C.J. Stone's Blog, page 2

A Revolution in Time

Devising a new calendar

In The Revised Boy Scout Manual, William Burroughs’ unfinished attempt to create a blueprint for counter cultural revolution, he states:

To consolidate revolutionary gains, five steps are necessary:

Proclaim a new era and set up a new calendar.Replace alien language.Destroy or neutralise alien gods.Destroy alien machinery of government and Control.Take land and wealth from individual aliens. Time to forget a dead empire and build a living republic.

It’s interesting that he should put devising a new calendar at the top of his list. In this he agrees with the I-Ching, the ancient Chinese meditation on time and change which emerged in the late neolithic period.

Hexagram 49, Revolution (Wilhelm/Baynes translation) says:

Fire in the lake: the image of REVOLUTION. Thus the superior man Sets the calendar in order And makes the seasons clear.

It was often the case that when a new dynasty took over in China they would institute a new calendar as a reflection of the new regime. Hence the association between the idea of the calendar and the idea of political revolution as it appears in this hexagram.

A calendar is a measure of time. It is supposed to reflect the progress of the seasons through the year, as well as to keep a track on history. In this our current calendar system, devised in 1582, under the aegis of Pope Gregory XIII (after whom it is named) is a clumsy tool, which only partially succeeds in doing what it is supposed to do.

It is a modification of the earlier Julian calendar, enacted by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. Both calendars are solar in nature, that is, they keep track on the solar year. The Gregorian calendar is slightly more accurate than the Julian Calendar, which assumes a year length of exactly 365.25 days, when it is actually 365.2422 days long. Over the centuries there was a drift away from the real year, which meant that Easter, which is calculated by its relationship to the Vernal Equinox, was falling further and further away from its true date, and an adjustment was required. The date was advanced by ten days, from Thursday 4 October, to Friday 15 October 1582, and new rules applied for leap years to take account of the difference.

It took centuries for the Gregorian calendar to be adopted around the world. It is now the most widely used calendar on the planet. Some organisations, such as the Eastern Orthodox Church, while they have adopted the Gregorian calendar for secular purposes, still hold to the Julian calendar for calculating religious holidays. This means, for example, that Christmas in the Eastern Orthodox calendar falls on the 7 January rather than on December 25. According to one famous story, when the new system was introduced to the British Empire, in September 1752, people were so annoyed by the change it led to the so-called “calendar riots” in which they demanded the return of their lost days. This is an urban myth. It never actually happened, but it is too good a story not to repeat.

The problem with solar calendars is that they take no account of the moon. Months become arbitrary units disconnected from the lunar cycle. Our months vary in length from 28 to 31 days, and serve no purpose except to tick off the year in irregular and disorientating intervals. A true month is 29.53 days long and is usually measured by observation. The Chinese calendar, for example, measures the month from new moon to new moon, which is either 29 or 30 days long, depending on what time the new moon falls. The month is then divided into three “weeks” of either nine or ten days. But a lunar year of twelve months is only 354 days long, meaning that the lunar year and the solar year will drift significantly apart as the years progress. The way the Chinese calendar deals with this is to insert intercalary months approximately every three years. Thus the Chinese year varies in length from 354 to 384 days.

As it happens, the number of lines in the I-Ching is 384, an interesting fact which led the psychedelic explorer and magic mushroom user, Terence McKenna, to suggest that the I-Ching is itself a 13-month lunar calendar. He said that it followed the sun spot cycle, amongst other things, and used it to devise a sort of grand calendar on a cosmic scale, which he called The Timewave, which, he said, would reach its culmination on December 21 2012. That’s the day that history was supposed to have ended according to his calculations. Unfortunately he was mixing up two calendar systems here and misrepresenting what the date actually means. The other calendar system he’s referring to is the Mayan long count calendar, which had accurately tracked the days from August 11 3114 BC, to that end date of December 21 2012, and which many westerners misunderstood to predict the end of the world. All it actually predicted was the end of the calendar cycle. The following day, December 22 2012, was simply the start of a new calendar, the day the calendar clicked back to zero, showing that all calendar systems are cyclical, even long ones.

Burroughs’ view of the Mayan calendar was that it was a device for controlling thought. As he said:

The Ancient Mayans possessed one of the most precise and hermetic control calendars ever used on this planet, a calendar that in effect controlled what the population did, thought and felt on any given day….

It could be said that all calendars have this effect. However you divide the year, some days will be more important than others. Whether it’s Easter, Yom Kippur, Diwali, or the Chinese New Year, days are set aside as sacred, with particular rites attached. On those days the population will be thinking, doing and feeling similar things. This is why calendar systems are important, and why it is equally important that we understand them and learn what their origins are. Calendars can bind us together, but they can also tear us apart.

Take the seven day week, for example. Days have an objective reality, as the measure of the rotation of the Earth, as do years and months, but weeks are an entirely human construct. The earliest reference to them dates from the Sumerian period in the Near East. The Babylonians celebrated a seventh day festival which probably fed into the Jewish notion of the Sabbath. The word “Sabbath” can be tracked to the Sumerian sa-bat, meaning “mid-rest”, a term for the full moon. As to when the Sabbath is marked, this depends on whether you are a Christian, a Mandaean, a Muslim or a Jew. Wars has been fought over this issue.

Many calendars around the world do not acknowledge the seven day week. The Chinese calendar works around nine or ten day periods, while the Hindu calendar works around 15-day half-months. Weeks, as we understand them, probably arose as a reflection of the seven planets of the ancient world, which were understood as gods. The English still reflect this to some degree, with Sunday and Monday associated with the sun and moon, and Saturday with Saturn. The other days are named after Norse gods which may, or may not, be associated with planetary deities.

The most precise calendar system currently in use is the Persian Calendar, which dates to the second millennium BC, and which is accurate to less than one second per year, or one day in every 110,000 years. Compare this to the Gregorian Calendar, which is only accurate to 27 seconds a year, or one day in every 3,236 years. This is because the Persian calendar is observational, that is it is tied to an astronomical event as viewed from a specific place in Iran: the Vernal Equinox as viewed from 52.5 degrees east, the Iranian time meridian. It is this that determines the new year, called Nowruz in Persian, celebrated by Iranian people throughout the world. Once again this is a solar calendar, however, and Persian months are just as arbitrary and uneven as our own.

This is always going to be the case, whichever calendar system you use. Months do not fit exactly into years and there will always be a drift between the lunar and the solar cycle. The only way to deal with it is to map the lunar calendar onto the solar year, so that the phases of the moon are displayed on a daily basis. Many calendars already do this.

In Wilhelm’s commentary on hexagram 49 of the I-Ching, he says:

Fire below and the lake above combat and destroy each other. So too in the course of the year a combat takes place between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, eventuating in the revolution of the seasons. Man masters these changes in nature by noting their regularity and marking off the passage of time accordingly. In this way order and clarity appear in the apparently chaotic changes of the seasons, and man is able to adjust himself in advance to the demands of the different times.

The Celtic year takes the form of a myth, of the battle between the Holly King and the Oak King, the personification of Winter and Summer respectively. This idea is reflected in the Wheel of the Year, the pagan calendar, which was adopted by Gerald Gardiner, the founder of the Wiccan religion, and Ross Nichols, of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, in the 1950s. The Wheel of the Year combines two different calendar systems, the so-called quarterly and cross-quarterly days. The quarterly days are the precise astronomical events of the solstices and the equinoxes, which can be determined by observation. Stonehenge was built to mark these days, and still remains accurate over five thousand years after its construction. The cross-quarterly days consist of the traditional Celtic fire-festivals of Beltane, Samhain, Imbolc and Lughnasadh, in May, October, February and August respectively.

These festivals are approximately, but not exactly, half way between the solstices and the equinoxes, and are still dependent on the Gregorian calendar to determine. This has led to some commentators trying to work out a better system for dividing the year. One such attempt was made by Merlin Hickman, known as Merlin of England, one the neo-druids who attends the Stonehenge open access ceremonies at the monument four times a year. You can find Hickman’s reasoning and calculations here:

Such a system would divide the year into eight separate seasons, tied to precise observations of the progress of the year. If you were to combine this with a lunar calendar showing the phases of the moon, you would have not only an astronomically accurate calendar, but one which reflected the real cycle of life on this earth on both a spiritual and a physical level. It would bring us back into alignment with the seasons, with the sun and the moon and the planet on which we depend.

Article first appeared here.

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New York: City of the Nephilim

New York is not just a collection of buildings. It has a psychic presence too. CJ Stone goes in search of angels and movies in the City of the Nephilim as Atlantis rises from the waves.

Evolution

We came in on the George Washington Bridge on the Interstate, but you could see the city long before that, from deep inside New Jersey somewhere, the jagged line of skyscrapers flashing between the hills and trees, shimmering in the bright autumn sunlight like some giant bejewelled crown abandoned on the shore by a long-forgotten god. Manhattan Island. Was there ever a more iconic – or instantly recognisable – skyline?

And then we were sweeping in off the freeway along the slow arc of the ramp and down into the bustle of traffic along the highway, making for the Upper West Side.

What is it about New York? Even that phrase “the Upper West Side” is iconic – despite the fact that is no more than a geographical description – sending a spurt of adrenaline into the blood and making the heart beat a little faster. And now there we were amongst the snarling traffic, the mean yellow taxis, the lumbering behemoths of those great American lorries, the limousines, the big-wheel trucks, nudging forward from traffic light to traffic light amidst the blare of horns, the dust and confusion, edging slowly forward in the contending traffic like Darwinian creatures in an evolutionary struggle for survival.

Yes, that’s exactly what New York feels like. It’s like you’ve accidentally wandering into some accelerated version of evolution, like the city is urging you from behind – nudging you, pressing you – the whole weight of the city pushing you forward whether you like it or not.

As soon as you step out you can sense it: a kind of hormonal electricity in the air, humanity on a knife edge, an urgency, a drive, crazy, egotistical, vain, but marvellously exciting, as if anything can happen here, and often does, in the grand canyon avenues with the constant blare of traffic and the echoed wailing of police sirens, and people moving to and fro with such a mighty sense of purpose. The hustle. The noise. The constant movement, like a tidal surge of humanity welling up along the straight square streets laid out like graph paper and buzzing with life.

We parked the car, my brother and I, dropped our bags in the hotel, and went out to join the throng.

Pizza

But first we stopped off for a slice of Pizza.

Throughout the whole of New York state, and probably everywhere else in the world, the New York Pizza is known as that: the New York Pizza. Except in New York, that is, when it is just called “Pizza” and is pretty well the only kind of pizza you can find.

I forget what kind I got. We just went in and pointed, like the foreign tourists we were. “I’ll have that one,” I said. Mine had olives on it, Rob’s had meat. And then we went and sat outside to eat them.

There is an art to eating a slice of New York pizza. It’s actually a piece of architecture. You hold it by the crust, folding it in half, forming a V from which the weight of the pizza hangs, and then load it into your mouth from the pointy end, like a dumper truck loading gravel onto the back of a lorry, positioning your mouth slightly below it to achieve the desired end.

The crust is a bit like the structural arch on a bridge. It holds it together. What you don’t do: you don’t rip or mangle the crust or the whole thing falls apart.

Which is what I did. I ripped off a bit of the crust to taste it, thus damaging the architectural integrity of the whole structure, so that the pointy end flopped limply forward sending the weight of the topping sliding off onto the plate, which I then had to pick up piece by sticky piece with my fingers.

It still tasted great though. My first taste of New York.

Downtown Train

After that we went on the subway.

It was at this point that my excitement exploded and a sense of hyper-reality kicked in, on a train heading downtown towards Times Square, in a carriage of polished aluminium, hanging on to an upright post as the train jerked and screeched and kicked its way along the track. I was humming Downtown Train by Tom Waits quietly to myself, looking round, and it was like I’d been here before, on this exact train, with these exact people: the Latinos and the Blacks and the Irish and the Jews, all these shades of complexion in their various types of clothing, sitting, standing, reading, watching, talking, listening, contemplating the world, one young woman fanning herself with an old fashioned fan, on the inside of a shining silver bullet heading into the heart of downtown New York. The rattle of the train. The rhythm of the track. The train tossing us back and forth. Winding and sliding into the station. The doors swishing open. People getting on and off. Moving round to let more people on. Gripping tight again as the train jolts off. And all those finely delineated faces, all around, their characters moulded in flesh, like animated sculptures worked in various shades of clay. So precise. So alive. So human. People I felt I already knew.

But something starts to niggle me, a feeling which goes on repeating itself throughout the day: the sense that I’ve been here before, that I’ve known all this before, in some other life perhaps, in some other incarnation, as if, maybe, I have New York blood running through my veins, a New York soul and a New York sensibility, like some ancient jazz riff in the background of my thoughts, like the musical score from the movie of my life.

Something like that.

Times Square

And stepping out of the subway into the noise and the traffic and the crowd, streets bursting at the seams and rippling with humanity, Rob says, “there’s the naked cowboy,” and starts to take a picture. And sure enough, there he is, a guy dressed in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, but otherwise only Y-fronts, standing on an intersection between traffic lights, with traffic moving either side of him, and people jostling back and forth, singing and playing the guitar. A handsome black dude crossing the road just as Rob is pointing the camera says, “Did you really take a picture of him?” as we head off, and Rob says, “it’s not for me it’s for my wife,” not answering the question and sounding defensive, which makes us all laugh.

But I realise something – not then, later, on reflection – that this naked cowboy guy has placed himself in precisely this spot for maximum effect, the city swirling about him like white water rapids, and that the whole of New York is like that: like a showbiz act, people stepping out onto the streets like they step out onto the stage, the whole huge towering cityscape like a stage set, the people, the actors, the chorus line, the props, like an all-singing, all-dancing, costumed, bejewelled, sparkling, brightly-lit Broadway Musical show: like 42nd Street maybe, where all the buildings suddenly acquire legs and start kicking in unison, like the girls in the chorus line. So now Rob and I are heading into Times Square, doing the tourist thing – well what did you expect, we are tourists –– and we’re looking up at the lurching, hovering, heaving buildings towering above us, spinning round and round with the intoxication of it, the flash and the span of the building-sized neon advertisements like vast statements of overheated wealth, the whole space a display of conspicuous consumption on a grand scale – I mean, how much electricity is being used here, and for what purpose? – unashamed, unabashed, brazen and obvious, over-the-top and yet viscerally exciting, here at the navel of the world.

Broadway

It is here that the layout of New York reveals itself, in this intersection, this square that is not a square, where Broadway cuts across Seventh Avenue between 47th and 42nd Streets, because whereas the town as a whole is a relentless series of grids and blocks (avenues running one way, streets running the other) Broadway is this vast sweeping diagonal that cuts across the whole of it, dissecting it at an angle and adding interesting variety to the otherwise straight-up-an-down architecture, forcing buildings into weird, aerodynamic angular shapes to accommodate it, breaking up the rhythm of the streets like the syncopated swing in a dance band number, and adding cool dissonance to the orchestration of buildings, like the blue note in a jazz riff.

And now I hear it – don’t you? – sailing in with the sounds of the city: the suave, cool, sophisticated tempo of a Duke Ellington song – Take the A Train, written to celebrate the journey through Manhattan to Harlem – this deeply-textured, moving, modern music, but with an edge, a drive, like the rattle of the train on its tracks or the whirring of electricity in the generators, living, alive, accentuated, sweet-stepping, free-flowing, swirling through the cascade of notes in a relentless pulsating chorus of change, riffs and notes scattering like sparks and eddies into the charged air: the perfect musical accompaniment to a visit to New York, this neon electric city of the Jazz Age.

Sport

So now it is time for a drink, naturally, and Rob – who’s been here a few times now, having moved to Syracuse in the North of New York state about seven years ago – decides to take me to ESPN Zone which is across the way. Now this is crazy. A huge two story bar full of TV screens showing sports channels. Not just one screen, or two screens, or ten screens but – I don’t know, I’m trying to count them in my head – maybe fifty screens, maybe a hundred screens, with baseball and American football and ice hockey and basketball and various other sports (one of the smaller screens is showing a British football match) and commentators in studios discussing the action – the whole lot – the largest screen about three times the size of the wall in my living room, a great bank of pixellated colour and light, so much sport it makes your head spin, and, like everything else in new York, way over the top.

So we order a beer and the girl behind the bar says “large or small” and we say “large”, thinking maybe it’s the choice between a half pint and a pint. Only it’s not. It’s the choice between a pint and a quart and now we have these two huge pots of beer to drink. Which is fine. We can drink them, though they are a bit on the expensive side, the round being $17. We photograph them, then we drink them, then, at some point, having consumed a quarter of a gallon of beer, I make the inevitable trip to the gents, only to discover that directly in front of every one of the urinals is yet another small TV screen about the size of a cigarette packet, showing yet more sport, so you don’t have to miss even half a second of the action. How many screens did I say there were? Well you can double it. Talk about neurosis: this is a whole building constructed around a clinical obsession with the demon of sport.

Empire State

After this we walk to the Empire State Building and I say, “you can tell the tourists can’t you? The tourists are the ones looking up all the time.” And it’s true, because this is what you have to do, to look up into the soaring vertiginous depths of the sky-high city, between the buildings which suck your gaze forever upwards as they graze the clouds, amazed at the boldness, the confidence, the sheer, brazen self-assuredness of this city’s architecture, like monstrous overblown cathedrals dedicated to the megalithic religion of commerce, whose god is money, dwelling places of the economic Nephilim. It’s immoral. It’s wrong. It’s absurd. It’s insane. But it’s epic too, it’s vast, it’s intoxicating, it’s bold and it’s dangerous and you can’t help but admire it at some deep visceral level while condemning it at the same time. Who said that life was simple? Or that we can’t live with contradictions?

It costs $19 to go up the Empire State building, but you have to don’t you? Everyone has to do this once. Unfortunately the whole building is going through a refit at the moment so something of its Jazzy Art Deco sumptuousness is lost – all that layered, multi-coloured marble, the sleek, sweeping staircases, the glass and the stainless steel, the doormen in their smart maroon livery – as we are herded past plywood barriers with posters of King Kong and into the elevator to the 80th floor. And on again to the next elevator taking us the last six floors to the observation point.

Time

OK, and I have to say how exhilarating this is, looking out across the chequered urban landscape from this vantage point, seeing the layout of the town like some vast chess board, with the towering beautiful buildings scattered about. Yes beautiful. These huge, playful, crazy edifices of a deranged imagination, soaring upwards into the sky. Two buildings strike me in particular: the Chrysler building as the epitome of Art Deco on a grand scale, definitely the most beautiful building in New York, not as large as the Empire State, but prettier, nicer, quainter, the model of what a skyscraper should be; and this other building whose name I don’t know, which looks like a copy of a Renaissance cathedral, with arches and palisades, a quadrangle and a clock. Yes a clock, a giant clock, maybe fifty stories up. A great big clock. And who can see this clock but the people in the building opposite, or us, up here on the top of the Empire State? You can’t possibly see it from the street, or from anywhere else. So what’s the point of it, except as a gesture of flamboyance, a grandiloquent statement, a pointless embellishment, a magnificent, ostentatious whim? You can’t help but love a city that puts clocks so high up no one can see them. It is a city in which time no longer exists.

So we circle the building about two or three times, looking out in the four directions, towards the four corners of the world, the west side, and the east side, downtown and uptown, Brooklyn and the Bronx, and out towards Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty, across this vast, sprawling metropolis – this hub of humanity, this vortex of ceaseless activity, of time and life and psychosis, this city of hallucination and exhilarating insanity, mad like the gods, a modern Atlantis rising out of the waves, miraculous, expansive, fuelled by vanity and electricity, by sex and by greed, breathless, startled, crazy, alive – I can’t help but pause and wonder at the works of humanity, how glorious they can be, and think to myself that this city has to be one of the great wonders of the world.

King Kong

And now I get it – now as I’m writing this, a few weeks later and several thousand miles away – that one of the symbols of New York is King Kong himself, that overblown ape of humanity, trapped within this urban landscape, the instinctual beast raging against the constraints of the modern world, driven crazy by love, tortured by technology, put on display for money, before bursting free of his chains, and then climbing this, the Empire State Building in a bid for freedom, harried by biplanes, before falling to his death in the streets below..

Which is where we are now, of course, on top of the Empire State building, up in the wild, crashing skies, with buffeting winds blustering in off the Atlantic, gazing out at the city of the Nephilim, surrounded by people taking photographs. Everyone is taking photographs. They’re taking photographs of each other. They’re taking photographs of themselves. They’re asking other people to take photographs for them, positioning themselves in front of the camera with some landmark in the background. So we take some photographs too, and someone offers to take our photograph, so now we too have a photograph of us on top of the Empire State building with a landmark in the background, just like everybody else. And then you wonder how many photographs there must be from this place, over all these years? How many shutter clicks in how many seconds over how many days, how many years? How many cameras? How many pictures from this weird eyrie, this eagle’s perch, high up in the luminescent sky? Will there ever be time to look at them all?

But it’s getting as bit cold now so we decide to come down. Down, down. Down through the layers of steel and glass and marble and humanity. Down passed the offices, through the soap opera entanglement of lives, storey by storey, by story, at free fall speed, though we don’t know it, to arrive back, padded and cushioned by air, at the ground floor and find a bar so we can drink yet more beer.

Banks’s Bitter

There’s a bar under the building itself, which we invade with our presence, sliding past a pillar where a bunch of people are nattering away. Only they’re not nattering away in New York parlance, but in some weird foreign language only Rob and I can understand. Rob says, “can I hear Brummie accents?” And then standing next to us at the bar, where we are leaning waiting to be served, is a guy wearing a bright red football shirt on which, when he turns around, we read the words “Banks’s Bitter”.

Banks’s Bitter is brewed in Wolverhampton, not more than 15 miles from where Rob and I were brought up in the West Midlands.

“Is that a Banks’s Tee-shirt I see there?” says Rob, in his broad Brummie accent. And sure enough, there’s a bunch of Midlanders here in the heart of New York with us, and we begin chatting about our respective holidays. They’re just about to leave having spent the last five days in New York, just drinking up their last pints – “very expensive,” says the man with the Banks’s tee-shirt – after which we raise our glasses and bid them goodbye.

After this we head off again, making for Chinatown now. We have a subway map which we’ve been consulting all day, and the process of finding our way around is a bit like pinning the tail on the donkey. We’re just abstractly pointing to bits with nice names we half recognise and deciding to go there.

Movie Streets

But first, before we go down the subway, I see this guy with a bouffant hair-do and a $10,000 suit, with buffed immaculate shoes and a crisp, white shirt and a tie, stepping out of the sleek marble lobby of some up-market hotel while the concierge hails him a taxi. He has a woman on his arm – this broad, as we’d say, using the vernacular – with a fur stole and high heels and hair piled high like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and she’s powdering her nose and checking her make up in a little vanity mirror, and I think I recognise them both. Yes, she’s Audrey Hepburn all right – Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly – and he’s Michael Douglas. Michael Douglas in Wall Street. She’s a naive socialite who takes a $50 tip for going to the bathroom, and he’s this son of a reptile who’ll eat your soul for breakfast, two movies stepping out together onto the same sidewalk. So something strikes me now about this irksome sense of familiarity I’ve been having ever since we got on the subway, that actually I have seen it all before, not in another life, in the movies. 42nd Street and King Kong and Wall Street and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy and Naked City and the Fisher King. All these movies. All these scenes of streets and people. The crowds, the taxis, the subways, the shops, the diners, the bars, the streets, the avenues, the buildings, the bridges. Tracking shots down Broadway to Times Square and Fifth Avenue. Aerial shots from helicopters swerving in and out between the skyscrapers. Long shots along wind-blown dusty streets with a solitary sheet of newspaper bustling in the wind. Night shots though a windscreen in the rain with the wipers swishing back and forth. All of these shots. All of these scenes. All of these stories. Being in New York is like walking about inside a film set. It has to be the most filmed city in the world.

So I wonder what kind of movie Rob and I are in? Hopefully none of the above.

Statue of Liberty

Finally we make it to Chinatown where we stop off for something to eat. $5 each for a meal. Can’t be bad. And then, just as the sun is starting to go down, we head off to Battery Park near where you catch the Staten Island Ferry, which is the nearest point on Manhattan Island to the Statue of Liberty, where Rob takes some great photographs of the statue with the sunset blazing in the distance.

After which we start walking back passed the National Museum of the American Indian as night is gathering in the streets and the lights are flickering on in the skyscrapers, and nearby there’s a bunch of cop cars gathered in a car park, and they start to move off slowly, each one just giving us a short burst of its siren – wee-ow: like that! – and a single red-blue flash of its lights as they crawl out into the city in a funereal procession one at a time. How many are there? I don’t know, maybe 20 or more. What is this about? Are they all just going on shift? Is this like some sort of a daily ritual? Or is it a protest of some sort or an actual funeral? We never do find out.

And after this it is Grand Central Station with its bustle and noise – I’m reminded of a scene in the Fisher King where everyone begins to waltz while Robin Williams is following his girl – then back to Times Square, and after that to a series of bars along Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side between 80th and 86th I think, which get cheaper and cheaper the further we go along, till we fall into our cheap hotel room sometime after midnight, after a night of ogling the barmaids, which beer and tiredness and lust and age had made me decide were amongst the most beautiful women in the world.

New York, City of Frustrated Dreams.

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Columns from the Whitstable Gazette

I wrote a column for the Whitstable Gazette from 2009 till 2020. Following are a selection of stories from one particular year.

The Whitstable Gazette

December 22nd 2011

By the time you read this it will be the Winter Solstice, which is the shortest day of the year. It is also the day when the sun reaches its most southerly point on the horizon.

The word “solstice” means “still sun”. It is called this because for three days, when the sun rises, it appears to be stuck on the horizon. After this it visibly moves again and the days start to get longer.

In ancient times this first sign of movement after the solstice was considered to represent the birth of a new sun and was located on the 25th of December. Mithras, the Persian sun god, was born on this day, as was Sol Invictus, “the invincible sun”.

Other gods said to have been born on the 25th December include Horus, Osiris, Krishna, Dionysus, Heracles, Tammuz, Adonis, Hermes, Bacchus and Prometheus. What all of these mythical beings have in common is that they are all sons of a god born to a human parent, often to a virgin, sometimes in a stable.

It is a very ancient theme indeed.

The Roman Saturnalia was celebrated around this time of year, as was the Nordic Yule. The Saturnalia involved a school holiday, the giving of gifts and a market. There was a banquet in which the social hierarchy was reversed: the slaves were served by the masters and special clothes were worn.

Yule also involved a great feast. The peasants attended the temple bringing with them gifts of food and ale. As long as the ale lasted the feast would continue, sometimes for several days and nights.

One of the Norse sagas refers to Yule as “a time of greatest mirth and joyance among men.”

None of this is to denigrate the Christian story. Indeed, to my mind it reinforces it. It shows why this time of year is so important.

The idea of the birth of a new King in the depths of Winter, one who will act as our saviour and redeemer, is a potent thought, resonant with hope. It is why we still celebrate the festival to this day.

January 5th 2012Mayan Temple

In my last column I talked about the importance of the Winter Solstice. In this column I want to talk about one particular Winter Solstice, the one taking place this year.

For those of you who are not already aware of this, it represents the conclusion of the Mayan Calendar, which began on the 11th of August 3114 BC and is due to end on the 21st December 2012.

Some people say it is the end of the world.

The Maya were a stone age people who lived in Central America and Southern Mexico at the time of the Spanish invasion. They built huge temples of stone orientated to the yearly cycle and had a sophisticated writing and numerical system.

Their calendar was the most accurate that has ever been devised. Indeed, when the Spanish first encountered it, they realised that their own calendar was out of date, which forced the shift from the Medieval Julian Calendar to the Gregorian calendar we use today.

The descendents of the Maya still live in the Chiapas region of Mexico.

A number of prophecies are attached to the calendar and its end date. Specifically it is said to be the end of a “World Age”. Many people in the New Age community are preparing for this date. It is said by some to represent a moment of profound spiritual transformation for the human race.

There are certainly times when these apocalyptic predictions seem to be coming true. Right now it looks as if the Euro is about to fail, which would probably bring about the collapse of the banking system as we know it. We have the huge shifts in political alignments being brought about by the Arab Awakening, and the possibility of wars with Iran and Syria looming on the horizon.

Meanwhile there are people on the streets in most of the major cities in the world, riots in Athens and Moscow, and the inexorable rise of China as the new world power.

Something does indeed seem to be going on.

A happy new year to you. It looks like it is going to be an interesting one.

March 15th 2012

I’ve just come back from my holiday to discover that Britain is in the grip of a drought with a hosepipe ban due to be enforced in April.

What the British news doesn’t tell you, however, is that this is a world-wide phenomena.

Tenerife – which is where I went for my holiday – is also in the midst of the worst drought for 50 years, and many parts of the world are experiencing freak weather conditions.

Those of you who have been to Tenerife will know that the island is hot and dry in the South, where all the holiday resorts are located, but wet in the North, where most of the inhabitants actually live.

As you drive around the island you reach a point where the Southern weather gives way to the Northern weather, and the island is suddenly green. It goes from a desert to a scene from the Home Counties in the space of just a few miles.

Not now though. Now the North is just as dry as the South. Whole swathes of forest are dying and the usually lush ferns are withered and brown. The whole island, which is usually bright with flowers at this time of the year, is looking dried up and decayed.

There are also droughts in Texas and Oklahoma in the United States, and in East Africa, while in Australia a persistent drought lasting several years was followed by devastating floods.

Something is going seriously wrong with our weather systems.

“We are just trying to say to people who don’t realize it: the climate is going to change. People need to know,” says climate scientist Richard Somerville, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

And while there has been some debate on the issue, with a concerted effort by the oil industry in particular to cast doubt upon the evidence, the majority of climate scientists are clear that the main cause of these changing weather patterns is the impact of human activity on the environment.

In other words: we made this mess, it up to us to clean it up.

March 29th 2012

I’m an insomniac. I find it hard enough to get to sleep at the best of times.

The most important thing for an insomniac is having a regular routine. You go bed at the same time each night, and get up at the same time every morning. That way sleep becomes a ritual.

Sleep is not something you can make yourself do. It either comes to you as part of a routine, or it doesn’t. The act of trying to go to sleep triggers the very parts in the brain that are inclined to keep you awake.

Thus it is that twice a year I find my hard-won sleep ritual completely shattered by the imposition of something known as Daylight Saving Time.

Can anyone please tell me why we do this? Why do we dislocate ourselves from the natural rhythms of life according to the sun, and impose this sudden, catastrophic break in our daily routine?

You may say that it is only an hour. Not for me it isn’t. It is several hours for several weeks before I finally start to adjust. By the time my sleep patterns have settled down it is almost time to return to Greenwich Mean Time again.

What’s most puzzling is how this came about? How is it that some arbitrary rule, applied across the whole world, apparently without our consent, has become standard? We resign ourselves to the disorientating effects twice a year, without knowing what its purpose is.

Every year I ask people what it’s for, and no one seems to know. It has something to do with farmers, I’m told. That’s all anyone can tell me. It was introduced during the First World War. And I think, well the First World War was a long time ago, and the farmers can get up when they like, why do the rest of us have to suffer?

It is yet another arbitrary, meaningless imposition on our lives. It goes along with war, taxes and Britain’s Got Talent as something we just have to live with, apparently.

Personally I can do without any of it.

April 12th 2012Beach at Seaview

My brother lives in America. Once a year he and his family come to Whitstable to visit. Mum and Dad are now in their eighties and somewhat frail. Much as they love to see their son, the idea of sharing a house with two rowdy teenagers and a volatile toddler is a bit much for them to take.

Last year they found a compromise. They booked a caravan. This worked out brilliantly. My brother and his family had a great holiday, and Mum and Dad got to see as much of the family as they liked while, at the same time, having a bolt-hole to escape all the noise and chaos.

So that’s what we decided to do again this year. I drove Mum and Dad over to the Seaview Holiday Park in Swalecliffe in order to book a caravan.

And the park is great. It’s spacious, with a good clubhouse, right on the seafront between Whitstable and Herne Bay, with a decent swimming pool and a play area for the kids: the perfect place for a family holiday. I would have no trouble recommending it if it wasn’t for one strange anomaly.

It seems they don’t rent caravans out on all the days of the week. You can book from a Friday, from a Saturday, or from a Monday. But you can’t book from a Sunday, which is when my brother will be arriving.

Can anyone tell me why this might be? Is it like the Cinderella story? Will the caravans turn into pumpkins if you try to move into one past midnight on a Saturday?

According to the receptionist it is company policy, though she couldn’t actually explain why. So we tried to book from the Saturday instead, plus an extra night. But they couldn’t do this either. The week goes from Monday to Friday, and the weekend goes from Friday to Monday, but you can’t have anything in between.

How strange. Don’t these people want our money? They seem to be running their business in the interests of company policy rather than for the convenience of the customer.

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The Whitstable Gazette: “Is Cannabis a Gateway Drug?” and Other Stories

I wrote a column for the Whitstable Gazette from 2009 till 2020. Following are a selection of stories from that publication.

1. Is Cannabis a Gateway drug?

You may have heard the term “gateway drug” with reference to cannabis. It is the idea that cannabis use opens the door to other drugs.

The basis of this is that it can be shown that most people who end up using hard drugs like heroin have, at some earlier point in their lives, also taken cannabis.

This is an absurd argument, of course, since it can also be shown that most heroin users have also previously drunk tea, gone shopping or watched Deal Or No Deal on daytime TV.

Should we make Noel Edmonds illegal then? Does daytime TV drive you to heroin? I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Of course the only real similarity between cannabis and heroin is the fact that they are both illegal and therefore available from the same source.

In other words it is precisely the status of the two drugs as illegal substances that is most likely to cause an escalation from one to the other. Heroin addicts often fund their addiction by dealing in other drugs.

Plus when people find out that they are not instantly and irrecoverably addicted to cannabis after a few smokes, they begin to disbelieve the official line on drugs as a whole, and to imagine that they can handle heroin in the same way.

This is where they are mistaken. No one can handle heroin. It’s the second most addictive drug on the planet. Unfortunately the most addictive drug is freely available to sixteen year-olds over the counter in almost every corner shop or newsagents in the world.

It is nicotine, more addictive, more dangerous, and far more harmful than heroin.

Ask any heroin addict. Cigarettes are more difficult to kick than heroin. And you’ll notice this too: heroin addicts generally stop taking other drugs. They don’t drink alcohol, and they rarely smoke cannabis. But they all smoke cigarettes.

It’s as if, in having become addicted to cigarettes – something we all consider quite normal – it gives them permission to become heroin addicts too.

So you have to ask yourself, which is the real gateway drug?

2. Where was God?

There was an odd little programme on the TV a few years back, called Tsunami: Where Was God?

It involved the presenter going to a number of places in Southeast Asia where the Tsunami was most devastating, and asking people about God.

This seemed a very strange thing to do and it brought up some quite peculiar responses. One extremist Muslim said that it was a punishment for tight clothing, while the most profound statement came from a Hindu woman whose son had been swept away in the Tsunami. She was grief stricken but resigned. “God has returned to God,” she said.

What struck me was that the question itself is absurd. God just doesn’t come into it. It takes a peculiar form of human vanity to think that God listens to individual human prayers, or that he has a particular preference for one religion over another. The fact is that Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, believers and non-believers, were all carried away in the Tsunami, which made no distinction whatsoever between people or their religious beliefs.

This took place on the second anniversary of the Tsunami, but the first anniversary of the Gaza massacre in which 1,400 Palestinians were trapped in their cage and killed, a large percentage of them children.

It seems odd that the second anniversary of one tragic event was so extensively covered, but that the first anniversary of another was so completely ignored.

The difference being, of course, that the first was a natural occurrence over which human beings had no control, while the second was entirely man-made.

Even more notable is that while the rebuilding of the coastline of South East Asia continued, the people of Gaza still labour under an economic blockade which stops building materials from crossing the border, and so are unable to even begin the process of rebuilding their devastated country.

A saner anniversary programme might have been called Gaza: Where Is Our Humanity?

3. Believe it or not

My Mum told me this story.

She said went into a shop and bought some items and paid for them with a £10 note, but the woman behind the counter gave her change for £20.

There were several people lined up at the counter waiting to be served, and, not wanting to embarrass the shop assistant, Mum waited till the queue had cleared.

“Excuse me,” she said eventually, “I think you’ve made a mistake. You’ve given me the wrong change.”

“No I haven’t.,” said the woman behind the counter, very curtly.

“Yes you have,” said my Mum, getting ready to hand the extra £10 back.

“No I haven’t,” said the woman, raising her voice, obviously annoyed that anyone was questioning her point of view.

My Mum tried a few more times, each time being interrupted by an increasingly angry shop-assistant before she had even completed her sentence.

“OK if you say so,” she said finally, and put the extra £10 note into her purse. Later her and my sister went out and had lunch on the money.

People believe a lot of things that aren’t necessarily true. In the case of that shop-assistant, she had obviously rung the wrong figure into the till, and when offered a choice between what the till was saying and the word of a customer, preferred to believe the till.

Machines don’t lie, of course. But when provided with faulty information they will give you faulty answers.

The problem with human beings is that once we get a belief stuck into our head it’s very difficult to dislodge it.

Sometimes some of our beliefs make some sort of sense. But often they don’t. Some of our beliefs have been inculcated into us since early childhood. They’ve been repeated so often we take them for the truth. Our whole world is built around received belief-systems such as this.

Personally I always retain a healthy scepticism about anyone’s beliefs… and that includes my own.

https://www.eldaddruks.studio/

A Revolution in Time

Devising a new calendar

In The Revised Boy Scout Manual, William Burroughs’ unfinished attempt to create a blueprint for counter cultural revolution, he states:

To consolidate revolutionary gains, five steps are necessary:

1. Proclaim a new era and set up a new calendar.

2. Replace alien language.

3. Destroy or neutralise alien gods.

4. Destroy alien machinery of government and Control.

5. Take land and wealth from individual aliens. Time to forget a dead empire and build a living republic.

It’s interesting that he should put devising a new calendar at the top of his list. In this he agrees with the I-Ching, the ancient Chinese meditation on time and change which emerged in the late neolithic period.

Hexagram 49, Revolution (Wilhelm/Baynes translation) says:

Fire in the lake: the image of REVOLUTION.

Thus, the superior man

Sets the calendar in order
And makes the seasons clear.

It was often the case that when a new dynasty took over in China it would institute a new calendar. Hence the association between the idea of the calendar and the idea of political revolution as it appears in this hexagram.

A calendar is a measure of time. It’s supposed to reflect the progress of the seasons through the year, as well as to keep track of history. Our current calendar system, devised in 1582, under the aegis of Pope Gregory XIII (after whom it is named) is a clumsy tool, which only partially succeeds in doing what it’s supposed to.

It’s a modification of the earlier Julian calendar, enacted by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. Both calendars keep track on the solar year. The Gregorian calendar is slightly more accurate than the Julian Calendar, which assumes a year length of exactly 365.25 days, when it’s actually 365.2422 days long. Over the centuries there was a drift away from the real year, which meant that Easter, which is calculated by its relationship to the Vernal Equinox, was falling further and further away from its true date, and an adjustment was required. The date was advanced by 10 days, from Thursday October 4th, to Friday October 15th 1582, and new rules applied for leap years to take account of the difference.

It took centuries for the Gregorian calendar to be adopted around the world. It’s now the most widely used calendar in the world. Some organizations, such as the Eastern Orthodox Church, while they’ve adopted the Gregorian calendar for secular purposes, still hold to the Julian calendar for calculating religious holidays. This means, for example, that Christmas in the Eastern Orthodox calendar falls on January 7th rather than December 25th. According to one famous story, when the new system was introduced to the British Empire, in September 1752, people were so annoyed by the change it led to the so-called “calendar riots” in which they demanded the return of their lost days. This is an urban myth. It never actually happened.

The problem with solar calendars is that they take no account of the moon. Months become arbitrary units disconnected from the lunar cycle. Our months vary in length from 28 to 31 days and serve no purpose except to tick off the year in irregular and disorientating intervals. A true month is 29.53 days long and is usually measured by observation. The Chinese calendar, for example, measures the month from new moon to new moon, which is either 29 or 30 days long, depending on what time the new moon falls. The month is then divided into three “weeks” of either nine or 10 days. But a lunar year of 12 months is only 354 days long, meaning that the lunar year and the solar year will drift significantly apart as the years progress. The way the Chinese calendar deals with this is to insert intercalary months approximately every three years. Thus, the Chinese year varies in length from 354 to 384 days.

As it happens, the number of lines in the I-Ching is 384, an interesting fact which led the psychedelic explorer and magic mushroom user, Terence McKenna, to suggest that the I-Ching is itself a 13-month lunar calendar. He said that it followed the sun spot cycle, among other things, and used it to devise a sort of grand calendar on a cosmic scale, which he called The Timewave, which, he said, would reach its culmination on December 21 2012. That’s the day that history was supposed to have ended according to his calculations. Unfortunately, he was mixing up two calendar systems here and misrepresenting what the date actually means. The other calendar system he’s referring to is the Mayan long count calendar, which had accurately tracked the days from August 11 3114 BC, to that end date of December 21 2012, and which many westerners misunderstood to predict the end of the world. All it predicted was the end of the calendar cycle. The following day, December 22 2012, was simply the start of a new calendar, the day the calendar clicked back to zero, showing that all calendar systems are cyclical, even long ones.

Burroughs’ view of the Mayan calendar was that it was a device for controlling thought. As he said:

The Ancient Mayans possessed one of the most precise and hermetic control calendars ever used on this planet, a calendar that in effect controlled what the population did, thought and felt on any given day….

It could be said that all calendars have this effect. However you divide the year, some days will be more important than others. Whether it’s Easter, Yom Kippur, Diwali, or the Chinese New Year, days are set aside as sacred, with particular rites attached. On those days the population will be thinking, doing and feeling similar things. That’s why calendar systems are important, and why it’s equally important we understand them and learn what their origins are. Calendars can bind us together, but they can also tear us apart.

Take the seven-day week, for example. Days have an objective reality, as the measure of the rotation of the Earth, as do years and months, but weeks are an entirely human construct. The earliest reference to them dates from the Sumerian period in the Near East. The Babylonians celebrated a seventh day festival which probably fed into the Jewish notion of the Sabbath. The word “Sabbath” can be tracked to the Sumerian sa-bat, meaning “mid-rest,” a term for the full moon. As to when the Sabbath is marked, this depends on whether you are a Christian, a Mandaean, a Muslim or a Jew. Wars has been fought over this issue.

Many calendars around the world don’t acknowledge the seven-day week. The Chinese calendar works around nine- or 10-day periods, while the Hindu calendar works around 15-day half-months. Weeks, as we understand them, probably arose as a reflection of the seven planets of the ancient world, which were understood as gods. The English  still reflect this to some degree, with Sunday and Monday associated with the sun and moon, and Saturday with Saturn. The other days are named after Norse gods which may, or may not, be associated with planetary deities.

The most precise calendar system currently in use is the Persian Calendar, which dates to the second millennium BC, and which is accurate to less than one second per year, or one day in every 110,000 years. Compare this to the Gregorian Calendar, which is only accurate to 27 seconds a year, or one day in every 3236 years. This is because the Persian calendar is observational; it’stied to an astronomical event as viewed from a specific place in Iran: the Vernal Equinox as viewed from 52.5 degrees east, the Iranian time meridian. It’s this that determines the new year, called Nowruz in Persian, celebrated by Iranian people throughout the world. Once again this is a solar calendar, however, and Persian months are just as arbitrary and uneven as our own.

This is always going to be the case, whichever calendar system you use. Months don’t fit exactly into years and there will always be a drift between the lunar and the solar cycle. The only way to deal with it is to map the lunar calendar onto the solar year, so that the phases of the moon are displayed on a daily basis. Many calendars already do this.

In Wilhelm’s commentary on hexagram 49 of the I-Ching, he says:

Fire below and the lake above combat and destroy each other. So too in the course of the year a combat takes place between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, eventuating in the revolution of the seasons. Man masters these changes in nature by noting their regularity and marking off the passage of time accordingly. In this way order and clarity appear in the apparently chaotic changes of the seasons, and man is able to adjust himself in advance to the demands of the different times.

The Celtic year takes the form of a myth, of the battle between the Holly King and the Oak King, the personification of winter and summer respectively. This idea is reflected in the Wheel of the Year, the pagan calendar, which was adopted by Gerald Gardiner, the founder of the Wiccan religion, and Ross Nichols, of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, in the 1950s. The Wheel of the Year combines two different calendar systems, the so-called quarterly and cross-quarterly days. The quarterly days are the precise astronomical events of the solstices and the equinoxes, which can be determined by observation. Stonehenge was built to mark these days, and still remains accurate over 5000 years after its construction. The cross-quarterly days consist of the traditional Celtic fire-festivals of Beltane, Samhain, Imbolc and Lughnasadh, in May, October, February and August respectively.

These festivals are approximately, but not exactly, half-way between the solstices and the equinoxes, and are still dependent on the Gregorian calendar to determine. This has led to some commentators trying to work out a better system for dividing the year. One such attempt was made by Merlin Hickman, known as Merlin of England, one the neo-druids who attends the Stonehenge open-access ceremonies at the monument four times a year. You can find Hickman’s reasoning and calculations here.

Such a system would divide the year into eight separate seasons, tied to precise observations of the progress of the year. If you were to combine this with a lunar calendar showing the phases of the moon, you’d have not only an astronomically accurate calendar, but one which reflected the real cycle of life on both a spiritual and a physical level. It would bring us back into alignment with the seasons, with the sun and the moon and the planet on which we depend.

Article originally appeared here.

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Anno Lumina, Year of Light​​​​​​​

How do you measure time?

Daylight saving time (DST) ends on October 31st in the United Kingdom and November 7th in the USA. What this means is that the clocks will go back one hour. In the UK the clocks revert to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) which is the standard time in this part of the world. The same thing will be happening on different dates in different countries around the world.

Many countries apply DST. Many don’t. Most Western countries do. Most African and Asian countries don’t.

Have you ever wondered what its purpose is? I’ve heard different arguments over the years. It had to do with Scottish farmers, I remember my father telling me. Due to their proximity to the far Northern latitudes, Scottish farmers need an earlier start, he said. Looking around on the Internet however, I find this argument doesn’t exist anymore. Other arguments refer to Benjamin Franklin’s famous dictum: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”. Franklin didn’t actually propose DST, he merely wrote a humorous letter suggesting that Parisians could save on candles by rising earlier (he was the American envoy to France between 1776 and 1785) but his satirical observations have become the basis of many of the arguments for DST over the years.

Two men were chiefly responsible for the policy: George Hudson, an entomologist out of New Zealand, who liked to collect insects in the afternoon after work and campaigned for DST in order to extend his hunting hours; and William Willett, a freemason who, on an early morning ride in 1905, observed how many Londoners slept through a large part of the day in summer. He was also a keen golfer who hated his evening game cut short by the sunset.

So we have two individuals who, for selfish reasons, wanted to change the daylight hours for the rest of us: one to collect insects, the other to play golf.

The first city to enact DST was Port Arthur, Ontario, on July 1st1908. The first country to adopt it was Germany during the First World War, as a way of saving coal. Many countries quickly followed, including Britain, in May 1916, and the USA in 1918. Most countries dropped the policy again soon after the end of the war, except, for inexplicable reasons, the UK, France, Ireland and the United States.

As a chronic insomniac the change in hours, twice a year, can have a deleterious effect on my sleep patterns. A robust and regular sleep routine is one of the most important defenses against the scourge of late-night sleeplessness. Disruption to the routine can be very distressing, and it usually takes at least a week for me to get my bearings again. I’ve also observed the same effects in other people. Even those who do not usually experience difficulties with sleep are bleary-eyed and confused for a day or two after the change.

You may wonder why it persists? The policy was introduced to save energy during the war, but the war has long since passed. I use it as an illustration of how out of control we are as a species. Not many people like it. It disrupts everyone’s routine. Even politicians, our captains of industry, and the rich don’t like it. There’s a kind of collective insanity in abiding by a rule that doesn’t do anyone any good. People go half-crazy in the days following the change. They’re more likely to have accidents. They get irritable. They fall out with their spouses.

This is because it interrupts our circadian rhythms. Most animals have an internal clock that’s naturally adjusted to the seasons. Humans are no different. We’re creatures of the light. It’s the Earth and the Sun that tell us when we should wake and sleep. We’re already significantly out of step with the Earth’s rhythm due to our electronically-adjusted lifestyles. We stay up late into the night in an induced hypnotic trance watching the flickering images on our TV screens. We sleep in long after daylight has begun. We work in enclosed spaces in artificial light insulated from the sunlight that gives us life.

This isn’t the only way that human beings are maladjusted in our relationship to time. Our calendar system is a strange artifact. As a measurement of time it’s completely out of kilter. Our months shift in duration from 28 to 31 days, depending on the month and the year. The only way we can remember how long our months are supposed to last is by repeating a piece of doggerel to ourselves. “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,” we mutter, trying to work out what the date might be at the end and the beginning of every month.

Isn’t that odd? It’d be like our miles differing in length depending on location. A New York mile being different from a Chicago mile. A London mile being different from a Glasgow mile. How would you measure distance under those circumstances? And yet we allow it for the measurement of time.

The word “month,” of course, refers to the Moon. A month is a moon cycle, which is naturally 29.5 days long. So as a measure of time, not only are our months uneven and inaccurate, but they aren’t even remotely attached to what they’re supposed to be measuring. Add to this, as another affront to our sense of reason, a number of the months are ridiculously misnamed. The ninth month is called the seventh (September), the 10th month is called the eighth (October), the 11th month is called the ninth (November) and the 12th month is called the 10th (December).

This is due to the shift from a lunar to a solar calendar. Most hunter gatherers relied on the moon to track time, while agriculturalists are more dependent on knowing the time of year. Stonehenge, for example, was built to track the solar year. Some calendars today, including the Chinese and the Islamic, are still fundamentally lunar in nature, but this always involves large readjustments to the calendar due to the fact that a lunar year is significantly shorter than a solar year. This difference in size between the lunar and the solar year is one of the historic problems of mankind, and much mental energy has been expended on trying to resolve the difference.

Another problem is how we decide when the year begins. This differs from culture to culture. Some set it on the Spring Equinox, others in the Autumn. The Celtic New Year takes place on October 31st.  This is known as Samhain, meaning summer’s end. As the year is cyclical, when the year starts is arbitrary, but it should at least be attached to a significant point in the year: say an equinox or a solstice. In northern Europe, traditionally it took place around Yule, the winter solstice. This makes sense, as every day after the solstice the days are getting longer and we can truly celebrate the rebirth of the Sun.

Instead of this we start our year on January 1st. This is 11 days late according to my calculations. We should be long done with our celebrations by then, but we’re only beginning. We’ve missed the year and it hasn’t even started yet.

The word “calendar” is from calends, which means “the called” and is Latin for an account book. The calends was the first day of the Roman month, when debts were paid. So a calendar is an arbitrary accounting system for calling in debt. It’s a bureaucratic structure meant to keep the moneyed classes serviced by debt. It has no relationship to the progress of the year, to the Sun or the Moon, or to the cycles of the seasons. It’s a bit like a magic spell which has been cast over our minds in relationship to time. We live inside of it, strangely disorientated by its arbitrariness and dysfunctionality, constantly dependent upon consulting our charts to find out what day it is. It’s like a clock that doesn’t quite tell the time ticking away in our heads, counting down our lives to oblivion.

The other problem is the start date of the calendar, which is linked to the birth of Jesus. This is culturally specific, associated with the triumph of Western culture over the rest of the world. It also makes thinking back in time very complex as anything that happened before this date is recorded backwards. Earlier dates have a higher number than later ones.

It suggests a hierarchy in time, as if dates prior to the birth of Christ are inferior, and less civilized, than subsequent dates. Time is broken by this process. History is divided. We have, almost unconsciously, rejected our own past. We have rejected who we are.

There have been attempts to reform the calendar system over the years. One of the most significant was by Robert Anton Wilson who wrote an article called How to Live Eleven Days in 24 Hours. Unfortunately—and ironically—it’s undated, so I can’t tell you when it was written.

He first started thinking about the calendar, he tells us, when he was writing the Illuminatus! Trilogy with Robert Shea. Between them they devised a new system, which they called Anno Lumina, Year of Light. Historical dates are strung out along a single timeline, starting in 4000 BC with the birth of Hung Mung, an ancient Chinese philosopher who answered all questions by shouting loudly “I don’t know! I don’t know!” Thus 4000 BC is year one A.L. and all dates follow on from that; today, for example, is the year 6021 A.L.

After that Wilson realized that all calendars, even his own Illuminati one, are an attempt to impose a single structure on a complex universe, and instead adopted a multi-faceted approach, in which he gave the date in a variety of different formats. A Robert Anton Wilson article might be dated in any combination of 11 different calendar formats, included the French Revolutionary, Hebrew, Thelemic, Mayan, or Chinese.

As to whether this is a practical solution to the problem of time, I’ll leave that to you to decide.

Artile first appeared here.

Three Stories from the Whitstable Whistler

I moved to Whitstable in 1984. You could call me a DFB – Down From Birmingham – except that the previous place I lived was St Pauls in Bristol. Before that I lived in Humberside, and before that, again, Cardiff, South Wales.

Whitstable Views

by

Christopher James Stone

Illustration by Jade Spranklen

People may have seen the Whitstable Whistler. It’s a new magazine that first appeared in April 2021, given away for free at various venues around the town. It is published by Brightside publishing and is one of a nest of magazines from around the coast, including the Margate Mercury, the Ramsgate Recorder, the Broadstairs Beacon and the Deal Despatch (they like to alliterate their titles). The Margate Mercury has been going since 2016 and won the Highly Commended Magazine of the Year award in the Kent Press and Broadcast Awards in 2020.

I write a regular column, called Written in Stone. People will recognise the title as I’ve used it before. (It was suggested to me by Chris Rowden in the Labour Club many years ago, and I’ve been using it ever since.)

Unlike other free titles, the Whistler…

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A Well Respected Man

Ray Davies, the Kinks and the perfect English pop song.

Julien Temple has made two documentaries about the Kinks. The first, Imaginary Man, features the older of the Davies brothers, the principal songwriter of the group, Ray. The second, Kinkdom Come, focuses on Dave: less well-known, less feted, but crucial to the band’s success. It was Dave Davies who was responsible for the guitar sound on their first hit single, You Really Got Me. He did it by slicing the cone of his speaker with a razor blade, thus achieving the grungy sound that later became a staple of rock music through the use of the fuzz box. Jimi Hendrix said that it was a landmark guitar sound.

At the end of the film Temple tells Dave that his brother once said that, if he had to do it all over again, he’d change every single thing. Dave looks amused. “That’s so amazingly funny,” he says, “because I wouldn’t change any of it.”

And therein lies the difference between the two brothers. Ray is shy, awkward, inward-looking, secretive: a loner; while Dave is an extrovert: outward-looking, easy going and friendly. Nevertheless, it’s clear who’s the dominant partner in the relationship. It was Ray Davies’ genius that made the Kinks, and both brothers know it.

They started off, as was the fashion at the time, as a blues group, and the first five singles are all R’n’B numbers. The riff for “You Really Got Me”, their third single, is essentially a take on Muddy Waters’ Mannish Boy, except that it shifts up the scale, giving it a more urgent feel than the original. This goes along with the lyrics which are a fevered invocation of sexual longing:

Girl, you really got me goin’You got me so I don’t know what I’m doin’Yeah, you really got me nowYou got me so I can’t sleep at night

The song was number one in the UK and number seven in the United States and catapulted them to international stardom. It was the time of the British invasion, when UK acts were storming the American charts. The Rolling Stones, the Zombies, the Hollies, the Animals, the Who, a whole fleet of bands were flying the flag for Britain over the Atlantic, riding on the wave first started by the Beatles.  The Kinks were no exception. They toured the United States in 1965 and soon acquired the reputation as an unruly bunch: hard-drinking, argumentative and a handful. The tour was chaotic, involving on-stage fights and arguments with promoters and TV executives. One such incident occurred backstage just before their appearance on Dick Clark’s TV show Where the Action Is on August 2nd 1965.

As Ray Davies recounts in his autobiography: “Some guy who said he worked for the TV company walked up and accused us of being late. Then he started making anti-British comments. Things like ‘Just because the Beatles did it, every mop-topped, spotty-faced limey juvenile thinks he can come over here and make a career for himself. You’re just a bunch of Commie wimps.’”

Punches were thrown and Davies got one in the face. The TV exec (or whoever it was) told them they’d never work in the US again. “You’re gonna find out just how powerful America is, you limey bastard!” he said. The result was that the Kinks found themselves banned from touring in the United States for the next four years by the American Federation of Musicians. It was 1969 before they traveled to America again, by which time the British invasion was over, and the Kinks were an almost forgotten band.

But the ban kicked off a new phase in Davies’ songwriting. There’s a new tone to the words after this, which take on a satirical edge, while the music is reflective, gentler and more lyrical. Gone is the rough-hewn R’n’B sound, replaced with folksy guitar and an emphasis on clarity of expression.

There’s also a new-found concern with Englishness and English values. A Well Respected Man is a satirical take on the English middle class. It’s observational and character-led, very class-conscious, reflecting the brothers’ poor, North London, working-class background. The fourth verse is sardonic, delivered in a posh, upper class accent by Davies, aping his betters in a way that every working-class English person would recognize:

And he plays at stocks and shares,And he goes to the regatta,And he adores the girl next door,’Cause he’s dying to get at her,But his mother knows the best aboutThe matrimonial stakes.

Dedicated Follower of Fashion is another satire, with a strong Vaudevillian feel; probably directed at brother Dave, who was a bit of a dandy, wearing thigh-length leather boots, and having his long hair back-combed and permed by a women’s hairdresser. This was also the first time that specific English locations are mentioned in a Ray Davies song. There are references to Regent Street and Leicester Square, the boutiques of London town and “the Carnabetian army,” reflecting the fame of Carnaby Street as a center of fashion at the time.

It’s this ability to suddenly shift the direction of his music that marks Davies from the other songwriters of his era. Long before the Beatles had met Bob Dylan and gone all psychedelic, long before the social commentary of the Who or the Bulgakov-inspired imagery of the Rolling Stones, Davies was already charting his own, unique course, while extending the parameters of what the popular song can do. There can be whimsy in a Davies song. There can anger. There can be satire. There can be deep nostalgia for a dying age, and a call to arms for the values of his parent’s generation. There can be politics and humor and irony and observation, all sung with that characteristically understated voice of his: so fragile, so constrained, so unashamedly English. There’s no other voice like it.

But it’s the song that came out on May 5th 1967 that marks him out as a genius. Waterloo Sunset stands alone. From the descending bass line at the beginning to the rising chorus throughout, from the delayed echo sound on the guitar (again a Dave Davies contribution) to the angelic harmony in the background, it’s a master class in how to make the perfect record. Ray Davies says that the tune came to him in a dream, and that it was so personal to him that he didn’t want to release it commercially. It was meant for himself and his family he said, no one else.

The words are simple but multi-layered. We have the observer at the window, meditative and calm, looking out over the Thames as it flows on into the night. We have the crowds down below, with the taxis moving about in front of the station, their headlights already glaring. We have the chill of the evening and Terry and Julie, two people differentiated from the crowds, who are obviously in love. It’s an assignation. They walk across Waterloo bridge, presumably hand-in-hand, where they feel safe and sound. We’re never told where they’re going.

Then we have the sunset, that vision of paradise. There’s something magical in this. It’s not any old sunset in any other part of the world: it’s a Waterloo Sunset, in the heart of the bustling, noisy, metropolis of London. The specificity of the location makes the message more complete. The song creates a picture in your head. Even if you’ve never been to Waterloo, nor visited the station, you know what a sunset looks like. The image of the sunset carries you to that very place, that very moment, where “Terry meets Julie, Waterloo station, every Friday night.”

There was a rumor that the names in the song referred to Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, at the time engaged in a very public affair, but Davies has denied that. It referred to one of his sisters, who was about to get married and to emigrate, he said. It was a wish-you-well for their journey to a new land. In another interview he said that Terry was his nephew, Terry Davies.

But it doesn’t really matter who it’s meant to be. It’s a universal tale, simply told. There’s no pumped-up rhetoric in this song, no overblown imagery, no grand metaphor. It’s quiet. It’s ordinary. There are people like Terry and Julie throughout the world, young people who meet in public places and who are in love. There are bustling stations and taxis and crowds in every city, in every country around the globe. And there are sunsets too, moments when we can shrug off our cares and commitments, our fears and frustrations, and be at one with the beauty of the world.

This wasn’t the last song that Davies wrote. There’s a string of hits stretching into the early 80s, and at least one widely recognized cult classic album, in the form of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. The band were still touring and recording until 1996, and Davies has had a successful solo career since then. But it is Waterloo Sunset that defines him. If he’d never written another song, his reputation as one of the greatest English songwriters of all time would remain intact.

Artile first appeared here.

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Brum Beat

Second City Sounds of the ’60s and ’70sThe Spencer Davis Group

Birmingham is England’s second city. Comparable in size to Glasgow, it’s known as Brum, or Brummagem, by people in the UK. Its inhabitants, in turn, are known as Brummies.

It’s a big, old working-class city in the West Midlands, in the heart of England’s industrial belt. In the 19th century it was known as “the workshop of the world” and “the city of a thousand trades.” Unlike other manufacturing centres it was never associated with any particular product; rather it was home to a variety of industries, often housed in small workshops scattered all over the city. Brummies can turn their hand to anything. There’s a jewellery quarter and a gun quarter. The steam engine was developed here. Birmingham made motorbikes and cars, toys, swords, textiles, leather goods, pottery, coins, locks and chocolate; almost anything you can imagine.

The name “Brum” is not a diminutive. It was probably part of its original title, as the presence of nearby West Bromwich, Castle Bromwich and Bromsgrove clearly testify.

In the 1960s, after the worldwide success of the Beatles from Liverpool, the music industry began scouring other British cities for their indigenous groups. Manchester produced the Hollies, Newcastle the Animals, Dartford the Rolling Stones, and London the Who, the Kinks and the Small Faces. Birmingham, too, had a lively and interesting music scene. Just as music from Liverpool was known as Mersey Beat, after the famous river than runs through the city, so Brummie music came to be known as Brum Beat.

The first group of any note to come out of Birmingham was the Moody Blues, who had an international hit with their first single Go Now in 1964. There were earlier British hits by the likes of the Applejacks and the Rockin’ Berries, but the “Moodies,” as they were affectionately known, were the first Brummie band to achieve fame outside the British Isles. The story goes that they developed their name as an attempt to get sponsorship from the local brewery, Mitchells & Butlers, known as M&B. They were called the MBs or the MB Five, but when the sponsorship failed to materialize, they opted to keep the initial letters of the name, adding “Moody” as a reference to “Mood Indigo” by Duke Ellington, and Blues because they were principally a blues group at the time.

They began to look like a one-hit-wonder. It was three years before the Moody Blues had another record in the charts. By this time the lead singer, Denny Laine had left, replaced by Justin Hayward, and they unveiled a radical new sound. Nights in White Satin is inspired by classical themes, centering around the judicious use of the Mellotron and the flute. Even this betrays its Brummie source. The Mellotron, as an instrument, had been invented in Birmingham, and the Moody Blues’ keyboardist, Mike Pindar, had once been a tester for the company that made the instrument.

It was the beginning of what came to be known as progressive rock. The Moody Blues have since gone on to forge an international reputation as one of the originators of this ponderous, high-minded, classically influenced musical form.

The next serious group to emerge from the Brummie scene was the Move who had a string of hits in the 1960s and early-70s, starting with Night of Fear in 1966, and ending with California Man in 1972. Although the Move never broke in the United States, the follow up band, the Electric Light Orchestra, became internationally renowned, and its leader and co-founder, Jeff Lynne, went on to greater things, including working with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison in the Travelling Wilburys.

There’s a theme here. Night of Fear was based upon the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky, and the Electric Light Orchestra was an attempt to graft classical instruments on to rock music, as was the Moody Blues’ concept album, Days of Future Passed, from which “Nights in White Satin” was taken. It’s as if Brummie musicians were trying too hard to be taken seriously, as if just playing rock music wasn’t enough.

Another great Brummie band of the 1960s was the Spencer Davis Group, featuring Steve Winwood. The Spencer Davis Group was cooler and more hard-edged than its rivals, playing funky, bass-led rhythm and blues, and Winwood was a phenomenon, with a perfect soul voice, even at the age of 14, which was how old he was when he first took to the stage. He was also handy on the Hammond Organ. The group went on to score a number of hits, including Somebody Help Me, Keep On Running and Gimme Some Lovin’. After the band’s demise, Winwood formed Traffic with another group of fellow Brummie musicians, and later joined Blind Faith, with Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker. Winwood, too, has become an international figure, both as a solo artist, and as a session musician of renown.

But the band which perhaps most typifies the Birmingham music scene is Black Sabbath. If you want to hear a full-on Brummie accent, just listen to Ozzy Osbourne. While other Brummie musicians have hidden their origins, putting on vague, transatlantic accents, Ozzy has never turned his back on where he comes from. He’s a Brummie through and through. Same goes with the other members of the band. All of them retained their accents.

Black Sabbath was virtually the resident band of Mothers Club in Erdington for a while. Interestingly, the Moody Blues had also been resident there, some years earlier, when it was known as the Carlton Ballroom. It was one of the principal venues for the rock scene in the late-1960s and early-70s and parts of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma were recorded there.

The significance of Black Sabbath is that, unlike bands from other parts of the United Kingdom, they created a whole new musical genre, in the form of heavy metal. Black Sabbath’s music is characterized by epic riffs with a sinister edge, steely and loud, with doom-laden lyrics. Their lead guitarist, and principal songwriter, Tony Iommi, had lost the tips of two of his fingers in an industrial accident some years earlier, and he was forced to invent a new way of playing the guitar to compensate. He replaced his missing fingertips with home-made thimbles and detuned his guitar to make it easier for him to bend the strings. The result was that dark, heavy sound that characterises Black Sabbath’s music. At the same time, being working class, and coming from an old industrial city, the band wasn’t impressed with the flower-power lyrics of much of the music of the time, and opted instead to focus on words that reflected their more pessimistic outlook, stealing ideas from horror films and Dennis Wheatley novels. The sound of heavy metal comes from the workshops and steel mills that surrounded them when they were growing up. It was in a sheet metal factory that Iommi had lost his fingers. This was a much more urban sound, born from the inner-city landscape that was their home and, while early Black Sabbath music was derided by critics, its ongoing popularity with fans has secured their legacy as one of the most influential bands of the 20th century.

Other Brum Beat bands that attained mythical status are Slade, from nearby Wolverhampton, and UB40, from Sparkbrook. Robert Plant and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin are also from Birmingham and were both prominent in a Brum Beat band from 1967 called the Band of Joy.

The word “Brummagem” has come to mean something cheap and shoddy, an inferior copy of a superior product. That’s the way it is used in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned. A “Brummagem screwdriver” is a hammer, reflecting the sense that Brummies are crude and unskilled at their work. In fact, the opposite is the case. Just as it was Brummie workers who built the steam engine, the BSA motorbike and the Mellotron, so it was Brummie musicians who helped create heavy metal and progressive rock.

Article first appeared here.

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Disney Punks

How it all went wrong

On August 23rd, ex-Sex Pistols’ front man John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, lost a court case against two of his fellow band members, Paul Cook and Steve Jones, about the use of their material in the forthcoming Disney miniseries, directed by Danny Boyle.

Read that sentence again. In less than 50 words I’ve managed to sum up all that’s gone wrong with the British punk scene. As if punks using the courts to settle disputes amongst themselves is not enough, it’s over a miniseries being paid for by the Disney Company.

Lydon’s been going downhill for a long time now. In 2004 he appeared in the reality TV series I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! in which generally minor and failed celebrities compete with each other to eat Kangaroo’s testicles and the like, while isolated in the Australian jungle. In one live broadcast he referred to the show’s viewers as “fucking cunts,” showing that he still had the capacity to shock. It was a cheap stunt, probably planned months in advance, which helped to revive his flagging career as a professional controversialist.

In 2008 he took part in a TV advertising campaign for Country Life butter, dressed in the kind of clothes that are usually reserved for the squirearchy, the British landowning elite. Was this meant ironically? It’s hard to say. The campaign was a great success and earned Lydon enough money to restart his post-punk band, Public Image Limited.

In 2012 he appeared on an episode ofQuestion Time, a long-running BBC current affairs program, in which members of the public ask questions of a panel of guest speakers and politicians. He came over as embarrassing, self-promoting, loud, pointlessly argumentative, frequently talking over other guests, and expressing attitudes which would certainly have upset his former self.

In 2018 he was photographed wearing a MAGA t-shirt, and in 2020 said that he was planning to vote for Trump. (He became a US citizen in 2013.) He told the BBC’s Newsday: “Yes, of course, I’m voting for Trump. I don’t want a politician running this world anymore.” In November that year he was interviewed for Good Morning Britain, saying that his support for Trump was meant as a rejection of “intellectual, left-wing ideas.” Many viewers were puzzled as to why the political views of an ex-pop singer, now living in the USA, would be of interest to them.

And now we find him using the courts to defend himself against the opinions of his former band mates. John Lydon’s descent into irrelevancy is complete.

It hadn’t always been this way. The Sex Pistols are regarded by some as one of the most important bands ever. They came out of the London pub rock scene of the mid-1970s. Influenced by the pared-back aggression of such bands as Dr Feelgood, and the style and stage-posturing of Ian Dury, as well as by the burgeoning New York scene, they brought a new attitude to rock, at that time burdened with an overweening sense of self-importance. Prog rock and pomposity was the order of the day, with long, technical guitar solos and pretentious lyrics wedded to overblown orchestral arrangements and classical themes, in the style of The Moody Blues.

The Sex Pistols blew all that away. They were loud, aggressive, in-your-face and thrillingly raw. The songs were at once concise and musical, with a political edge. Anarchy in the UK, with its descending power chords, and Lydon’s demonic laugh at the beginning, marks a turning point in British rock. It hit the 70s music scene like a slap in the face to the industry. It woke everyone up.

There followed months of controversy, with the nation firmly divided. The band appeared on an early evening TV programme and, with encouragement from the interviewer, began swearing on live TV. It caused a storm. Later, with the release of God Save the Queen, timed to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee, they gained even more notoriety. The song was banned by the BBC, workers at the pressing plant downed tools over the record’s contents, while the plate makers, tasked with producing the famous cover, had to be persuaded to finish the job. There were protests at their gigs and members of the band were physically attacked. The young loved them, the old hated them. They were riding the zeitgeist like surfers on a tidal wave come to bring vengeance on the old regime.

It didn’t last. They sacked bassist Glen Matlock, one of the band’s premier songwriters, in 1977, and replaced him with Lydon’s old friend Simon John Ritchie, known as Sid Vicious, who couldn’t play an instrument. The ostensible reason for Matlock’s removal is that he liked the Beatles, a crime against music in Lydon’s eyes. It left the band bereft of its former cohesion. Vicious was chosen for his looks and attitude. Pale, skinny, spiky-haired, with a permanent sneer, he looked the part, but exposure to the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle went to his head and he soon found himself in a self-destructive relationship with heroin addict Nancy Spungen, which eventually lead to his premature death. That story is well told in Alex Cox’Sid and Nancy (1986) in which Vicious is enthusiastically portrayed by Gary Oldman.

Matlock later claimed that the tensions between himself and Lydon were deliberately exacerbated by their manager, Malcolm McLaren, as a way of creating chaos in the ranks in order to stimulate creativity. McLaren saw the band as a Situationist art project rather than as a rock group. He had observed the Paris uprisings in May 1968 and was attempting to bring about his own rock ‘n’ roll insurrection, using the Sex Pistols as his means. He succeeded. Punk became a brand as more and more young people throughout the British Isles adopted its style and attitude. We were soon in the throes of a full-scale punk revolution, with punk combos cropping up in every corner of the land, with punk style and punk haircuts usurping the earlier hippie look. Long hair gave way to spiky hair, great coats to leather jackets, flares to straights.

What McLaren failed to recognize was that the Sex Pistols were a formidable band in their own right: tight, energetic, with a fierce rhythm section, they could carry themselves before any audience. Also, the country was ready for the change. The punk revolution didn’t spring into life because of the machinations of one Svengali-like manager on the King’s Road, as McLaren liked to portray it, but because there was a weariness in the heart of the nation, and we were all looking for something new.

The word “punk,” by the way, has an interesting history. It originally referred to rotten wood dust used for tinder. Later it came to mean any worthless thing, later again, to a worthless person. It can also mean a male prostitute, or, in prison slang, someone forced into sex by a stronger partner. It was used in relationship to music first to define rockabilly, then adopted to describe certain characteristically aggressive bands, such as the MC5 and the Stooges, coming out of Detroit. It was that raw, fast, unadorned style that British punks chose to emulate.

The Sex Pistols were no sooner here than they were gone. They were on the scene for a total of two-and-a-half years, and, looking back, it was mostly nonsense. Lydon’s lyrics, for example. In “Anarchy in the UK” he gives examples of what anarchy means to him: “give a wrong time, stop a traffic line,” and “get pissed, destroy,” he sings in his howling voice. This isn’t really anarchy, it’s juvenile delinquency, petty vandalism, and nihilism. Also, while they derided the hippies as “boring old farts,” they were living off the back of what the hippies had achieved previously, living in squatted properties, and playing in pubs which had been commandeered for the London pub rock scene, of which they were only the latest incarnation.

This is why Lydon’s latest noisy intervention into our collective consciousness is so irritating. Steve Jones called Lydon an “annoying little brat” in his 2016 autobiography, Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, on which the Disney series is based. That just about sums it up. Lydon called the series “disrespectful,” which shows a lack of self-awareness. Since when has Lydon shown any respect for anyone but himself?

It’s the lack of acknowledgement of where they came from that’s most annoying. The Sex Pistols were part of a movement. There was a history there. They didn’t arise out of nothing. They weren’t the first working-class band. They weren’t the first to lead a style revolution. They weren’t the first to redefine what rock ‘n’ roll means. They represent a period in time, sadly now passed. They stole the moment and ran with it gleefully, cursing and rejoicing and voicing how we all felt. It wasn’t John Lydon, Simon Ritchie, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock or Malcolm McLaren who made the Sex Pistols: it was us, the fans.

Article originally appeared here.

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