Comeback

After the devastating failure of Corporate Whores Become Disenchanted with Geopolitics, the Corporate Whore franchise has just announced its newest series, which should launch in the coming weeks. Unsurprisingly, it appears to be a return to the formula which had served the franchise so well up till this recent tragedy, and will, we are told, be titled Corporate Whores Get It On.

Dunno

 I don’t know how I feel about this - and it’s certainly not beautiful - but here it is for now anyway in its present state.

wet ink 5 b

 I posted a photo of this not long back when the ink was still wet, but I touched it up a bit just now.

Socialist Fantasy Meets Reality and Produces Fascism 2 - Temptation

[The continuation from Part 1  . The piece as a whole is summarised here

“Idealism is the noble toga political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”  

Aldous Huxley

“Most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts.” 

Friedrich Nietzsche 

So in Part 1 I focused on how ultimately the core nature of all fantasies, even if involving benign activities like stamp collecting, is an enhancement of power for the fantasist. Now however we move on to the more raw arena where it is power itself that is the object of fantasy, and specifically dreams of social-political power. And since here we are in the unfettered world of the imagination, unhindered by the restrictions of reality, and fantasy tends to deal in absolutes, then these imaginings will extend all the way to visions of absolute totalitarian power over all life. And so, “secretly guided by the instincts”, the intellect evolves ideological forms to encapsulate, legitimise and hopefully realise this primal lust for power. 

As Huxley says above, with these ideologies and their idealism, beneath the intellectual facades when stripped bare the true essence is the will to power, which in turn is the ego’s dreams of victory over any reality hostile to its desires - which again is the essence of fantasy. We are deep here in the terrain of temptation, and very usefully for that phenomenon we have an almost limitless capacity for self-delusion and self-justification, for whatever state we are in to appear to ourselves as truth. Think of two people in a raging argument, each to themselves completely in the right, the hated other completely wrong. There is naturally huge scope for this kind of everyday phenomenon to play out with ideologies and their followers.

So to recap a little, fantasy is always about the enhancement of power, and in terms of inner logic as this extends this power essence comes more to the fore, even when seemingly dealing with more pleasure based fantasy. And power will come to be power over others. We can regard people like Jeffrey Epstein and Jimmy Savile in this context. But with the political power fantasy, compared to more usual pleasure-based ones, we are dealing from the beginning with ego and power in raw undiluted form, and there exists a potential for harm way beyond the relatively private confines of most fantasies.

Another element here is that the sense of good and evil are intrinsic to us, and so we have a natural affinity for narratives involving divisions along those lines, of good combating and defeating evil: from Sleeping Beauty to Lord of the Rings to basic Hollywood blockbusters we can see this reflected. This is ingrained in us just as is our sense of language, and so it can be very easy for imposters, be it people or ideas, to step in and seemingly satisfy this perennial longing with their good/evil narratives and solutions. Nature abhors a vacuum and, given the fabric of our minds, peoples will everywhere develop language, and similarly given our spiritual nature a sense of truth and good will manifest, but the more misguided and distorted individuals become, the more misguided will in turn be their ideology or good/evil sense and narratives.

 With even the most toxic of ideologies there will of course be some good mixed in with the bad - otherwise they could hardly get far in terms of willing followers. But think of say an alcoholic with no desire to stop. What kind of ideal will this person have? Maybe a beautiful pub, with friendly, attractive people to engage with, charming conversation, etc - but the greater truth underlying these natural and elegant trappings is alcoholism. So genuine healthy yearnings, especially the yearning for a sense of belonging and participation in a life of meaning, can be encompassed within a toxic ideology, and so cloak and legitimise its essence. And actually it is essential for the success of the ideology to fulfil the role of the good in the good versus evil dynamic that it taps into and seemingly embodies.

We shouldn’t be afraid of recognising temptations as coming from some hostility outside of us, tailored to the psychological nature of the relevant individual, their particular weaknesses of character targeted and exploited - one person responsive to the thought-stimulus of gambling, another to drugs, and so on. The initial temptation in its attraction appears innocent and even good, especially if sensually appealing, but its nature is to draw one step by step along a gradually distorting and destructive pathway. For the gambling addict, for instance, the seemingly innocent initial excitement and adrenaline rushes can lead onwards to all kinds of obvious financial and personal chaos. So each temptation has an inner logic leading deeper into toxicity if one falls into its river, so to speak. And, to jump ahead, thus modern European nations like Germany, at the heart of scientific and industrial progress, could in the 20th century fall into unimaginable evil. This was the inner logic of the relevant field of temptation. Even here very few people, if any, would have initially consciously set out to bring society to that level of horror, but it was always the evil inner nature at the source of the phenomenon of temptation, and down whose paths they naively and obediently followed. 

And now finally, after all this generalising, onto socialism. The socialist utopian ideologies are basically the imaginings of 19th century well-educated Western European intellectuals, very much of the bourgeois background, with the leisure and inclination to form theories of material existence, society, history, etc and the imagined and desired future where all this reality should progress. Despite all the focus on the proletariat, these academically inclined individuals were most certainly not slaving in the coal mines along with their supposed fellow working-class sufferers. 

And in this initial wave of socialist utopianism, there was huge focus on the bourgeoisie and “bourgeois decadence” as the declared enemy, and nowadays the white male is vilified. It’s pretty obvious though that all these figures like Marx, Engels, Fourier, Proudhon and so on were all very much white bourgeois males. This in itself more than hints at the energies of hypocrisy, envy and desire for revenge bubbling away barely beneath the surface. To add, which sector of society now comprises the “liberal” progressive element and its base support? Obviously the educated bourgeoisie again, and so now with obsessive concern with the proletariat having been cut well loose and discarded, time has washed away the illusion that this was somehow at its core a proletarian movement. As an emanation of the educated intelligentsia, it was of course coming from the personal desires of those educated bourgeois individuals. You wouldn’t have heard much in the way of working-class accents in 19th century European academia! And then, just as now, academia is very much the engine room of ideology. The academics, the teachers, etc are basically a kind of ideological civil service for the power fantasy. The media is also obviously very much populated by people from the same kind of milieu and inclinations.

Regarding this semblance of contradiction, though very much of the bourgeois background, this intelligentsia, by virtue of their intellectual bent, were and are in terms of their society ill-cut out for success in the bustling extrovert arenas of business and industry. So if power in a modern material environment in its most crude terms equates to money, then these academically minded figures are outsiders in these power terms, with little hope of significant material advancement. They are not much more than tolerated and should feel grateful for whatever crumbs fall their way from their more worldly “cousins”. To find a living, the intellectual had to be often literally “patronised” by his financial betters. To add, in an earlier era, these less worldly types may have found a relatively natural home in say the monastic world, while in modern times the academic environs is an equivalent.

But though on the outside these more intellectual figures from their privileged backgrounds may appear reconciled to their relative powerlessness, the ego hasn’t simply disappeared, and because of all these frustrations, desires for power, control, revenge, may be all all the more virulently bubbling away subconsciously. As the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz wrote about the seeming “bourgeois” contradiction in all this in The Captive Mind: “The intellectual’s eyes twinkle with delight at the persecution of the bourgeoisie . . . It is rich reward for the degradation he felt [when within that world].” 

His intellectual superiority was unrewarded, perhaps hardly even recognised, but now he conceives a fantasy, an ideological imagining, where it is intellect rather than business acumen, or say military aptitude, that is the most powerful force within this new society of his imagining, and beneath whose mental formulations everyone else will be forced to bow down. So as a quick jump forward, when schoolteachers and academics are using the education platform to do things like subvert children’s sense of gender, beneath the supposed idealism, for the indoctrinator, the agent of temptation, is the thrill of forcing society to bow down to the dictates of this ideological priesthood, to which he or she has the self-righteous pleasure of belonging. The nature of the dictates is basically irrelevant; it is the sensual thrill of power that is at the heart of things.

That’s enough for now. Part 3 next.

Tony

Interesting news from the music world where Tony Blair has just released his newest song, Customise My Margins. The song has a gentle disco beat and something of a nostalgic 1980s Eurovision vibe. 

Sumi-e 4

Archbishop Vigano, Vaxxx

 I had seen this man mentioned as I think very much standing out from the crowd within the hierarchies of Catholicism, but I had not actually followed up and read on him till seeing this article here: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/vigano-priests-bishops-covid-jabs/

Just to lift some samples from the piece below, and where, if wondering, the Bergoglio mentioned is the current Pope. Separately I see that very recently an 8 year old Israeli boy, Yonatan Elrichman, used as a poster boy for the vax, died suddenly of a heart attack, while a 3 year old Argentinian boy, Santino Godoy Blanco, used as a poster child for the same purposes, died also after being rushed to hospital. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/israeli-boy-featured-in-covid-vaccine-campaign-dies-of-heart-attack-at-age-8/?utm_source=digest-freedom-2023-10-16&utm_medium=email

Extracts from the article by Archbishop Vigano below:

Three years ago I was among the first – and certainly the first Bishop – to denounce pandemic and vaccination fraud. Expressed with arguments that today emerge as true and well-founded are the critical issues and immorality of an experimental gene treatment, which aborted fetuses were and are used to produce.

I expressed my dismay at the silence of the bishops, priests, and parish pastors, of many religious workers involved in hospitals, and at the servile zeal with which the Catholic Hierarchy conformed to the crazy and criminal health regulations and Bergoglio’s promotion of the serum. I was publicly insulted on television and in the media, while my brother bishops were silent. Faced with a crime against humanity that has continued to take place before our eyes for three years, I would have thought that many Pastors would have found the courage to raise their voices and join in my denunciation of the plan of world depopulation implemented by the Word Economic Forum, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the WHO, and the UN, while the funds of these criminals were also given to the Vatican, transforming Bergoglio into a vaccine salesman and a supporter of climate fraud …

But if today some priests surrender to the evidence and ask Catholic journalists to tell the truth about the adverse effects, I wonder with what serenity they have so far silenced their conscience, and if their silence and fearful silence – like that of the doctors, police forces, magistrates, teachers and governors – has not turned into a timid protest today just because they see the showdown approaching and fear for their own reputation more than for the health of the billions of people subjected to the inoculation of a product that was known from the beginning to be dangerous and even lethal.

Their silence on the pandemic fraud is identical to that on the apostasy of the Catholic Hierarchy. And the moral responsibility that weighs on them will remain as an indelible stain for which they will have to answer to God, to men, and to History.

Sumi-e 3

 

Not finished, but hopefully not far off getting there.

positive negative

 

Not that I’m that gone on the above image, with its negative beneath, but here it is anyway.

Uneducated Morons, Canada, Misinformation

“Did you see there where recently the Canadian parliament gave a rapturous standing ovation for a Ukrainian Nazi from World War 2?”

“I saw that all right. But they had no idea he was a Nazi.”

“But he was presented to them as this Ukrainian who fought in the Second World War against the Russians. Who the hell did they think the Russians were fighting in that war?! How ignorant could they possibly be?!”

“Apparently extremely ignorant.”

“You’d think at the very least they might have paused and pondered something like, “Ok, World War 2. Who were the Russians fighting against again? I think it was mostly Hitler, wasn’t it?” “Yeah, I’m fairly sure it was the Nazis. There was lots of countries involved, but Russia was especially allied with Britain, France and the US against the fascists of Germany and Italy, and also Japan.” “Ok, right. So if you were fighting against the Russians, you were probably with the Germans?” “Yeah. And we’ve all heard accusations of Ukraine’s Nazi ties.” “Hmm. We better make sure of our facts here so with this old man before we do something really stupid.” But there wasn’t anything like that, was there?”

“No, they just went straight into the joyfully rapturous standing ovation for the SS Nazi guy.”

“Imagine these kinds of uneducated morons dictating to others what amounts to misinformation, and giving themselves powers to shut up anyone opposed to them on that basis. . . .”

*It struck me just now that in presenting the Ukrainian Nazi to the Canadian parliament perhaps it wasn’t actually specified that it was during WW2 that he fought the Russians, and so their ignorance could be excused to some degree. And so I just checked, but no, it was indeed mentioned that it was during the Second World War that he was fighting against the Russians. And then came the ecstatic adulation.

So uneducated morons is fair enough.

Into

 “You know what I’ve found?”

“What?”

“It’s generally a lot easier to get into something than it is to get out of it.”

Before Trump, Skull and Bones, Anthony Sutton

 

“The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings.”

John F Kennedy, in a speech he gave in 1961.

The 2004 US Pressidential Election was contested by George W Bush and John Kerry. They were both members of the same very powerful, occult secret society, Skull and Bones/Brotherhood of Death at Yale. This is how the democratic political divide should always be balanced. Take your choice. They’re such different people. 

So remember, Trump is the bad guy. These are the good guys. The world has been a very peaceful place without him. Peace, peace, peace. Nothing but peace.

To add, you probably wouldn’t hear an awful lot about things like Skull and Bones, Bohemian Grove, and so on in the mainstream media unless to laugh at such silliness. “Ho ho ho, Illuminati stuff!? That’s hilarious. Now let’s talk real politics. What a racist fascist that Trump is. We need to keep politics clean. Respectable. The way it always was. And by the way, in my opinion the only thing stopping men giving birth is prejudice.”

“What about biology?”

“What about it?”

“Is that stopping men giving birth?”

“Biology is misogyny. Everyone knows that.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It was made up by the patriarchy to coerce women into staying at home and having babies.”

The English man in the video is historian Anthony Sutton, who did lots of great work such as Wall STreet and the Bolshevik Revolution and Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. I see from his WIkipedia page, At the Hoover Institution, he wrote the study Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development (in three volumes), arguing that the West played a major role in developing the Soviet Union from its beginnings until the then-present year of 1970. Sutton argued that the Soviet Union's technological and manufacturing base, which was then engaged in supplying North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, was built by United States corporations and largely funded by US taxpayers. Steel and iron plants, the GAZautomobile factory, a Ford subsidiary in eastern Russia, and many other Soviet industrial enterprises were built with the help or technical assistance of the United States government or US corporations.

In National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union, after which he was forced out of the Hoover Institution, his conclusion from his research on the issue was that the conflicts of the Cold War were “not fought to restrain communism” but were organised in order “to generate multibillion-dollar armaments contracts”, since the United States, through financing the Soviet Union “directly or indirectly, armed both sides in at least Korea and Vietnam.”

F.A. Hayek, Socialism into Fascism

 

This above is the cover of a book I’ve had for years by this acclaimed Austrian economist, though I’ve only just now started to read it. This all very much syncs with a couple of pieces I’ve written on this, the summary piece here on how socialist fantasy meets reality, and then unites with existent power structures like big business and the state, and thus morphs into fascism: https://wwwinabstentia-andrewk.blogspot.com/2023/09/socialist-fantasy-meets-reality_27.html .

I probably bought it largely cos of the unusual choice of its striking cover, from Hieronymus Bosch’s great painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Hayek received a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, but this more political book, written in England, between 1940 and 1943, struck out beyond his more usual confines. He wrote it, he says in the 1970s foreword, because of:

“my annoyance with the complete misinterpretation of the character of the Nazi movement in English “progressive” circles. . . . Few are ready to recognise that the rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period, but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.. . . Many who think  themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realisation would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.

The conflict in existence between the National-Socialist “Right” and the “Left” in Germany is always the kind of conflict that will arise between rival socialist factions.

Liberalism in the old sense had been driven out of Germany by socialism” [prior to and paving the way for the Nazis].

washerwoman

 

I wouldn’t be getting too excited about the title having to define or represent whatever’s there, seeing as it came to mind as a suggestion after the piece got done rather than before it.

rEd

Something I must try and see if I can get to a finished state. Another piece on Sumi paper, which are generally made very kind of randomly, or quickly and see then if there’s something interesting to work with - though in truth, come to think of it, that’s kind of how I do everything!

Sumi-e 2

 

Serpents and Scorpions

 The Lord said: “Behold I give you power to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and upon all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you (Luke 10: 19).”

The power was given, but freedom was reserved to use the power and trample on snakes and scorpions, or to despise the gift and voluntarily be subject to them. Under the name of snakes the Holy Fathers understood openly sinful undertakings, and by scorpions they understand things camouflaged with an exterior of innocence and even goodness.

Ignatius Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus

Manolo Millares

 

Two works by this 20th century Spanish artist.

Respectable, Hardcore

“Were you watching the news earlier?”

“No, I never watch the news. I tend to avoid the mainstream media like the plague.”

“But how can you know what’s going on in the world without the media?! It might not be perfect but it’s still overall pretty reliable.”

“Ok, I’ll give you an example of how respectable I consider the media and the society that is attuned to it are. So who have been the most powerful individuals in the media over this part of the Atlantic over the last 30 years?”

“I suppose it would have to be the Murdochs.”

“Of course - with their fleet of supposedly respectable serious newspapers like The Times to the tabloids, and of course on tv the Sky network as a whole. 

Now let’s say there was an arms dealer. Even if this arms dealer also sold umbrellas, it would still be correct to call him an arms dealer - is that fair?”

“Of course.”

“So for decades now the Murdochs have as part of their tv network an an expanding army of hardcore pornography channels, some of which they presumably set up themselves as well as being an amenable platform to host other ones. This all even pre-dated the internet era, back I think it was the early 90s when the Murdochs started pumping porn into the fabric of the average family home. 

So anyway, just like it’s perfectly fair and accurate to describe the umbrella selling arms dealers simply as arms dealers, the Murdochs, these people at the centre of the Western media, are hardcore pornographers - and at a grand scale. You could say this is who they are at a spiritual level. It’s not the kind of activity you accidentally get into and it means nothing.”

“Well I suppose so, yeah. It’s kind of extreme.”

“And so the most powerful single news family or empire, let’s say this side of the Atlantic, and also huge worldwide, deciding what stories, what agendas to push, or what to ignore, who to attack, etc are hardcore pornographers. This is the kind of people the receptive public are getting their idea of reality from. 

Imagine a society where someone, say felt to be threat to its “rulers” - people like the Murdochs - can be made an example of, targeted and relentlessly attacked on a moral basis by a media empire run by hardcore pornographers! Wonderful. 

And by the way, another media giant this part of the world was Robert Maxwell, whose daughter is Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s in jail for her activities with Jeffrey Epstein.

So anyway, broadly, overall, there’s one look at the respectable heart of the mainstream media, and why it might be a good idea to be slow to plug into it.”

aRt

 

Sumi-e b

 

wet ink 5

 

The Island

 

I think this is a wonderful film, and the performance of the central character is extraordinary.

landscape?

 

Sumi-e 1

 

Sumi-e is the name of the very light type of paper used for Japanese ink painting here.

MAGA

“What do you think of MAGA extremists?”

“Are they the ones saying men can’t give birth?”

“Yeah, that’s them.”

“That’s terrifying. They need to be re-educated fast or else just gotten rid of.”

“Yeah, we, the civilised, the educated, simply have to wipe out the extremists.”

Sad

Unexpectedly sad news from the entertainment industrial complex and the Corporate Whore stable, where their newest tv series, Corporate Whores Become Disenchanted with Geopolitics has seemingly had very disappointing viewing figures. “We shouldn’t have departed from the formula,” opined an executive from the franchise. “I tried telling them, but they just wouldn’t listen. Corporate Whore fans want positivity and glamour, not downbeat programs about geopolitics. They took their audience for granted.

“Also the stars of the program, the Corporate Whores themselves, were uncomfortable with the whole concept. They tried their best to make it work, the professionals that they are, but you could tell they were just confused and a bit out of their depth.”

When God is Silent

 

I think this goes very deep. 

And I might as well post something here I thought of lately. Though there’s no Orthodox Church anywhere near where I am, I’m sure Orthodoxy is the true faith, and the Roman Catholic split from it was very much in error. But maybe because of the lack of spiritual power of the “organised religion” the West and “rationalised” West tends to experience, a very normal reaction has been to search for spiritual in all kinds of other directions, and to say for example “I don’t believe in organised religion.” So I’ll just post a little dialogue on that thought below.

“I don’t believe in organised religion.”

“Do yiu believe in organised music?”

“Organised music?”

“Yeah. Do you believe music shouldn’t be organised? Like no bands, no records, no concerts or festivals and so on?”

“Well no, of course. It has to be organised in those senses, yeah.”

“What about organised films?”

“Well obviously there wouldn’t be any films if they weren’t organised, so yeah, I suppose I do.”

“And theatre, the same again I suppose. And then there’s architecture, the basic societal structures, from electricity to plumbing, roads, etc, etc.”

“Well yeah, it would just be a chaotic mess.”

“What might make it easier is if you tell me is there anything else that is organised that you don’t believe should be, or is it just organised religion that you don’t believe in?”

Though the video is the main reason for this post! Just to add, ideally in “organised religion”, ordinary people are in a deeply beneficial relationship with people who are deeply committed to a life of holiness, and to remove that relationship is to do a great harm. So that’s one sense in which it’s a framework around which faith and experience may flourish and deepen - and I’m sure someone could talk on how it’s far beyond that issue. Whatever about reality that of course is the ideal, and I’m not going to go beyond that for now or I’ll be here all day.

another one

 

grey black and a bit of red

 

I’ll probably try to work a bit on this to try to make it, to me anyway, more satisfying, but this is it for now. Working on art though can make it less satisfying! There’s no foregone conclusion that it will change for the better.

Bob Dylan 1966, Judas, Dostoevsky

Probably the most famous tour in popular music since the 1960s is Bob Dylan’s world tour of 1966, where the, till now, acoustic folk-based Dylan went electric, and was booed and heckled relentlessly by the hardcore folk element, previously when he seemed a perfect figurehead for the movement, was now famously being roared at as “Judas”. On the surface the hatred was due to he, the icon of the protest movement, was now embracing rock n roll decadence, and betraying all the longing for idealism. But within socialist ideology, all art must be propaganda for the movement, and all morality is that which serves the movement. The only permitted stance regarding existent forms of society, including its morality, is protest against and subversion of them. The cult of Progress is by definition moving away from the past, “progressing” away from it, a past to which a negative value judgment is intrinsically attached. 

So Dylan in going electric and concerning himself and his art with more personal concerns than simply protest against external reality, could certainly no longer be pigeonholed as a figurehead and propagandist for the ideology, and, not that it had to be consciously understood, he now had to be literally shouted down. And so, though I don’t know if it’s been pointed out elsewhere, he was a victim of cancel culture, which is the standad and “correct” position of the totalitarian ideology’s adherents to forces it feels to be opposed to itself. 

There is actually a parallel with the early career of Dostoevsky in Russia in the mid19th century. His first work, Poor Folk was hailed as a masterpiece, particularly by the foremost critic Belinsky, who possessed a degree of influence it might be hard to fathom in our time. Besides its wealth as a work of art, much of this adulation spring from the fact that the novel, and Dostoevsky himself, seems to fit perfectly the desire for a “protest literature”, pointing to the sad fate of society’s downtrodden poor folk, helpless beneath cruel society. This may have been partially true in terms of the book, though also something of  a crude simplification. 

With his next work however, the far more interesting, deep and strange work The Double, influenced much by the work of Nikolai Gogol, Dostoevsky could certainly not simply be reduced to the role of a simple propagandising figurehead for a simplistic ideology, and with this far deeper work, Dostoevsky saw his support from the influential progressive critics vanish. His renown did not resurrect till far later, with the work The House of the Dead, about life in the Siberian prison camp where he had served for, ironically, his subversive activities, because of his hatred of serfdom. Perhaps that he could now be, even if uncomfortably, considered a protest writer/ propagandist again, helped this rehabilitation. Not that this illusion could last long.

Below is Ballad of a Thin Man from that tour. Imagine being so stupid and blinkered as to think this is the work of a sell-out, and that you’re now looking down at him from the height of your truth and integrity. That’s how powerful delusion can be - and all the more so when it’s a collective one. Dylan as you see begins with trying to get these poor self-righteous clowns to shut up and let him play - and this snippet gives a very mild glimpse of what he was receiving at this time from these people. The guy blathering in pompous fury about Dylan crawling through the gutter is of course as usual a well-educated, middle-class guy, though convinced he stands knee-deep and arm-in-arm in the mud with the downtrodden. 

This is what happens when this “intelligentsia” in their mental straitjackets encounter a kind of living, elemental force of freedom. They might embrace such a one at first for a while, but when this person ultimately refuses to conform to their parameters, if they don’t step beyond their old selves, their rejection of him is off the scale. Not having to pretend Dylan to be some perfect being, but Jesus and the Pharisees comes to mind - and you can be pretty sure the Pharisees weren’t telling themselves ”We’re the bad guys here.”

To add, I love the wild, “uncivilised” freedom of some of the singing here. Gets I think a lot less mention than merited.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

 

A copy I did a long time ago in pen and ink, not the most subtle or forgiving of mediums, of Vermeer’s famous paining. It’s a bit awkward at times, but anyway I came across it lately and here it is.

19c

 

quick ink

 

Just some throwaway thing done in ink done very quickly - as in just a few seconds. This when the ink was still wet, and, whatever interest it might have, unfortunately it was definitely more interesting or attractive before it dried and the intensity of tone fading along with the drying.

Phones, Heaven

“Do you believe in heaven?”

“I do yeah.”

“Do you think we’ll have our mobile phones there?”

“I doubt it. Why?”

“I don’t think I could handle it if we don’t.”