S C R O O G E D !

Once more I am returned as Lazarus from the unending silence of the tomb! Once more I am delivered as Ishmael from the vast roiling ocean! I'm exaggerating, of course, for I merely find myself sitting, discomforted, in the cold and shivering garret of STONEDHOLY HQ battering the keys of the laptop and adding yet another dreary page to 'The Diary of a Pop-Slop Nobody'....but it's been some time since last I sent forth my tidings of comfort n joy!

'Decrease the Surplus Population!'

It comes as no surprise, I'm sure, to you few readers of these humble pages, that I am returned to you not as a fully redeemed Ebeneezer Scrooge, filled afresh with bonhomie and a newfound resolve to spread happiness and ease the pitiless burdens of the poor, but as the same crabbit auld shitebag as ever I was before my late protracted absence from these virtual walls! And even if I had been rudely plucked from golden slumber or, like as not, fretful & agitated tossings & turnings, and received visitations from the same trio of Chrimbo spirits that effected such a job of shakin' old Scrooge from out of his moneygrubbing and joyless ways, I couldn't do anything about it....for the Stoned Holy Pocketbags still contain nowt much more than fluff! So that huge turkey will have to remain in the shopkeeper's window and Tiny Tim, bless his innocent little heart, will have to remain toyless. For you see, gentle reader, that Scrooge was only ever able to chuck his errand boy half a crown and shower gifts upon his nephew and the whole Cratchit family and warm the cockles of our beaten down hearts and bring tears to our world weary eyes because his bank account was already bulging with the ill-gotten gains he had accrued as a penny-scrimping git and money-whoring bringer of doom! Redress is a luxury the poor can't afford ; unavailable to such as the
S T o n e D h O L y b L o G G E r and the many other legions of the totally-fukn-skint!! I expiate guilt daily, I assure you, readers, but the World takes no notice!! 

A modern version of the hearwarming morality tale would have to involve some tosspot like Lord Sugar of the Dodgy Stereo undergoing electric shock therapy, issuing forth from the exclusive retreat or sanatorium and skipping blithely along the pavement with a song in his heart and a stupid smirk on his face! Perchance the dry and dessicated husk of humanity that is the CEO of Wonga.com could have his distorted little mind blown and his shrivelled heart shown by the liberating effects of 10,000 micrograms of LSD Love Power!! Right on, baby! The shareholders, in both these instances, would not, ahm pretty damn sure, be happy bunnies!!

Perchance, as a means whereby I could fill the StonedHolyCoffers, I could pen a postscript to Mr. Dickens' tale of restitution ; in which pages a generous and philanthropic Mr. Scrooge quickly finds himself out of business and after blowing his wad is removed to the workhouse where he sees out the last of his days turning the screw and labouring long on the treadmill!! Perhaps a title like 'Slim Pickings, Mr. Dickens!' would grab the attention of the ticket buying populace and put bums on seats! But here are, I fear, no rosy-tinted, Victorianesque happy endings in the post-modern, post truth, Neo-Liberal age.

'There's more of Gravy than the Grave about you, whatever you are!'

But enough of aw this bletheration! The truth is oot there - No One Here Gets Oot Alive. Not Scrooge or Dickens, Jim Morrison, Hank Williams or Baby Jesus! And certainly not the high heid yin of Wonga.com! He shall, hear me now, die shamed with a obscenely bloated bank balance and a portfolio of overseas investments and tax dodges that will lay bare the wasted minutes and hours of his one time only wonderlife! The very life that he has just given over to the accumulation of meaningless trash and baubles and money that other people will now spend for him on more of the same!!!

God Bless Us, Everyone!!!! 

   

The Cursed Leaf!!

Spring is in the air! This very morrow I sallied forth from the sheltering portals and ramshackle walls of Stoned Holy HQ and partook of the invigorating and diesel particulate enriched airs which encircle its venerable and mossed walls. Verily, did I glory in the life giving energies of the sun as they kissed my troubled brows. Gratefully, I filled the Stoned Holy Lung Bags and felt the sap rising in me old Stoned Holy Bonesticks! Being a capricious soul I was overtaken by the sudden urge, nay, need to rudely grab this One Time Wonderlife by the scruff of its glorious neck and gie it a damn guid shoogle!! Time to shuffle off these Wintertime Suspended Animation Blues I told myself....but quickly I discerned the major stumbling block to my making good on this endeavour ; the Stoned Holy Pockets contained nothing but fluff!! Ah wiz skint!!!

What tragedies our humble little lives contain! What low intensities our life candles burn at before they finally fizzle out! And how doth it profit one to know that we ourselves, humankind, breathed life into that which oppresses us, called forth into being the inexorable force we allow to crush us!! Our Frankenstein Monster is MONEY!

Cash. Moolah. Dosh. Folding...Call it what you may, but there's no denying how it holds sway over the very minutes and hours of our one time shot at this 'Life' mallarkey! Whether it's in the spending of it, the considerably lengthier time frittered away in the getting of it, or indeed, the fetishistic hoarding of it, Money constitutes so much of our allotted time experiencing livingness! What explosions of Spirituality & Creativity will be unleashed when finally we unshackle ourselves from the prisons money has trapped us in. Cities will be Psychedelic, Entrancing Delights! The fields and pastures will be ours to frolic in! Sadly, for now, it limits & Contains us! Restricts & Obstructs us! Degrades & Corrupts us! Diminishes & Belittles us! And, yes, ironically, robs us....For even if you haven't got one lousy, worthless brass fukn ha'penny or one red cent to your name, Money STILL manages to steal from you!

Given that a crime has been committed, the S t o n E D H o L Y b L o G G e r here enquires as to who precisely shall be prosecuted. Is it they who exploit our labours directly and put the excess in their own bank accounts? Is it the thieves and pickpockets of Government who do so much to frame paradigms, create circumstance and polish glass ceilings? Or is it their puppet masters, who pull their strings, their paymasters who bid them dance to their tune but are themselves slaves to their dehumanising obsession of Profit!!

How to free ourselves from Capital's fetters, to heal ourselves of Capital's cancer? Are we, the great mass of humankind, doomed to pitiable lives inside the cocoon money has woven around us? Are we content to subsist as the soulless elites live lives unimaginable? Do we sit cowed and compliant as we wait for the crumbs to fall from the table of our masters? Do we resign ourselves stoically to pain and misery as the poison that is money maims and deforms our societies?  How best to play this Money-game whereby all can benefit and not just the sordid, twisted, aberrant elites who debase & debauch themselves atop their gargantuan piles of ill-gotten, flesh-rotting, soul-corroding lucre ?!?! Answers on a postcard, dear readers......but keep it short, for heaven's sake. Having once attempted tae plough through the stoney soil that fills the pages of 'Das Kapital'   I can tell you that reading about The Cursed Leaf is nearly as nauseating as sniffing aw the shit yiv gottae sniff just tae get hold of some of the stuff in the first place!! The S t O n e d H o L y b L o G g E R , though but a humble songsmith, feels that when hunger strikes it's time to put down the book, however educational and enrichening, grab yir gittybox and start rawkin' pavements instead!

'You may say I'm a dreamer...but I'm not the only one.'  And I content myself with the thought that we Dreamers are the seed that will break & bloom from within this putrid shitpile! And the flowering has began! Spring is with us.....and I detect a little bit of it in every step I take with my brown suede beetlecrushers!!

Kick Over the Statues!

We merry few, we band of brothers, we dejected and financially troubled middle aged has-beens who call the rococo master bedrooms and badly carpeted garrets of Stoned Holy HQ our home, are Iconoclasts by inclination...our avowed Atheism however, has resulted in the secularisation of our destructive urges to include all the trappings of the Great & Good as they look down on us from plinth and pediment.

Oft in the firebrand days of youth the S t o N e D H o L y b L o g G e r was wont to pass the lonely, girlfriendless moments in flights of idle iconoclastic fancy. I pictured myself atop a sturdy charger galloping o'er the Green & Pleasant bridleways of Englandshire with the New Model Army, tearing down the bloated edifice of church and state. Of course, the truth of the matter is those Iconoclasters were nothing but a bunch of Joyless Religious Zealots cum Humourless Bully Boys who wouldn't have let me shovel their horseshit, let alone allow me into their greeting-faced ranks! Goodness knows how much wondrous artistic endeavour in wood & stone & paint has been lost to us due to the thuggish actions of this mob of  ISIS-like Holy Willies.

Madamme Michel - What a Gal!!

The Paris Commune of 1871 would have suited our Democratic & Iconoclastic ambitions more, I feel. Oh, to be ripping up the cobblestones and darting through the backstreets with the glamorous Petroleuses! Oh, to be at Madame Louise Michel's side watching the Tuileries Palace aflame! Oh, to be with Monsieur Courbet as the Vendome Column toppled in a matchless piece of performance art!

One reason Courbet cited for why the Vendome Column had to go was its  being "devoid of all artistic value" and we here sheltered within the Unadorned & Stark Walls of the Stoned Holy Chapel of Love & Brethrenness mightily concur with this sentiment! So much of Art, after all, is completely NAFF!! Doesn't Portraiture boil down to a bunch of dead people trying to convince us what wonderfully important people they were! Surely, you too, like I, have ambled down many a dreary gallery corridor bored out yir mind as the utterly forgettable faces of big wigs of yore in all their dreary finery with their dreary wives and dreary children and their dreary favourite gun-dogs in front of their dreary over-sized homes stared down at you from dreary ornate golden picture frames! Kings, Queens, Lords, Ladies, Dukes, Viscounts, Chiefs and aw manner of puffed up n self-important High Heid Yins - Bollocks tae the lot of them!! Do we really careif the 4th Duke of Och-Aye-The Noo rendered luminescently in oils goes up in flames?! We here congregated in the Stoned Holy Art School of  Dada say 'Strike A Match & Let's Get the Bonfire Started!!

Anywayz, ahm only mentioning aw this Iconoclasm mallarkey because it's Burns Night and we here assembled in the Stoned Holy Supper Club, we ragbag o raggedy-arsed chiels n skellums, we, like tae think Rantin', Roving  Robbie Burns was an Iconoclast too! Indeed, we're pretty sure he'd join us in tearing doon aw the Pomp & Pantomime that will be played out in his name this very night in locations as far afield as New York and Tokyo. We're not really ones for dates and formalities, here in the Supper Club of Love & Social Union, but January 25th is as good a night as any tae doff oor bunnet n raise a toast tae a man who recognised a tinsel show and ribband star for what they were and are and always will be - Bullshit!!

Here's tae yi, Rob! There's no More Heroes Anymore! We're Kicking Over the Statues!

 "The Rank is but the Guineas's Stamp, 

the Man's the Gowd for aw that!"

As a wee footnote to aw this havering, here's a couple o wee linkies. 1st tae a modrin take on Tam o' Shanter that we few here collected in the Stoned Holy School of Rhymes n Lines fully and heartily endorse.....and 2nd tae a stooshie that happened in the Louvre recently in front of Gustave Courbet's 'The Origin of the World' It is in its own inimitable way, a classic piece of Iconoclasm....and we here in the Stoned Holy Art School of Drawings n Paintings n Sculptings salute this young lady.....and wish we coulda been there!! 

Until next time, Pop-Pickers, Ahm Ooty Here!