PsyOps in the Civic Centre Carpark

Leona Pippin reminded Norris of something on the day of the demo outside the Mosque. She stood on the back of a small flatbed truck that had been rigged up with a portable PA system to make a movable stage for speakers at the demo. She had a voice that was high pitched and clear. It carried and Norris could distinctly hear every word that she shouted into the microphone, but she was not shrill. She was fired up but she was not excited.

She just went on and on and on. She was unrelenting.

“The EDL are not welcome here. We are all assembled here because we don’t want the EDL in this borough. This is a multi-faith, multi-ethnic community. People of all religions and none live here and we all get on together. We don’t need the EDL coming here to start trouble. Go away EDL, go and crawl back into your holes. We are all united to oppose you and we are not going away until you have left the borough forever……”

At the beginning of the demo a large picket, two or three hundred plus, had formed up on the roadside directly opposite the mosque. That was where the lefties were, they were mainly, but not entirely, white. Across the road, outside the Mosque people were assembled who by their dress seemed to be mostly Muslims; they were mostly, but not exclusively South Asian men. It was difficult to quantify which group had the most facial hair, probably on balance, the Muslims.

Speeches were made by political activists and priests from the back of the flatbed, but it was all to the converted. The only persons in the immediate locality who might not fit into that category were the police who were corralling the demo and the pedestrians and motorists who passed it by with apparent indifference.

Then some how the word spread, “The EDL are here”, “There in the car park over there, outside the civic centre”.

The whole demo turned and began to move about an eighth of a mile to the left, focussing on a place where behind multiple lines of police who you just make out the tops of the head of about fifteen or twenty people, the EDL apparently.

Most of the demo moved across the car park and the flatbed truck went with them and Leona Pippin’s diatribe commenced. Only after she had kept going for about an hour did, Norris recall Hereward the Wake by Charles Kingsley. In this fictionalised account of early medieval English history, a climatic battle between Normans and Saxon rebels takes place in the Fens near Ely that involved the Normans' use of an early form of what the Americans in Vietnam were to call “Psyops”. They erected a wooden tower with a platform on top from which a witch, hired for the purpose, hurled curses at the Saxons. Perhaps this was as much to boost the morale of the Normans as to spook the Saxons, after all a marsh is not the best place for heavily armoured cavalry to operate.

Whatever the historical case had been, Leona Pippin was now carrying out a similar function relation to an early twenty-first century struggle against English neo-fascism. However in doing so Norris thought that she fell into a trap called: “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” At times she was creating a verbal picture of the suburb that she was speaking in, (which was not the neighbouring suburb where she actually lived), as some sort of multi-cultural heaven, where all sorts and kinds of people united together against the common neo-fascist enemy.

Norris doubted if he needed this romanticised account of a suburban shithole to impel his political action. Norris knew that the road he picketed against racists was also the road where men outside the Mosque were rumoured to spit at passers by who they deemed to be gay: they were probably not big on Feminism either.

The situation like Norris himself was a mass of contradictions. He decided that he was a multi-layered onion within a multi layered onion which rotated in an unknowable universe. 

The Vindication of Ginger John

Norris had come to realise that he owed Ginger John a retrospective and silent apology. Ginger John had been/was/is a performance poet from the “punk wing” of what was a decade or two ago, a movement to politicise and popularise an art form that had, like a hat made from an ornamental chicken, become simultaneously effete, over elaborate and dead.

Norris could only remember three or four things about Ginger John: he was big, he had cropped ginger hair, he wore army surplus olive green combat trousers and he performed a poem about the Falklands (Malvinas) War which had the refrain: “No Blood for Oil”.

Back then, just after the Falklands (Malvinas) War of 1982, there had been no announcement of any oil field in or near these islands. The war then looked like a political manoeuvre driven by the demented patriotism of Margaret Thatcher. Some say that then she was clinging onto power by manicured and varnished fingernails; and that if she had let Argentina have the islands, she might well have consigned the Conservative Party to at least a generation of political oblivion. Thanks to some expertly organised killing, it took her about another decade to manage that, and thanks to the preceding expertly organised killing of its own population by the Argentine Junta, her military adventurism made even elected government by crass monetarists preferable to an unelected government pursuing a policy of selective political genocide.

Anyway the point of this convoluted rambling is to assert that some British lefties, (Norris included), thought that Ginger John and his ilk were wrong when they alleged “Blood for Oil”.

Thirty years later, as a South American shipping Boycott kicks off against the Falklands over the issue of British claims to own South Atlantic oilfields because Britain holds the islands. Ginger John, who did seem like a moronic yob at times, now seems like a lost prophet equipped with incredible perspicacity and foresight.

Looked another way Norris and his ilk now seem very stupid and naïve. After all every twentieth century war and probably very human war ever, and even the Chimp tribal total wipe-outs recorded by Van Lawick-Goodall, were basically resource wars. Death-dealing weapon-penises may be lightly covered by fig leaves such as nationalism, religion, liberalism, fascism, humanitarianism, and even colonialist feminism, but they are all aimed at consequence-free imperialist resource-rape. And the more black, viscous and useful as vehicle fuel that the resource concerned is, the worse the wars are. It is and always has been “Blood for Oil”.

Norris found the dead fox in his back garden

The day before Norris found the dead fox in his back garden, he had entered his own version of dreamtime whilst sculpting in his garage. As he had sleep apnoea, which meant that his fat neck sometimes closed his air passages and sent him, briefly to sleep, this was easy to do. Once in a while he was awakened from a momentary micro-sleep by the clang or click of a chisel dropped from his inert paw onto the concrete floor of the artistic garatelier.

But sculpting engaged physical routines and motor controls, which counteracted boredom, the psycho-active bit of Norris’ apnoea, and meant that he seldom lapsed in total unconsciousness. He could dream shapes into the wood that he has on the work bench before him and then he could try to define and suggest them with chisel cuts.

Norris spent about 3, almost 4, hours doing this, he could put this time aside because he had to come downstairs and sit in the garage to let in a plumber who might come to unblock the drains.

Norris thought that he achieved quite a lot this way, but, he might come back the next day and not see the patterns and schemes in wood that he had seen the day before. What he definitely had were numbed hands that felt like claws. He had never got the hang of holding the chisel properly and also, he consistently hit too hard, or sometimes he missed, or partially missed, the chisel and whacked his left hand. So when the Dyno-rod engineer came and unblocked the drain, Norris was glad was glad to stop being so creative, before managing to totally paralyse his hands.

He then locked up his garage, went into his suburban semi-detached and when inside and rebaked baked beans and dreamt again, with others, through his computer.

The next day he embarked on a series of his bus journeys around London. These bus journeys were assuming a quasi-triangular character, in that he seldom returned home, from wherever he went, by the same route which he had taken to get to the apex or notional destination of the journey; aka “there”. This triangularity of movement was a function of several factors: a disabled person’s bus pass, almost constant pain from arthritic knees and diabetic feet, and a relative lack of pressure of time. These, factors were in some way multiplied or divided or somehow influenced by the patchy nature of disabled peoples’ access to London Transport tube stations and bus stations at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

So on a bright, warm, sunny mid-winter’s day, Norris began his voyaging by turning left and uphill at the end of this cracked concrete front garden path. An unusually large flock of twenty or so parakeets flew over heading in a straight line to the north-west, squawking to one another.

Leaning on garden walls, every few yards or so, Norris took about twenty-five minutes to arrive at one of the two final houses at the uphill, northern, end of his road. This building was converted into a GP doctors’ surgery. Here both of Norris’ lower legs were redressed, which involved being washed with anti-bacteriological fluid, smeared with some sort of paraffin-wax based ointment and rebandaged with several layers. Norris conversed with Nora the Nurse who was doing these things to his limbs, they spoke of Bournemouth.

Leaving the surgery supplied with some extra anti-bacteriological fluid, and bandages, to see him over the Christmas, Norris lurched across the road from the surgery to the nearest bus stop, towing a blue tartan shopping trolley. The bus arrived and took him across the rolling hills and dales of North-West London suburbia to massive shed which was full of things arranged in piles and ranked in aisles. Crowds of people flowed like fluid through this retail maze with wire trolleys and baskets; they were aurally bombarded with cheesy carolling. Frequently their anxiety was raised by authoritative tannoy announcements about alleged offers and bargains which might go away forever unless immediately purchased.

Part of the vast shed was set aside as a café for the shoppers; Norris cowered there for a bit, ingesting a potion of sugared grease, as the entire zeitgeist of the place pressured him to consume more. He was able to disobey this because, in an amazing paradox, his own diabetes, itself the consequence of many previous episodes of over-consumption, came his rescue.

This particular mega-store happened to be situated in a pit dug out of a hillside. To exit it and get back home, Norris would have had to haul himself and a laden shopping trolley up a slope with an arm that ached from yesterday’s sculpting, on swollen feet, stressing the few ligaments that remained in his arthritic knees. It was far easier, for once, not to shop, to pull a light, almost empty trolley up the slope and across a dangerously busy road to a bus stop. Anybus could take him to another supermarket, after all, that was the only place where anyone wanted, or could ever want to go. As he came out the mega shed doors Norris felt that he had surfaced after a swim in a swamp full of mad reptiles.

At another supermarket, Norris, emerged frombus onto the forecourt that was jealously guarded by the retail company to prevent any of its customers and/or potential customers having any contact whatsoever with any political ideas purveyed by vagrant pamphleteers. Here Norris met a colleague, candidate who perhaps wanted to be a Green Party Euro MEP. The candidate beamed around and was unusually affable, whilst his eyes were flickering and searching for the camera persons and journalists who wished to depict and publicise him, smiling. There were none there, so they parted, one going north for publicity and the other, east to another supermarket.

Here, unsurprisingly, the noise blitz of Christmas yammered away at consumers incessantly again. Words like “mince”, “pies”,  "reindeer” etc, were dredged up from the bottom of some sort of Dickensian estuary, where most of London’s excrement was dumped out of the hinged hulls of sludge barges. These words were sucked to the surface like some sort raw emotional ooze or pus, then they were reconstituted into signifiers of jollity and sprayed over people in a torrent of seasonal slurry. Grim faced shoppers crouched behind their trolleys and then loaded up their vehicles in the rainswept car park. The attempted brainwashing often left people empty hearted and with an increasing tendency to petty viciousness and avarice, as if they realised that as they consumed more and more they were getting less and less.

Why, just recently some turd had stolen a £35 Donegal tweed cap off Norris when he had nodded off on somebus or other. So when he completed this particular triangular odyssey and went down his back garden to load up his compost heap, Norris was not entirely surprised to discover the rotten corpse of a fox next to the massive clump of pampas grass which the defining feature of this little patch of suburban savannah. Reynard looked flattened, it had hide but most of the flesh seemed to be gone and some bones were starting to show through. Norris initially thought it just be a road kill that someone had thrown over the garden fence , but it could just as well have got there of its own accord and laid down to die, or there might have been a bit of fox-on-fox violence .

The remotest possibility of all was that secretive urban pagans had sent the fox off to ask the sun to come back again after it had run away for the winter solstice.

By ROYAL Appointment & FAKE NOSTALGIA

By ROYAL Appointment
Become a hamburger in Helmand
Or bolognaise in Baluchistan
Drive around in cloud of dust
Like spam in an armoured can

FAKE NOSTALGIA
I started off with psychedelics
And ended up with diuretics.

In brave young Technicolor days by the sea,
I saw the black cat that,
Did not cross my path,
Elongate itself into a multilegged curve,
like a black furred millipede,
as it turned a corner,
To avoid me.

Seagulls flew like biplanes
Over a deserted winter shingle beach,
And spirits spoke mysterious messages
From inside piles of folded deckchairs.

For sixpence we could make the
Laughing Sailor in the amusement arcade laugh
And he would guffaw,
Mechanically and maniacally
Into the teeth of a Channel gale

On good trips
I sometimes felt that I benignly controlled
The Solent with my solar plexus
And could by sheer concentration,
Calm the waves to rippling blue
And bring the Isle of Wight ferry
Safely into harbour.

Just as well since,
If the rumours, that I heard were true,
Half its crew,
Were on Acid too.

But now instead of waiting
To come up into a rush of revelation
I nervously await the onset
Of the urgent need to urinate
Oh, Froosemide,
I hate you so, you nasty pill
Punishing me
With enforced micturation,
For days by the sea
When drugs gave me visions.

EATLATINANDIE POETS at the Astor Theatre DEAL

REVIEW 29 OCTOBER

PERFORMANCE POETRY AT THE ASTOR

The poet Adrian Mitchell said: “Most people don’t like poetry because most poetry doesn’t like most people.” Not the case this evening! Four poets from the London circuit performed their work with exuberance, wit and drama, presenting a rich mixture of voices and themes shared with an appreciative audience.

Patric Cunnane read with passion about the Palestinian peace activist Rachel Corrie, told wry, funny verses about strangers on planes, and hilariously became reconciled with his comic book hero from the Dandy, Black Bob.

Zolan Quobble writes about what it is to feel alive. His verse was full of rhythms, about childhood, freedom, shamanism and people who die in prisons. A hypnotic and moving performance.

PR Murry gave us sad, funny and mysterious poems and songs about lobsters, eagles, launderettes and one about Tooting mutating, with extraordinary and blisteringly funny consequences.

Emile Sercombe presented surreal dramas, with an exploding potato, a royal Roman worm, a French werewolf and the ultimate folding bicycle. A breathtaking performance of absurd panache.

The first ever evening of performance poetry at the Astor. There is talk of the troupe returning in 2012. Can’t wait!

Nathan Lobb

Compered by Berni Cunnane Compere without Compare

Zolan Quobble first set

PRMurry first set

Patric Cunnane first set

Emile Sercombe first set

PRMurry second set

Patric Cunnane second set

Zolan Quobble second set

Emile Sercombe second set

STINKY THE DOLPHIN

Stinky the dolphin’s come to play

He washed up on the beach today,

And on the strand, he rots away,

Whiff, Whiff, Whiff, Whiff, Stinky.

Stinky the dolphin’s come to play.

He used to frolic in the waves

But that’s no way for a corpse to behave

So now he decomposes.

He used to click and squeak in the foam,

As all around the seas he’d roam

But above the tideline is his new home

He’s become a seagulls’ restaurant.

His bones are exposed as he turns to slime

He could outswim the tide, but he couldn’t beat time

And as I hold my nose, I wonder when I’m

Gonna be joining Stinky.

YOU CAN NO LONGER BE AS UNINVOLVED AS A TUNNELLING MOLE

It’s no good retreating

Into your shell like

An armadillo.

Shutting your small door

Or portillo, behind you

On the basis of some peccadillo

And sitting sipping the amontillado

Of which you are an afficionado

You can’t just shut yourself away in there,

You’ve get to out here.

Things are happening everywhere

Bif baf bof

It’s all going off

And it’ll come back down

Around all our ears, my dears.

Set get out of the cave Dave.

Get down off the hill Jill.

Get out of your shack Jack.

And back in the swim Jim.

You can no longer be as uninvolved

As a tunnelling mole.

So get out of your hole

Because worm eating is not the answer

Collective worm farming

Under democratic workers’ control

After the overthrow of world capitalism

Is.