C.J. Stone's Blog, page 9
January 26, 2020
Anti-war march through Canterbury
After WW2 Iran was a democracy. Unfortunately it was the wrong kind of democracy….
A tale of two rallies
I went on the anti-war march through Canterbury on Saturday 18th January 2020.
There was a rally at the beginning, and a rally at the end. In fact, strictly speaking, it wasn’t a march at all, but two rallies, it’s just that, in order to get from one to the other, we had to walk through the city.
The fact that we were all walking in the same direction at the same time, carrying banners and chanting slogans, was purely coincidental.
Two people objected to our march along the way. One of them shouted the name of Tommy Robinson, that well-known anti-Islamic activist who has just endorsed the Tory Party.
The other shouted “USA! USA!” Like that, repetitively, like a football chant.
Which says it all really. Let’s not bother to look at the facts. Let’s just pick a side and support them, like…
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January 12, 2020
Linocut Exhibition at the Horsebridge
Cutting away the surface to let light into the world…
Cutting away the surface to let light into the world
The highlight of last year’s carnival fund-raisers was the auction, organised by Julie Wassmer and myself, and held in St Peter’s Hall on Cromwell Road.
A number of prints were sold, including two linocuts, one by Ben Dickson, the other by Ben Sands. The Ben Sands was kindly donated by his son, Mat, and fetched the princely sum of £150.
My sister bought it. I’m looking at it now. It’s a black and white scene of Morris Dancers outside the East Kent on May Day 1987.
The dancers are leaping into the air, their feet off the floor, while the crowd looks on, clutching pints, or laughing and joking amongst themselves.
The image is taken from the far side of the road, outside the British Legion. There are two cars in the foreground and a couple of people trying…
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December 5, 2019
So you don’t like Jeremy Corbyn
Let’s look past the individuals and look at the policies
So you don’t like Jeremy Corbyn.
How do you know you don’t like him? Have you met him? Have you spoken to him? Did he come round to your house and kick your dog?
No. You saw him on the telly. He was bit scruffy and he didn’t know how to do his tie up properly. He didn’t bow his head enough at the cenotaph. He didn’t sing the national anthem. What else do you know about him? He’s an anti-Semite and a terrorist sympathiser is he? Google it. Where can you find an actual anti-Semitic or pro-terrorist statement? You can’t, because there are none.
You like his policies. You want railways and other utilities back in public hands. You don’t see why foreign-based state-owned rail companies should be taking profits from our subsidised rail system. You want to see our Health Service properly funded. You don’t want to…
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November 26, 2019
It’s More Than the Brexit Election
It’s class warfare in the most class conscious country on the planet
It’s class warfare in the most class conscious country on the planet.
The UK’s very tribal and class conscious. Urban, working class
people in the old manufacturing centers, like Manchester or Birmingham,
tend to vote Labour. Rural people, where ideas of patronage still hold,
are more inclined to vote Conservative. The ruling elite, historically,
all went to the same school. Twenty Prime Ministers went to Eton, plus large numbers of Cabinet Ministers and countless Tory MPs.
Labour members generally have more modest
backgrounds. Until 1945, most Labour Party members were working class.
Since then a significant number of lawyers and other professionals have
joined the party, a process that had its apotheosis with New Labour in the 1990s. New Labour was the creation of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
and was an attempt to rid Labour of its old Socialist credentials, to
turn it into the British equivalent of…
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November 14, 2019
Hackney meets Glastonbury in Wetherspoons
Next time I catch a three year old robbing an old Granny with a butter knife, I’ll remember to ring the police
Knife crime? This was a bored three-year-old playing a game
I went to Wetherspoons with a friend of mine and her two children the other day.
Their names are Angela, Toby and Kai and they live in Glastonbury.
Angela was born in Whitstable and often comes back to visit. She’s a bit of a space-cadet, as I’m sure she would admit, but I love her. For instance in 2012 she burnt all her things because she thought it was the end of the world.
“You realise you’re
completely bonkers don’t you Angela?” I said, laughing, when she
told me that. She didn’t argue.
She’s a single parent.
Toby is three and a half years old. Kai will be two in February. The
kids are a bit of a handful, a bit wayward and demanding. Angela is
always chasing after them.
Sometimes she looks
very tired. I would love to…
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November 8, 2019
Tarot: How To Re-Create Yourself With a Deck of Cards
Tarot as Picasso might have painted it
by Philippe St. Genoux
A game which you play
This is a really interesting book.
It’s not like a normal “How To” tarot book.
There’s no lists of meanings telling you how to interpret the cards.
Instead it offers you various ways you can approach the cards to discover the meaning for yourself.
It ditches a lot of the old tropes of tarot reading – the Fool’s
journey, synchronicity, archetypes, psychic powers and the like – and
offers in their place a new understanding of the process, as an
art-form.
Well I say “new”. In fact he delves into the tarot’s past to
rediscover its roots—as a game, which you play—and introduces us to a
long-forgotten form, originating in the Renaissance period in Italy,
known as Tarocchi Appropriati.
The idea of the game was to select one of the trumps (the major
arcana) and to assign it to an…
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October 31, 2019
Samhain Harvest Spirit
It’s one law for the rich, and another for the rest of us…
Why can’t people be allowed to top up their meagre wages?
It’s that time of years again folks.
The clocks have gone back, it’s dark by five in the evening, and there’s a smell of decomposition in the air.
Meanwhile the mushrooms are sprouting, the veil between the worlds has lifted and there are spirits roaming amongst us.
Thursday is Halloween. That’s Samhain in the Celtic calendar. Friday is the Day of the Dead. It’s the time when we remember all those who have passed over into whatever lies beyond this life.
Whether you believe in
spirits or not isn’t important. What we are remembering is our own
mortality. By honouring the dead we are paying attention to the fact
that we are alive, and that life is rare and precious.
One of the news stories this week was about the fact that there is fruit being left on…
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October 25, 2019
New York: City of the Nephilim
New York is not just a collection of buildings. It has a psychic presence too.
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…
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October 17, 2019
Review: The William Blake Exhibition at Tate Britain
The Information Revolution is upon us, and no one knows where it will lead.
Poet’s verses ring true as we face our very own revolution
I went to see the Blake exhibition at Tate Britain last week. I would love to recommend it, except for one thing. It cost £18 to get in.
The exhibition is
obviously a great success. I went on a Tuesday and it was packed.
Tens of thousands,
possibly hundreds of thousands, will go to see it. It will earn
millions for the gallery.
And yet Blake lived his
entire life in a state of poverty, dependant upon the charity of
benefactors. Were he alive today he would not have been able to
afford to go to his own exhibition.
This is only one of the
many ironies we can associate with William Blake.
For instance, his most
famous poem, Jerusalem, is virtually the English national anthem. And
yet Blake was not a nationalist.
It was played at the
wedding…
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September 24, 2019
Consciousness is King
In the beginning, before time and space, there was consciousness
a manifesto
Art is Magic. Work is Magic. Breath is Magic. Consciousness is Magic. Mind is Magic. Awareness is Magic. Time is Magic. Imagination is Magic. Application is Magic. Attention is Magic. Words are Magic. Language is Magic.
Language is the carrier
of thought through signs. Magic is the carrier of imagination through
symbols. Art is the carrier of emotion through effect. Language, art
and magic are three aspects of the same substance. The substance is
Mind.
Although we all appear
to be separate beings isolated in separate bodies we are, in fact,
all aspects of the same originating being which is consciousness.
Consciousness is the beginning of all things. Without consciousness
nothing can exist.
We don’t only share a
world, we share a Mind-Space. Mind is like an energy field that
radiates out from the core of consciousness. We can call this “the
Mind-Field”.
In the beginning,
before time…
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