A New Poem

Rather than my usual rant, this post comes under the heading of a diary entry, or possibly shameless self-promotion! Hell, why else do I write this thing?

Whitman
The town of Bolton has a long and powerful connection to America's greatest poet, Walt Whitman. The museum even has Whitman's canary. It's a long story.
In a fit of synchronicitous timing I've had a whole Walt Whitman week. I've been reading about him, writing about him (he features in a forthcoming book, pluggity plug!) and last night I was part of the band who played some tunes for the University of Bolton's section of the Walt Whitman Weekend that's happening in Bolton.
I'm thinking of growing a huge white beard and fancying soldiers now!

Anyway.
I don't write enough poetry. I always feel like I'm doing too many other things to find the time and moving too fast for the inspiration to hit me.
So - on Wednesday evening I went to the starting event of the LRM's psychogeography festival (see the link at the side of the page). On the way back I bought some cider for my beloved and I to share. The thing is that alcohol, endorphins from a 10-mile cycle ride, and a head full of things to do aren't really conducive to a good night's sleep. I'm normally early-to-bed-early-to-rise; this time I collapsed at midnight and woke at 2:30am with weird dreams, reflux pains and an inability to get back to sleep.

Side note: For those who don't know, acid reflux is one of those joys of getting older - abuse your body at 20, pay for it at 40!

Since I had a headful of Whitman and couldn't sleep I decided to write about it and exorcise his spirit at the same time. To whit(!), I wrote a Whitman-inspired poem.
Derivative? Probably. A pale imitation? Certainly. But actually, I quite like it.
So here it is:

I am empty of sleep

Because too full of what is, and is, and will be

And that which is, which opens itself before me.

With all, and of all, and be all resounding

Excludes dream

Until thought and fullness overflowing force escape to ink and paper

And the fluttering, laughing, howling mind pinned,

Folded, forced into

Inadequate shapes of words.

Seán Fitton

May 2008

In other news:
If you can get to the Royal Exchange in Manchester before the end of June, please do so. There's an exhibition on which is part of the LRM's "Get Lost" psychogeography festival (yup, the link's at the side of this post!), which includes 5 paintings by me.
I'm amazed too.
I originally offered one, which is a kind of map crossed with a kind of sigil. The other four are naked cyclists which I painted for the I Bike MCR festival but which, for reasons not fully given, were never displayed. The LRM's organiser, leading light and generally very fabulous person, Morag asked if she could have them in an emergency. The emergency happened!

And finally. . .
World Naked Bike Ride is coming!
Manchester's leg (please excuse the pun!) will start by meeting at 6pm outside the Basement Café on Lever Street, on Friday the 13th June. It's "bare as you dare", which means you aren't expected to strip off completely if you don't want to, just be there and ride.

If you can't ride, please come to watch your local city's ride and support it. Here's a link to the world site where you can find your local ride and take the chance to show your botty in public.


In the middle of all this I'm getting married. I wonder if I've got the time!

Love,
Seán

Surveillance Culture

I've recently read an interesting article by Nick Rosen about ways to attempt to live "off the grid" or, in other words, how to to avoid being spied on in everything we do.

Here's the link to said article:

Living Off The Grid

Who's Watching You?
It would appear that we Brits are the most paranoid, surveillance-obsessed people in Europe. As well as the fact that we can all be traced every time we use the internet (like I'm doing now, and so are you!) or use our mobile phones (which are GPS trackers), we have more CCTV cameras on our streets than any other country excepting the U.S.A.

Here's a nice quote:

Four years ago there were an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras – the exact figure is unknown as there is no central registration system – but there are probably nearer 6 million cameras now. There are up to ten on every bus and dozens at every station, so avoid London Transport if you want to evade the cameras. Most CCTV runs from speed cameras, which are less prevalent in the countryside. Maps of them are available on car websites

Note that figure: 6 million cameras. That's roughly one camera for every ten people in the country. That's a lot of cameras, and yet so many of us want to get on telly - including me!

There's also a total lack of legal registration dealing with these cameras except one simple rule - the height. You can put up a camera and legally point it just about anywhere you like as long as it's 8 feet or more above the ground so nobody can bang their head on it.
The way we pay our bills is recorded and so is the stuff we buy with our debit cards, our credit cards, our store loyalty cards. Such figures, particularly the ones from store loyalty cards are sold to marketers in order to sell us more stuff. Social networking sites are notorious for doing this sort of thing. Facebook has by far the worst reputation.

• Suggestions in order to live off the grid include:
  
  Wearing brimmed hats in public (because cameras are above head height)
  Tinting your car windows
  Using an infra-red light to illuminate your registration plate at night
  Swap store loyalty cards with friends
  Swap cards for cash
  Use the Freecycle Networks
  Email via companies that send messages through a "data cloud" (such as Xerobank)
  Living in such a way that the use of public utilities is minimized or removed altogether, such as buying a houseboat.

These are pretty good ideas when you find a lack of privacy a problem. My problem is whether or not all these security measures fulfill their specified purpose which is to protect us all from crime.

Let's have a look and see what we can find
In an article published here the police admit that CCTV has had almost no effect on street crime.

Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe

According to this really useful website the country with the least public surveillance in Europe is Greece. Greece has annually about 31 assaults per 10,000 people, we have 745! Similarly the UK gets about 157 robberies per 10,000 people, Greece has about 8. Even with mucked-about and massaged figures the discrepancy is obvious.

What To Do?
Frankly all this extra security is proving pretty pointless, but because people are paranoid and (despite the evidence) think more laws and security measures mean less crime it isn't going to go away. So what can we do about it?

One way is to attempt to live off the grid, which is difficult but possibly not such a bad idea. There is an alternative, though, inspired by those wonderful people, M@ and holly from HUMANWINE in their song Big Brother. The chorus, very simply put goes:

Big brother is watching. Let him watch!

I've forgotten where the reference is but there's some more inspiration from one of my favourite American heroes, Justin Boland (see the links to Brainsturbator, Skilluminati and Hump Jones). The point he's made goes something like this: If we are under constant surveillance which we cannot but accept then we need to turn that to our own advantage. Our lives are no longer private because we are being watched and the way to take control of that is to make one's life a performance.
We could try to escape our spy-on-you culture but we're fighting a losing battle, so instead (as in Tai Chi and Akido) we use the enemy's strength against him. We make the surveillance cameras see what we want them to by performing for them. This has it's occult element also in being an exercise in consistent self-awareness.

In other words AN IT HARM NONE DO WHAT YOU WILL. Do what you believe is absolutely the right thing to do, because to do otherwise would be to become less that yourself, and if the cameras are watching - let 'em.

What more can we do other than our true will, regardless of who's watching? The question now (with the greatest sympathy for those who live under totalitarian regimes like China and the US) is are we brave enough?

Love,
Seán

A Positve Environmental Future?

Please read this:

http://www.alternet.org/story/84960/

and then tell me what you think. I'm impressed but I'd value other opinions for balance.

Thank you.

Love,
Seán

Small-Town Racism

On May 1st we had our annual council election. Whilst not terribly important on any global scale political pundits usually see these elections as an indicator of the mood of the country and the potential state of the next general election. Overall there was a general rise towards the Conservative party and away from the present Labour government (For my U.S. friends, that's a bit like Republican and Democrat respectively). But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to look at things on a much more local level.

I live in a political area (ward) called Radcliffe West which comprises of roughly 7,000 voters as do the other two wards, Radcliffe North and Radcliffe East (odd names, considering I live right at the Southern tip of the town!)

Only about a third of the population actually bothered to get off their arses and vote, and here's a rough breakdown of the results:

Labour 44% (a fall of 6% compared to last year)
Conservative 27% (a rise of 5%)
BNP 18% (about the same)
Liberal Democrat 7% (about the same)
UK Independence Party 3% (no candidate last year)

A Worrying Pattern Emerges
The fact that Labour hold almost half of the votes (they actually had 50% last year) comes as no surprise, nor does the fact that the Tories are second with roughly half of Labour's votes. After all, this is an area of low education, poor health, low life-expectancy and all the other things that make up a typically "working class" town.

What bothers me is number three - the BNP.

For those who don't know, BNP stands for British National Party. Some years ago, before re-branding, they were called the National Front and were rightly known as vicious, racist nazis. They still are, but nowadays they have a respectable, clean-shaven face and a nice suit (instead of being a bunch of skinhead football hooligans).

We've only had a BNP candidate for the last two years but they seem to have been remarkably successful. Look again at the figures - the Liberal Democrat Party is, nationally, the third party in the country with 63 MP's (as compared to Labour's 351 and Conservative's 192, the BNP don't have one) - but that doesn't seem to be the case round here. The Lib Dems actually got less than half the vote of the BNP. In fact, if you round up the figures a bit, roughly 1 in every 5 voters in Radcliffe West voted for the BNP.

Or, to put it in a really blunt way: where I live, a fifth of the people who care about the government are fascists!

The BNP
I vote even though I instinctively don't trust politicians. I have a strong feeling that anyone who actively seeks out political power is the sort of person who shouldn't have it. Nonetheless I vote because it's one of the very few chances I get to have a say in how my country is run - it's bullshit really, but it's the best we've got so it'll have to do. Use it or lose it!

However, assuming that people vote because they want to express an opinion, it's safe to assume that the BNP voters also care about how their country is run. That's pretty scary. Let's see what they're voting for:

According to http://www.stopthebnp.org.uk/ the BNP are white-only party opposed to any none-white immigration (where do Greeks and Turks stand, I wonder?) who deny the Holocaust, believe that all black people should be repatriated - including the ones who were born here - and would make mixed-race relationships illegal. They're also anti-gay and anti-feminist.
I'm not going to go into them all, but their policies can be found by a simple Wikipaedia search - they are the same, in substance as the policies of the German National Socialist Party in the 1930's.

Why, then, is 1 in 5 of the voters in this area voting for them?

An Answer?
Okay, I don't have one! But then, I'm not a BNP voter so I wouldn't. I do believe, though that it comes down to something I've mentioned in previous posts - the fear of difference!

I would like to state the following as my own opinion of immigration:

Immigration is a good thing!
Immigration does not weaken a country, it enriches it. The reason for it is that the people do not make a country - the country (ie. the LAND itself) makes the people. The landscape, weather and language are what make the British what they are - and to become fully British takes an immigrant family three generations.

This country is made of immigrants. Everyone in Britain is the distant (or not-so-distant) descendant of an immigrant. Everyone. Including the members of and voters for the BNP. Having dark skin is the same result of ancestry as having red hair, but it's easier for simple-minded fascists to pick on.

A final word
Some of the nicest people I've ever met are immigrants. I spent a lovely day a couple of weeks ago talking to a native Pole and a native Norwegian. One of my best mates is an immigrant, again from Norway, who brought other friends - a Swede and an Italian to a party recently.
One of the nicest couples I've ever met are Ugandan Indians - the BNP would have them out like a shot because they've got brown faces! One ex-girlfriend of mine was of Indian descent and one was Ghanaian. My doctor's a Pakistani.

Should the BNP gain power at all, such people would be forced out of the country. Is this really what 1 in 5 people actually want? I do hope not! As a final note I'm adding Stop The BNP as a permanent link on this blog.

Fascists: we don't want them, we don't need them, we're better off without them.

Love,
Seán