Tag: love
Social movements; mainstreaming gendering and tackling hate crime
The murder of Sarah Everard by a met police copper brought the subject to mainstream focus again, amidst some tabloid distractions about Kate Middleton’s unmasked appearance to the memorial, yet not over-shadowing the re-offence of police on women during the vigil in Clapham junction.
The UN has introduced Sustainability Values as part of the award assessment tool, with the majority of contracts requiring gender mainstreaming, and women’s empowerment embedded in development and diplomatic responses.The UK government (FCDO, ex Dfid), introduced Social Value as a 10% contributor to the assessment process of proposals from suppliers and empowering women is central to this. The current debate in the House of Lords will propose that all acts of hate against women should become illegal whereas this is law in some areas.
This is certainly a step in the right direction for progressive development based on a basic understanding of valuing human capital through a broader set than the traditionally Conservative industrialised societies’ lenses.
In this context, the role of social media has been beneficial in unveiling outdated body-shamers, bullies, trolls and harassers to women therefore providing evidence and a trail to pursue criminal convictions on those who overstep the line for one or for many.
Here’s a reminder of behaviours to record with screenshots (if you need to report and block an account) for evidence in both public and private situations;
- passive-aggressive electronic messages (emails, social media inboxes, messaging apps)
- threats to harm others or oneself
- offensive comments to others or to yourself
- threatening behaviours (gas-lighting and bullying as an ultimatum)
Violence on women can happen from women and men and non-binary folk alike. Violence from women can happen towards either groups too.
Hate is a crime.
Each one of us need to keep this awareness of making sure there is a trail. Whether it is happening to you, a friend or family, or someone in the street, keep a record on your notes, take photos and recall what happened and how it made you feel.
The more evidence we all gather, the more power it generates to put those at risk to women/trans-women for judicial scrutiny and influence the level of sentencing and/or rehabilitation approaches.
Sign of spring?
Knowledge with sentiment
There’s a value in trying different lifestyles and disciplines.
Hunting for comfort is an instinctive act.
Refusing to accept the identities we were adopted in this world by, is the ultimate betrayal of oneself. An act of despair.
Self-oppression by transplantation, still foreign despite appropriation.
Faking privilege is the struggle of colonisation over the naked truth.
Criticism behind closed doors.
Narcissism in deep waters.
Withholding the inevitable natural life-cycle of renewal for a little while longer.
Concrete morality. Bourgeoisie locked jaws loosening up.
Like how fulfilled one feels as dinner is being had at the end of a long trip.
And the journey begins again…
April 2020, the month of coronavirus lockdown. My breathing exercises in spring views of East London, UK
I would like to start this blogpost acknowledging this has been one changeable mood kind of a month.
It begun in semi frustration and acceptance: this is what we need to do and we commit to it. Blindfolded into commitment, no questions asked. Then days, then weeks passed. The exhaustion of changing habits in and out of home. The disappointment of realising you can’t walk into this pub, or straight into the shop, they are either shut, or there is a queue. You can’t hug your friend or pat the back of your neighbour. And that cycle route you always thought as the best, is out of bounds, too many runners using the tow path and daddies training their little ones to cycle. So forced into rediscovering your vicinity in new conditions, you get to become the tourist again, and that is cool.
Then the important stuff happening unnoticed until you think there’s value in the time you have saved from travelling and all the social stuff you can no longer do. So talking to friends and neighbours you end up rocking up to a community space in a church build on the ruins of one that was built in the 1600s, thinking you’re not the religious type but there are enough Muslim kids and white working class families about to take the edge off.
Next thing you’re committed and talking to new people. That guy is familiar, of course he is in and out of my block, and we chat, I hear the news and off we go.
Those who are organising everything, early on in the outbreak, with little knowledge of the impact yet without hesitation, they set up shop quickly. They asked and got donations, listened unjudgmentally to the community’s input, and attracted people of all ethnicities and faiths to help. They reassigned resources quickly. The initial food was delivered to 40 odd people three times a week and now it has grown to double of that.
Today, the last day of April feels like a halfway point on a long holiday. It’s been thrilling, confusing, too long, too short, too busy, and now seems to be going too fast and to be true, I don’t want it to end yet, but I do want to be able to make plans for the future.
Somehow the reality is: I can’t, and none of us can.
As we will gradually re-enter a version of normality in the coming months, there will be plenty of vulnerable people who will still not be able to leave their home. This help will not stop with our needs being met, and not until they have their fully met. It has been challenging at times running up and down unfamiliar estates, motivating oneself to get out, cover up, do your deed, run home, take everything off, clean everything, shower. Yet it’s been worth it. The smiles, the chats, the waves, the odd requests, or the kind wishes and offers. It all makes it so special.
This month has also been one where I covered nearly 200km cycling. It’s not a lot, however in addition to my training, and the bursting energy of spring colours and smells, there was plenty of visual richness to record.
The blog and the photos are dedicated to the community leaders, and those who need their swift action. They are being both my inspiration and motivation throughout the past six weeks and the very out of the ordinary month of April 2020.
Even more so, this month I hope does not go by forgotten. Everyone has been affected by it and I purposely included the empty canary wharf development. No one is immune to this and I hope this chance for a level playing field is finally grasped like the breath of fresh air we so much need.
Squid, remodelling needs
In one of my last dissertation supervision sessions, my supervisor asked me which animal species are thriving at present?
I took a couple of guesses none of which were right.
I was trying to join the dots between his question and my dissertation topic, which was a comparative study between the political economy of the Sami and the Inuit. I just couldn’t see where he was leading onto.
Jonathan went on to say it is the squid. And the reason for it, is that whilst fishing has focused on other species, the squid had the opportunity to multiply in swarms.
He went on to explain that the obvious answers are not always the correct ones. I suppose he was trying to tell me by focusing on one thing we assume as the path to survival, there are emerging occurrences we leave unnoticed.
I since then took to noticing squid more often.
Walking down SE Division Street. Portland, OR, past Whiskey Soda Lounge with Tim, I took this.
In one way, the story is that of silver linings behind a cloudy day. We are seeing changes to our lives that we have not entertained in detail of how they will be affecting our emotional needs and resilience.
Making a smoothie cocktail with Craken is my resilience recipe for the odd night now we are spending a lot more time at home. And enjoying it over a long video chat to the wee hours of the day.
We know in times of uncertainty there are certain parameters we can measure against, and work towards, to meet those needs.
Our needs are not only our own. They are universal values our humanity exists by. When these are threatened, or placed in new unfamiliar conditions, there’s a couple of things we can do to refocus.
The top ten commandments of emotional needs are:
Connection
Attention
Privacy
Autonomy
Security
Wider community
Friendship
Competence
Achievement
Meaning & purpose
The overarching point I see across the list of emotional needs, is intimacy.
Intimacy in a non sexual way.
But the space where two people connect over a unique shared experience that rings emotions of belonging, and trust, for both of them.
We are all interconnected. Even at times when we may feel that life becomes unfamiliar, rather than trying to regain a sense of control, our biggest strength may be in our capacity to reflect, learn and evolve.
I don’t know much, but situations like today’s offer a unique chance, that of a lifetime, to improve and rejoin community with renewed values of what we need and how to approach what we have and what presents itself before us.
Chow salad
West Indian staple for boosting immune systems galore.
I’m sharing this seriously tasty medley of flavours as it has proven a huge hit shared out with friends from all over the world.
My mother in law called me the other day. She was thinking what to cook for her 72nd birthday in a couple of days’ time.
Being stuck with the insentive to boost my immune system, having just returned from a very long and challenging hike, Chow was the only thing that would hit the spot in terms of vitamins and flavours. Chow is a north coast Trinidadian staple salad and Anne’s call reminded of it just so.
I have made several versions over the years. This time around the first attempt I made contained (shown in the picture above):
Half lime juice, salt, sunflower oil, banana, mango, kiwi, spring onion, ceyenne, cucumber, carrots. Mix up and leave it to meddley together.
In the second version I added some red onion (quarter of it very finely chopped) and fresh radish.
The original version requires bell peppers, which I love.
I’m not so keen in the garlic, but that’s up to personal taste.
There is a wonderful Caribbean cook here that shows you how to make it with all the ingredients you can find in the north coast of this wonderful island.
Check this guy out. If you can get the incredients, go original. Yet seriously not much lost by trying alternatives!
In fact, the first time I tasted Chow was on Maracas Bay, by my friend’s beach house on the north coast of Trinidad.
The rest is history.
Enjoy, in honour and gratitude to my lovely Anne on her 72nd birthday.
American man
I grew up thinking of America as this homogenically superficial space fuelled by ignorance and ultra-arrogance imposed by the sound of mad dogs and gun shots in the background. A war within itself.
In the politics and economics of the past thirty years, the trajectory of individualism is a response to the controversy of sharing all, in post anti communism, Cold War era.
This skewed anti reality brewed the covering of the reduction of basic human rights, presented as anti-terror securities to the average folk, and messed up the minds and values of many alike. This was easily absorbed by a weak societal structure in the US that without free access to health, education or meaningful work opportunities, beyond the concept of self-sale, left people scraping by for the ‘mana’. The lack of cultural references, families or friendships providing emotional support systems can not be bought by insurance companies.
In adulthood, we are all paving our way on our own but the multilayered toxicity of American neoliberalism has easily spread a virus with the language of non sense – what people can’t understand conceptually, can’t analyse and therefore are open to manipulation, misinterpretation, abhorrent expressions – they don’t even make sense to those that speak of them.
Today, this translates into the extremist mini-anti-cultures surviving by a bashing each others’ existence in perpetuation.
Jamali Maddix got a few of them covered for Vice.
Bunches of incoherent folks at each other’s throats, caricaturing a very simple and singular dimension as a version of society. We can critique the social movements for not establishing fundamental change but they are not ripping cultures apart or marginalising what holds as a resource of existence to the average folk. 
For many on the outside of US, the scene is hopeless and bleak. For many on the outside, we can’t help but romantisize for a mind shift by the immense phoenix like male figures that despite the union’s level of absence in communal conscience, they have held a string light for long enough to beam their connection with and faith in humanity and in hope for a realignment of the American dream. They have the knowledge that one’s resources are equally owned and interconnected by everyone on the planet. Physical and emotional cultural references matter, the intangible connections energise the common pool.
Ultimately, isolationists are believing that by fighting everyone off to protect their patch of land, they will not end up finding out they are fighting against themselves, which they know its not only unsustainable, but plain self destructive and stupid. Sum it up in the simple lesson of the flowers and the bees.
My gratitude goes out to the two American men that know too well where the concept of the American dream really can stem from and what it could really translate into in the daily routes of American self identification. It is a work that will take a generation or two, and these men hold the tortch for the way there.
Respect to Neil Young
Respect for Bernie Sanders
Singing in-love
With Valentine’s around the corner, here is a fond selection of songs celebrating falling in love, all over again.
Hold on to your close ones, cuddle up and shake it all up. Life’s too short for holding back.
Enjoy the vibes…
David Gray “Please forgive me”
Jason Derulo “It girl”
Etta James “At last”
Roberta Flack “First time, ever I saw your face”
James Arthur – Say You Won’t Let Go
Ellie Goulding “Your song”
Beyonce “Halo”
The Cure “Lovesong”
The Temptations “My girl”
Neil Young “Harvest Moon”
The Red Hand Files (every single word in this post is copied from Nick Cave’s site). I own no rights or copyright. Issue #59 On Poetry, or infidelity.
Intro by blog owner:
Everyone should read Nick’s beautifully empathetic, humility fuelled, comicly crafted answers, coming from a big pool of love for his fans.
I first encountered his music as a punk/gothy teen at the Rebound club in Athens and my mature years had me thinking he needs to grow up and out of the pool of self-absorbsion and then his son died, and that was the fundamental lifetime event that I perceive when he did. We so need loss of life to define our reality and reconnect us with life again.
ISSUE #59 / SEPTEMBER 2019
My girlfriend, a woman I love through soaring heaven and table-flipping hell, refuses to read any of my writing because she always sees some hint of infidelity, resentment, or perhaps madness in it. How do I get her to understand that just because I might write a poem about some lusty girl I saw on the train I don’t actually want to sleep with another woman?
CIRCIUM, COLORADO, USA
Dear Circium,
Tom Waits famously wrote “You are innocent when you dream”, yet dreams are not nearly as innocent as they seem. Neither are songs nor poetry. Songwriting and poetry are perilous callings, full of intrigue and infidelity. They are covert undertakings that creep around our deepest and most hazardous needs. They are not for the squeamish or the eager to please.
I believe you when you say you don’t want to sleep with the ‘lusty girl on the train’ – the problem is what you want to do is actually worse. You want to write a poem about her. To write a song or a poem about another human being can be one of the most intensely intimate acts a person can perform, it is an act of profound, unblinking contemplation, a near religious meditation on that moment of carnal recognition.
Listen to Patti Smith’s version of ‘Gloria’, where she has taken Van Morrison’s already wolfish classic and expanded it into a supercharged religious rumination on lust.
I look out the window
See a sweet young thing
Humpin’ on the parking meter
Leanin’ on the parking meter
Patti Smith’s ‘Gloria’ is not concerned so much with the actual sexual encounter, but rather with the brutal carnality and religious ecstasy of language itself. It is one of the most demented displays of predatory sexual desire ever recorded. Yet, it is beyond sex. It is even beyond worship. It is poetry. The “sweet young thing” that is “humpin’ on the parking meter” is your “lusty girl on a train”.
Gloria, Peggy Sue, Billie Jean, Angie, Delilah, Fernando, Jolene, Ruby, Maggie May, Chuck E., Sharona, Sara, Suzanne, Sweet Caroline and, indeed, Deanna – these names live on, as sacrificial lambs, compulsively sexualised in our collective consciousness.
My song ‘Deanna’ was seen as a particularly brutal act of betrayal, and thirty years on I still haven’t been fully forgiven. I console myself with the thought that I was unflinching in my duties as a songwriter and in doing so wrote a song that brought joy to the lives of many, even though it broke a heart (or two) in the process.
From one wordsmith to another, and from someone who has spent a considerable amount of a long and contentious career in the songwriter’s doghouse, that’s the name of the game, Circium. Harsh as it is, we spend our lives walking on the hearts and messy eggshells we have smashed in order to make the omelet that feeds the multitudes.
I can perfectly understand why you want your girlfriend to read your stuff, as we poets and songwriters often have little else to offer than our words, and of course our perverse little truths. However, your poems are intimations of an eroticized and imaginative adventure of which your partner is excluded. It’s little wonder she might be reluctant to get involved.
Having said that, over time I have discovered great poetic and personal value in writing about the familiar, that which is in front of you, that which you see every day, that which sleeps beside you, for often that quotidian presence is the most extraordinarily complex and dangerous thing of all. It holds a looking glass up to beautiful and terrible truths that live inside us. As we look into our lover’s eyes and see our reflected selves, our courage as writers is tested and enlarged.
The girl on the train will always be there, forever travelling through that imaginative space, but maybe the challenge for you as a poet lies within the intricate wonder of the one who sits before you. She is, after all, your mirror.
Love, Nick
Cowboys and effigies 