seventeentimes

like a tea tray in the sky

This just wouldn’t be the same without the lovely Welsh accents… Enjoy!

I’ve been around for thirty one years. A shock indeed, as anyone who has ever been around for three decades will perhaps recall. The first two I spent in England, and over half of the last decade I have spent in the US. I sometimes forget that I am a foreigner here. I forget that if I were in England the scale of cultural references that I could understand would be much greater. I might not have been the most astutely political creature, but I paid attention, I read newspapers, I debated in pubs, I knew who the Education Secretary was. No longer. Not here, not there. And I have been tricked.

Sarah Palin, Karl Rove’s gun totin’, baby lovin’ answer to whatever turned up in the research they did to find out what those (nails on a blackboard) Undecideds in Ohio wanted to see standing next to McCain on the campaign trail, last week attempted to attack Obama with accusations about his relationship with Bill Ayers, co-founder of The Weathermen/The Weather Underground. Obviously this attempt to further associate the big-scary-black-man with the T word was not aimed at the likes of me. Nevertheless, I fell prey to an aspect of the reporting that really surprised me when I realised it this morning.

Without really giving it any thought at all, I wrote the whole thing off as not worth paying any particular attention to, but I did so with the assumption that The Weather Underground had killed a bunch of people with their bombs in the 70s, hence the total sense of condemnation. I assumed that ‘innocent civilians’ had been killed, that Ayers had already served a long prison sentence or gotten off on a technicality. Knowing that the group had been protesting the Vietnam War, I wasn’t going to automatically attach judgement to what they had done without understanding more about the situation. However, if I hadn’t happened to read a paragraph about them in an article on Common Dreams I would have slotted this set of assumptions into my world view, and there it would have stayed.

Now, I’m only fifteen minutes of internet research the wiser, but it turns out that the only people who ever died in a Weather Underground bomb were three members of their own group, and that they mostly sent out evacuation warnings. Compare this to the death toll in the Vietnam War they wanted so desperately to bring to an end:

3 to 4 million Vietnamese from both sides, 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians, and 58,159 U.S. soldiers.

Of course now I still know very little about The Weather Underground, but now I know very little about them from an active perspective as opposed to a passive one. An important distinction in this age where ‘common sense’ is being constantly manipulated by the megalomaniacs and their stooges.

Animation by Sam3

reminds me of an amazing animator/artist I came across recently. Blu. Lots to explore on his website. I particularly like the details on the enormous painting on the side of the Tate Modern.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

words

1. Crepuscular

1 : of, relating to, or resembling twilight: dim
2 : occurring or active during twilight

“The boy turned and looked back over his shoulder at the high window. The curtain twitched, but even though he waited and watched for a full minute longer, he saw no further movement. Behind him his footsteps trailed off through the thick snow, around the corner and out of sight. He knew that beyond the corner they followed along the edge of the house for a few feet before making a sharp turn towards the front door. Suddenly he felt blinded by the pain of it, the unbearable feeling of loss crashed inside him like wave after wave. He could no more retrace those footsteps now as he could turn himself into a crow and fly up to the window. He turned back and looked again towards the woods. The light in the sky was slipping slowly past the horizon of pungent furrowed fields to his right. Back in the other direction were the houses of his neighbours, and lightly sleeping dogs, and beyond them the village. That would not do. The woods, as threatening as they appeared, were his only option. He had to stay out of sight. There were some who roamed at this hour, in the lonely fields and the dark alleyways of the village, and such crepuscular folk were perhaps more dangerous now than that from which he fled.”

As it happened, there was something in Marama’s cave that was much too distracting for Millicent to have any room left over in her brain for worrying about being eaten. That is to say, there were two things - the first of which was an overpowering smell of all-things-bear.

They walked for some time without speaking, the only sound being the crunching of ice beneath their feet. Gradually the trees began to thin out and the forest floor became uneven, rising and falling in a series of jagged little hills and valleys, until finally they came to the base of a steep hill that seemed to climb endlessly above them. The right hand side of the hill was completely sheer as if it had been sliced in two and one half removed, and in the space left behind a great basin of frozen water lay in eerie stillness. Marama grunted and pointed to a dark opening in the rock face. It was almost hidden from view by a thick column of ice that rose from the surface of the pool at the foot of the cliff to the crest high above them. “The ice storm has silenced my friend,” observed Marama as she led the way along a wide but slippery ledge that jutted out of the rock several feet above the level of the basin, “It’s lonely without her this morning.” Millicent was going to respond but just then they passed behind the frozen waterfall and reached the entrance to the cave and she was hit full force by an incredible odor. A cacophony of scents like a blast of trumpets blared in her nostrils. It was as if she could smell in a single inhale the residue of every drop of blood Marama had spilled in the cave, every hot sweaty afternoon, every fart, every salty tear. As she followed the bear inside the smell only intensified, and it was all Millicent could do not to pass out on the spot.

Marama gestured to a large armchair and Millicent gratefully sunk down amongst the billowy velvet cushions, breathing as shallowly as she could. The bear went over to a large wooden table in one corner of the cave and busied herself with making tea. With a small hatchet she hacked several chunks from a block of ice inside a wooden chest at the very back of the cave and dropped them into a heavy metal pot with long handles. This she transferred to a hook that stuck out of a low alcove in the rock next to the table. Beneath the pot she piled up a pawful of sticks and set them aflame with an effortless flick of her wrist that sent sparks flying as the iron-hard claw of her thumb hit the rock. Then she disappeared for a time into what Millicent supposed was a pantry before returning to the table with a tray piled high with jars stuffed full of dried leaves, twigs, flowers and a few unidentifiable things that Millicent decided not to examine more closely. For the next few minutes Marama bent over the table, sniffing, measuring, grinding and combining the contents of the jars, and Millicent grew bored and let her eyes drift over the rest of the cave. It was becoming easier to breath now as she became accustomed to the smell, and as she looked around she risked some deeper breaths that made her feel less faint, thinking again of one of Oba’s rhymes, “Ne’er a trouble that can’t be eased, by she who knows the way to breathe”. There were a number of bookshelves crammed to bursting with intimidating looking books; several other armchairs that didn’t look as if they had been sat in for years; a music stand; another large table on the other side of the cave, this one cluttered with delicate-looking metal contraptions and large pieces of paper held down at the corners with big, glass paperweights; and the biggest bed Millicent had ever seen, piled with layer upon layer of blankets.

Just then the water in the pot began to boil, making the top jump up and down with a comforting sort of clattering sound, and Millicent shifted her gaze. That was when she saw the second distracting thing. That was when she saw the painting.

Two views

If you can, please watch in the dark with your speakers turned up and in Full Screen…