...another rather eccentric and marginal artistic project, the Willesden Herald blog.
A community blog written by the people of the London borough of Willesden
- Roundtable Review, Pretence or Genius
Great website. I never thought I'd find a website that appreciated the strange intensity of Willesden sunsets. It sounds ridiculous to say you don't see them anywhere else - but it's true isn't it?
- Zadie Smith (comments)
Despite your outrageous heightism, I would be very happy to take up your case with the Council...
- The Rt. Hon. Sarah Teather MP, Brent East
(Dear Feargal)
As you know yourself, the quest for form - the search for the voice and scale necessary to what one wishes to say
- is the primary effort of writing. This may lead one into novel writing at one point, and into the writing of sonnets later on
- rather as Beethoven confined himself almost exclusively to the string quartet after finishing the Op 125 symphony.
- Rana Dasgupta (Dear Feargal)
Let Afghanistan sell opium etc.It's poppycock to grow crops here but destroy them in Afghanistan: "So how would you feel, if you were sitting back on your terrace in Oxfordshire, and looking out at the poppies waving in the fields, and you heard the thugga-thugga-thugga of Apache helicopters? Suppose these helicopters were to disgorge hundreds of dark-glass-wearing US troops, who were to advance with flame-throwers and defoliants through the fields, destroying all the vegetation they could see. I put it to you that you would be exceedingly hacked off if you were a farmer." (Boris Johnson)
They (the government) are too busy being busy getting people killed and killing people to stop and think about what's best to do. That's when they're not playing silly beggars with capital gains tax.
Just so you know...Swine flu vaccine to be given to entire population: "The UK government has ordered enough vaccine to cover the entire population. GPs are being told to prepare for a nationwide vaccination campaign." (Telegraph)
More bees beeing around this year, certainly hundreds I think in the luxuriant clover and lavender etc in King Edward VII park in Willesden. In case you're wondering, it's the playing fields behind the sports centre, which few people knew the name of before but all will know as they've stuck nameplates and maps at every entrance. I have heard the footballers call it "King Edwards" before, so it wasn't completely unknown. Strange that many small parks are called King Edwards, I think (you can check if you like - I'm pretty sure there's another not far away in Wembley).
Ossian
* Update 08 July 2009: Added soundtrack "Across The Clearing" by The Ray Kelley Band (selected from YouTube "audio swap" resources) to Willesden Bee Movie. It's now like something by Visconti (I fondly imagine). Os
The report claims that thousands of mobile phones were hacked into by people working for News International and that payoffs were made in return for silence about the matter, a.k.a. "out of court settlements".
Today/this evening in Roundwood Park"Brent Respect Festival is a fun, friendly, family festival that celebrates Brent's talent, diversity and creativity in the setting of one of Brent's finest parks. Brent has been organising a Respect Festival since 2003 to coincide with the Mayor of London's Rise Week and it in continues to be a vibrant event and is an integral part of national campaigns such as Big Dance and 2012."
"At this year's festival you can learn to play the steel drums, practice your Bollywood dance moves, create a costume for carnival, join the football tournament or make your own compost. If you just want to relax, Brent's talented dancers and musicians, including well-known artists and rising stars, will be up on stage to entertain you."
Taking up where Rise left (was dropped!) off, the Respect Festival keeps on keeping on. Again we rise! Dance, music, food, all in a gorgeous London park. Brochure (pdf)
There are literary workshops and events in the Sshhh! tent, including the WGwg tour with "What we were thinking just before the end" from 6 pm to 8 pm. Catch good friend of the Willesden Herald, Steve Moran reading "Piano Smashing Blues", which appropriately enough is set in a local park on fair day.
Note: The Jubilee Line is closed today but there is a free shuttle bus from Willesden Junction station to the festival. (More transport details)
Criticism of the fire brigadeFire victim pleaded to be rescued - Telegraph: "A mother who died in a tower block fire that claimed the lives of six people had a final, desperate conversation with her husband as smoke poured into their 11th floor flat where she and her two children were trapped."
Why do politicians always instantly say how marvellous the emergency services are? Because they are ultimately responsible for the incompetence that is all-pervasive in this bureaucracy. The testimony of the father who lost his wife and children is very moving.
10,000 for me, 127 for youTroops' lives 'at risk through vehicle delays' - Telegraph: "The new second-generation Mastiffs should have arrived in service with the Army by the middle of last month, but commanders have now been told not to expect the full consignment until later in the year. [...] By contrast, the US Department of Defence has managed to procure more than 10,000 of the American version of the Mastiff, known as the Mine Resistant Armoured Protected Vehicle (MRAP), in just 18 months."
The members of parliament have been too busy "flipping their second homes" in order to avoid capital gains tax.
Incident in a police stateIs the state guilty of child kidnap? - Telegraph: '[...] on May 18, when Mr and Mr Jones, accompanied by their younger son, arrived at school to pick up their daughter, they were met by a group of strangers, one as it turned out a female social worker. She asked, without explaining why or who she was, whether he was Mr Jones. When she three times refused to show him any ID, he was seized from behind by two policemen, handcuffed and put under arrest. ... He was driven by a policeman to a nearby mental hospital where he was told that, because of "a number of concerns", he was being detained under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act and "sectioned" under S.2 as of "unsound mind". His wife, it turned out, had been similarly arrested, for loudly protesting at the handcuffing of her husband and the forcible seizing from her arms of her young son. The three children had been taken into care by social services. ... Mrs Jones was allowed to return to an empty home that evening. Mr Jones was permitted to attend court two days later, to hear the magistrates grant an interim order for the children to remain in the care of social services. Because he was "sectioned", he was not allowed to speak. The chief magistrate, it later emerged, was chairman of the trustees of the mental hospital in which he was being detained.'
And what was his "mental illness" - perceived delusions of grandeur and paranoia about the safety of his children?
Broadcast on:BBC HD, 11:40pm Friday 3rd July 2009 Duration: 60 minutes Available until: 12:34am Saturday 11th July 2009
"Recorded during a two-night residency at the O2 Arena in London, Live at Last represents a rare occasion to experience all the funky energy of a Stevie Wonder concert. A pioneer in modern R&B, the American pianist, songwriter and tremendous performer comes back in top form after having spent ten years away from the spotlight. ... An electrifying journey into Wonder's long and successful career, Live at Last includes all his classic hits such as My Cherie Amour, Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours, Superstition, Higher Ground, Living for the City, You are the Sunshine of My Life, I Wish and Isn't She Lovely, performed with his daughter Aisha Morris. All in all an unforgettable spectacle."
You won't want to miss this, particularly if you're into funky jazz fusions (or whatever this is called). Pure virtuosity and joie de vivre.
Watching and posting
The opening harmonica instrumental is lovely and subtle in the way it builds and blossoms and ends with a feat of virtuosity (needless to say).
The third track is a very soulful reworking of "Lately" - obviously heartfelt, especially when he uses his own name in a variation to the lyrics.
He's starting some communal singing for the next song, My Cherie Amour. Maybe I might update this post again later.
The audience are having a ball. Dancing, kissing...loving the music.
Excellent: Signed, Sealed, Delivered - hot from the Obama campaign revival. I like his singing in this concert - seems better than ever. How can one person write this stuff, be such a virtuoso and entertainer. Michael Jackson was something special but nobody can rival Mr Wonder himself.
At about 35 minutes in: Gorgeous "You are the sunshine of my life". The singers are perfect and full of joy. Now it's on to "I just called to say I love you", with a few ad-libs.
The whole time I'm watching this, I get the feeling that this is our present day Mozart, and just so wish we could bring Mozart back to life and hear what he would make of Motown and all that. Same thing with Shakespeare and present day writers. Pity - but maybe it will come to pass through time travel if ever that is enabled. (I know you may say that these people have lived their lives and "it didn't happen" but I'm telling you: they will live again! Hallelujah. ;-)
"Superstition" - just noticing the band is more like a small orchestra, with a rhythm section consisting of two separate drummers with drum kits as well as a percussionist on congas and other things. "Superstition" morphs into a medley with "What the fuss?" Brilliant.
45 minutes, band call out. Two percussionists and a drummer. 5 singers. Etc. I can't give you the names. (One I can, Aisha - his daughter, as mentioned in "Isn't she lovely".) He's going to end on "As" and he has an interesting speech near the end, all about love and his late mother. Sounds odd when I write it like that, but he's all heart, has a natural way about him and makes a great exit.
Boris on JackoMichael Jackson: It would be wrong to sneer at this outpouring of public grief - Telegraph: "[...] Never was someone so obviously and so literally unhappy in his own skin, and by his obsessional suffering he earned the potential sympathy of everyone who feels doubtful about their appearance, which is a fair chunk of the human race. [...] And by his musical triumphs, he proved the essential point, that you can look weird, feel weird, be weird – and still be a genius. In one sense Michael Jackson was beaten by the star system, in that it made demands about how he should look and behave which he felt he could never satisfy. In another sense he beat the system. He beat it by writing Beat It." (Boris Johnson)
Virgin Mobile insurance con
"3 months free phone insurance. Cover your Virgin Mobile Pay Monthly phone, and the first 3 months are on us. After that, its just £5.99 a month."
£5.99 per month to insure your phone? What a rip-off, a tax on the busy parents of impressionable youngsters who demand mobile phones, not anticipating that this financial trap is being laid for them when they click through online. All "first 3 months free" schemes should be banned.
Richard Littlejohn's racist rants etc.
Happened to be in the barbers today and nothing else to read but the Daily Mail rag. To be fair, this housepaper-in-waiting for the genocidal BNP dictatorship had one good double page memoir about sexual mores in France, which was worth reading - an eye opener as they say. However it also contained a pageful of brutal and racist rants by a big Jeremy Clarkson-like buffoon called Richard Littlejohn. Like Clarkson this blatherer Littlejohn has made a living out of being an arse in the media for years.
He criticizes the police in a strange backhanded way, for example he complains that a guy was Tasered three times while spreadeagled on the ground while also describing him as "a piece of lard who probably deserved a good kicking". He gets some things sort of half right, probably by accident, including pointing out the stupidity of Tasering a sheep that was blocking a road. He then goes on in another strange backhanded sort of way about police swimming lessons being cancelled in Wales because it would put Muslim women off joining.
What I really didn't like was how he then went on via a tenuous link to say (and I quote) that "the Warwickshire police are holding a pikey's picnic this weekend, inviting all members of 'the travelling community' to a day of festivities at the force's Leek Wootton headquarters. The manicured lawns of the country house HQ will play host to a traditional Roma band, story-telling and even 'a graffiti project'. I hope they remember to lock up their lawn-mowers." [My emphasis]
It's not just the word "pikey" - which is offensive enough, I think, but that remark about locking up their lawn-mowers. I don't think you need me to draw the historical parallels of vilification that little jibe evokes. Have people like him learned nothing from history? As long as this country thinks he and people like him are, in the American term, "good old boys" we are headed for the horrors.
Remember today, remember everything you see around you: the communities, the arts, the hospitals and hospices, the schools and special schools, the languages you hear everywhere, the public transport passes for pensioners, welfare for people in hardship, benefits, pensions, freedom, rights. All these things will be violently and wilfully destroyed and disappear forever if people like him have their way, if they ever gain power. All that will be left is a feudal system of mansions, with unrepaired roads between them and surrounded by hovels, the Brazil of Europe, a banana republic with no bananas and no republic, run on the divine right of inherited privilege.
We can start the fight by binning the Daily Mail. Let's also oppose the Tories 10% cuts proposals and their alliance with the far right parties of Europe. New Labour sucks, and Gordon's expenses fiasco (yes, let him own it all) sucks majorly but look around, there is regeneration everywhere: new sports centre, rebuilt secondary school, rebuilt community hospital all within five minutes walk of where I live. When you go to a hospital appointment, you don't have to wait as long to be seen. There are new tests that are pro-actively promulgated for preventive medicine. There is a minimum wage. These are just some of the things one could list.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, let's purge lazy and concupiscent MP's but let us not install Lord Snooty and his friends to try to turn the clock back. Don't let them dismantle, sell off and vitiate the investment that has been made. At the very worst, a Lib-Lab pact can survive. It is by no means over till it's over. Cameron is "measuring the curtains for 10 Downing Street" and therein lies his party's Achilles' heel: they think they have it in the bag, they have seen the winning post too soon.
The symbolism in the Earth Song video is messianic. Jackson redeems the world at the end by stamping his foot. The stamping of his foot as the world is regenerated is a primitive dance element and also (perhaps appropriately) how a petulant child demands something.
I don't know if he was guilty as charged although acquitted but that child abuse trial must have destroyed him. There was a chance of suicide at that time, I thought. Some good things are made by people who are not all good. Just one opinion.
"[...] The wide street, lined on each side with garage-like concrete alcoves that serve for shops, was strewn with rubbish and, the Jocks discovered, eight separate IEDs. The only people in the shops were youthful members of A Company, who spent their time frying up some of the potatoes the traders left behind. ... His company finally found two local people to engage with on the fourth day [...] The first was a teenage boy caught foraging for stale bread in an empty compound [...] The second was a grey-bearded old man the British found sitting under a tree, outside a tiny mud-brick home the size of two telephone boxes – the only inhabitant of an otherwise entirely deserted village to have stayed behind. Only his bad legs, and the trouble he has walking, had prevented him joining the exodus. ... No fewer than three British officers set about trying to extract information and to deliver their key messages. [...] The old man wasn't having any of it: "Last year a big British bomb in Nowzad killed 600 people," he said. "Another 170 were killed at a wedding party."
Meanwhile, John Bercow and the government are fiddling while Afghanistan burns.
Except for permission to include in the Willesden Herald online or other media editions, contributors retain copyright and all other rights on their letters and submissions. Please include any link or email address in your signature line, if you want it published.
We have told our columnists time and again only to post stories that are not not untrue, but frankly it would be easier to train monkeys. Please tell us if we have inadvertently hit on something not not true, and we will uncorrect it. (Ed.)
.jpg)
