The Scrollbars of Empire

Eek! A ghastly fly! So huge, so bulbous! Eek!

Screaming: the most natural thing in the world, an emergent necessity. We learn that we can modulate our screams by controlling lung pressure, mouth aperture and throat constriction at a very early age. We are quick to observe the effects on those around us. Soon we begin to manipulate those effects and thus commences the dialectic of me and you, us and them - the fundamental relationship between the self and the other, Ich und Du, Man and God, me and my Mum.

Inside us is another ontologically emergent necessity: to be observed. This is revealed to us by the blush. We show our inner disjuncture with outer circumstance. We are caught out. Our nub of being laid bare. Caught out concealing or lying? Not always. A blush reveals a deeply felt truth. I love you, but I can’t admit it. You say something, and I can’t utter the truth, therefore I blush. Emergence of self-awareness is one obvious cause the blush. I know I am being watched. I become self conscious, and I blush. Revealing the inner to the outer. The evolutionary advantage of revelation. The group knows what is going on in your head. Your body reveals inner truths unbidden.

Google ogles our whole planet and our every dealing, even our hedges and our windows. 360 degree knowledge emerges freely. Get it done before people realise there is such a thing. Total Administration gives birth to Total Surveillance. Our very connections reveal our inner workings. A cyber-blush rouges the planet in our midst.

Now we have the thousand eyes observing the one or two. Revealing more and more. The compound gaze of the fly, an instant multi-verse. As individuals, we are blinkered in our monocular screen world. Together, we are the compound eye. In homage to Flatland, we offer up our two dimensions to the implicit third. The Third Eye. The three in one creates the ten thousand things, and the ten thousand things beget twenty thousand eyes. We are watching ourselves. No Big Brother, only ourselves. 'Watching me, watching you.. ahaah'. We each enjoy surveying our realm. We ogle with Google goggles, the Self-Other toggle.

Have you ever blushed at a thought?

What is the r/evolutionary potential of that?

(And, of course, to anyone who knows their Book of Enoch - the Watchers, or Grigori, are in fact angels. Terrible ones to boot.)

Colour scheme

Had to happen. I kept seeing rentinal afterglow angels when the background was blackground. This is much more mellow. Sun-faded acquiescence. Less intensity, more readability. Illity. Hills. Bart At.

Chango who art...

I went to see and hear Chango Spasiuk at Leeds Wardrobe, on the 25th Feb.

He sat down on his chair, spread out a crimson blanket over his knees and placed his accordion in position. Not a single note. Even the band tuning up sounded like thrumming angels organising a tour of a fleetingly divine lake. He could play almost anything he could imagine. He could imagine far more than the gathered throng, you would not be alone in surmising.

It is rare that you get to see a musician who digs deep into your spirit and raises it screaming and kicking into the air like a reborn babe. The passage was easy. There was nothing at all traumatic or trammeled about the performance, almost no struggle at all on the outside. Most of the time he was playing, his countenance was serene and blissful, streaked only occasionally with seismic spasms of yearning passion. The passion of the quest. The next note, the next note, and possibly the next.

The music spanned continents, geological rifts, time zones, time signatures, tonal landscapes, the earth and the divine. All terrestrial and celestial elements were cycled, phased and fused.

He made a short speech before the final piece, expressing his passion for music. It was laudably translated by someone in the audience as he spoke. He doesn’t play for the King’s Ear, or the Dancefloor Beat, he seeks something deeper in the mystery that is music. The mystery that brings us together. As it always has. Music is our collective beacon, it lights up our individual path.

Chango is Jesus. He wouldn’t like to be called that though.




Chango’s music is quintessentially live. I have not heard any of his CDs, there is no substitute for the live experience.

Go and see him!! (And his band - Spanish guitar, percussion - mainly cajon, and violin). Did I mention them? They were excellent!)

Here is his website: click

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Since writing this, I have have been provided with some extra information from Leeds promoter Andy Brown:

The translator was Katerina de Kapa, Chango's tour manager.

The percussion was: Peruvian cajon, caja hand drums, the pear-shaped udu & tin fiddle "n'vike"

Another review from the Leeds Wardrobe concert, see here

London concert review from Saturday, Feb 28th here

You can become a Facebook "fan" ! - here

CDs probably available only via Amazon, but we're working on that.
'Pynandi' here
'Tarafero de Mis Pagos' here

Further Angels

I have decided that this year's blog will be devoted mainly to angels. I would welcome any ideas, sources or hints about these entities.

Here are some of the ones I captured around November 2008. They are pixelly because of the incredible magnification that has had to take place.




The magnification process has created countless digital artefacts, but those of you familiar with this kind of thing will doubtless concur that digital artefacts seldom create angels. It is clear that these are the real McCoy. Swirls of light created on a cold night with exposure beyond breaking point for handheld. That's when you might see them. Or are they merely nudes descending staircases?

I am trying to find an Eastern European animation with scary angels depicted. Julian has seen it, and knows it is referred to in a book somewhere. It was shown in the Fourmations sporadic series. I have a few videotapes of these to look through (and catalogue). Makes me wistful for the good ol pioneering days of Channel 4. It is such a shame that it has finally capitulated. With the support of the BBC, I might add - here no surprise there then.


A couple of things people have said about angels that I like:

We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another. ~Luciano de Crescenzo - little bit about him here


You'll meet more angels on a winding path than on a straight one. ~Daisey Verlaef

More about Angels

The closer you look, the more there are. Once you see one, you start seeing them all over the place. Every day a new angel is discovered, but the heard of angels remains the same. They are known as demiurges in various Platonic clinches. In culinary terms, garlic sublimes if you have the presence of mind to add enough. The notion of 'savor' in Latin America goes well beyond our own notion of taste. Savor. Saviour. Savoir faire. Save our fayre. Fairy. Faerie. Fiery. Angel.



























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City of Angels

The Angel pub here in Leeds sold me beer not to make me feel queer, but for the price of £1.42 for a pint of well-kept Sam Smith's Old Brewery. Guaranteed to floor a southerner.


Leeds is full of angels and they all avoid the church.

If every angel's terrible, how come we've got Coco Rosie? Even though they display a veno,mous disdain for the honest and humble web designer. All the more so since Flash became the Betamax of the triple-double yer. OK - it hasn't happened yet, but sites like Coco Rosie's are a good illustration of the pitfalls of Flash. Any aspiring Flash developers might do well to contact them.