It then went on to explain how “under the move, set to be unveiled in Tuesday’s Queen’s Speech that buildings left vacant for over a year would have to be entered into a ‘rental auction’”. Boris Johnson is quoted to have said that “boarded up premises were a blight on towns and cities and damaged local economies.” BBC.
What is love? This may seem like an odd question but let us be honest in understanding that it is something we all say every day and possibly at times without much thought. Not that we don’t mean it, but in a loving partnership, we know the other wants to hear it and when we part, or at moments appropriate, it is part of our lexicon and leaves our lips. But right now, I want to investigate what it means to love, what is love and how do we define it.
Imagine if an alien came down to the Earth. What a field day they would have.
I say ‘they’, as I don’t want to assume their gender. I mean it’s hard enough on this planet if you make a gender faux pas but imagine making a cosmic one! And anyway, what gender does an alien have with 6 titties, 8 testicles, 3 vaginas, 5 penises and 6 anuses? Don’t worry I’m sure Facebook with its 71 genders will add one in due time and we’ll be fine.
If there is one term in this cosmos of captions we now find ourselves encapsulated in that I truly biliously detest and everything it stands for, it is ‘brand loyalty’. Why anyone in their right mind would devote themselves to anything as dull and faceless as a ‘brand’ is truly beyond me. Have you not seen these clowns ‘branded’ head to foot with logos exhibiting their ‘brand loyalty’, under the incredibly false assumption that somehow, we should envy them or even worse be under the illusion that they have achieved something by simply going into a shop or online and paying for the ‘branded’ item? Wow what an achievement! It’s a pair of fucking shoes! It’s a garish gaudy handbag! It’s just a fucking car! I love to hear folk brag about how they think their ostentatious material products speak volumes about them. They have to, because they nothing to fucking say! It illustrates the legerdemain of marketing.
I had been trying and hoping to view the ‘Man and Beast’ exhibition by Francis Bacon for some time which was being held at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly. One thing or another had acted as an obstruction and so with just 10 days left before its closure, I booked it for an early Sunday afternoon. I don’t venture much into London anymore. I was born and brought up there, spent many years between my 20s and 30s hustling in the metropolis and have seen it slowly morph meretriciously into a nothing more than a monstrous shopping mall with streets simply lined with gaudy corporate logos. But the one attraction it still has to offer is art with its huge galleries decorated with paintings by the masters.
My mind eludes me as to how and why I got the mental itch to travel to the Brecon Beacons and hike up Pen y Fan Mountain, but at some point, in the last 6 months I had become fascinated, enthralled, and obsessed. Possibly I was inspired by my brother’s whirlwind 24-hour escapade of climbing the 3 peaks starting with a long haul from Folkestone to Ben Nevis and then working his way back through the verdant valleys and umbilical express ways that join the United Kingdom to ascend the remaining 2. Or it may have been that my cousin Tam who is a resident of the welsh metropolitan city Cardiff, which in a motor is only a short jaunt away had mentioned and suggested it. Either way, I was hooked.
Film, movies, the cinema, the pictures, the silver screen, the flicks, the motion picture has played a dominant role in my life from a very early age, as I’m sure it has in many others. I don’t recall and I wouldn’t want to confabulate, but according to my father, he took me to the cinema in Leicester square circa July 1977 and introduced a 4-year-old version of me to George Lucas’s science fiction cinematic masterpiece, Star Wars. I’m by no means a fan anymore but I’m sure at such a young age the moving picture left an indelible mark on my highly impressionable still forming embryonic mind as I stared wide eyed in the darkness at the huge screen, the celluloid light bursting across the theatre illuminating the auditorium like a religious experience with projector above beaming the film over our heads to be reflected back on the audience with images dancing over us, as we all tucked into our popcorn and watched Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero with a thousand faces’… in space.
I currently live in a small coastal village by the name of Seabrook in Kent. It is sandwiched between Sandgate and Hythe, and if one is driving from the latter or the former to the other and happens to blink, they will never have known the village existed. This, in itself, gives you an idea of how geographically microscopic the village is.
I have a mirror in my hallway hanging on the wall adjacent to the bathroom door and one above the toilet. Unless I choose to wear clothes in bed, which I have no desire to do, when I take that hazy matutinal stroll to the toilet to empty my bladder I am faced with the body I was ‘blessed’ with, or more to the point, one that I ‘shaped’ over the years. The slightly rotund stomach, the adipose tissue clinging to the sides making ‘love handles’, the ubiquitous ‘Dad’ bod, that women apparently love. Let’s face it, I have my fair share of avoirdupois.
From as early as I can remember I have been a creative person. This I consider a blessing, a true benediction. To be constantly bursting and overflowing with ideas across different formats and genres, adrift and absent in the moment where time is of no consequence with thoughts parading in the background unattended is a state one could only wish to attain constantly. It’s a freedom, a release, a spiritual connection unblemished or untarnished and untangled from emotional thought and subjectivity.
As I ground a canvas coupled with music or the natural soundscape, as the brush is dipped into the paint and the mind/arm/hand move swiftly and symbiotically in tune leaving indelible strokes and marks, as my fingers dance across the keyboard so freely married with the mechanisms of my mind using the alphabet to digitally scribe and bring my thoughts to life, as I strum, bend and hammer the strings of my guitar to interpret my emotion, as the minds meet when I perform in front an audience… I am truly free.
The other night as I settled onto my settee for the evening, I picked up my fridge-cold can of Brewdog, their Elvis Juice flavour to be exact and took a good hefty hearty swig. This was the way to end a night, with our nations much loved ‘alcohol’, the permitted and accepted drug. I was acting out as the rebellious consumer chugging down on a Brewdog and living vicariously through their outrageous and offensive advertising as they ‘disrupt’ the alcohol market with expletives and engage, which I guess could be considered postmodern, in the act of mocking advertising itself. It is an interesting insight into the workings of a society where marketing that uses cussing and coarseness still resounds as an act of rebellion, you only have to look at the millions of people who were willing to pay to have the word FCUK across their chests. But yes, it still grabs the eye of the consumer, and particularly rankles as we work our way through this new age of purity. Does this say more about marketing or about us, the consumer?
For a moment picture the Earth floating through space, this lonely ball of rock placed with exactitude in our solar system, the perfect distance from the Sun for life to begin and flourish, this planet surrounded by other heavenly bodies, all spinning on their axis in what we have called the ‘Universe’. And as we start to move into our world through the clouds, we can begin to see the shapes of blue and green where the aquatic worlds float under the surface and mammals stretch across the land comprised of towns, cities, deserts, mountains, forests and jungles. And what seem like ants from a distance are human beings living within their social structures, their evolved environments, their religions, their economies, their quotidian affairs utilizing some of the most advanced technology enhancing their lives, like never before. We definitely are living in a world of wonder, creativity and leisure. With the touch of a finger, we can access a colossal amount of information that will undoubtably add interest and inform our lives incredibly.
There is a disturbing irony between how human consumption is destroying the Amazon rainforest through our need for vast amounts of resources including logging, agriculture, cattle ranching, mining, oil extraction and dam-building while the other ‘Amazon’ known to us all too well for delivering consumeristic goods at the touch of a button is growing exponentially and taking over the world.
In the last 5 or so years it has been somewhat disturbing yet hilarious to watch flat earthers and their theory gain a little momentum. Let’s be honest who in their right mind seriously believes the Earth is flat? It is antithetical to anyone who views the world through the eyes of rationality. But wait! They may not be wholly wrong, for the world may not be flat, but neither is it round, because as of late, it actually feels fucking square.
As I talk to many people, read many posts on social networks and place my ear to the ground there is clearly an air of fear, rage, anger and despair. People are openly disgusted with the current status quo as they watch their lives get increasingly harder, the price of living climbing out of control and making ends meet a feat in itself as they move slowly through the years.
This against the backdrop of the FAANG corporations making trillions, their governments and associates doing as they please, breaking their own rules that they create for the population and setting new agendas with laws to increase and control through digital surveillance often leads one to think: ‘what can I do?’
It pains me to watch the domestication of the British public. And how obvious it was after the interview between Oprah and the ex-royals. No, I couldn’t watch it, why would you need or even want to? I say ‘need’ simply because you couldn’t not hear about it non-stop afterwards, and oh yes how we have!
There is an extremely interesting case of denial happening within the borders of Great Britain. Nationally we are amazingly good at blowing our own trumpets, looking down our noses at the ‘others’ across the seas and bathing in self-congratulatory for simply being ‘British’. If we were to listen to our own self-indulgent praise, we are angels, leaders of the world that have never put a foot wrong.
51 years ago, in 1970 Joni Mitchell wrote the melodic highly compelling song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ with the lyrics “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” to alert her listeners to the fact that “you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone” which included various different things including trees, animals, her old man and of course paradise. Paradise, of course, comes in many different forms to many different people.
The other night as I lay awake at 3 in the morning, as does happen from time to time, the thought suddenly hit me, among many others, that in 13 years I will be 60. Fuck me 60! I have to admit I felt a twinge of fear, a spike of horror, a stab of insecurity.
Over the course of the last few weeks, I have seen a subject on the ‘news’ that has been circulated widely across many news mediums that should make you question British society: The royal family.
We can all debate ‘what the news should be’, but more importantly if we look at what the news actually is, this in itself is much more telling and a greater insight into how our society functions.
Thankfully we now live in a time where collectively racist terms are no longer used by the majority and if they are, people are quick to point out their disgust and move to halt such behaviour. To say the N word or the P word just simply is no longer excusable or acceptable.
Every morning, in a Kantian fashion, I like to rise from bed and walk down to the beach. It’s a walk I generally do in solitude to allow myself 40 minutes or so to compose my thoughts, to allow the dust to settle as each thought fights for prominence and importance in my mind, and with a gentle act of selection I file each one into a somewhat ordered list to work through as the day moves along at its own pace all determined by its sequence of events.
There is a well-known phrase: Never judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.
But perhaps that should be: Never judge a man until you’ve seen his family killed, witnessed his country being bombed, travelled precariously thousands of miles to find safety and warmth, been vilified in the press and all across social media, then detained and treated like an animal for simply being one of ‘them’ in his shoes.
I am now filming myself reading VIR(US), the latest novel that I have written. Each chapter will be broken into 5-6 minute segments. You can view the videos here: https://meetthemottas.com/author/virus-a-live-reading/
As we move through this period of COVID with the lengthy lockdowns I have sat in front of the TV more than I would be prepared to admit. I don’t have terrestrial television and refuse to pay for a licence, simply because I don’t use it enough or feel there is actually anything worth watching. I have 5 shelves of DVDs, mainly films you won’t find on Netflix or Now TV, possibly on Amazon, but you would have to pay the extra on top, which I feel is a bit much. These films I return to periodically, like a good novel, as they are such beautiful, in this case, cinematic experiences.
