Until last week, Dean Atta was relatively unknown; unless you were deeply immersed in the world of spoken word you probably wouldn’t have heard of him. Then, in the wake of the conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence, he wrote his poem I Am Nobody’s Nigger, and took the internet by storm. In five days, his poem had received in excess of 15,000 hits and gained him an extra 1,000 followers on Twitter. The poem was, he says, a reaction to “the injustice of the death of Stephen Lawrence”, and to the loose usage of the N-word. “Watching Panorama, where they reconstructed his murder, and hearing that the N-word was the last thing they said when they stabbed him really struck a chord with me”…/
Art Garfunkel was on typically modest form when interviewed by Rebecca Jones for the BBC yesterday. But then he has much to be modest about…
AG: I’m just thrilled to have this singing voice that’s been with me since I was five years old, I mean just thrilled that God was so generous with me. It’s extremely elevating – it gives you one foot on earth and one foot in the heavens – and it’s my life to be so lucky.
RJ: You say you’re lucky but hard work must have played its part as well…
AG: Well yes, when you say that I think it was a million and a half hours in the recording studio where it’s not quite right enough – and this makes perfectionists like me and like Paul Simon very driven and kind of crazed. It’s an absolute flavour of love – of love and madness.
RJ: Do you listen back to your hits?
AG: There are times if my confidence is low (when) I remind myself of my past achievements and I put the earphones on and I listen to how Scarborough Fair flows.
RJ: So what made those songs so good?
AG: Well Paul Simon is one hell of a writer and he plays magnificent acoustic guitar, but I sing pretty well and I taught Paul how to harmonise with me and I helped create a very palatable sound between the two of us. So you get a fascinating combination: rock’n’roll that swings, where the lyrics make you think.
RJ: Do great singers get the respect they deserve, do you think?
AG: No they do not. It’s the age of the singer-songwriter, ever since Dylan. Well what happens to wonderful singers – you know, Sinatra didn’t write those songs of his. Read more…
We know who the killers are,
We have watched them strut before us
As proud as sick Mussolinis’,
We have watched them strut before us
Compassionless and arrogant,
They paraded before us,
Like angels of death
Protected by the law.
It is now an open secret
Black people do not have
Chips on their shoulders,
They just have injustice on their backs
And justice on their minds,
And now we know that the road to liberty
Is as long as the road from slavery.
The death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us to love each other
And never to take the tedious task
Of waiting for a bus for granted.
Watching his parents watching the cover-up
Begs the question
What are the trading standards here?
Why are we paying for a police force
That will not work for us?
The death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us
That we cannot let the illusion of freedom
Endow us with a false sense of security as we walk the streets,
The whole world can now watch
The academics and the super cops
Struggling to define institutionalised racism
As we continue to die in custody
As we continue emptying our pockets on the pavements,
And we continue to ask ourselves
Why is it so official
That black people are so often killed
Without killers?
We are not talking about war or revenge
We are not talking about hypothetics or possibilities,
We are talking about where we are now
We are talking about how we live now
In dis state
Under dis flag, (God Save the Queen),
And God save all those black children who want to grow up
And God save all the brothers and sisters
Who like raving,
Because the death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us that racism is easy when
You have friends in high places.
And friends in high places
Have no use whatsoever
When they are not your friends.
Dear Mr Condon,
Pop out of Teletubby land,
And visit reality,
Come to an honest place
And get some advice from your neighbours,
Be enlightened by our community,
Neglect your well-paid ignorance
Because
We know who the killers are.
A few years ago Child A and I became intrigued by a monochrome canvas we saw at the Tate Modern gallery in London by the French artist Yves Klein.
The name meant nothing to me at the time, but according to c4gallery.com “he is generally considered the progenitor of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. In Klein’s short life he singlehandedly managed to redefine the foundation on which the entire generation of the 1960s avant-garde stood…” [read full article here ]
In 1958 he developed his trademark, patented, colour International Klein Blue which he claimed had a quality “close to pure space – a Blue in itself, disengaged from all functional justification”. Conveniently for dealers in fine art, the colour allegedly lies outside the gamut of computer displays, and can therefore not be accurately portrayed on webpages. That said, international-klein-blue.com gives it a shot anyway. View the page in fullscreen mode on your browser and you’ve got yourself a DIY 20th Century modernist masterpiece right there on your desktop.
According to Tate Modern Klein made around 200 untitled monochrome paintings using IKB and, after his early death at the age of 34, his widow assigned a number to each of them. The one my son and I saw was IKB 79 painted in 1959. [More]
In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: ‘The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may not comprehend, may not remember.’
And he: ‘I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.
From Little Gidding, part of Four Quartets Read by Alec Guinness in 1971
What made you decide to go the rock’n’roll route ?
Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I start drinking. The first thing I know, I’m in a card game. Then I’m in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13 year old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas “Before And After” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chilli and hot dogs. Then this 13 year old girl from Phoenix comes in and burns the house down. The delivery boy – he ain’t so mild. He gives her the knife and the next thing I know is I’m in Omaha. It’s so cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburettor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that turns newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say ?
And that’s how you became a rock’n’roll singer ?
No, no – that’s how I got tuberculosis.
Happy 70th birthday Bob Dylan…
From an interview with Playboy magazine, quoted in the 1978 paperback Bob Dylan In His Own Words, ISBN-10: 0860015424 – still one of my most treasured possessions. Well that said, it currently sells for £0.01 secondhand on Amazon UK. Delivery costs £2.80 – what did you expect – but it’s still a bargain.
