started to seep in under the doors and through the windows and the cracks in the walls. Fire, I had to build a fire, a small one that couldn’t be seen from the street. A light box, once used for viewing x-rays had been stamped into a billion fragments, I couldn’t tell them from the rest of the damp debris. Only the metal casing remained, whoever did this didn’t have the time or the inclination to dismantle it. This would do as a fire place. Three cupboard doors stacked against the wall – my foot fell again and again and again, no way I could see my foot hitting them, but I could hear their bones break. The wind gave a sigh in another room on another level somewhere in this vast five story building. Kindling, I need kindling, damn it!, it’s getting colder. Sound of paper scrunching, still can’t see much, soon after twenty to thirty paper balls in the light box casing, I feel at last as if I’m getting somewhere. Fuck it, why is everything so damn cold? I reach for another bit of paper and find instead a dry mop. Pulling desperately I lay the strands over and under the paper. I strike a match, light at last, but not much, a small flame cannot burn away this much inky blackness.

I put the flame to the paper, paper takes the flame, the room becomes more friendly to my presence. At last things are going well, I lie back and light a cigarette, inhaling deeply. Warmth and light – on my skin and face – even creeping up my back and into my bones. My smoking oh so suddenly turns to choking, razors cut into my throat. I turn on my stomach, those damn chipboard doors, smoke fills my lungs like kerosene, the whole room is now poisonous, the broken windows don’t make a difference. I panic, try to stamp it out. Cinders like fireworks fill the room and add to the smoke. I’ve got to get out of here, I lunge for the metal casing, and fling it out into the asylum corridors, it rolls and clatters away from me, leaving a runway of fire behind it.

I sit shaking in the corridor listening to all the scary night noises this place can throw at me. The room starts to clear of smoke, I wait, as the embers flicker and die leaving me again in darkness. Ten minutes, twenty, thirty, I re-enter the room, each footfall shatters the silence and the glass and plastic. I go to another room in the office complex and find three unbroken chairs, I pull them together and create a makeshift bed, using my bag as a pillow. I lie down and cannot sleep, trees dance on the wall, slowly coming out of oblivion travelling painfully across the width of my vision and dying, only to be reincarnated when another set of headlights tops the hill.

Metal hits metal somewhere in the darkness, it turns me into a rod of steel for fifteen minutes then when I finally begin to relax I hear the same noise again. I find myself holding a steel bar in defence, to stop whatever it is, whoever it is, from getting me. Please God, just let me sleep, just let me close my eyes and when I open them again let it be morning, the creaking bones and the dead feeling behind my eyes will be worth it just to see morning.

Silence.

So I have a cigarette, I’ve got enough to last me, this packet and three more in my bag. After five cigarettes and the feeling that something died in my mouth, I finally get to the point where I can relax and lie back.

The hospital creaks and groans in remembrance of the sadness of the past, it remembers the people who died here and those who were born here, the children who cried here with the needles in their veins and the chemicals in their blood. Somewhere down in the basement plunged in darkness with its two foot walls, the old cook rattles his pots and pans and the chains that have kept his spirit in this deserted kitchen for one hundred years now. His rhythm lulls me into sleep.

Morning breaks like its just climbed out of a fridge, my bones ache, a layer of hospital smell covers my body. I walk, I walk, and creak and hobble down to the nicotine stained station café. I breathe a sigh of relief as I board the train and write this.

I’ve still got a chip of the Hospitals crumbling plaster on my shoulder.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Liberty and Security

2006-12-20T14:30:00.000Z

Well, it's official, the knee jerk reaction to this countries (Ireland) rising organized crime problem has almost succeeded in wiping out what remains of what we once described as "Justice".

The old truism has finally manifested itself, there is no Justice, there's just us.

Gun crime has indeed increased in this country, this is due to a number of reasons, among which are the decomisioning and abandonment of Military campaigns by Militant groups in Ireland allowing their firearms to make it to the street, augmented by other factors like the changing demographics as many new cultures endeavour to make their home here, and of course the increased demand for cocaine. Cocaine demanded by, amongst other individuals, the fine solicitors of Ireland (at least two of whom I have actually seen imbibe the substance who will inevitably be applauding these recent decisions.)

Der ReichsFuhrer SS, sorry Justice Minister Michael McDowell as a response to the rising gun crime rate, the hysterical overreaction of the media, and the impending General Election has, in a body of new laws that resemble the American Rico Act of the 1970's decided to destroy many of the civil rights we take for granted.

It's the old story of loosing Liberty for Security. Didn't some American comment once on just such an exchange? Ah yes, I think it was Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

The proposed changes to our "justice" system will soon remove the right to silence of a suspect (a spin off of earlier anti-terrorist laws, where if an individual could not be proven to be a terrorist, his silence in response to questions would be taken as guilt, thus allowing a member of the police force to merely point and say, "he's a terrorist" which would be enough to secure a conviction). Also gone with the wind is a suspects right to have a trial by jury, leaving the decision to the Judge and whatever individual foibles he may have.

There are additional less concerning, though still worrying provisions that include the right to prevent a suspects release on bail whilst a trial is pending and allow full disclosure of a suspects criminal history during the trial.

Civil Liberties groups are described as being understandably "concerned". Really? concerned about the new abilities that allow the Government and its agents to condemn you to jail for undetermined amounts of time by merely pointing the finger at you, and saying that you are a "criminal".

Of course a Jury would throw this out of court, well, they would if you were still entitled to a Jury.

Perhaps it might be better to actually ensure that proper police work is actually done when dealing with these violent and ruthless criminals, police work that actually turns up what is known as "evidence" in order to put them away. This would thus make the streets safer whilst actually allowing the innocent to wander the streets without fear of arrest and imprisonment on the whim, grudge or impulse of an Officer of the law.

Or is that too forward thinking?

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

Gods in the Hills.

2006-12-20T11:37:00.000Z

Image © Nicole Storck 2006.

Lady Wicklow shakes off her browns and greens this time of year only to reappear with a ruddy and sanguine coat pulled tight around her neck against the cold. It's a breathtaking season, that I have, thankfully over many years been able to enjoy from Wicklows frozen heart.

The wonderful thing about this time of year is that all we are required to do in order to capture at least some of its majesty is point and click.

I'm quite looking forward to my ascent of Tongalee which should be occurring sometime between Christmas and New Years. This time of the season, if you pay attention you can almost hear the breath of the land, inhaling and exhaling, belly moving in time with her breathing, as her mist drifts across the summits of the hills.

This anthropomorphism of Wicklow's ecology is, as I'm sure you probably suspect, not a new thing.

As a matter of fact, at the summit of Tongalee if you pause and look out across the valleys Eastward, you can see what the Pre-Christians used to call "the breasts of Danu" (or Brigit, depending on which books you read or which tribes cosmology you feel like subscribing to). A quattuorvirate of hills which the ancient tribes took as the physical personification of the mother goddess archetype, head, belly and breasts. This was where many religious and magickal rituals were performed to honour the land and its constant cycle of rebirth and death, right on her "bellys" apex.

Thanks to Nicole for the wonderful image.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Anarchist Disaster Relief

2006-12-12T12:35:00.000Z

I was just on my usual perambulations of the interwub, when I came across this article.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/116789.html

I no longer live in America, but that hardly counts with the speed of information nowadays it is as easy to keep up with current events as if my physical presence still resided in NYC. The news feeds I have been monitoring, regularly comment on how Anarchists, Burners etc are pretty much ineffective at doing anything that actually changes things for the better. These people are mostly seen as good natured hippies, hipsters and ehm, even Neophiles out to have a good time and pontificate about how they are changing the world, or planning do so, without, well, doing so.

Being of a Techno-Anarchist bent, I both agree with and despair of these comments. The above link gives me hope, and demonstrates how co-operation, imagination and dare I say it, even anarchism can coalesce and make a difference to peoples lives. Read the article, and realize that the co-operation is the natural state of humans, and not, as we may have been led to believe, competition.

Welcome to the work of the "Common Ground Collective"

It's a great example of Burners, Anarchists and various middle class counter culture types actually taking the initiative and creating a service that in many ways goes past what FEMA and the Red Cross are doing down in whats left of New Orleans. Its pretty much a "fuck you" to the naysayers.

Disaster relief as Civil Disobedience, many of the projects that these guys and girls have been up to, violate the law as it stands. They help people with medical, food and reconstruction aid and set up in areas that have not been "cleared" by the authorities, and reconstruct buildings that legally need a permit to do any work on, many times the Common Ground volunteers do not have said permit, but they do have the owners permission, and help. Common sense over bureaucracy.

When the Government has fucked up, its time to Fuck the government and do it yourself.

Anarchists functioning in an area where Government has completely failed.

Idealism turned to pragmatism.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

2006-11-24T11:59:00.000Z

Dance Monkeys, Dance.

Fast Fiction: Cut to the Future.

2006-11-14T14:18:00.000Z

It, the blood, pools at his feet, his thirteen year old feet. Life sucked from flesh, to give life to flesh. White tiles reflect his face as he bends to the mop and paints the red in swathes across the floor.

Sounds of suction and flash of steel gone now for an hour, Paul is left alone in the vaulted room, the room that ascends into darkness beyond the halogen lights suspended above a steel operating table.

The arteries and veins that make up the anesthiologists equipment, coiled like intestines in the corner of the room. "He makes me do this, I make myself do this." Paul thinks

Day after day, week after week Paul witness's the charnel house that is modern medicine. He witness's brothers, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, friends and cousins being transformed from breathing personalities into examples of the surgeons art.

Into examples of his fathers art.

Bisected with incisions sealed with stitches, the doll makers art.

Sometimes he is let watch.

"Sometimes he makes, no that’s wrong, sometimes he lets me watch. This man hardly seems like my father, tall and obscured in resplendent white, that gradually turns to red as the grand guignol humour grows with every incision, with every clamp, with every suture. But every day he becomes less my father, and more that hunched creature of my dreams with its small silver box of surgical tools."

This is how the boy spends his Summer holidays.

The precious time when others, beyond those hospital walls date girls, get drunk, party, and explore the terrain of LetterKenny, its parks, alleyways and coast. The endless variation of teenage years, of teenage exploration. As these teens explore their world, and their identities, Paul sees only red.

As white clouds in time lapse photography speed overhead to the accompaniment of wind chimes, Paul in his fathers surgical dungeon fills white bins full of medical waste, of rotten sections of bowel, of flailed kidneys, of gangrened and necrotic limbs.

The only girls he gets to see are those that lie pale and silent, fluorescent in the glow of the halogen. From a distance, from the corner of his small world, hidden in the shadows, he watches their pale breasts rise and fall, and from below, he hears, but does not see the work of the surgeons knife as it pushes into virgin flesh, tearing through the derma and below, through the organs. All the time, the breasts rising and falling in time with his own breathing, in time with his hand, friction against his crotch. No one else in the theatre sees, this he knows, all eyes are on the patient, and the incessantly beeping cardiographs that tell them they are still in no danger of a malpractice suit.

At home there is not even the noise of the ventilator, nor the light of the halogen lamps. At home there is not even books.

There is only Father, sitting in silence at the head of the table, he glances up, and begins to whisper grace. Then leaning over his paper and chewing each slice of rare meat forty times before swallowing. Paul counts each chew in his head, one, two, three...and on and on. The boy has long finished his meal by the time his father has swallowed the last piece of masticated flesh, but he is not permitted to leave the table without fathers permission. He lowers his head and waits for the baritone of Father to give the permission he needs so every night.

And so it goes.

But where does Paul go? As bones grow, sinews strengthen and the boy becomes a man, he goes forward in time, toward the end of his education, and further into all our nightmares.

The Doctor will see you now.

Peace and Hope

Fathercrow

Stephon Marbury's Starburys

2006-09-07T15:15:00.000Z

National Basketball League stars have a long history of product association, every one from Michael Jordan, Kobe and Lebron have all had shoes named after them. Allot of these guys come from "the ghetto" and basketball is one of the few ways out of the pit of poverty for them. Only it seems that when most of them make it, the only thing they have on their minds is making as much money as possible in the short sporting careers they have.

The conventional wisdom of sneaker makers is that kids will only want exclusive and prohibitievley expensive sneakers, thus putting them in an elite Club. Stephon Marbury professional basketballer for the New York Knicks has decided to challenge the conventional industry wisdom, and in so doing remember and support the poor neighborhood that he emerged from, and all other poor neighborhoods for that matter.

The new Starbury basketball shoe costs a mere fifteen dollars and they're no cheap pieces of shit either, Marbury himself wears them on the court. In the words of the man himself "Two hundred to buy a pair of sneakers? That's groceries for the week,". So far the shoes are only sold in the US discount chain store Steve and Berry's, which makes a point of ensuring that a family can be clothed for the year on one hundred dollars. Apparently there is now a "two for one" limit on the shoes, two pairs for one customer no more. Queue's are apparently already forming around the various blocks where the stores are located.

No news on when the shoes are coming to Europe, but when they do, I'm gonna go out and get myself a pair (the ones in black are particlarly smooth). "History is going to say Stephon Marbury changed the game." says Marbury, we can forgive him the arrogance I think, the boy's doing good.

Check out the man and the shoes at: http://www.starbury.com

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

New 9/11 Bullshit Smokescreen Security Alerts.

2006-08-16T15:09:00.000Z

Are you scared? are you really really scared?

Good, they hope so, they hope you're scared of 10 different planes blowing up, of fellow passengers with liquid explosive disguised as toothpaste, of detonators that can be anything from pagers to walkmans, they hope you're really fucking scared. They hope you're too scared to think about domestic problems, they hope you don't even leave your fucking home.

There are BAD PEOPLE, Evildoers if you will, and they're out there, somewhere, possibly everywhere, and don't you forget it.

Remember the only people who can protect you are the Labor party of Britain and the Neoconservatives of the U.S.A.

I call Bullshit.

I call Bullshit on this recent "Red Alert" and you know why? Cause I have FACTS on my side, because if I didn't this would be just a lone looney ranting into the wind. Because I have FACTS on my side I can say all of this, and still be a sane, though angry member of society.

First off let me start with these Terrorists that were going to plant bombs this week. Did you know that none of them had any explosives, or anthing that can be used for making explosives. Its kind of hard for something to blow up if there is nothing to blow it up with, would you agree, good, now we can move on.

Secondly, none of these "Terrorists" had bought plane tickets, and most of these guys didn't even have passports. Not having passports makes it kind of hard to get on a plane. So far we are left with a number of "Terrorists" that couldn't travel with no bombs. Considering the huge backlog that the U.K. passport agency has to deal with, an immediate terrorist alert might be a little presumtive, right? No matter what these idiots may have waffled on about in internet chat rooms.

So, how did these vicious terrorists get nailed, and who nailed them. Well, all the "evidence" came from the "interrogation" of one man, one man who was on the run from the U.K. for the murder of his uncle. Pakistan by the way, is famed for its use of torture in "interrogations". So a guy who really, really, really does not want to go back to England, in a country famed for torture turns up a large conspiracy which a year of investigation failed to find any evidence of a plot to blow up planes.... getting suspicious at all yet?

I sure as hell am.

Remember NONE of this has anything to do with the fact that both Bush and Blair are almost being hung from their heels domestically with popularity that is rapidly falling into the toilet. Especially Blair who has been wrangling with his own party over the leadership of the labor party, and in turn the Prime Ministership of the U.K.

Racism and Fear for political ends, who woulda thunk it?

By the way, the man who first put me onto this curious internet find is Craig Murray, the former U.K. Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan and his little eye opener can be found here.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

2006-08-11T09:42:00.000Z

George Galloway Savages SKY NEWS!

Say what you want about Galloway personally, you can't argue with his grasp on the facts, or indeed his historical perspective.

Its just nice to hear another perspective, no matter how firebrandish it may appear, no?

Peace and Hope

Fathercrow.

In Celebration and Commemoration of a Wedding.

2006-07-24T08:37:00.000Z

(R and N on their big day)

In celebration of my oldest Friends Wedding to the girl of her dreams, the speech I gave at the celebration of her nuptials.

Friends:

As is traditional for a man in my present position, I have been asked to say a few words. Contrary to tradition, they will indeed be few.

I have known R a long time. I'm fond of saying that we were pushed around in prams together, and though we may not in fact go back that far, it's pretty close. R is, bar members of my immediate family, the individual I have known the longest in my thirty four years on this planet. Even beyond that, she is my oldest friend. Thus she is one of the few people I have ever known whom I feel capable of standing up in public and, in effect, passing judgement on.

Throughout our long and not uneventful friendship, we have seen each other through some very good, and indeed some very bad times. Through all these times, she has shown herself to be a person of many qualities. These qualities, for those of you who know her, will be familiar. R is, and has shown herself to me, over and over again through the years, as being capable of endless love, ferocious loyalty, unyeilding principles, tremendous humour, and a deep and almost overwhelming humanity. She can burn the fear and hopelessness out of you in the darkest situations with little other than a smile. These are qualities which, in my mind, are the pillars of a marriage or public commitment, that will last, as the saying goes, till "death do us part".

And surely in these days of history accelerating to the point where it speeds past us in a blur, while we watch with shielded eyes. Where institutions created hundreds of years ago that are no longer relevant crumble, and new creations, social structures and traditions are born, the most important thing, the thing that will allow us to cope and thrive in this relentlessly changing environment, is to have someone there who has "got our back", who will look out for us as we will look out for them, in love, honour and friendship. I cannot think of a better partner in crime to see a person through this tumultous and ever evolving time, than R.

N, I also know and consider a good friend, but as you might imagine, I know her considerably less well than R, but well enough to say this, in marrying R, she deserves everything she is going to get.

Thank you, a toast to the Bride and Bride, a traditional toast at a non-traditional wedding, LONG LIFE AND HAPPINESS.

(names above truncated as always, because I have no idea who the Hell you web people are.)

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Death takes a Diamond

2006-07-11T14:26:00.000Z

Syd (Roger Keith) Barrett.

Syd Barrett, seminal musical artist, founding member of Pink Floyd and recluse passed away due to diabetes this July 7th 2006.

It seems the only thing that will shake me out of this dark miasma nowadays is when someone I respect dies.

Syd Barrett was one of those men.

Syd joined Pink Floyd in 1965, sang, played lead guitar and wrote all but one song on their debut and inimitable album "Piper at the Gates of Dawn". Syd named the Pink Floyd after old bluesman Pink Anderson and another blues musician named Floyd "Dipper Boy" Council, which was at least in my mind preferable to the previous names the group had, names like "Architectural Abdabs" and "the Megadeaths". The Floyd started off by covering American blues standards, but then Barrett took acid for the first time, and the writing that ensued almost single handedly created the English Psychedellic sound.

Unfortunatly Barrett, whilst experimenting with large amounts of LSD (girls apparently enamoured with him and the legend he was creating even started dropping acid into his drinks on a regular basis) triggered a latent schitzophrenia that grew more and more in control of his life as the bands popularity grew. Many report seeing Barrett on stage with the group, strumming on one chord through entire concerts, or purposly detuning his guitar, or, more often than not, not playing at all. As the groups popularity grew the delicate and incresingly deraged Syd joined the group on a disastourous US tour, that had to be abandoned as a result of Syds behaviour (which continued in much the same fashion as it had before, only this time on US national television shows.). After this show the brief five man pink floyd toured, with the groups friend David Gilmoure taking over the guitar parts which Syd by this time, rarely played. The group at this point considered keeping Syd on as a songwriter (as he, up until this point had produced most of the groups material). This did not come to pass. Eventually one day, the group just did not stop in the van to pick him up. The Pink Floyd went on to become a very different creature in years to come. The last recorded contribution to the Pink Floyd that Barrett made was the haunting "Jugband Blues" which appeared on the follow up to "Piper" "A Saucerfull of Secrets." which was an effective chronology of his mental disintegration.

After he was exiled from the Floyd, Barrett however was not at this point completely unproductive. Between 1968 and 1972 (the year I was born) Barrett pursued a solo career, or at least a couple of solo projects. The first of these projects was his inital solo album "The Madcap Laughs" (one of the photos from the Madcap sessions is the image associated with this article). "Madcap" was just that, a collection of mad, fragile, lonely and isolated songs that truly reflected his state of mind, notably "Dark Globe" an inside out look of his mental illness. "Madcap" was produced mostly by his old band members Roger Waters (the composer of "The Wall") and David Gilmore (the guitarest who replaced Syd in the Floyds lineup). There has been much controversy and discussion about the inclusion of Barrets more vulnerable moments before and after tracks, apparently to give the album a more "authentic" feel. The songs themselves are timeless, and all are classics.

The follow up album "Barrett" was recorded between February and July 1970, the cover of which was drawn in Barretts own hand, regimented lines of insects span the front, a parallel of his still fragile and fragmented mind. The sound of this album is more polished, but it fails to conceal the even more degenerative state of Barretts Schitzophrenia.

After the "Barrett" album was released, he appeard on John Peels top gear, and played five songs, one of which had already been released.

Barrett played one more gig, at Londons Corn Exchage, where his head hung down away from his guitar, and the mike, which made his singing inaudible. After four songs, Barrett politely put down his guitar, and walked off stage.

In 1974, Peter Jenner (once Floyd manager) talked Barrett into returning to Abbey Road in the hope of recording another album. Nothing of real note became of the sessions, which lasted three days where Syd mostly did riffs of blues rhythm tracks with faltering and disjointed guitar (the only titled track is the fascinating "If You Go, Don't Be Slow").

Once again, Barrett withdrew from the music industry into reclusivity. Though he died at sixty, Syd is preserved in the minds of most in his Glory Days, early twenties and more beautiful than Jim Morrison.

After the last sessions Syd sold the rights of the music back to the record company and moved into a London Hotel until the money ran out. Then, with no cash, he walked, from London, back to his mothers basement in Cambridge, where he continued to live until his death a few days ago.

He reverted to his first art love, painting, and created several large canvasses, but he never picked up a guitar again, save to strum it. He cut himself off from all except his family. Even then however, fans from the past, and paparrazzi followed him to his home town and every few years from the early 80's on he was occassionally photographed cycling to and from the shops. Syd never liked being reminded of his rock-star past and resented any reminders, it was for this reason that no member of Pink Floyd ever decided to visit him at home.

Syd "Roger Keith" Barrett left behind a menagerie of fragile, crystalline songs that will ring true through the many years to come, and map a past of beauty, love, and isolation.

You would do well to pick up his albums for they can tell us much about how fragile, and how beautiful we are.

Syd, Roger, Rest In Peace.

You brought us such Wonder.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

Invasion of the Plant Girl

2006-06-16T10:25:00.000Z

Plants parasitize Girl, Girl starts to mutate into plant.

Jesus suffering fuck

http://english.pravda.ru/science/health/9418-0/

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Psycho's Path.....

2006-05-08T10:51:00.000Z

above: the bus that tried to murder me.

"Ah sure, smoking kills but you could get hit by a bus tomorrow." that thought kept spinning round my mind, again and again as I was lying on the roadside patch of grass. I had just narrowly avoided being turned into roadkill by the psychopath who yesterday stole a bus and caused carnage on the streets of Dublin city.

I was seriously considering taking back up the smokes.

A calm sunny Sunday afternoon, I had risen about 12 and had just woken myself up with a morning brew of caffine. The birds were singing, contentedly and all seemed well with the world. After my coffee, M who was studying decided to send me off to get the Sunday times, it was going to be a good day, one to recharge my batteries in. So as I walked down Aughavanagh road, whistling to myself contentedly I had no idea of the situation I was soon to be facing just a little down the road.

It was about 1pm.

Earlier that day, across the city in Rathcoole at 6.40am the driver (who according to reports had spent some time in a mental hospital) arrived early for his 7am shift at the Dualway coaches bus depot. He had an argument at the depot, the driver took the wrong bus, and without authorisation. He then drove the coach to Heuston station where he tried to murder (with the bus) a man associated with the bus company owner. He failed and made his escape with Garda (the Irish Police force) in pursuit.

At its height, the chase involved 40 cop cars, a helecopter and at least one black mariah. The Gards fired seven shots at the bus's tyres and tried to immobilise the bus with stingers, a total of four times.

All these attempts failed.

Meanwhile, I was on my way for the papers, I had decided since the local Spar was almost certainly out of The Sunday Times, my best chance would be down the road, in the Maxol Station by the Grand Canal. I was crossing the road by that station when the psychopathic fucker handbrake turns around the goddamn corner in his fucked up bus (the left hand headlight and the panels surrounding it were at this point torn off by some kind of impact) at about seventy miles an hour, the rear end fishtailing sickeningly left to right as he barrelled towards me.

I at this point was in the middle of the road, staring dead ahead as grill of the bus drew down on me, and didn't know which way the nutter was going turn that monster. I had about a 1/4 of a second to make a decision as to which way I was going to jump, I jumped instinctively to the right, which turned out to be to the decision that saved my life, over a small wall and landed in a patch of roadside grass. I was just sitting up as the bus screamed its way around the next corner and disappeared out of sight. Then came the caterwalling of what later turned out to be forty or so cop sirens. Many cars raced past, then a black mariah and then two more special branch cars.

I was shaken, to be honest, it's been about five years since anyone tried to kill me, guess I'm just not used to it anymore.

After I had regained my wits, I crossed the road, somewhat unsteadily I might add, and picked up a copy of the paper. On the way back, a man who had been smoking outside a pub by the garage saw me, "It's getting like new York" the man said, all I could do was look at him blankly and mutter "I lived in New York for a couple of years, saw gunfights, crack, smack, lunatics shooting up trains, but never in my life DID SOME PSYCHOPATH IN A BUS TRY TO KILL ME!", I guess I was still a little overwrought at this point.

The Bus itself continued up to the Naas Road, where it drove the wrong way up the dual carrigeway, smashed into a womans car, and dragged the car and the corpse 20 yards down the dual carriageway to near the bluebell bus stop. Witnesses could not believe what was happening. Brendan Flynn, a man who was there to witness the first of the Garda cars try to block the bus's path on the carriageway managed to pull most of the motorists from their cars before the impact, he did not make it to the dead woman's car in time, but did save many other lives by his prompt and brave actions. By the time that had happened the bus had already smashed its way through two garda vans and a garda car, the occupants of which had not managed to pull themselves out in time.

Total score by this deranged "Grand Theft Auto" madman, one dead and fourteen injured.

As for myself, I got back, amazed at my survival, which was ensured only by my inability to freeze under pressure (something which I always wondered whether I would do), sat down, and realized for one of the first times in my life, I was actually pleased to see the boys in Blue.

Getting the Sunday papers is now an extreme sport in Dublin, though I think as a result of it, or rather as a result of my amazement at being alive this morning, my breakfast tasted pretty damn good.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Cúchulainn of the North Side

2006-04-11T08:44:00.000Z

Darren Healy stars in "Crush Proof " a mythic parable set in 1998 Dublin. A flawed but ambitious Irish movie set in my home town.

Hooda Neil (Darren Healy) gets out of jail (Mountjoy) and tries to see his son, the mother tries to bar the door of her flat to him, and things rapidly get out of control from there. "Crushproof" travels, mostly on horseback from the decaying concrete of inner city flats to the mean streets of council estates and finally, climactically, out to the wildes of Wicklow.

"Crushproof" is at once another modern story from the underclass of Dublin, a story of an unemployed working class Dublin sociopath in the jaws of the Celtic Tiger, an Irish Dublin Western and a legend of ancient Irish heroes.

The director (Paul Tickell) throws everything including the kitchen sink at the cinematic wall in the hope that something sticks, and surprisingly most do, but there are moments of glaring awkwardness in the script and some dreadful miscasting (specifically Viviana Verveen as Nuala.)

"Crushproof" works well as cinematic metaphor of the harshness of todays Dublin underclass and their dead end lives and our own ancient heroes who fought like lions despite the inevitable violent death. It looks like someone (specifically script writers John Edwards and James Mathers ) finally saw the parable between the "thug" mentality of Dublin's Lumpenproletariat and our own mythic heroic past. You don't really pick up on the parable till some time into the film, but when you do, the story's bone structure grows into the same as you read in many an Irish myth. The comrades in Arms, the forces of the enemy, the destructive female relationships, and the death of the Sun hero, all there. It's a weird surprise but as my mate Marzy will know if he gets around to watching this, the spirit of "Hyla" lives on.

"Crushproof" boasts a good soundtrack and some great performances, however the director tried too many different techniques, as a result of this the film manages to be both stylised and verite at different points depending on what was thought was needed for the scene. Unfortunately the styles do not seamlessly blend. Also in some moments the mixture of the "humour of the damned" and the more serious scenes are juxtaposed to the point of being jarring and not helping the flow of the film.

Still all in all I would give this gets a seven (out of the IMDB's ten) being at once in touch with both our ancient and modern Irish identities. Many, many great and truthful moments, that do not all hang together comfortably as a film. With any luck the spirit of audacity and originality that got this film made will be harnessed for many more, and if that's the case, the Irish film industry has a while to go before it stagnates into a Hollywood like mire of medocrity and banalness.

"Crushproof" is a must see if you're from or living in Dublin, bone jarring truth through parable.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

The Death of the American Dream

2006-04-03T15:12:00.000Z

Robert Fisk reports:

"In Australia a few days ago, I opened The Sydney Morning Herald. It told me, on page six, that AP, using the US Freedom of Information Act, had forced US authorities to turn over 5 000 pages of transcripts of hearings at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

One of them records the trial of Feroz Abbasi, a British prisoner who has since been released, in which Abbasi vainly pleads with his judge, a US air force colonel, to reveal the evidence against him, something he says he has a right to hear under international law. And here is what the American colonel replied:

"Mr Abbasi, your conduct is unacceptable and this is your absolute final warning. I do not care about international law. I do not want to hear the words 'international law'. We are not concerned about international law."

Alas, these words - which symbolise the very end of the American dream - are buried down the story."

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Stanislaw Lem is Dead

2006-03-28T09:37:00.000Z

Stanislaw Lem died Monday in his native Poland, his secretary said. He was 84.

Lem was one of the most visionary of 20th century science fiction authors. He wrote in a language other than English, and his works were translated from Polish into more than 40 other languages.

Lems books have sold 27 million copies.

His best-known work, Solaris, was adapted into films by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. The latter starred George Clooney and Natascha McElhone.

His first important novel, Hospital of the Transfiguration, was censored by communist authorities for eight years before its release in 1956 amid a thaw following the death of Josef Stalin.

Lem also covered topics that would not be unfamiliar to Phillip K. Dick, who reported Lem to the FBI in 1964 as an undercover KGB operative who was using Science Fiction to spread Soviet Propaganda, and that he intended to kidnap Dick himself. The troubled Dick was at the time having one of his "difficult" periods.

If you are to read any Lem, try tracking down either "Solaris" or "the Futurological congress" the latter might be a little hard to find in the shops, as shortsighted stockists tend to only carry Solaris due to the recent movie.

With each obituary I post on this blog, I wonder, as I keep my ear pressed to the ground for the distant rumble of genius, who is replacing these people.

The spirit of the 20th century is nearly dead, and the new millenium begins to crawl, and its newborn visionaries with it. I wait with baited breath for their arrival, tearing through our collective cultural membrane.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Chinese create Concentration Camps for adherants of Falun Gong

2006-03-15T10:23:00.000Z

The Irish Falun Gong Information Centre received shocking, detailed information on Wednesday from a Chinese Communist Party insider documenting a concentration camp set up in Shenyang city, Liaoning province, expressly for Falun Gong practitioners.

"The Irish Falun Gong Information Centre received shocking, detailed information on Wednesday from a Chinese Communist Party insider documenting a concentration camp set up in Shenyang city, Liaoning province, expressly for Falun Gong practitioners. The news comes on the heels of the U.S. Department of States 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, released Wednesday; the report documents continued, systematic abuses of the Falun Gong in China.

Information about the camp was relayed via audio recording from a former intelligence agent of the Chinese government. It is the first time news of the secret camps existence was disclosed to outsiders. The camp is said to hold over 6,000 Falun Gong adherents at any given time, and nobody has yet come out from it alive. According to the source, it contains a crematorium, and an unusually large number of doctors work there reflecting the camps practice of killing prisoners for their organs, which are then sold for profit.

The source tried to convey the horror of what is happening in the concentration camp: Why was a crematorium built, and why are so many doctors housed there? & The answer is something unimaginable. You must be clear that a cremator for bodies is different than a burner used for sanitation purposes. "

Have we learnt nothing from the 20th century?

Click the link above for the full horrifying story.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

NeuroMagickal Programming

2006-02-13T17:00:00.000Z

No such thing as Reality people, only Realities.

We each manufacture and manifest our own reality to a great extent, and are even capable of manifesting our will in physical space.

So, take a hint from the venerable old Mr. Wilson, and don't program your life into a slum, life can do that for you if you don't take precautions. Here's some hints and tips on defending your home.

The Eight Basic Winner Scripts*

1. The biosurvival winner:
"I will live forever or die trying."

2. The emotional-territorial winner:
"I am free; you are free; we can have our separate trips or we can have the same trip."

3. The semantic winner:
"I am learning more about everything, including how to learn more."

4. The sociosexual winner:
"Love, and do what thou wilt." (Anon. of Ibid)

5. The neurosomatic winner:
"How I feel depends on my neurological knowhow."

6. The metaprogramming winner:
"I make my own coincidences, synchronicities, luck, and Destiny."

7. The neurogenetic winner:
"Future evolution depends on my decisions now."

8. The neuroatomic winner:
"In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true, or becomes true within certain limits to be learned by experience and experiment." (Dr.John Lilly)

*(scipt as in the programming sense)

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

Blog Reactivatied.

2006-01-16T09:34:00.000Z

All:

Sorry about the long Hiatus, but unless all you wanted to read about was my whinging, well you should be glad that I didn't write anything.

Still, don't expect anything until at least the 26th of Feb, as I'm away to the wildes of Finland, but you can console yourself that I should have a bit to natter about when I get back. In fact, during the five weeks that this blog has been out of action, I have amassed quite a few stories and tales to send you away to bed. So hang on, good things come to those who wait, and I know you good people have waited quite the while, but hang on it there, it'll be worth it I tell ya.

If you're new to the blog, I guarantee there are some interesting posts below, and in the archives.

I hope you all check back occassionally.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

Sci-Fi: The Flame of Infinite Possibility

2006-01-13T11:13:00.000Z

The whole of Potsdam seemed to shake on that terrible morning in 1931.

Passer's by said of the Heim houshold that the idyllic wooden strutted German house almost reared up like a horse that had been shot. The shockwaves dropped several of Potsdams citizens to their knees as that terrible blow washed over them. As the ringing in their ears dropped to a constant sigh, a woman, in the grip of a terrible hysteria ran from the house, her son, she knew now, had been experimenting with exposives.

During world war II when he was 19 an essay Heim had written about explosives led to his working briefly in a chemical laboratory as an explosives technician, during his tenure there A terrifying explosion in the laboratory was caused by the mishandling of unstable compounds abandoned him with appalling injuries and crippling handicaps.

That was the day that Burkhard Heim, the boy who would turn into the man that would change the world, was really born, not in 1925, but years later in blinding gunpowder and flash. These were not to be the only explosions in Burkhards life. Germany, was then in the grip of a change that would forever change humanities view of its own nature, and Heim would be part of that and many other changes.

Burkhard the child had wanted to be that most elusive of birds, the phoenix, the rocket scientist. To help him on his way, his parents had allowed him to conduct some early "experiments" in the family home's basement. Now, reality, evil luck, and childish incompetence had tried to burn that dream away.

The explosion left Berkhard with no hands, forearms, and some said, the loss of up to ninety percent of his hearing and eyesight. Burkhard turned in the matter of those few fatefull seconds, from a curious and bright eyed boy into a freak that would be lucky to survive the impending third reich.

For many years our boy Burkhard raged and wailed against this terrible fate, cursing the Gods from the heavens and retreating into his own private world. A world which talked only of escape, escape from the bounds of this frail and terrible existence he had been thrown into by the fury of Aries. The god, who would loom over most of Burkards life as a terrible spectral portent of death, and carry with him the stench of burning human flesh.

Burkhard, maimed and physically deformed though he was, had an edge to him that was sharper than any sword. Outwardly he would forever remain a freak, but inwardly there was a flame stronger and brighter than the explosion that had in a white streak of hate torn his arms from him. Burkhard had a flame of intelligence within that would take him far beyond the tattered remanents of his body and senses.

Burkhard, after years of painful, crippling growth that took him through, and saved him from the endless, savage years of world war two. He had seen so much, so much death, and pain, and suffering. So many explosions and burns that he felt that the human race was evolving into something more like him. And he pittied them for it. After the war, his razor intelligence, and his father's money managed to scrape together a place in the revered university of Göttingen.

He was to study physics.

There in Göttinggen, amonst the test tubes, bunsen burners, endless iterations of theories and algorythems, Burhard found his calling which nurtured his need for escape, then Burhard slowly and painfully as was the compass of his life, began to devlop his theory of the Hyperspace Drive. He willfully ignored General relativity, throwing Newton broken and bewildered to the side. He decided to harness the potentially far more powerfull Quantum forces. Forces which, he dreamed, would take him from the burnt and desolate surface of the earth to the distant stars.

His only other solace was his new wife.

For years he struggled with the glass sculpture abstractions of the mathematics that imprisoned him, but when he stared at the symbols long enough, sometimes, just sometimes he could see a means of escape, defying the oppressive force of gravity he had a vision of humans stretching their wings and travelling to distant stars.

He saw humans on distant planets, and perhaps, he even saw himself on the farthest planet in his imagination, in a lush green wilderness, spared the endless mocking eyes of other humans.

Burhard took the first step in his magnificent journey in the finned glow of the Commie hating, rock and rolling 1950's when he started, slowly, developing the idea of the hyperdrive.

Heim re-wrote the equations of general relativity, added a two dimentsional "Sub-Space" to the four dimensions. He claimed that it was possible to convert electromagnetic energy into gravitational and back again, and speculated that a rotating magnetic field could reduce the influence of gravity on a spacecraft enough for it to take off.

As he worked, helped by his father and wife, who replaced his senses, his theories multiplied and many knowledgeable men heard of him, men who were themselves trying to break free from the bonds of this world and make it out to the black. It is said that nobel laureats and Werner Von Braun came to him, and asked him if the Saturn rocket project was a waste of time, for he had heard it whispered that Burkhard would make the dimensions touch, and take us across to out nearest stars in as little as ninety days, and to the moon by teatime.

Burkhard the cripple, the freak, the visionary hated the visitors, hated their quests, perhaps because of his deformaties, perhaps because he did not want his work stolen. This fear was not just irrational paranoia as an article in Magazine for Missiles indicated various aerospace and ordnance companies had made several attempts to kidnap him. Burkhard never learnt English for that very reason, and wrote much of his papers in code so that men like Werner and the other more unscrupulous individuals could not steal away his dreams and his secrets.

Heim eventually realised that nothing would come of his theories in his lifetime, not because they were wrong, but because the group consensus of science had drifted away from his vision, and General relativity instead of Quantum physics was being used to propel the chariots of the black.

His dream of escape died then.

From that point on, in sadness and in response to requests for more information about the theory behind the predictions, he spent all his time detailing his ideas in three books published only in German. And then as far as the world was concerned, he faded from view, and disappeared into the final vanishing point of the black, not space as he had always dreamed but death, cold, cold death.

It was many years later, when the first of his books came to the attention of a retired Austrian patent officer called Walter, that the hyperspace propulsion idea came back to life.

Walter looked again at Heim's ideas and produced an "extended" version, resurrecting the dimensions that Heim originally discarded. The result was "Heim-Dröscher space", a mathematical description of an eight-dimensional universe.

Word then spread to Hamburg,where the university there implemented Heim's theorem in a computer program, it predicted masses of fundamental particles that matched the measured values almost perfectly. If this was true they thought, why not the rest of it.

And then the U.S. military got involved.............

The End.

Or is it, this trashy cliched piece of science fiction, which would have difficulty being sold to the American Sci-Fi pulps of the 1950's is actually a true story.

Would I lie to you? well perhaps, but New Scientist wouldn't.

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and you never know what either is going to give you.

Here endeth the lesson.

Peace and Hope

Fathercrow.

2006-01-12T14:03:00.000Z

Too busy today to write anything, when I get the time, more original content on the way.

The above image is a Culture-Jammed World War II poster.

See more of the same.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

HAPPY 100th BIRTHDAY DR. HOFMANN!!!

2006-01-11T10:33:00.002Z

A recent photo of Dr. Albert Hofman

"LSD spoke to me. He came to me and said, 'You must find me.' He told me, 'Don’t give me to the pharmacologist.'"
- ALBERT HOFMANN

Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of lysergic acid diethylamide-25, more commonly known as LSD (from the German acronymn) is 100 today.

A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU Dr. HOFMANN!!

Hofmann, through this discovery became one of the most influential men of 20th century, his discovery having profound influences on music, mysticism, writing, magick, youth culture and even the military.

Hofmann, born this day in 1906 in Baden, Switzerland has always had a conflicted relationship with what he calls his "Problem Child" (from the title of his book "LSD, my problem child"). Hoffman's main interest in chemistry, up until his discovery, had been the structure of plants and animals, and he first synthesised LSD-25 from wheat argot whilst working for Sandoz laboratories in 1938.

The drug was filed away, as Hofmann was not aware of its properties, and the research that produced it was focused on improvements in farming, which LSD-25 did not appear to effect. It wasn't until some three years later, after accidentally absorbing LSD-25 through his fingertips that Hofmann discovered its hallucinogenic properties.

Three days after that, on April 14th 1943 (LSD enthusiasts, now know of this date as bicycle day, a day for psychedelic celebration) Hofmann purposely ingested 250µg of LSD and experienced extreme psychedelic effects whilst riding home on his bicycle. Hofmann then followed this with a series of experiments on himself, which he first wrote about on April 22nd, the first glimpse of what he has called "a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality." he went on to say that "I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," and that "any natural scientist who is not a mystic is not a real natural scientist." furthermore "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance, all of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."

It was not until many years later, that LSD-25, became known in popular culture by the efforts of men like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, as Acid.

Hofman has never been a fan of the popularisation of acid by men like Leary, in fact he has said that Leary's distribution and popularisation of LSD was, in fact, "a crime" and has added that it allowed the drug to be "hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed." Hofmann is in favor of LSD having the status of a controlled substance, in much the same way that morphine is today, as it is quite as capable of bringing you as Aldous Huxly once remarked about mescaline, to Heaven or to Hell.

Though Hofmann has been viewed as having an ambiguous view of his child, he seems to view it as essentially a positive gift to humanity. He calls it "medicine for the soul" and is dismayed by the worldwide illegalisation of the drug.

Now a century old, a recent New York Times interviewer described Dr. Hofmann as being "physically reduced but mentally clear" a man whose eyes grow bright when he recounts tales of his boyhood, the beauty of nature and the ability LSD gave him to witness "a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."

Now with mans mortality more on his mind as the centenary of his birth dawns, he said "I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore, maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley". Huxley famously asked his wife, when he was on his death bed, to inject him with LSD and read to him from the Tibetan book of the dead.

Hofmann's recent interviews always come around to the one topic, mans oneness with nature, and our increasing alienation from that awareness. Hofmann insists that "It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature. In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans. The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature. And, yes, LSD, could help reconnect people to the universe."

Today Dr. Hofmann is attending a symposium in Basel, near his home, on the drug that he discovered and that blew open the Blakean doors of perception.

So again, Happy Birthday Dr. Hofmann, may you have many more.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Witch Hammer - Genesis of the Burning Times

2006-01-10T15:20:00.000Z

First published in 1486 the Malleus Maleficarum (Witch Hammer) was the primary guide for the identification, persecution, and punishment of Witches by the Christian establishment.

The Maleficarum set in stone many of the misconceptions and fears associated with Witches and Witchcraft. The infamous text was the handbook of the "burning times" - the period associated with the persecution of Witches, the genesis of which stemmed from the date of its publication through the Salem Witch trials, to the last recorded execution of a witch in Switzerland in 1782.

Authored by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, it was submitted to the University of Cologne on May 9th 1487, and was approved and welcomed by all of the Doctors then in the theological faculty.

The Maleficarum was given added weight by the Bull of Pope Innocent the VIII (whats in a name eh?) which was issued two years previously to the Maleficarum's submission to the University of Cologne in order to allow Kramer and Sprenger to continue with the good work of the Inquisition of the Alpine region. The Papal Bull was included with the original edition of the Maleficarum to make it appear as though the tome enjoyed papal sanction.

The book attempts to illustrate the various (imagined) nefarious means by which Witches were viewed to control, poison and subvert the known world. Examples such as: why women roast their first born child, how to raise tempests by torturing washerwomen, various means of making formal pacts with Satan and how Witches steal the penis's of men they despise are all explained in glorious medevial technicolor.

The Maleficarum is a document that allowed the powerful patriarchial christian establishment to persecute herbalists, mid-wives, and any independent women for over 250 years. General feeling is that few actual Witches (representatives of the Old Matriarchial religion, which Christianity was threatened by, though for little reason)were killed. Accurate figures as to the number of people killed in the Maleficarum's name are impossible to come by, as estimates are usually much higher than recorded deaths, guesses range from 35,184 - 63,850, sources for these numbers are provided here.

Read the full Malleus Maleficarum.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Witch Hammer - Genesis of the Burning Times (first published on www.disinfo.com 26/08/2003)

How Neutral is Ireland really?

2006-01-06T10:39:00.000Z

(USAF planes at shannon Airport, 2005)

The Republic of Ireland, a country in which I was born, and so have been awarded citizenship by the government that rules over the territory, has, since the Second world war, declared itself to be a neutral state.

But yet, currently, some Islamic Extreemist clerics declare us to be a viable target in their war against the United States. How can they justify this when the Republic of Ireland declares itself to be a neutral state. First of all what constitutes a neutral state under international law?

Articles one, two and three of the Second Hague Convention, the principle international law covering neutrality state:

Article 1.

The territory of neutral Powers is inviolable.
Art. 2.

Belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions of war or supplies across the territory of a neutral Power.
Art. 3.

Belligerents are likewise forbidden to:

(a) Erect on the territory of a neutral Power a wireless telegraphy station or other apparatus for the purpose of communicating with belligerent forces on land or sea;

(b) Use any installation of this kind established by them before the war on the territory of a neutral Power for purely military purposes, and which has not been opened for the service of public messages.

Now I want all students to compare and contrast this with the following information about the Republic of Ireland, which has declared itself a neutral state since the formation of the Irish Republic in 1949 (as distinct from the Irish "Free State").

The Republic of Ireland's fulfillment to the letter of the law of the Second Hague Convention has always been questioned, though not always in Ireland itself, by way of some for instances:

1. When Ireland began to assert its neutrality during the Second World War, Ireland supplied some important secret information to the Allies; for example, the date of the D-Day invasion of France was decided on the basis of incoming Atlantic weather information which was covertly supplied to them by the Republic of Ireland but kept from Germany.

2. During the Kosovo war, when Ireland began allowed US armaments, including Cruise type missiles to pass through or over its territory while the US was engaged in an attack on Serbia, this was done with no UN Security Council approval.

3. In the ongoing war against Iraq and Afghanistan, the Irish government so far, has allowed the passage through Ireland of over 100,000 heavily armed US troops in the preparation for and the conduct of the US-led war against Iraq. Along with some very dubious looking lear jets, which "have not" been used in the practice of "extraordinary renditions" according to the US government. The independent MEDACT report has confirmed that up to 30,000 people were killed "major combat operations" section of this war.

No definition of neutrality allows states like the Republic of Ireland to allow or facilitate military operations to the extent of the above instances. Ergo Ireland is not a neutral country under any present definition of international law.

Ireland's status as a credible neutral country when future wars occur will only be restored by a referrendum that forces the inclusion of a specific neutrality clause that abides by the Second Hague Convention in the Irish Constitution.

Until then, unfortunatly, Ireland, in the eyes of Islamic jihadists will remain a viable target in their war against the American Aggressors.

When the first bombs go off in Ireland, to herald the new wave of terrorism, the government of this fine Republic will hold a news conference, publicly throw their hands up to heaven, and shout "why lord, why?". Then they will return, with heads hung low, into closed chambers and calculate the deaths incurred by the bombings and compare them to the jobs created and profits made from American multinationals investing in Irelands economy. It will, I imagine, be a savage mathematics.

Remember you heard it here first.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Punishment Park Rises.

2006-01-05T11:36:00.000Z

1970, the United States.

The death of the hippie era.

Vietnam was raging, the draft was in full force, African Americans were organising into groups like the Black Panthers. White middle class kids were forming groups like the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Mass protests swept the country and more and more the elder caretakers of the government saw the difference between kids and insurgents against the American state eroded. The Nixon presidency was about to go into freefall. New legislation was being drafted to allow, should the need arise, for the establishment of what amounted to concentration camps.

In Kent State University, students were assailed by a shoot to kill policy at an anti-war demonstration on campus.

Several died.

It was now just as possible to get shot and killed on the way to class as it was in the Jungles of Indo-China.

Then there was the introduction of the McCarran, or Internal Security Act of 1950 (which was passed against President Truman's veto and was eventually repealed in 1990 - though FEMA still has the power to set up "work camps" for citizens in situations of extreme national danger), in which the U.S. government had given itself almost unlimited rights to incarcerate any U.S. citizen considered disloyal, traitorus, seditious or even subversive.

The American dream was dying, and the hands at its throat were those of Americans.

Everyone knew, but still, the government and the (even then) growing media clonglomerates began a stage management of information, the propaganda machine rolled inevitably into action.

At the same time, in California, a little known British filmaker named Peter Watkins had a series of educational films based on the American Civil War collapse on him. As he fought to keep these films alive, he felt that he was witnessing a new Civil War outside his window.

Watkins felt that he could not keep silent about this, or the increasing information control that was becoming ever more prevalent. And so he decided to make a film to comment on it.

Thus his 1971 opus "Punishment Park" was born.

Watkins wanted to do something that would reflect those troubled times, through the words of real people, and fight against the tightly scripted control that major media was embracing. And so in 1970, he raised fifty thousand dollars, got a basic crew together, and began filming what would now be known as a "mockumentary". Watkins recruited several young and older people from Los Angeles and gave them a brief of what the movie was to be about, then sent them away to develop their characters life and ideas. All scenes in the movie were to have no script and were to focus on real converstation between the actors, some of which were expressing their own views, and some who were not.

It was a triumph, as I could not tell who was playing against type and who was not, in fact, when you watch this film, it is incredibly difficult view anyone as actually "acting". This free flowing and amorphous method, that directly rebels against most cinema conventions worked so well that the Dainish government mistook this "metaphor movie" for an actual documentary and through diplomatic channels sent messages of concern to the U.S. government about how their judicial system was treating their own citizens. The U.S. government replied with the message that it was only a movie.

Punishment Park premiered in 1971, and caused what was then described as controversy, but today could only be described as outrage. American critics were almost universally appalled at the way this film, directed by an British man, portrayed the state of the nation in the land of the free.

Punishment Park was refused distribution, and only ran for a day in ONE cinema. It was then buried and was almost completely forgotten about until it's very timely release, now, thirty five years later on DVD.

Watkins idea centered around the creation of what he termed "Punishment Parks". Punishment park was his own extrapolation of where America was actually heading, as the Government incresingly viewed it's own citizens as internal enemies. The Park was to be a sixty mile stretch of desert where Political Prisoners were given the choice of a long gaol term, or three days in Punishment park. Those who chose the park option were to be pursued by representatives of the police, national guard and army across the desert with the ultimate goal of reaching an American flag flying at the end. If the participants reached the flag, they would be set free, if not they were to be arrested again to serve out their custodial sentence. This was all to allow for the training of security forces in the apprehension of what was then viewed as the greatest threat to America, its youth. In Watkins brutal vision things quickly get out of hand, and one Pole of the social structure sets out to deliberatly eradicate the other.

The Structure of the film is divided between an "Emergency Tribunal" which hears and then sentences individuals accused of sedition (Poets, Pacifists, Folk Singers, black journalists, black nationalists, etc) without jury. This section of the movie is particulary moving as the "actors" that play the accused trade unscripted verbal punches, that reflect their ideas with the "actors" that play the tribunal. These are all real issues from a real time from the lips of real people.

The second section, which is intercut between the "tribunal sections" focuses on another group of convicted seditionists who are simultaniously being pursued across the desert by law enforcement. It is brutal, violent, pathetic and hopeless as the citizens one by one succumb to the desert and the pursuit.

Punishment park has a seemingly unlikely premise, like that of a post apocalyptic movie. But it is chilling effective at hiding this through striking performances and skillfull camera work. It avoids falling into the easy pit of "counter-propaganda" or simple escapist horror as even in it's bloodiest moments it moves to an ambigious plane as both the Agents of the state and the radicals are shown as being to a certain extent victims of their own prejudice and fear.

Today, in these troubled times of Secret US detention centers, US torture of combatents, non-combatents and its own citizens alike, and with the increasing use of fear as a divisive weapon to erode civil liberties on US soil and solidify state power over any and all indivduals "Punishment Park" is less a historical record as a prescient warning of the potential evolution of the troubles of today. It is also a great example of how a more fluid and less controlled vision of cinema can produce something that is far more powerful, unpredictable and I would even say truthfull than a scripted movie ever can.

Though always bear in mind, it is just a metaphor.

Check it out, rent or buy on dvd, it's an essential piece of viewing and left me stunned and in a self imposed silence for minutes after the movie had ended.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Away with the Wookies....

2006-01-04T16:04:00.000Z

(Chewie's family, in "the Star Wars Holiday Special")

And now for something completely different, an anecdote.

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, my six year old self sat down in front of the t.v. and watched......this, this thing.

This "thing" is none other than the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special (an early tribute to the Christmas replacement the great yearly "non denominational holiday" P.C. is strong in the force Luke.).

This was, even by George Lucas standards, a giant turd floating in the bowl of low brow 1970's popular culture.

Lucas only allowed one showing of it, in any of the European countries it made it's insidious way over to, and one showing in the U.S., he wanted to protect the mass hallucination of "Lucas as cinema auteur". He needen't have bothered, as Emporer Lucas was soon discovered to have been naked all along.

The plot, such as it is, involves Luke Skywalker and Han Solo battling the Imperial forces in order to help Chewbacca reach his imperiled family on the Wookiee planet - in time for Life Day, which oddly enough was the most important day of the year. Apparently in a vote it pipped "incredibly painful death day" to the post.

I have not seen it since, and to be honest it's probably for the best. However this is not so much a review of the Holiday special, as the telling of a story that is connected with.

Roll forward many years from the showing, and back a few years from the present, and I sat, stoned amongst stoners when the inevitable Star Wars conversation took place, sigh, again.

We eventually got around to the topic of Chewbacca. Then it hit me, sometime in the distant past I had seen a planet of peacefull wookies, sons, daughters, wives....of....Chewie.

Now no one in that band of brothers had seen it, and after being dragged to the floor, and having a cathetar brutally inserted, I had the piss relentlessly taken out of me, for what must have been an hour, it was generally believed I had lost my mind, and was imagining things.

From then on, for a period of two years, whenever I made a faux pas or said something that was against the group consensus, everyone giggled and said "FatherCrow's away with the Wookies!!".

"Away with the Wookies."

Two years, two long years of "away with the Wookies" "away with the Wookies" again and again and again.

They said I was insane, again and again and again.

I was starting to believe them, starting to believe that I had never seen it, that any memories of it was more than likely the result of some hallucinogenic childhood fever.

So, when I looked up "Star Wars" on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB), and found this curious entry for the "Star Wars Holiday Special" which turned out to center on my fabled "Planet of the Wookies" I leapt up from my desk in work, yelped for joy, and shouted at the top of my voice, "I was right dammit, I was right".

It only took me thirty seconds or so to realise that If I kept it up, I would most likely be facing an Imperial disciplinary hearing. So I sat down, printed out some information took it over to my mates gaff and showed it to my detractors.

They Shame faced, have now been banished to "the planet of the Wookies" where they are forced to endure endless terrible anuerism inducing dialog that can even be discerned if you don't actually speak Wookie.

Thank you IMDB, thank you so much, their humiliation is now complete.

Now I have never been a fanatic Star Wars fan, though I did like it, the new movies I have always viewed as absolute trash. This is more a piece about the IMDB, which more than likely saved me from malicious mates. Mates who were on the verge convincing the two doctors needed to sign on the dotted line, on the basis of the aforementioned Wookie story. Thus commiting me to a dank asylum and regular courses of Electro Convulsive Therapy.

So thank you IMDB, for keeping me on the streets, and in the ethereal realms of the Blogosphere.

And as for my "friends", damn you, damn you all to hell........especially you Fentor.

I wouldn't advise it but if you really want to, and have Realplayer, you can see the Godawful Holiday Special

Peace and Hope.

FatherCrow

HAAAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!

2006-01-03T12:17:00.000Z

Here we go again,

May blinding rays of enligtenment and love sweep you all to the skies.

Nothing you have done to damage yourself or others in the past need be repeated, ever.

Really.

It`s all down to a simple choice

A choice between fear and hate on the one hand, or, on the other, quite simply, love.

This choice can only be made by you.

Let`s all try to make this year a better one yes?

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Tilting at Windmills

2005-12-14T11:29:00.000Z

The Irish Ferries dispute ended today, in the manner of many of these things, with a compromise.

The Union and Company delegates emerged at six am this morning, after an intensive all night session, an agreement was reached at the eleventh hour. Minimum wage is saved, despite the attempts of the company to circumvent Irish law by waving (very thin) International waters law books frantically in the air and whittering about how twenty-six million in profit last year is not enough to save the company. The company, however, still gets to re-flag their ships which is appalling, but will take a change in Irish law to stop. It also still gets to hire foreign labour to replace the Irish, which in principle I have no objection to, as long as they are paid the same as Irish workers, which is now guaranteed by Irish law. The Irish workers get redundancy deals, and by the end of the day, the lock in on many of the Ferries will end.

This is of course all on the condition that Irish Ferries stick to the agreement, which if previous ones are taken into account, is about a fifty fifty chance.

This whole crisis has made me so Angry that, at the moment, along with a close friend I have had the feverish and badly thought out idea of running for the Irish Parliment at the next elections as an independent, under the single issue of compulsary union acceptance by companies setting up in this country, and the enforcement of any pay restructuring from the top down. The CEO's and their cohorts should get hit first, and hardest.

It's not that I have lost any faith in Anarchism (which I still hold by) but I am sick of ranting to no purpose, both on my blog and to my friends and family.

In the event I run with this insane idea, I think I'll be running down the path of the ex Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra who in the Eighties ran for Mayor of SanFranciso and came fourth. Jello at no point was a candidate that could win, but during the race he managed to put many candidates in uncomfortable positions with regards to their stance on many issues.

The only reason I would run (though the idea came up today, and is still very much only in the "joking about it" stage) is to cause as much trouble as possible for the other candiates and get some issues that I believe in strongly discussed. Things like the fact that the top tax bracket of forty two percent applies to anyone who earns more than €32,000 euro which is most of the country, the destruction of our national heritage to make way for endless roads that do nothing to solve the traffic problem or end our dependency on imported oil.

Those points and about a thousand other things that daily make me want to snap, and stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 Carbine-gas semiautomatic, bitterly pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers alike, would be alleviated somewhat by a political soapbox and the adoption of a "holy-fool" like persona. These changes in strategy, taken together would prevent any, ehm, "sapping" of our fine nations economic growth.

Seriously though, the political run will, most likely, never happen, but in the weak light of today's winter sun, it all seems quite plausible.

Now I just have to find out how to do it, how much it costs, and get 100 individuals with a mental imbalance to sign me up for it.

Tilting at Windmills.

Peace and Hope.

FatherCrow.

Santa Claus revealed as the evil demon MAMMON!

2005-12-07T16:45:00.000Z

So Christmas arrives like a beggar at the doorstep again.

We are once again compelled to go out to the highstreet and worship at the altar of Mammon in order to pay him his due.

The sacrifices are wrapped and left under a dying tree.

Our nearest and dearest come.

How appropriate that these people are celebrating the birth of their God, with wrapped dead things, under a dying thing, Christianity is after all, a death cult.

There is almost nothing left of the festivals of the old ones, and Yule, the death of the Oak King, the birth of the Holly King. We are smothered under the harsh red glow of the neon that calls you to the sacrifice dealers.

We gorge ourselves on traditional flesh, farmed and imprisoned where their bones twist and fuse as they grow, trapped in cages that are sizes too small. The teeth that tear this flesh are the same ones that rattle when after too much booze, razor words are spat across the table. All to celebrate the love and the birth of their saviour.

This is honouring their God, "the"God - the older I become the less I know about their ways - the memories of what it was once meant to be drift out into the mist, nothing but formless daemons, shadows of what they once were in the purity and innocence of childhood.

This is honouring your family, this outpouring of money, they are only worth what you spend, this is what we are told.

Lies.

Scrooge knew the meaning of Christmas, its the reason he stayed well out of it. Or perhaps his family were just sick of him winning the annual Christmas games.

Bah Humbug.

A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every December 25th.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

Self Portrait

2005-12-07T15:59:00.000Z

Photo taken with strong light source, and no photoshop trickery.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

The Apparat Program

2005-12-01T15:33:00.000Z

The word "apparat" is the old Soviet Era "bureaucracy" or "apparatus" the "bureaucrats" of this system were commonly referred to as "apparatchiks".

It's rare that I do this, just provide a link to another's page but so far I have gleaned quite a bit of enjoyment from Warren Ellis's Apparat program and so, have decided to share it with you, the denziens of the blogosphere.

The Apparat program is Ellis' attempt at spreading the music of unsigned artists who have sent in mp3's to him that give him a kick.

Ellis converts them into Podcast format and leaves them up for anyone to download.

The individual Apparat files comprise of up to seven tracks in compressed podcasts (about 23 meg in size), each file tends to comprise a mixture of tracks, some hard, some soft, some syncopated, some not. My personal preference so far is Apparat 2.

Ellis himself, as am I, is a huge fan of punk rock (emphasis on the "rock" side of it) and electronica. If these genres ring your bell, then it's high time you followed the above link and got some free gut stompin' music.

If you yourself are involved in making music (not "my mates in a band" or "I think you will really like this track by someone other than myself") send him an mp3 and you may find you and your band included in the next apparat program (he gets thousands of hits a day). Of course, he may think you're shit, but that's his perogative.

Support new bands, hear new tunes, and turn off that fucking top twenty radio station you daily subject yourself to, or else I will involve myself in a high magick ritual, and you may well find youself being fucked to death by rabid minks.

Peace and Hope.

FatherCrow.

Art of the Living Dead

2005-11-25T11:40:00.000Z

Image © Fathercrow2005

A very small version of an A1 size charcoal drawing I recently completed, an attempt to draw the zombie obsession out of my head.

Now it's in yours.

Click to enlarge.

Enjoy

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Comments Temporarily Reactivated

2005-11-23T12:12:00.000Z

I have reactivated the comments section temporarily.

The decision was made when I found an option in bloggers function tabs that allows people to comment only if they type an assigned selection of letters that initally appear in jpeg form. This procedure is intended to prevent automatic bots from posting ads.

To anyone who is thinking of manually posting ads, DON'T, this is an ad free blog, and will remain so.

If any ads are posted I will disable comments again, as I will never allow this blog to degrade to the point of hawking products, this blog is written from passion and not for money. I think I made this clear with the earlier announcement that the comments were disabled.

Nor will I, before anyone asks, include product placement in any of the posts. So if any advertising agency employee is considering asking, again, don't waste your time. The only response you will get will be an abusive email that mocks your profession.

The reactivation is a pilot. I encourage discussion and dissent, if the comments section is reduced to advertising or abuse, it will not remain.

Lets see how this goes shall we?

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

SCUM

2005-11-23T10:32:00.000Z

Bessonov Nicolay. Girl in a prison. Water-colour. 1987.

Some States in the U.S. are now billing inmates for their stay in jail.

So how do you like the possibility of being billed past your ability to pay? If you cant find a way to pay the debt for staying in jail (and have no-one who is willing to pay for you) you go back to jail where the debt gets larger and the cycle never ends.

And it can all happen for the sin of a joint.

You can now be, as a friend says:

"(possibly falsely) accused by a flawed system, imprisoned, buggered, beaten, quite possible strung out AND have to pay for the privilege. Then when you get out you can't vote or get a job."

Your relatives can also be punished for your sins as well, because if an inmate cannot afford to pay for his stay the burden of payment falls to his or her loved ones (if he or she has any). If the persons relatives cannot afford to pay it will, inevitably, result in them being in debt up to their necks.

These people are not being rehabilitated, they are now chattel to be exploited.

Even the innocent, who are imprisoned awaiting trial are billed ( a "booking fee"), so both the guilty and the innocent are exploited.

Now include the fact that the State can, for drug offenses, freeze and then drain your bank account, reposess and sell your car and your house (under the pretence that ALL of your earthly belongings are the result of drug trafficing). So now that your money's been taken by the state, how can you afford to pay the prison "company"? You better hope you have a well off family, or else some of them may be joining you for failing to pay your debt.

Then as a direct result of the privatisation of prisons in the states, the prison "companies" need to make a profit from your incarceration. These companies will not only bill you for your stay, but many force the inmates to participate in work programs where the company "rents" the inmates to other organisations to provide services. I would imagine that if things continue they way they are, several prisons will bill the prisoners AND in isolation from their prison "debt" force them to participate in work programs, .

To add injury to injury if you happen to get busted in Kansas the drug offense can also be tax evasion. "Tax evasion?" you ask, "how so?", well in Kansas the state is now taxing drugs with stamps (to be purchases anon, though how this works I am not sure), if you dont have your stamps you have to pay an additional charge. How likely do you think drug dealers are to expose themselves to the law by paying an "illegal drug stamp tax".

Its not about justice anymore, it's about profit.

Talk about things going to fuck.

Who wants to go on vacation to the states now?

Read about the SCUM.....

(It has been a while since this article was posted by the times, and you may now have to pay a fee to view the whole article. When, I ask myself, is the NYT going to adopt a sensible policy for access to their archives? As it is a site for profit, perhaps the NYT might consider introducing a system like Salons' "watch an add and get free access for a day" should be adopted.)

A variation of this piece was sent out on FatherCrow's now mostly defunct mailing list on 13th of August 2004, but due to its nature I thought it bears repeating on the blog.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

U.S. illegally Napalms Civilians in Fallujah

2005-11-10T14:37:00.000Z

Photo: Nick Ut's photograph of Kim Phuk age 9 running to escape death in 1972 after being struck with napalm. An image that may have changed the course of the Vietnam War.

The U.S. has since 1980 made it illegal to napalm civilians.

In Fallujah they broke that self imposed law.

Civilian victims of napalm in the hundreds died in Fallujah, even those waving white flags.

Faces melted away, clothes still intact, enabling observers to distinguish combatent individuals from non-combatent.

The following documentary can and most likely will disturb as it contains images of a very graphic nature, but deserves to be seen as the truth deserves to come out. If only to prevent any further atrocities.

You can see the documentary here

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Cannibal Holocaust "Interview"

2005-11-03T10:01:00.000Z

Back in the nineteen-eighties, in the dark depths of the "video nasties" scare in England and Ireland, one film caused more revulsion and disgust than any other.

That film was Ruggero Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust" (1980) one of the many Italian Exploitation Horror Films of the late seventies, early eighties.

The film is intended as a cautionary tale about the West's and Western Media's involvement with primitive societies, and society itself, creating, rather than reporting news.

The plot involves a group of young documentary film makers going down to investigate some of the last Cannibal tribes of the Amazon, they disappear and the movie begins with another expedition to find them. We follow Professor Harold Moore (Robert Kerman) down to the Amazon and watch his travels as he attempts to find the missing crew. He only finds their bones, and the film they shot. Professor Moore then returns with the footage and reviews it in preparation for its use in a documentary about the missing crew. The second half of the movie involves the reviewing of this footage and is shot as a documentary and thus Cannibal Holocaust can be viewed as a precursor to films like "The Blair Witch Project".

The movie itself involves various scenes of Rape, Torture, Mutilation and perhaps most disturbingly of all, real scenes of animal death. A monkey has it's head split in half with a machete, a tortise gutted alive with a knife, and finally a pig shot and killed to advance the plot. It is one of the hardest movies to watch that I have ever sat through, though it is not without value.

Cannibal Holocaust caused such a stir on it's realease that the Italian Government refused to believe that some of the "Native" deaths were special effects and sent a team over to the films locations to investigate that no actual murders had been commited. Of course none had.

The movie was until recently still banned in the U.K. and Ireland.

Last Saturday, presented during the I.F.I.'s (Irish Film Institute) 8th annual Horrorthon was a rare screening of "Cannibal Holocaust", even rarer was the fact that Director Ruggero Deodato was in attendance and gave a short speech about the movie before it began, and afterwards answered questions from the audience.

I asked the first of the questions and I got a longer answer than I bargained for, Ruggero Deodato gave an answer that was nearly eight minutes long, and he only had fifteen minutes speaking time.

I managed to catch a good deal of his answer on my cameraphones video, though due to the time it takes my phone to process and then save videos I lost a minute or two of his answer. However since it was such a rare opportunity to capture his comments, even incomplete (as I have checked the web for similar media and found nothing) I have uploaded them and present them here for your edification. The visuals are mostly the back of other Patrons heads, but the sound is clear enough and allows for Ruggero Deodato to make his point.

The files themselves are in 3gp format and can be played by the quicktime player and are in four parts.

The question that I asked is not included on the recordings and was as follows:

"Could you tell us a little about the thought process that went into the inclusion of the animal killings in Cannibal Holocaust? and do you think that the inclusion of the killings caused Cannibal Holocaust to become as Exploitative as the media that it was trying to comment on?"

The following is Ruggero Deodato's answer in sequence (with the exception of video 1 which is part of his initial speech prior to the screening).

This is where the files are stored.

When you get to the page, look to the right at the green icons by the files, click to download. This will bring you to a new page, where it specifies the file that you have selected to download. Scroll to the bottom of the page, where you will find another "download" button, click, and it does exactly what it says on the tin.

If you are wondering why I chose this particularly arcane way for you to access these files - 1. I could not find a "free" way of uploading files to the blog and 2. It was one of the only free services I found that allowed public downloads of personal files.

Anyways, enjoy.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

The Tide is Turning.

2005-10-06T10:54:00.000Z

The tide is turning.

The tide of Corporate Fanatical Christianity is turning, these are the days when that wave of darkness, breaks and rolls back into the depths of the sea.

The Neo-Cons are in big trouble.

The first cracks began to show as the bodies piled up on the backs of parents who have suffered for King George the Seconds attempt at Global Hegemony in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those cynical and murderous capitalisations on the tragedy of 9/11.

Those cracks ran like shafts down to the foundation of his administration after his idiocy left FEMA in the control of the Department of Homeland security and his cronyism handed its operations to "Brownie", a man whose nickname I am sure came from his reaction to pressure and stress.

Hundreds died, thousands made homeless.

Then the architects of his corrupt house of cards were too busy trying to save themselves to save his house. Karl Rove, is now under investigation for supposedly revealing the identity of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. This was followed by Congresional Majority Leader, Former Majority Whip and Born Again Christian Zealot Tom DeLay being indited by a Federal Grand Jury for illegal campaign contributions and money laundering.

Fewer and fewer people are left to scream and shout Bush's ducks into an acquiescent, obedient line.

Now, even Bush's ability to torture and maim detainees of the United States Army (and intelligence organisations) has been taken from him in a rare display of balls from the Republican controlled Senate. Yesterday there was a vote on whether restrictions should be placed on the treatment of Terrorism detainees.

The Senate has voted and the vote passed.

The wording of the resolution states that it will stop"cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against anybody in United States government custody, regardless of where they are detained. This almost open revolt against Bush policies would have been almost inconceivable even a year ago.

One by one the walls of his house are falling.

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart
The center cannot hold."
(The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats)

Peace and Hope.

FatherCrow

2005-09-30T08:07:00.000Z

The lounder I shout the more foolish I look.

2005-09-23T13:02:00.000Z

Watch Bill O'Reilly of Fox News get FUCKING OWNED!!

Read the story and then watch the video.

Ahhhh, I can feel the tension seeping from my shoulders.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

To the Devil-Girl with you all.......

2005-09-21T08:34:00.000Z

I think I may have mumbled something before on this blog about how I had occassionally contributed to the counter culture site "Disinformation". Well for the more curious among you here's a list of all of those articles I reported on/scrawled frantically on bits of paper in the middle of the night.

The articles span the gamut from comics to drugs, from self penned religious/philosophical diatribes like "Beyond Belief" to reports of Nazi bombers buried below Berlin Airports and much other weirdness in between.

Oh and in the next couple of days I should have a short story tentatively entitled "Salaryman" up here, its a bit of a bizarre one and, I think, worth waiting for.

Enjoy.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Death and Despair.

2005-09-07T15:11:00.000Z

All you need to know about the Federal Response to Katrina.

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/This-Week-Landrieu-puch-Bush.wmv

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Meet-the-Press-Broussard.wmv

Paul Craig Roberts on Hurricane Katrina

Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.
http://www.prisonplanet.tv/audio/050905roberts.mp3

You fucking people tried to impeach Clinton for a blowjob. Bush MURDERS thousands by his cuts and devolution of FEMA, promises help for nearly a week and none comes:

Time to get rid of him, no further discussion needed..

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

The Past Distorted

2005-08-18T09:17:00.000Z

Many years ago, when I was a member of that distinguished secret society the "Tuath de Tony" myself and my fellow disciples sallied forth to spread the word.

Above is a rendition of one of the central pillars of that society, "Marzy", now viewed through a glass darkly, or rather processed through the prism of photoshop.

They were mythic times, and deserve mythic representation.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Comments now officially Hidden

2005-08-17T17:35:00.000Z

Due to, and I put this mildly, some CUNT who decided to post an ad in the comments section.

If this is a new tactic on behalf of advertisers, I have no choice but to hide any future posts on this site, so that only I can read them.

There is a REASON why I don't have any ads on my site, and that is they lower the quality of life of everyone on this planet. They put a dollar sign on everything they fucking touch, sucking all meaning, beauty and good out of anything they come in contact with.

As for you, ad-poster, I hope you get bone marrow cancer, as you have now offically ruined it for everyone else.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Monsanto officially "More Evil" than Halliburton

2005-08-04T11:15:00.000Z

Well, it's finally happened, Monsanto the Genetic food giant has offically (in my book anyway) clawed it's way up that dubious ladder that leads to the throne of "most evil multinational company".

How have they done this you ask? Well it's not what you think, it's not, for instance the fact that they have genetically altered crop seeds so that they cannot reproduce themselves. So, farmers have to pay for each yeild as without an additional Monsanto issuance of seeds there will be no crop the following year.

No it's not the seed issue.

What could it be? Well a Greenpeace patent monitor has found that Monsanto has applied for a two patents in 160 countries. The first of these patents is WO 2005/015989 which claims property rights on several very basic methods of pig breeding that speed up pig breeding and enhance specific pig traits.. This is then followed by patent number WO 2005/017204 which claims property rights on all offspring of the previous patent.

This effectively means that Monsanto has APPLIED TO PATENT THE PIG.

Monsanto seems to be looking forward to a world where all food that is consumed by the people of this planet is owned by Monsanto.

If I was paranoid I might see this as a the beginning of a ploy for world domination via the planets food supply, but that of course would be crazy right?

Right.

For the full Green Peace story check out:

The GreenPeace article

Peace and Hope for a world that is free of ownership.

FatherCrow

The Gods are angry

2005-07-28T09:53:00.000Z

My first photoshop experiment with colour alteration.

For this image I combined a photo I took of an Irish secondary school's gym (background) with a photo my father took of me horsing around with a Catholic religious statue (forground).

I then messed with the saturation, colour, lightness and applied two different sets of filters (one for the foreground and one for the back).

I'm pleased with the image, but I'm a little disturbed at how completely fucking insane I look.

"Gonna join a baptist church, so I don't ever have to work, then buy me a gun just as long as my arm, and kill everyone who ever done me harm." as Jeffery Lee Pierce would have said.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Shipwreck passes house at sea

2005-07-27T15:20:00.000Z

My first photoshop experiment.

I know the piece looks photoshopped, but the idea is to use images that I have seen in life and create impossible/dream images which I can then translate into my paintings.

This one image is a composite of three photographs in four sections. The forground is the picture below, the two sections of the sea is from a beach photo and the background is an Inis Oirr house in fog. All of these photos were taken by me on the Aran Island of Inis Oirr.

The image of a house sailing out into the atlantic with a powerline that somehow still connects it to shore, whilst an aincent shipwreck flounders is like an opium dream, I may even translate this one into oils.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Boycott Irish Ferries.

2005-07-15T13:19:00.000Z

(above: the wreck on the Aran Island of Inis Oirr, hopefully a view of the future for Irish Ferries)

Earlier this year I described in a post to this blog how Irish Ferries had nearly ruined a weekend of mine by booking me a ticket on a ferry that was not running at the time of the booking or the time of the sailing, it was then I decided to stop using their services. Now some news has come to light that has made me reconsider my position and forces me to ask you to boycott the company.

Well, not so long ago Irish Ferries were brought up in the Irish Labour courts for paying a Polish Immigrant to Ireland a paltry one euro an hour for her services as a beautician on one of their ships. The Irish workers received minimal wage and far more holidays than their Polish co-workers who had to work twelve hour shifts day in day out for three months at a time.

The Polish worker in question got several thousand euros in compensation from the company after the labour court ruling, and the company itself got a severe black eye, which a Human Resources manager in the company described on last nights "Prime Time" current affairs program on RTE (the national broadcaster) as a Public Relations disaster, though not, I noted a humanitarian one.

You would think that after being hauled through the coals in the press for that piece of institutionalised racism and worker exploitation the company would improve its performance, if only to improve its image, and please the shareholders, which in this day of rampant robber baron capitalism seem to be the only things that matter to these soulless corporate bastards, but no, not a bit of it.

It seems that the company has decided to re-register its ferry the "Normandy" in the Bahamas so as to avoid having to pay minimum wage to its immigrant employees or comply with any and all of the indiginous Irish employment laws that prevent exploitation of workers. This is a brazen act of disdain for anyone woman or man, old or young who is not a shareholder. This will not stand.

In addition to that, Irish Ferries are still receiving the tax break that comes from having ships registered in Ireland.

If you are considering using Irish Ferries for any purpose whatsoever, on any of their lines whatsoever I urge you to boycott this unscrupulous and exploitative company, it is the only humane thing to do.

Irish Ferries exploit their workers, and by doing so encourage other companies to do the same, this will not stand so again I ask you to Boycott Irish Ferries.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

Does Philip K. Dick dream of Electric Sheep?

2005-06-23T09:29:00.000Z

Reality has become twisted in a bizarre mobius loop.

Philip K. Dick, world renowned science fiction author is dead, dead as a doornail, this we know.

Dick died in 1982 at the age of 53 after a life of drug abuse, paranoia and a prolific career that spans 44 novels and 121 short stories. These stories often dealt with mans relation to the universe, and what exactly makes us human in a world increasingly dominated by simulcra and artifice.

He was not a novelist but a man who used the novelists tool box to expound on truth and philosphy in an attempt to explain the mysteries and contradictions of life to himself.

One of the devices that Dick repeatadly used was one whereby Robots or Androids had been developed to such a stage that it was impossible to physically distinguish them from humans, and even the robots were programmed to believe they were human. This device was used to examine what makes us human. The most famous of these "Robot" novels being "Do androids dream of Electric Sheep" which was turned into the film "Blade Runner" by Ridley Scott in 1982, the year of Dicks Death.

In November 2004 David Hanson of Hanson Robotics began bleeding a stream of irony and confusion into the river of reality. He has teamed up with the FedEx institute of technology and the University of Texas' Automation and research institute to manufacture a Robotic Simulcra (pictured above) of Philip K. Dick himself. The Dick Robot itself apparenty incorporates what Hanson refers to as "a convergence of the worlds best expressive robotic hardware, natural language and machine vision that will appear in a wide range of applications such as advertising, entertainment and education."

I am not sure that if Dick were alive today he would approve of his image, and voice being used in advertising and entertainment, as many of his concerns in his novels expressed rage and helplessness at the individual being exploited by a heavily controlled and monitored mechanised technological society.

I leave you with a quote from the man himself.

"So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind."

It seems to me to be the ultimate corruption, that the man who raged so fiercely and furiously at the erosion and co-option of our individual identities by labyrinthine machievellian structures like corporations and governments be used in such a way.

Who knows what they will make it tell us?

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Old Capitalist White Billionaire Scum, are finally starting to get whats coming to them.

2005-06-21T10:16:00.000Z

"But I'm 80, i'll die in prison!" - yes you will, yes you will indeed........MWA-HA-HA-HA!!!!

Finally some good news emanating from the bowel that is America's court system.

John J. Rigas (pictured in the photo above) head of the worlds sixth largest cable company Adelphi Communications Corporation has just been sentenced to 15 years in prison for looting billions of dollars from his company's coffers.

Previously this kind of prison sentence was only meted out to teenagers who sold a ten dollar bag of marijuana to their friends.

Rigas who still maintains to this day that he did nothing wrong, was reminded that this might not in fact be the case when Judge Leonard B. Sand of Federal District Court in Manhattan said "Even to this moment, you say you did nothing wrong; that's what is unacceptable." apparently it's about fifteen years worth of unacceptable.

Won't the poor man be lonely in Prison? no, not at all. Due to a rare bout of humanitarian thinking on the courts behalf, Timothy J. Rigas, Mr. Rigas's 49-year-old son and former CFO (chief finaincial officer) of the company was sentenced to twenty years at the same trial. His other son, Michael, was acquitted of conspiracy and wire fraud charges. Though before he starts any celebration of freedom he still has to face down the barrel of another trial in October for securities and bank fraud counts. So there may well be a large Rigas family reunion in prison yet.

Riga's gaggle of defense lawers, who were obviously of the opinion that this case was going to be treated like most white collar crime that strangles millions of working people a year, petitioned for a maximum sentence of six months for Mr. Rigas and his son.

Peter Fleming, the lead defense lawyer on the Riga's trial said "It's a very stiff sentence. We're living in hard times." Perhaps he was wondering who was going to pay his fee, cause if you look at most white collar criminals, here and in the States you'll find that they aren't going through any hard times at all, compared to the working class and colored people (4,919 black male prison and jail inmates per 100,000 black males in the United States, 1,717 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 717 white male inmates per 100,000 white males, mostly poor white males).

The tide is starting to turn, perhaps, where the most dangerous criminals are concerned, those that cause untold misery to an untold number of people the world over. These people are not the violent criminals or drug dealers that the media so frequently uses to scare us into staying home. They are the white collar criminals, those of them who destroy the ecology of the planet, lose whole demographics their jobs, exploit children and third world countries, some even going so far as to co-operate with death squads to sort out management-worker relations.

The people in power in the US, to save their own scrawney necks from the enraged hoi-polloi are beginning to look at you, your books, and your crimes. It doesn't matter how powerfull your lobbies are, when the politicians are faced with a choice between them and you - you will be sacrificed if it keeps the torch bearing mob from their doors.

This case will hopefully set a precedent of stiffer sentences, I for one would dearly like to attend the disembowelment and quartering of CEO's that for their own personal gain cause the suffering of others.

It is a step on the way to deconstructing the Corporation in its entirety.

Peace and Hope.

FatherCrow

Tall Ships Hit Dublin

2005-06-20T09:59:00.000Z

" yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee." Job 1:16

Hidden was I, in the aft storage locker of the ship, cloaked with shadows, a stowaway from port taxes.

I had nay but dry buscuits and was ridden with scurvy when the Death Freighter attacked and the black hearted pirates boarded us.

Our Captain was the first to be killed, and then the rest of the crew.

The bosun was nailed, crucifixion style, to the mast. They took his eyes, the dark bloody sockets still stare at me in dreams.

The rest of the men were beheaded, their decapitated heads nailed to the prow of the ship in place of the beauty of Lillith, the figurehead.

Some crew were keel hauled with wire. Some crew were drowned.

All the heads were taken and spiked, for the pleasure of the Pirates Captain Crazyfuck.

Crazyfuck cackled as he waved a bottle in one hand and held his engorged penis in the other. Drunk and raving, his "jolly roger" tatooed bell end darted in and out of the mouths of the skewered heads.

I existed for three days in fear and trembling, eating the strange moss that grew damp and glowed on the roof of my storage locker and hearing Crazyfuck's heavy step bend the boards above my head.

His constant wheezing laughter only ceased when he slept.

Then came the day we docked and the Captain was poised to let his bilge rats loose on the City of Dublin.

However as it turned out, they were not prepared for the actions of a brave traffic warden and a fat off duty employee of Securicor.

You people don't know how close you came.

AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

2005-06-20T09:57:00.000Z

Das Frauleinbot....Sex doll invented by Nazis

2005-06-17T09:57:00.000Z

Just in from the historical archives of "Words of Fire, Ink of Blood".... apparently the Nazis invented the world’s first blow up sex doll.

Her name, or at least her project name was "Borghild" (in Norse mythology the wife of Sigmund and Mother of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer) and was, in true Nazi fashion euphemistically referred to as a "field hygienic project", Final Solution anyone?.

Apparently this was a project that was ordered direct from the office of Heinrich Himmler who had become concerned about the "Unnecessary losses" that the German army was suffering in occupied France at the time due to the charms of the French prostitutes.

Borghild was born, built, created, whatever....in Dresden in 1941 with what was referred to as "skin friendly polymers" and, ehm, a "realistic organ". Of course being built by the Nazis meant that she was manufactured to their Aryan ideal of beauty, pale skin, blue eyes, and of course blonde hair - Nazis are nothing if not predictable.

Borghilds "father" IG Farben said of his creation that its face was an "artificial face of lust.....exactly like the common wanton's face."

Apparently it never got widespread distribution across the Fronts, because as the fortunes of the war changed, and the Nazis were forced into retreat, the project was shelved.

Unfortunatly no photographic of Borghild exists. Still you have to run the idea up the flagpole and give it a manly and erect salute.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

My Venus Flytrap

2005-06-15T13:47:00.000Z

Ok people, since I have been gone for a while, and as a result of a lack of posting the hits on this site have dropped to an almost embarrasing level. But now with the new flood of posts (starting this week) I am going to follow my friend "scrubjockeys" plan for getting his hits back up to a point where he felt that he was actually being read by someone.

Well if it worked for him, it should work for me.....now let's get that flytrap working on the unsuspecting denzines of the web......

words of fire ink of blood lindsay lohan jessica alba sigourney weaver boobies words of fire ink of blood gail porter suicide pics Michael Jackson trial XXX lolita xxx jesus xxx words of fire ink of blood pamela anderson kylie minogue naked lolita xxx tom cruise gay anus gay jesus gay words of fire ink of blood plastic surgery my mother the choad cunt Nine Inch Nails driven through Trent Reznors empty depressed cock cranium janet jackson nipplegate tits words of fire ink of blood jesus fucks the olsen twins in the ass with bigger penis now viagra porn Allah mohammed words of fire ink of blood young nubile teens Fred Durst tiny little hairy man ass words of fire ink of blood prolapsed fake vaginas of christian singles words of fire ink of blood ashlee simpson protracted anus words of fire ink of blood fag blowjob pussy.

So with that stream of obscenity I should at least let the net giger counter light up a bit, and get one or two more hits than I would have normally, trapping the "prolapsed fake vaginas" web searchers into some kind of literary situation (pictures and videos all the time are bad for your health you know) where I can convince them that ceaseless masturbation is a bad thing if it's not placed in it's proper context.

"Wecome back FatherCrow"

"Thanks it's good to be back".

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Show me your Spine.....

2005-06-15T09:28:00.000Z

Moaning and lurching through the warm wet darkness of a June night I come, hunched and muttering.

The blog is back with a tale of a back, my back to be precise.

Years past, when I was a kid I started the abuse, falling off trees and ramping over my friends on a bicycle. Each incident jarred my spine and shifted the vertebrae into ever more creative positions, as it coped with my absolute disregard for its existence.

Later, years later, as the fights, parachute jumps and a multitude of motorcycle accidents rolled by I gradually became aware of its existence as it occasionally shot the white light of protest pain up through the column and into my brain, letting me know about the possibility of death, and the ridiculousness of my youthful illusion of immortality.

It was in the states that I first went to a chiropractor. It was many years ago now, 1995 or perhaps 1994 I had just had a collision with an unwelcoming slab of concrete, courtesy of a ramp, a pair of rollerblades and of course, my old nemesis, gravity.

The Chiropractor in question was a professional, he took me in to his office and asked me myriad questions about my accidental history and I regaled him with a litany of crimes against my spinal cord, most accidental, and some, I have to admit, not. Then he x-rayed me, and told me of a chipped vertebra in my lower neck/upper spine.

Then I was on the table.

It was like being in one of those wrestling matches you see in American Movies before the kid gets sent to 'Nam to get his legs blown off to learn the futility of war. Elbows and fists pummeled me; arms twisted and reefed my shoulders and legs into positions they had never been in before. I could hear the cracks of my bones ricocheting around my cranial cavity, not so much feeling them as hearing them. I expected to be knotted as a Muppet by the end of the ordeal and paralyzed to boot.

Not so.

When the man had finished his medieval martial arts, I stood and the pain was gone. He asked me to come back the next week and he could continue with the "treatment" but the pain was gone and I saw no need.

Over the next few years, whenever I realigned my back into a position that caused me to screech like a banshee being tazered and walk like the hunchback of Notre Dame I would return to one of the cabal of chiropractors that stretched over the face of the globe like some kind of Secret masonic lodge. Over the years I noticed the disquieting fact that many of these Chiropractors were in fact scientologists who would try to convert you to their ridiculous Hubbard alien waffle whilst you were on the couch. There's nothing like hearing your spine snap as the man who is assaulting you "suggests" that you go and get "cleared" by those glassy eyed sheep and listen (for a huge cash donation) to their comical cosmology. But for the benefit of my spine, I continued to throw cash hand over fist at the Chiropracter conspiracy. It seemed like a worthwhile exchange, the removal of my pain for a few minutes restraining laughter so the true believer who was fucking with my vertebrae would not put me in a wheelchair for the rest of my life for giggling at his naiveté and laughing at his yacht owning messiah....

There was always something odd about these people. Not only did they tend to have a leaning (forgive the pun) toward scientology, but they also had a persecution complex about the mainstream medical community, specifically osteopaths.

Most Chiropractors train for about six years. Osteopaths have to become doctors and then do additional years training to become Osteopaths, which is nearly double the training that Chiropractors get, and dear god are they aware of it. I never heard a doctor complain about them, but I did hear about their constant complaints, specifically from Chiropractors when I was under their manipulative hands. But still I went, as they seemed to do the job.

I turned to the Osteopaths this week, but what turned me?

Sit down by the fire and I'll tell you a story to send you away to bed.....

About two months ago I did my back in again, this time nothing too visually impressive or something, I bent down too suddenly to pick up a towel. The pain was pretty bad though, so I immediately made an appointment with a Chiropractor that I had not seen before.

When I turned up at his office, the midget (perhaps I am being cruel, but I am pretty tall and he was under five foot) asked me a few preliminary questions, which I answered, giving a fairly detailed history of the abuse I have put my back through over the years, taking special time to specify that I had a chip out of my neck vertebrae and I had been advised not to have it adjusted. He began to explain to me that "stopping my pain" was not what chiropractors were about, it was more the solution of "long term" problems.

He then threw me down on the couch, and proceeded to do two adjustments. Then he allowed me to sit up, and said something to the tune of "thanks very much, that will be thirty five euros, please come back tomorrow, we will have to do at least six or seven adjustments over the next two or three weeks" each visit of course at thirty five euros a pop, it was necessary he said because my back was in his clinical estimation "the wrong way around"

I came back then next day, when he did a NECK ADJUSTMENT on me. I have never had a pain in my neck, but by god I did that day, and the day after and the day after that. The second visit I made was the last visit I will ever make to a chiropractor since he ignored the most basic medical principals of healing.

The next day, by sheer synchronicity, as if to validate my decision, all over the news here in Ireland was a medical community bulletin that there had been found a link between Chiropractic neck adjustments and Stroke victims. A large number of former Chiropractic patients in Ireland had succumbed to strokes shortly after getting neck adjustments off the Chiropractic community. These were patients with no serious problems with their necks who now had serious problems blinking by themselves.

It didn't take any more than that, I made an appointment with an Osteopath. The appointment I had yesterday. The Osteopath looked at me funny when I asked him, in his clinical opinion was my spine "the wrong way around" (admittedly just to see his reaction).

Anyways, one day after the Osteopaths appointment and my back feels better than it has in years of Chiropractic appointments, and more than that, instead of a course of 20 fucking appointments at thirty five euro a pop, he asked me back for one more appointment to see if the adjustments had set in. All in all free, after the VHI has paid for a third of it and I get tax back on the rest.

The choice seems plain no?

No? well then I'll see you in a wheelchair someday soon.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow.

Robot wants to say hello

2005-06-14T09:09:00.000Z

"Repliee Q1 (at left in both pictures) appeared yesterday at the 2005 World Expo in Japan, where it gestured, blinked, spoke, and even appeared to breathe. Shown with co-creator Hiroshi Ishiguru of Osaka University, the android is partially covered in skinlike silicone. Q1 is powered by a nearby air compressor, and has 31 points of articulation in its upper body.

Internal sensors allow the android to react "naturally." It can block an attempted slap, for example. But it's the little, "unconscious" movements that give the robot its eerie verisimilitude: the slight flutter of the eyelids, the subtle rising and falling of the chest, the constant, nearly imperceptible shifting so familiar to humans."

Good Grief...........

FatherCrow

BLOG BACK NEXT WEEK.....

2005-06-10T13:35:00.000Z

You can all stop your slavering......I know its what you want....

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow