Missing in Action - A.W.O.L - Vamoosed!

Another protracted absence from these virtual walls! And what excuses are to be offered this time for the s T o n E D h o L y B L o G G e R  posting AWOL? What are to be the mitigating circumstances that shall absolve this latest dereliction of my blogging duty?

Gouranga, my arse!

I could have, like Muddy Waters before me, found religion : only to lose it again after these few short months of handclaps and fingerbells as I ambled, sandal-shod, with my happy cohort of robe wearing fellow-believers, along a host of miserable and financially exhausted British High Streets. Could anything else, I ask you, scotch the fires of religious devotion and dampen the spirits of proselytising zeal more quickly than trudging through the rain soaked, pedestrianised main drags of 'Broken Britain' - filled, as they are, with fat people in sportswear eating hamburgers and tangerine coloured young ladies clutching Primark bags! Indeed, what other salutary lesson could convince you that it was, indeed, exactly how the Black Atheists have been saying all along - a Vast Godless Universe! Oh, such such humdrum emptiness! Or, perhaps, it occurs to me, that if a Supreme Creator was to be conceded, he could in no way be counted as benevolent! It could be contested that the Supreme Transmuter of Air into Dust & Fire into Water had simply forgotten all about us. Perhaps we were one of his early works, created in his world forming apprenticeship, wholly lacking the finesse and elegance of later worlds he called forth from the cosmic maelstrom! Sadly, it's not ours to know...but meanwhile the smell of chicken goujons and the promise of a few moments more of diversion tempts many a wearisome shopper to dig into their pockets and put such considerations to the back of their spongy uninformed minds!

Hup 2-3-4...you 'orrible bunch of poofters!

Perhaps it is I could have enlisted. Popped the flamboyant Stoned Holy Autograph (which, if there was but a scrap of justice in this Pop Slop World, I should have been scrawling on the eagerly presented, heaving bosoms of Divine Pop Poppettes) on the dotted line and took the King's Shilling!  As you mugs have laboured long these past months at your soul sapping job or frittered away precious hours buffing the bonnets and endlessly valeting the interiors of your little metal boxes on rubber wheels, I have been forging bonds, real bonds, manly bonds, with my tattooed bunch of Boneheads, Bruisers, Blockheads & Bampots!!  We have yomped together. Crawled through shit together. We have pulled latrine duty together. We have stuck out our chests and pretended we were hard men. We have lied about the birds we have been with. To plug the want of a meaningful or rewarding relationship in our lives, we have substituted the emotionally stunted world of the playground bully and banter, liberally laced with epithets belittling men & denigrating women! We have marched as one up then down then round the parade square as the R.S.M called us a bunch of Cock-Guzzling Sissies & Mummy's Boys! We have retreated to the barracks to polish things that were already shining brightly. And later we have consumed shit lager till we puked and then drank some more! If you have dreamed recently of breaking free of computer porn, endless hours of 'Call of Duty' and eating cold pizza for breakfast whilst watching 'Homes Under the Hammer', and this litany of stunted macho pretence appeals, then the s t O n E D H o L y b L O g g E R says get your wobbling bubble butt out of that reclining armchair and haul it down to the nearest recruiting office! But look not for the S T O n E d H O L y b L O G G e R , for, verily, he shall not be there. Not today. Not Never!
For the  S T o N e D h o l Y B l o g G E r is still a snarling Punk Rock Dog who remembers well the febrile energy of Crass at the Sheffield Leadmill shouting 'Fight War, Not Wars' and The Plastic Ono Band saying 'I Don't Wanna Be A Soldier, Mama. I Don't Wanna Die'. So enjoy yir 'Hup-2-3-4' but count me out!

So, perchance it is that I have joined the Freemasons and eschewed social interactions with any but my apron wearing brethren. Improbable, yes, yet l have stood like a total fukn eejit with my left nipple exposed and one trouser leg rolled up listening to pseudo-religious gibberish and reciting mumbo-jumbo just so l can enjoy a subsidised bar bill and intimate conversations with my bank manager. To be fair, l have now skirted the periphery of several conversations involving members of the Royal Family and some senior coppers! I now know who allowed the cigar puffing, shell-suited Golem that was Jimmy fukn Saville to podger his way through several hospital wards and spend the occasional hour or two entertaining himself in the morgue! And, oh yes, I also now know the whereabouts of Geoffrey Dickens' Paedophile Dossier that was, oops, mislaid by top Thatcherite bumsniffer Leon Britten! On the other hand, those tete-a-tetes with my bank manager mentioned earlier are as dull as dirty dish water...and I don't really care for golf! And so, though the appeal of wearing a sash, an apron and white gloves whilst you fuck goats is obvious, I have not passed through the delphic portals of the Lodge. Nor have I stuck my todger in a dead pig's mouth. But, hey....never say never!

such a colourful bunch of characters!

No, friends, the real reason l have been remiss in posting on these Virtual Walls is 'ah couldnae really be fussed.' I have been compelled to issue forth from the House of Worship that is StonedHolyHQ to earn a crust by means of brain & brawn and returned to drink porter and watch Scandi-Noir. The scant days have fallen like grains of granulated sugar through the pudgy fingers of an overweight diabetic. Or, if you prefer, like time-worn parchment in the witless and brutish hands of a future race of proto-simians which shall rise from the shitpile of civilisation as we know it, once we've allowed the A-Grade morons who control us to finally flush us all down the stinking toiletbowl of history!

Hell, I know it's only Rawk n Roll

...but I like it! 

See yuz soon, you miserable lot! 

This Train Aint Bound For Glory!

Seeing as ahv no pounded the keyboard for some time - not as a consequence of me feelin' like a Broke Down Engine, nor me contemplating the utter pointlessness o ma Tinternet scrivenings, y'understand -  I thought I'd rectify matters for the want of something more fulfilling to do with these very beat moments I find myself in. How better to fill some of my wasted n defeated minutes than with the temporary distraction that tapping oot this bloviating bluster can afford a poor, put-upon Pop Slopper! So, my virtual readers, on with the blow!

'This Train Aint Bound For Glory!

Seeing as Saint Theresa of Mayhem, current hollow mouthpiece of the venal & warped preservers of all that is outdated, joyless & dull-as-dishwater, (known to you and I as the Conservative & Unionist Party of Great Britain) has called a snap election for June and it's Easter time anyways, why not write about Resurrections methought.....political or otherwise!

This Train Ain't Bound For Glory!

As an avowed scoffer & skeptic the S t O N e d H O L y B L O g G e r couldn't be seen to have faith in much but, when it comes to the rolling away of stones and unpowered flight up into the heavens, I do have faith in the scientific approach to such matters ; consequently yi can sum up my thoughts on the possibility of an Essene mystic up n aboot and showing off the holes in his wrists n feet tae doubters just days after everybody seen him die a horrible death at the hands of the Roman Army of Occupation by use of the word 'Bollocks'. And though talk of metaphors or symbols is perfectly admissible let's agree tae leave the Theosophy for another time and another dander doon Desolation Row.

This Train Ain't Bound For Glory!

So then, closer to home, what of the mooted resurrection of the United Kingdom? Free of the banana-straightening clutches of Johnny Foreigner at last. The People have spoken, seemingly. Unfortunately what they have said turns out to be wilfully ignorant, misinformed, xenophobic, petty-minded shit! But Westminster loves a pantomime so on with the circus and let's hear all the phoney talk of how fabulous it's gonna be now 'we've got our country back'! Let's, for the want of a real democracy participated in by an informed and engaged populace, pretend Britain will be Great again.

This Train Ain't Bound For Glory!

 The s T O n e d h O L y B L o G g e R says 'No chance!' Not least because of the notion that we can, as one, return to some fanciful time when British industry fashioned everything the world wanted and British commerce ruled the waves is risible horseshit! Would that be the time, one wonders, when infant mortality rates were the highest they've ever been and we sent small boys up chimneys to clean them? Would that be the time when urban squalor was a breeding ground for diseases like cholera and smallpox? Would that be the time when British bayonets let British business grow fat & wealthy on stolen resources? Let's get this straight people, Britain has never been 'great'! Not even when the Arch Imperialist and hideously self-entitled, Churchill was giving speeches about fighting them on the beaches!

This Train Ain't Bound For Glory!

So even as new life and promise is emerging from the greening earth all around us, the Disunited Kingdom is busy sticking its head back into the shitpile of ignorance and dreaming of a golden age that never was. A 'resurrection'? Jesus returning to Albion and blessing this green & pleasant land is more likely! Though May and her hit squad of millionaires are undoubtedly riding the Gravy Train, the chances of either you or I or any Little Englander driving around in his white van, waving his union jack and tugging on the leash of his pitbull terrier called 'Damage' hoppin' aboard and getting a seat in the dining car are negligible...if not downright impossible! For this Train ain't Bound for Glory people - the Empire is over! This Train ain't Bound for Glory, people - British exceptionalism is a self-harming fantasy!  The Little England Express will be calling in at Austerity,  
Low Wages, No Rights, No Housing, Rachman Rents, Zero Hour Contracts, Racism, Xenophobia, Terrorism and Perpetual Rule by Tory Oligarchs sworn to nothing but filling their own pockets....where this service will terminate! Please collect your belongings before alighting from this train and, please, mind the pay gap!

Please Mind the Gap!

 

Birlin' In The Boneyard!

Well, Readers, it's January 25th n yi ken whit that means? It means Mr. Robert Burns, late of Alloway, Ayrshire, is, right noo, furiously birlin' in his grave!! It's noo that his eternal rest is disturbed year after year as 10 million haggises are piped in to be cut up wi 'ready slight' and the formulaic Burns' supper is enacted in every corner o the globe.

"warm, reekin, rich!"

He would've hated it, I'm sure! Just think of aw them folks that he would gladly have seen on the end o a bayonet toastin' his guid name and his work! Arch-Tories, Monarchists, Ministers o Kirk n State and No-Voting Bastards aw lining up tae sing his praises noo that he's deid! The mouth that would've damned them aw tae hell is stopped up wi clay! Words that coulda descried and mocked, mute!

Burns in the Boneyard is a lot safer and sanitised than the flesh & blood swagger o the real thing. Gone are the resentments and indignation that he would've hurled to aw the Holy Willies and their ilk whae made him sit on the penitent's stool. Gone the profane banter o the drinking dens as the yill took hold. Gone the bawdy bonhomie and licentious celebration of the Crochallan Fencibles. Gone the Republican sentiments and egalitarian outbursts o the howff.

And if Burns thought the 28 bankrupt posh-boys whae signed Scotland away  tae English gowd were a 'parcel o rogues', what would he have made of and what fury would he have reserved for those who voted 'No' to Scottish Independence for worries about money! It's just as well the poor bastard's deid, my friends, 'cause the shock of September 19th 2014 would've finished him off, for sure!!

Noo he's dust, the Establishment toadies who would've hated him with a vengeance if he were still around, can toast his memory and stick him on tins o shortie! Maybeez that's the fate o aw rebels ; absorbed, claimed, made safe and explained.
The S T O n e d H O L y b L O G g e r has every confidence in his assertion that Burns would've loathed it all.

Or mebbe no. Burns, after all, never got the chance o growing old n comfortable, pegging oot young, as he did. He just missed oot on that high ranking position wi the Excise doon Leith that would've seen him back in Auld Reekie's boozers n parlours conversing wi the best o Edinburgh's 'enlightenment' and flirtin' wi both the mistress o the hoose and the scullery maid! It could've aw been so different if he'd made it back tae Edinburgh wi' siller jinglin' in his pockets! If only those damned debtors had held off for a year or two more....maybeez then, the s T O n e d h O L y B L O g g e R wouldn't be here in the garret o Stoned Holy HQ hammerin' oot this crap. What would Burns' reputation be if, instead o fizzling oot in Dumfries at the age o 37, he'd lived tae 87, old n well off in his big, fancy hoose in Edinburgh's New Town.

Aye, but these are but idle flights o fancy for Burns didnae make it ; And so' is forever fixed the rebel outsider. As a consequence of this he belongs tae the rebels & outsiders ; the dissidents & rabble-rousers; the firebrands & malcontents.

So, gentle readers, bollocks tae Burns Night and January 25th.....but if yi find yirsel on either bank o the sweet Afton as it flows gently on its way tae the Solway Firth, much as it did twa hunnert year ago when the glowin' een o Robbie the Ranter gazed doon upon its glassy waters, raise a glass or doff yir bunnet tae Scotland's ploughman poet and Auld Lang Syne....a more fitting tribute, ahm sure, and one he would've appreciated.


Ladies n Gentleman, Louns n Quines, please be upstanding... I give you Mister Robert Burns, late of Alloway, Ayrshire!

Robin Wiz A Rovin Boy

On New Year's Resolutions!

And so, with a million fireworks bombing their shimmering brilliance out upon a dark, winter's sky, we slid through the portals of 2017. And with half of January already drained away, the sands of time are slip-slip-slipping away through our clutching fingers! And our life energies alongside them!

But we shall not trouble deaf heaven with our bootless cries here. For January is a month for Resolution. No doubt many have already wavered or cracked regarding what they promised themselves on January 1st but, even as I write, there is, no doubt, some smug bastard foregoing the, admittedly ephemeral, pleasures afforded by a pistachio macaroon or coffee mousse encased in a velvety chocolate shell. Some other steely-hearted individual is, right now, making the most of his new gym membership and sweating profusely on some apparatus akin to a medieval instrument of torture. I will be fitter. I will be slimmer. I shall succeed - These are the mantras oft repeated as we stare at ourselves in January's unforgiving mirror. The S T o n E d H o L Y B L o G G e r , however, when countenancing his blasted features, says bollocks to faux asceticism, bollocks to ersatz sackcloth & ashes and bollocks too to counterfeit self denial and sham stoicism!

Ours is an age of bogus Puritanism as product. Buy the self help manual, buy the work-out DVD, buy into the latest fad dieting regimen. Fear envelops our lives. If it's not fear of obesity or ill health then it's fear of losing our jobs, our homes, our sanity that eats up the precious seconds of living. Is this why we meekly accept the austerity programme administered to us by our great elected leaders? So now, even as our waistlines expand due to our addiction to junk food, even as we're sent the credit cards enabling us to consume, we are told to tighten our belts!

It is against this backdrop we can discern one of the major problems facing humanity today - Joylessness! Why are there so many joyless turds ; mostly, it must be noted, skulking along the corridors of power. Those people we let away with 'running' the whole sorry charade are, indeed, a weird little coterie of dreary, joyless cunts, devoid of imagination....and don't they take it all so seriously.

Isn't that the reason we find ourselves in the 21st Century but still, weighing us down and holding us back are the stunted scrag ends and ossified remains, the accumulated nefarious junk of ages past with all the ridiculous prejudices, snobberies and hierarchies, all the outdated injustices and all the obsolete delineations of class & caste like links in a heavy chain being dragged behind us as we advance at a snail's pace into the future, consigning yet more generations to lives of unending toil, misery and want!....and Joylessness!

Why after 10,000 years of something laughingly called civilisation isn't there free food in the streets? Why aren't there giant psychedelic lollipops in all our public parks and green spaces? Why aren't their trees and shrubs and flowers of every description all around us, enthralling & entrancing us, binding us to Nature within our own urban environments? Why aren't our cities home to, not only us, but a myriad of our fellow creatures? Why isn't there free art on every wall in every city? Why are there, STILL, hungry, homeless, illiterate people in this world??? Do you seriously think that the world as is is the best we can do?!?!

Who is responsible? I charge the pragmatists and their dreary concerns! I indict the serious-minded who ponder and pontificate! I accuse the humourless who reduce all to monetary value! I impeach the broken & jaded whose heart isn't in it! I revile the pusillanimous drones sweating on their treadmills and little wheels! I curse the cowardly and resigned ones for their practicality!

But surely, one could counter, only chaos could result if the world was left in the hands of idlers and dreamers such as the S t O n E d h O L y B L O g g e R ? But look you now upon this globe of ours and you must see the irony - Chaos Reins Regardless!!

So, no to those who deny pleasure. No to the prudent and their judicious orthodoxies ; No to the conservative fussbudgets; No to the bourgeois fuddy-duddies; No to the straight-laced and stolid stuffed shirts.....and no, no, no, a thousand times NO, to New Year's Resolutions!!

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!

Something Wicked This Way Comes! It's Chrimbo!

Something wicked this way comes! The Jolly Fat Man cometh! Dark foreboding popped round last night and chapped my door. Dread waved to me in the street. The sound of jingling grows louder!Time is merciless - Christmas is upon us!

Now, those of you out there who regularly perambulate the labyrinthine backstreets, skulk furtively along the  twisted alleyways or sift the brimming gutters of the Tinternet-Super-Highway may recognise that it's usually round about now that the S t O N e  d H o L y b L o g g E R posts a wearisome and jaded paragraph or two berating the tawdry assault on the senses, the gaudy spendathon  that Chrimbo has mutated into in the hands of our corporate masters! This year will be no different!

For there have been no Damascene moments of Revelation since last the malevolent Christmas pixies were badgering me to join in the fun! That skinny little runt, our Stoned Holy Bro' of Yore, Hank Williams, may have Seen the Light but I sure as hell ain't! Mr. Williams, it must be pointed out, was an Alabama boy steeped in Pentecostalism and soaked in the kinda spirit available in bottles!

Meanwhile, there have been no late night visitations to the Stoned Holy Bed Chamber by spirits, no excursions to Chrimbos past, present or future. That Scrooge geezer may have seen the error of his ways but the S t O N E D h O L y B L o g g e R is the same crabbit, auld misery guts as ever he was! I will most definitely not be sending any rosy cheeked little scamp on an errand to buy the biggest turkey in the shop!

Roy Wood may well have wished that 'It Could Be Christmas Every Day' but if that were to actually happen the suicide rate would rocket, I wager! Droves of exhausted consumers and spiritually corrupted shoppers would be throwing themselves merrily from the upper tiers of the shopping malls! But how infantile a thing to wish for in the first place. If it was Chrimbo every day then it wouldn't be 'special', would it?  It would merely be yet another dull, lifeless inch on the empty road to nowhere we are all treading! Anyway, it has to pointed out that Mr. Wood liked a bottle of vodka for breakfast everyday and had a large silver star painted on his forehead, so his views on anything must surely be suspect!

But the Chrimbo juggernaut rumbles on. Crushing good taste beneath its merciless wheels. Flattening the dawdling hedgehogs of reserve and modesty as they attempt to cross the Chrimbo highway! On and on it thunders with it's stinking exhaust pipe spewing forth a noxious mix of choking gases which burn the lungs, leave a bitter taste in the mouth and empty your bank account! In its wake it leaves an alcohol drenched trail of bitterness and loneliness that leads all the way to the landfill. And it's the landfill site where all the collected crackpot wackiness and assorted ridiculous religious guff that form the Chrimbo ether in the minds of fools who are easily parted from their paltry wages manifest themselves and are formed into actual stuff. And what stuff!!  A towering, festering mountain of the ersatz and kitsch, the shoddy and fake, unasked for and unrequired! What better monument to Chrimbo's black, cynical heart than a monumental midden of worthless plastic shit....and no matter how much you polish shit, it never looks clean!!

B'jaysus, I need to cheer up! Time to self-medicate, I feel. Pass the Egg-Nog, Henry!! See youz all when it's over....meanwhile there will no quarter given, no clemency offered! It's everyone for themselves! It's not often the S t O n e d H O L y b L o G G e r  gets to compare himself with Beyoncé but we are both 'Survivors'!!