Yard

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

does any one listen to Jon3?

[Lateralthinking1]

Hi Calum - I watched 36 minutes of Michael Pollan, then unfortunately he came to a juddering halt. A problem with the system! Anyway, I quite like his delivery. He has the timing of Woody Allen and some interesting perspectives. Not sure though that his arguments hold together tightly. His "garden" is less formal than wild. So rice has more genes than the human being. The problem with the genome project is that it isn't about facts but rather codifying. It is severely limited by being just a human language. Similarities between the gardener and the bee are pretty obvious given that the perspective is that of the gardener. Is a bee really a bee? Is anything really anything beyond what it appears to be to the human mind?

Yes, attitudes towards drugs are modish - aren't all attitudes thus, hence the need to be cautious of support structures in which the works of Jung are comprehended as almost biblical or the legal system is seen as always providing indisputable norms. I don't recall tea and coffee being referred to as drugs a couple of decades ago. There has been a turn of the circle but arguably it doesn't go nearly far enough round. Sleep, walking, even breakfast all naturally change consciousness. Such things are more addictive being essential for living. Perhaps we need to reframe our perceptions of addiction rather than our views on drugs.

It is not clear from Michael's thought-provoking speech whether the cleverness of plants in attracting is at root random or for their own benefits. Chemical changes, in the absence of movement, do not necessarily represent growth. Battered seaweed stands up to survive rather than to develop. The potato catalogue is doctored by humans essentially to hype attraction and reap the rewards. Instincts for getting high may merely obscure the more basic instinct for maintaining balance. Systems tend to dispense drugs not only in actuality but in their laws and cultural values. However, many are natural inuits even where there is availability so I don't think we can consider humans as just one land mass. There are many examples in music and the arts of a jazz or psychedelic sensibility that is not drug induced, although there are links in trend. The average OAP on a stroll or drive in the countryside is likely to meander, even "improvise", rather than keep to the same course.

Sometimes the impacts of "artistry on drugs" are indirect. As a child of the sixties, I believe that in absorbing the culture of the day, I and my contemporaries took drugs "virtually" if not actually, through a kind of filter. This had an impact on imaginations as well as the permissions and controls which now prevail. Cannabis is fascinating because it is the only drug that I can think of which divides people on the issue of addiction as it is perceived. Some say it is addictive; others say it isn't. I'd like to hear why every illegal substance is seen by many as having addictive properties. This has always seemed to me to be a peculiar coincidence. LT1.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

lateral
apologies for the link to Pollan - i would not use genius to describe the entwinement of plant chemical production and other life forms ... since it ascribes a 'mover' rather than life just expressing itself ....

one point he makes about cannabis that i like is the route it took via Africa to Europe if opium is the 'yellow' peril what is mariJ? opium was ok when the merchant banks were coining it from the slaves/cotton/opium trades ..... but no longer; alcohol is ok cos tesco sells it cheap eh?

a few seasons back the football terraces turned into carnivals because all the lads were taking E .... much nicer than the usual alcohol/starch/sugar intoxications

being a teenager in the sixties i must say that i inhaled .... but now just value mental clarity, a difficulty with the type of painkiller my GP suggests for arthritis! however when i reach 70 it is my infirm intention to become a dope fiend ....


btw Rogers might argue that you make a category mistake with your survive/develop distinction; living forms have only one option - develop or stagnate and cease - what exactly does one mean by 'survive'?

[Lateralthinking1]

Nice comments. There will be Tesco wars, mark my words. They will go down in history. The only question is who will be the new Lord Palmerston.

I never took E but I saw a lot of the Happy Mondays and wore Sergio Tacchini on the terraces. This almost rebalanced me for 0-0 excitements on Saturdays. There was only one Georgie Graham.

Some of my friends with more stances than stashes have always been quick to point the finger. From the white socks with black shoes to my Ford Escort with fluffy dice, they are generally alarmed by the instincts.

I currently survive. Development doesn't come into it. It's the difference between exasperation and inhalation. :cool2:

[Lateralthinking1]

.....which reminds me, and my apologies, this is the entirely wrong place for it.

I promised one of my 1980s/1990s Highbury buddies yesterday that I would stick this on the site when people weren't looking. He likes "Everybody needs a break, climb a mountain or jump in a lake". And it reminds him of all the good times in Irish North London "without which we wouldn't be the people we are today".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCd16mQO32M

You can go back to the jazz now. I know my place.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

everyone is welcome in da yard!:cool2:

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

[Lateralthinking1]

Thanks Calum. The Yard is full of perplexities. I like it. The great man above begins weakly. He stresses the first word of "The Riddle of Poetry" and decides bizarrely that this is "riddle", not "the". Still, it is good stuff. We know now that children develop their hearing sense first and become visually aware surprisingly late. Words are there ready to be applied to pictures.

With this in mind, consider the notion that poetry is the ability to see without words. It requires a natural forgetfulness of nouns and verbs which in turn enables feelings. Feelings that may be most closely expressed with a new, differently structured, learning of sounds. In the gifted such are grooved as deep or strip like bark in parallel.

Haphazardly, I like to think, I maintained that sense of poetry. My head was regularly washed in records. What was the value in absorbing the language of science more than was necessary for convenience? I love gardening and the countryside but I'd hate to know how a tree "works". This doesn't mean that I am a poet. Oh no. I'm an environmentalist.

As the main man seems to say, there are books and books of the stuff. It can be lovely but at it's most profound, it boils to a beautiful nothingness. Nothing comes from nothing. Something comes from this writing but, being something, it is lacking a lot of nothing. I'm humanly proud of that fact of analysis.

So, yes, the very point of a poem is that it is the final frontier. The emphasis here is on the second word "the". It is THE frontier before the poetry of the non-verbal drifts away. Music is the inner liner but you know that well. You've been in The Yard a long time. Now for me beans on marmite toast with worcester sauce and a side dish of fish fingers dipped in cranberry jelly.

[Lateralthinking1]

Sorry for this yesterday. It was my attempt at jazz writing - too much Kerouac - I promise that I won't do it again.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

.... the original typescript scroll of On The Road was exhibited at the Walker Gallery at Birmingham University last year ... went with other similarly aged beats and jazz buffs to see it, extraordinary document .... we had a great day out, lunch in student cafe, guitar recital [renaissance and baroque] and a waltz round the collection as well .... rejuvenating [and without benefit of anything other than caffeine and in my case nicotine ....]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uN6Qv2nxPY