Friday Night Is Music Night: A Meditation On Time

JD introduces a trio on time  -  two unusual tranches sandwiching a cool slice of Booker T:








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Local sludge for local people

One fine day in 1973 found me driving through the centre of town in the works JCB towing a trailer load of fresh sewage sludge. I was heading for the local allotment. Not my job but the driver was off sick and I fancied the trip. Or perhaps I was making up for inadvertently driving the Allen Scythe through a rose bed. That wasn’t my job either, but I was young and interested in everything.

The other day, an old work colleague and I were walking through Dovedale asking ourselves when our bit of environmental science went wrong. We both came to the conclusion that the rot set in after local government reorganisation in 1974.

One should not see that trailer load of sewage sludge through rose-tinted spectacles, but for a short time I was working at the local sewage works and I enjoyed it. Effectively we were all working for the Borough Engineer and via him for local people. We knew why we were there, why we did what we did and for whom. By modern standards it may not have been an efficient arrangement but after 1974 a sense of working for people slowly evolved into a sense of working for a salary.

It did not happen quickly but bit by bit small offices, laboratories, depots and workshops were closed and merged into bigger units. Headquarters became bigger, more stratified, more remote and inward looking. The range of work became much wider and the technology much more sophisticated, but in 1973 we did what was thought necessary and if it wasn’t necessary we didn’t do it. That changed too.

Over the following decades regional bureaucracies spawned by 1974 became entangled with national bureaucracies or became national bureaucracies themselves. Later they became entangled with international bureaucracies. From what I saw, doing real work for real people became sidelined in a sense highlighted by that load of sewage sludge.

A degree of local transparency was lost in 1974. As bureaucracies grew they became less visible and less transparent. That is a key word here – transparent. By merely avoiding scandal or political disfavour they could settle down and wallow around forever behind their internal processes. So they did and still do.

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Better off mad

Better Mad with the rest of the World than Wise alone. So say politicians. If all are so, one is no worse off than the rest, whereas solitary wisdom passes for folly. So important is it to sail with the stream. The greatest wisdom often consists in ignorance, or the pretence of it. One has to live with others, and others are mostly ignorant. "To live entirely alone one must be very like a god or quite like a wild beast," but I would turn the aphorism by saying: Better be wise with the many than a fool all alone. There be some too who seek to be original by seeking chimeras.

Baltasar Gracian - The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

Perhaps we are better off mad with the rest of the world, but it would be reassuring to have the option. Is democracy supposed to sort that out?

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Support your local curmudgeon

...for they were either politicians or reporters, which, of course, comes to the same thing.

Ford Madox Ford – The Good Soldier (1915)

Almost every morning I use the  iPad to run a quick check on news headlines. I used to rely on Ceefax for my daily fix but those days are gone forever. I don’t usually read past the headlines apart from an occasional yen to get some detail, but an outline is usually enough.

I also find myself skipping from headline to comments and if there are no comments I move on. In other words, I’m hardly ever interested in what the average journalist has to say about a story. Only if the story is written by a tough-minded curmudgeon am I likely to read it and there aren’t many of those around, especially in the mainstream media.

Which finally leads to the point of this post, because in my experience there is something important about unyielding scepticism. We are stuck with a major social dilemma where mainstream opinion has to be – well mainstream. Otherwise it could not fulfil its social function, its need to suck up to the establishment and foster political correctness. Fear shapes behaviour, which is why the news is mostly alarmist. Doom and gloom rules the newsroom. Always has.

As a species we are not particularly intelligent and accept the most absurd garbage if it is socially acceptable to do so. A sharply critical outlook is required to detect the garbage but here’s the rub. Detecting garbage ought to be a positive and respected social skill, a welcome addition to the tools of social discourse. Unfortunately it isn’t, because it can’t be, because socially cohesive consensus would flounder if critical analysis were to be valued as a welcome corrective to the garbage and to the establishment viewpoint.

Support your local curmudgeon.

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Friday Night Is Music Night: Hear My Song

JD presents another five singer-songwriters...

Gram Parsons, "In My Hour Of Darkness":


Gene Clark:


Tim Hardin:


Tim Buckley:


Tim Buckley:



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The Reunification Of Britain & The Struggle Against Empires

"As the UK straps itself back together post-Referendum, deeper issues come to the surface" - latest article on Talkmarkets, here:

http://www.talkmarkets.com/content/news/the-reunification-of-britain--the-struggle-against-empires?post=100591


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A kingdom within a kingdom

Most who have written on the emotions, the manner of human life, seem to have dealt not with natural things which follow the general laws of nature, but with things which are outside the sphere of nature: they seem to have conceived man in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom. For they believe that man disturbs rather than follows the course of nature, and that he has absolute power in his actions, and is not determined in them by anything else than himself. They attribute the cause of human weakness and inconstancy not to the ordinary power of nature, but to some defect or other in human nature, wherefore they deplore, ridicule despise, or, what is most common of all,  abuse it: and he that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is beheld by his fellows as almost divine.

Baruch Spinoza – Ethics (1677)

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