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Tag Archives: Mary Poppins

Sticks & Stones & BoJo’s bitter pills.

02 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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American Rebolution, Bert, BoJo, Boris Johnson, BREXIT, Conspiracy Theorists, East Sussex, EU, Founding Fathers, George Soros, Inflammatory Language, Juwes, LEAVE, Lewes, Mary Poppins, Radicalism, Remain, Ripper Murders, Robert Bowers, Surrender Bill, The Queen, Tourettes, Traitor, Trolls, Trumpeteer, White Genocide, Whitechapel

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So. Apparently bluster, divisive phrasing and inflammatory language do nothing to stoke any kind of aggressive nature, hate or violence against the person or property.

Well that’s frankly bollocks as we all know.

Both sides of this current ugly debate make a lot of decrying their adversaries in the most pestilent terms . The only thing that is slightly disappointing is how easily BoJo can scatter a few Churchillian phrases around the place and get such an immediate and rousingly patriotic response regardless of the veracity of what he is spouting.

It seems you really do just need to walk around shouting patriotic anti-foreigner things and everyone is there flags a waving and bunting a buntin’

Never Surrender. Traitors to a man. It’s them foreigners wot done it G’vnor, and no mishtakin’!’

The language seems to have become a vague collision of Churchillian oratory and some form of patriotic Tourettes as dispatched by what I can only assume to be Bert from Mary Poppins.

It is a short hop from ‘surrender’ language to ‘traitor’ – that ultimate betrayal

[The loose use of the ‘T’ word does though seem rather rich given the Judicial view-point of the Prorogue of Parliament as having required BoJo to ‘sham’ the Queen; surely the only person in pole position to comment on what traitorous behaviour might look like. But I forget. The judiciary are just another part of the Liberal Global Jewish Conspiracy – more of that later]

Traitor is a word that carries. And if you happen to be Jim Cornelius, a pro-Remain Liberal Democrat living in Lewes East Sussex, it is carried on both sides of a brick and hoofed through your window.

Ugly blame games are an ancient human art of divide and rule.

We’ve been using blame, public decrying and propaganda to take the spot light away from the real crooks and miscreants for centuries. And we like nothing more than a highly complex set of adversaries and a complex conspiracy to fuel the moment. The more ridiculous and elaborate the better.

Lewes in East Sussex is traditionally a hot spot of radicalism. From hosting one of the founding fathers of the American Revolution to happily embracing the Anti papist firebrands in support of the protestant Martyrs [we like to burn Papal effigies in Lewes] it is home to some rather punchy political dissent and exclamation.

Traitor Bricks are just one accessory for the discerning Lewes radical. A good old fashioned tin of spray paint is another. Thought the content, as a modern media person might point out, needs a little work. Or does it?

‘FUCK THE EJEWS SOROS’S WHORES AND TRAITORS’

This was emblazoned across a new fence of a perfectly nice house in a perfectly nice road in Lewes the other morning.

Now, once the surprise of what it says wears off and one starts to dissect it, it would be rather funny, if it wasn’t so desperately sad, deeply sinister and a blatant outcome of the kind of divisive crap people are increasingly spouting in the cold light of day.

The current climate has without question let some rather unpleasant people out of their fetid rat-pits of trollery and ugly blame into the waking world.

So lets start with the EJEWS. Did the perpetrator simply miss-spell I-JEWS. Did I miss a new product  accessory from Apple’s Israeli market, available with every new i-phone?

Or are EJEWS simply electronic Jews, like emails are electronic mail. And if so, what are they? Where do they come from? Why do EJEWS exist? And how exactly are EJEWS different to non E Jews? Are they electronically generated Jewish people – like alter ego avatars in Sim City? Or is it the platform name for real jewish people whom exist in virtual environments?

Or are the EJEWS jews from the E.U. or Pro European jews. Simply put, are they jews who’ve moved here from Europe or British jews who voted Remain?

So many questions.

Whether Pro EU, European, electronic, wholly virtual or simply virtual versions of a real person, the one thing we know from this graffiti is that these EJEWS are busy. Boy are they busy. And it seems they are in cahoots with one George Soros.

Now, for anyone not paying attention, George Soros is a Hungarian-born jewish Holocaust survivor who has made billions speculating on the currency markets. More importantly he is vilified by the Alt-Right as being at the heart of the global jewish conspiracy, blaming him in no uncertain but rarely proven terms for everything from the Charlottesville Rioting to Fake Bomb plots against himself and Barack Obama – and whom is presented  in the social posts of one Robert Bowers, murderer of 11 jews in a Pittsburg Synagogue, as the ‘jew that funds white genocide [the global jewish liberal conspiracy] and controls the press’.

So in the heart of an East Sussex town, on a fence are words that echo the disturbing belief system of a dangerous and sometimes murderous cabal, obsessed with some global jewish conspiracy and whom in this time of division feel free to publicly and explicitly conflate it with the BREXIT sentiments and traitorous brick throwing events.

To posit that the two are separate incidents and not linked by any direct evidence would be to deny historic hindsight’s tendency to show us after the fact that human beings act in waves and urges – their sentiment coagulating in emotional clusters of activity that though in some ways seem at the time unconnected prove themselves retrospectively to have been part of there same toxic malaise or momentum.

In some ways the EJEWS piece with its shoddy spellings smacks of the Goulston Street graffito scrawled on  a wall near one of the Ripper Murders in Whitechapel in the late 19th Century. The graffito stated that  ‘the Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’.  Ironically it was written at a time when frankly the jews were being blamed for most everything, and subsequently has been viewed as Anti Semitic propaganda that was designed to stoke ill feeling and create an uprising against the new arrivals.

In much the same way that White Genocide and the Global Jewish Conspiracy is increasingly present in the ghoulish theatrical nightmares of the likes of Robert Bowers in our here and now, so it was in the late 1800s in the East End.

The jewish influx, though seen initially with sympathy due to the pogroms and harsh treatment they had received in Russia Poland and Germany from whence they fled, was soon to be seen, first as a blight, then as both a soft invasion and a commercial coup [Jews were blamed for increasing output and decreasing quality, flooding the markets with cheap shoddy fare to the detriment of older East End manufacturers and producers] Eventually, as the anti semitic sentiment increased and locals became more incensed, the Jewish problem was to be regarded as an affront to all that was truly British and wholly against the social balance and social improvement of the East End. As unemployment rose and housing became scarcer the usual spectres rose up and the jews were blamed for indigenous East Enders increasingly precarious and perilous existence.

John Law AKA Margaret Harkness, in her book Out of Work, put the sentiments of many residents of the East End of London into the words of one of her characters – the wife of a radical carpenter:

“Why should all them foreigners come here to take food out of our mouths…” 

Twas ever thus.

So when BoJo spouts Surrender schtick and fires up the mood against Johnny Foreigner, and when he attaches the memory of the murdered Jo Cox to a successful BREXIT – and when traitor bricks get thrown through windows while troll conspiracy theorists scrawl EJEW graffiti on fences in sleepy Sussex towns, it is time to be alert.

Because we can be sure that those words can become sticks and stones can all too easily. Sometimes murderous ones.

So lets tread carefully and take responsibility for what comes out of our mouths. Starting with our ‘leaders’. And when I say that I mean all of them. Not just the flaxen-haired Trumpeteer.

Disney, atoms, spinal tap & the power of the Melancholic hum

21 Saturday May 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Abrahamic peoples, Atomoles, Brian Cox, Bruch's Violin Concerto, Cradle of Civilisation, D Minor, Dissonence, Feed The Birds, Gnostic Chanting, Hebrew Spirituals, Kracow, Lydian Harmoniai, Mach Piece, Mary Poppins, melancholia, Mellin, Octaves, Rad-energy, Robinson Crusoe, Sentimentality, Sherman & Sherman, Spinal Tap, The Crusades, The Law of Harmonic Repulsion & Attraction, The Moors, Theory of Musical Equiliberation, Thermism, Travers, Walt Disney

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Why do some pieces of music seem to overwhelm us with emotion?

There are some pieces of music that seem to tear down the defences of even the coolest cucumbers and the most rational beings – stirred to high emotion by the mellifluous cadence of the piece.

And there always seems to be a minor key mooching about in there somewhere with the more melancholic or sentimental pieces of music. Certainly in western cultures those Minor keys are right up there with best of them in the profoundly moving department.

How can we forget Nigel Tufnell and his unforgettable Mach Piece – in D Minor

“I’m working on in D minor which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don’t know why.”

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BUT is ‘sadness’ really a universal minor key thing?

Melancholy in the western world may well reverberate through its minor chords. But such is not the case for many other cultures who can find joy and happiness in chords or harmonies that might have western ears sprinting for the Kleenex and a teary lie down.

The minor chord features heavily in both some African and Asian wedding music. Someone recently pointed out that in the Lydian Harmoniai of Ancient Greece which was designed specifically to evoke melancholy most closely resembles our major scale – and not a minor tear to be seen.

To be fair the ancient roots of our musical heritage have travelled a long and complex road – from music or harmony as one of the first human technologies – a way of expressing complex emotion, information and occasion – to their more recent shadings the result of its continental shifts out of the cradle of our current civilisations beliefs and influences.

Music or musical Harmony as we know it has bounced and bobbled around to a most staggering degree, spouting up from the rhythmic heart of Africa, thrown northwards to be strung high on the strings of the pre hellenic tribes to those deep in the Syrian basin; to roar out in the soaring song and melody of the Abrahamic peoples and faiths, via Palestine, through the Monastic Orders of the Crusades, up into the mellifluous discordant chanting of the orthodox churches into the throaty baritone of steppe Russian and Cossack singing and echoing amongst the walls of the ghettoes of Kracow; or carried on the warm, sandy  Gnostic breezes to turn up towards the Mediterranean, clipping the southern rim to meet the war-ish Moorish wails and chants: to vault the seaways into southern Spain and the monastic orders to collide with the Cantorial Melancholy of the Renaissance rendered dissonant by the long Asian shadow of the Venetian  merchant and underwritten by the colder airs and arias of the Middle and Northern European marches.

In a nutshell, harmony has been around a bit – and its been a little loose with its favours. Harmony has found itself sad and happy in so many different contexts that it doesn’t know its major arse from its minor elbow when it comes to the proving of what makes a sad or happy musical sound, note or chord.

You could say that for a broadly consensual idea of ‘sad’ (for that read minor) chords to have percolated to the top of that millennia-long journey shows their immutable and inherent power. But on the other you could say that every sequence of harmonies or notes, having travelled that road, would by now be laden with ‘context’ – the shaper and colourist of emotion in music.

This historic cultural criss-cross, the subsequent assimilation and blurring of musical cultures might explain why the chord sequence of ‘Lord, Hear my prayer’, the French Taize Christian spiritual has a decidedly Hebrew quality in the way in which its chord sequence descends and ascends, and whose chord succession has a remarkable similarity to some of the orchestrations from Disney’s Mary Poppins (more of which later).

In music particularly, there is much debate about how ‘melancholy’ or emotional characteristics are given to certain notes or chords – back to Nigel Tufnell and D Minor, the saddest of chords.

Specialists in this area point to the Theory of Musical Equilibration to explain the relationship between music and emotion. They see notes and chords as not inherently emotional but as a process of Will – a process which sets chords and notes in relation to particular cultural social and temporal contexts. The theory contests that it is these contexts that ’dye’ the notes chords or harmonies with emotion.

An example perhaps of this theory is the song ‘Feed The Birds’ featured in the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins. Written by Sherman & Sherman. There is enormous contextual substance and potency in this song for generations of western adults and their children (as the adults tend to pass down their cultural ‘mores and memes’ through sharing of the things they loved as children, and the children in turn love what their parents love as an act of belonging – emotional adhesion).

It is said that Travers, the lady who wrote the story of Mary Poppins, on hearing the suggested song Feed The Birds wished instead for Greensleeves (which Wikipedia notes as being in E Minor as is much of Feed The Birds) to be the soundtrack to Mary Poppins – as it was quintessentially English. The quintessence of Feed The Birds I would venture is of a very different tribe.

There is an underlying spirit in the music of Feed The Birds that for me is inextricably linked to the Hebrew spirituals and the eastern European musical traditions. The echo of the yiddisher musical culture of eastern Europe seems to rise up in so many of the composers of these ‘melancholia’ or nostalgia pieces. The Sherman brothers are but one example.

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The composer of another great and renowned melancholic piece, the theme tune to the 1960s TV serialisation of Robinson Crusoe, was originally from Kiev in the Ukraine. And though there are some parts of this score that sound more Bond theme than anything else, the core of it, is distinctly eastern European for me. There is a point about 3 minutes and 40 seconds in where it transfers from a bombast Bond-like orchestration to the most heart wrenching solo violin. The echo of the first 60 seconds of Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G Minor is not difficult to hear – and seemingly a similar wish in Robert Mellin to incorporate Jewish inspirations into his music, as Bruch did so many years before.

In much the same way as Feed The Birds, the soundtrack for Robinson Crusoe is quite extraordinary in its ability to overwhelm the listener with feelings of profound emotion – both joy and sadness in perfect harmony.

These both make very good exemplars of the Theory’s concept of how Context (yearning, simpler times, naivete, longing, loss, when the world was young, carefree, endless summer) ‘dyes’ the music with emotion

The yearning in these pieces does seem to reach beyond simple sentimentality though. There was a profound feeling present when I first heard them. This pre-sentimental, pre-nostalgic effect is played out in the numerous comments that can be found underneath their youtube listings – ‘as moving as the first time I heard it’ is a reoccurring refrain. The fact that these pieces of music have become sentimentalised and dyed with emotion is I would suggest a secondary effect: an outcome of their initial impact and the mesmeric effect they had on the viewer/listener.

I would like to venture that they vibrate with something far greater than simple ‘context’ and dyed emotion.

They seem to vibrate with the power of a far more timeless human ‘voice’.

I wonder whether there are certain harmonies that in their vibration come closer than anything else the millennia of musical story tellers could muster to capturing the vibration of life itself.

That vibration – the energetic shaking of atoms on which all animate existence or life is based – but perhaps its resonance, however fleetingly is captured in some of these pieces.

The Law of Harmonic Attraction and Repulsion tells us that atoms shaking or vibrating at between 42 and 63 octaves per second produce a creative force – thermism – whose transmissive force – Rad-energy – creates association and cohesion – creates ‘stuff’ -the ethereal and material world we live in – Oh, and us. So we are in effect vibrating along with everything else. So why would we not recognise and respond to a fellow vibration in the world and feel drawn – to want to cohere with it – even if it is just a sound, note or harmony

It is a long stretch from the measuring of atomic octaves per second to the sweeping choir of the Sherman Brothers piece in Mary Poppins BUT I would venture that as we find out more and more about our existence and how we fit into the world we live in, especially at a sub atomic universal level, a distant and circuitous link between the octaves or vibration of life and those of musical harmony will eventually be laid out, only yo be met by an Uh Duh! response. ‘Of course they’re linked’ we’ll say.’Whoever was stupid enough to think they weren’t ?!’

There will be a quick populist ‘Brian Cox’ rewrite on the  infinite and unchangeable quantity of atomoles, the base of all matter and their state of constant vibratory motion, then the odd deft collision of both pop and high culture referencing:

What piece of work an atomole.  How infinite in extent, how unchangeable in quantity, how initial of all forms of energy; how express and admirable in action, how like a god!

Closely followed on stage by a rip roaring rendition of:

I’m pickin’ up good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations 

Perhaps a far more complex nature is at work in Nigel Tufnel’s saddest of all chords – one that reaches far beyond the influence of the cultures in which the listener was nurtured: in which they exist – one that reaches perhaps into the realm of our very life’s vibration.

Vibration as a signifier of the most profound life force is a reoccurring theme in many faiths and belief systems – not just in the physical, mathematical treatise of atomoles.

And I’ll bet you two finger cymbals, a Catholic Mass bell and a Buddhic gong that music is our way of reconnecting with the vibration of life.

And perhaps the melancholy we feel when we hear certain music is not only the residue of context and emotional dyeing but perhaps driven by a yearning rooted in its ability to remind us of a more profound connection with the vibration of life: one which we were once so closely aligned with; and to which we have now become strangers.

 

 

Tuppence a bag and a quick weep is a small price to pay for the key to cosmic connection

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