Gender: Male
Status: Single
City: London
State: London and South East
Country: UK
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Sunday, December 06, 2009
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Current mood:  relieved
Category: Writing and Poetry
CREATIVELY POISONED BY PHARMACEUTICALS?
After two years' of misery and creative sterility for me, one of the top psychiatrists in the UK has ceased to prescribe a form of chemical filth called Imipramine, an antidepressant. I suggested fairly timidly at the time that something was wrong, only for it to be implied that I was talking nonsense. But now the drug has been purged from my system, it seems beyond question that it was to blame. I've even written a fresh poem - nothing special or new, but scratched out without fear or pain and maybe my first step back on the long road. It describes my existence as a recluse now:
CREDIT RATING
The void beneath those sheets has been my great vaultA cave, a subterranean system Where light, beyond a distant wisp Glimpsed through a chink of cathedral elevation Rarely penetrates. Here the shivers of an upper world are, mercifully, absent. Here, only, the damp must of Earth, The occasional strange music of unearthly places; The glamorous foreboding of being where one was never meant to be. And here is all that a long-locked room holds for a child: Lost dolls, their shapes intimated in dust: Carpets and drapes, their purpose lost in blotted moss As darkness, like a stain, reclaims its own And old lumber, its moment for joy now forgotten, Is digested by the lumber of the twilight. Above me, maybe, the songbirds and squirrels of the trees Keep their incantations and lucky charms (God spare them motivational speakers) And totems, too – as bower birds might, Or as industrious ants build catacombs – Anything to staunch the fatuous passage of days. And above them in its turn, as the firmament rises, The custesy-puffy clouds of half-filled hope. You’ll say men conquer mountains Doubtless, as two flies might conquer a window. Only I know the score. Let me keep to what I know. Let me be unchallenged by laughter, by the risk of seeing love crushed. Keep me clear of this tender-febrile garden of earthly delights - Attuned, rather, to the Great Prosaic of eternity.
Come to think, my life was always an opera behind soundproof doors. A mad scene was bound to be on the cards one day.
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Monday, November 16, 2009
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Current mood:  obsequious
Category: Art and Photography
Are you an artistic failure?
Let me confide a secret.
I know. You see, I'm an artistic failure as well. And so is pretty well everybody else on My Space. What's that? You get people from all over the world seeking you out here and proclaiming the "haunting beauty" of your work? It happened to me too. But is that going to win you praise from London's Lord High Blatherer of the Received Opinion? Will it allow you to expect £7,000 for a smallish painting and get away with it? Will it afford you a gallery-paid airfare to an Art Show or Festival on the other side of an ocean?
No. So what return have you gained for your love and passion and your years spent building a first-rate technique, tuning your indiviual voice or an individual phenomenological horizon and all that other aesthetic claptrap a la William James? Words mean nothing. But now, let me unveil this - from an artist and outsider poet; a true Renaissance man by the enchanting soubriquet of Billy Childish:
Now let's scrutinise one of mine on a similar subject:
The problem with me should be clear. A fatuous, out-dated allegiance to some non-existent legacy of visionary symbolism, itself the hallmark of self-affected and self-pitying narcissism. The burden of a mountain of irrelevant baggage concerning "craftsmanship" or "form". Sentimental curlicues and nostalgic arabesques - no more to me than that.
Consider Billy Childish and Neal Jones. Each knows exactly what he is doing and whom he is doing it for. Everything is calculated and yet each brushstroke blasts a galvanic shockwave straight from the heart and the belly. If not, moreover, the gut. The art that conceals art. The amusing yet beguiling facade of the Faux Naif. A poseur in none but the noblest sense.
In case you can't read Mr Harold Rosenbloom's perfumed obsequies on the clipping at the top, let me repeat his words here:
“What unifies the different practices of these two painters, is a recurrent theme of engagement with the self and our world through the act of painting; this in turn is played out through various degrees of aesthetic and meritocratic discomfort, acute artistic and cultural ambition, and spiritual elevation. Their quest suggests that it is possible for artists of this generation (in Post-Crisis Culture?) to address themes of universal wellbeing through elemental means without betraying their contemporary or radical credentials.”
So now you know why Neal Jones is winner of the John Moores' Painting Prize. Look and learn.
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Monday, November 09, 2009
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Current mood:  savage
Category: Life
Normality is a Cult to which Some of Us
Choose not to Subscribe
Dearly Beloved
Above (should you not be able to read the wee words) is new research from the Semelweiss University in Hungary, showing clearly a link between a variant of the Neuregulin 1 gene and psychosis, chronic depression and exceptional creative ability in both the arts and - some might claim - the sciences. So why should these outsiders (upon whom our culture depends, as does the fact that we and not the Nazis won the Second World War) be treated by Normal people as freaks and pariahs? To quote the Sunday Express: "Armed and dangerous: public at risk as mental patients escape the care net".
(Bless! But the fact is that Mental Health Service users are far more likely to be attacked by you good compassionate Normals.)
All this gives me a chance to publish a merry little piece I've been working on. I trust everybody is sitting comfortably, for this is going to be a long night:
.................................................................................... YOU might be living NEXT DOOR to a bleedin’ Mentalist Well: come to think of it,
who were the neighbours of: Mozart, Charles Dickens, Tchaikovsky, Robert Schumann, Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, Michael Faraday, Puccini, Vincent Van Gogh, Goya, Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Sibelius, Mussorgsky, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Hugo Wolf, Shostakovich, John Clare, Michelangelo, Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig van Beethoven, Albert Einstein, Edward Elgar, Dorothy Parker, Scriabin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Franz Kafka, Georg Frideric Handel, Hector Berlioz, William Burroughs, Donizetti, William Styron, Soren Kiekegaard, Hildegard of Bingen, Edward Lear, Felix Mendelssohn, Philip Larkin, Groucho Marx, Dylan Thomas, Arturo Michelangeli, William Blake, John Ogden, John Keats, Carmen Miranda, Johannes Brahms, Richard Dadd, Paul Durcan, Salieri, Sigmund Freud, Vivien Leigh, Spike Milligan, Francis Ford Coppola, Francesco Scavullo, Buzz Aldrin, Otto Klemperer, Jaco Pastorius, Theodore Roosevelt, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Louis Althusser, Honore de Balzac, Johann Goethe, Graham Greene, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Roethke, August Strindberg, Mark Twain, Charles Baudelaire, Ludwig Boltzmann, Gordon Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Stephen Foster, Hermann Hesse, Faulkner, Ivor Gurney, Tim Burton, Nikolai Gogol, Erik Satie, Florence Nightingale, Emil Post, Stevie Smith, Janet Frame, Kurt Vonnegut, Friedrich Nietzsche, Johannes Brahms, Mark Rothko, Oppenheimer… Somehow, we seem to forget their names… Extract from An Angel At My Table by Janet Frame
…Faced with the family anguish, I made my usual escape, the route now perfected, and once again I was in Seacliff Hospital. I knew as soon as I arrived there that the days of practising that form of escape were over. I would go away somewhere, live on my own, earn enough money to live on, write my books: it was no use: I now had what was known as a ‘history’, and ways of dealing with those with a history were stereotyped, without investigation. Very quickly, in my panic, I was removed to the back ward, the Brick Building, where I became one of the forgotten people. When Mother recovered her health, she and Bruddie and Dad would visit me for Christmas and my birthday and on one or two other occasions during the year. It was recognised that I was now in hospital for life. What I have described in Istina Mavet is my sense of hopelessness as the months passed, my fear of having to endure that constant state of physical capture where I was indeed at the mercy of those who made judgments and decisions without even talking at length to me or trying to know me or even submitting me to the standard tests which are available to psychiatrists. The state could be defined as forced submission to custodial capture. In the back ward I became part of a memorable family that I have described individually in Faces in the Water. It was their sadness and courage and my desire to speak for them that enabled me to survive, helped by the insight of such fine junior and staff nurses as Cassidy, Doherty (both Maori women), Taffy, the Welsh nurse now living in Cardiff, Noreen Ramsay (who gave me extra food when I was hungry) and others. The attitude of those in charge who unfortunately wrote the reports and influenced the treatment was that of reprimand and punishment, with certain forms of medical treatment being threatened as punishment for failure to co-operate where not co-operate might mean a refusal to obey an order, say, to go to the doorless lavatories with six others and urinate in public while suffering verbal abuse by the nurse for being unwilling. ‘Too fussy are we? Well, Miss Educated, you’ll learn a thing or two here.’ Dear Educated, Miss Educated: sadly, the fact of my having been to high school, training college and university struck a vein of vindictiveness among some of the staff. It was now my writing that at last came to my rescue. It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life. My mother had been persuaded to sign permission for me to undergo a leucotomy; I know that she would not have done so had not the experts wielded heavily weighted arguments – the experts, who over the years as my history was accumulating, had not spoken to me at one time for longer than ten or fifteen minutes, and in total time over eight years, for about eighty minutes; who had administered no tests, not even the physical tests of E.E.G. or X-rays (apart from the chest X-ray whenever there was a new case of tuberculosis, a disease prevalent in the mental hospitals then); the experts whose judgment was based on daily reports by overworked irritable nursing sisters. I listened, trying to avoid the swamping wave of horror, when Dr Burt, a likeable overworked young doctor who had scarcely spoken to me except to say ‘Good morning, how are you’ and not wait for a reply as he was whisked through the ward, found time to explain that I would be having a leucotomy operation, that it would be good for me, that, following it, I would be out of hospital in no time. I listened also with a feeling that my erasure was being completed when the ward sister, suddenly interested that something was about to be done with and to me, painted her picture of how I would be when it was all over. ‘We had one patient who was here for years until she had a leucotomy. And now she’s selling hats in a hat shop. I saw her just the other day, selling hats, as normal as anyone. Wouldn’t you like to be normal?’ Everyone felt that it was better for me to be normal and not have fancy intellectual notions about being a writer, that it was better for me to be out of hospital, working at an ordinary occupation, mixing with others . . . The scene was carefully set. A young woman of my age who had become a friend but who had remained in the admission ward, the ‘good’ ward, was also spoken of as about to have a leucotomy. ‘Nola’s having one,’ they told me. Nola’s having her hair straightened, Nola’s having a party dress, Nola’s having a party – why not you too? Nola suffered from asthma and the complication of being in a family of brilliant beautiful people. I can make no judgment on her case except to say that in a period before the use of drugs, leucotomy was becoming a convenience treatment. I repeat that my writing saved me. I had seen in the ward office the list of those down for a leucotomy, with my name on the list, and other names being crossed off as the operation was performed. My turn must have been very close when one evening the superintendent of the hospital, Dr Blake Palmer, made an unusual visit to the ward. He spoke to me – to the amazement of everyone. As it was my first chance to discuss with anyone, apart from those who had persuaded me, the prospect of my operation, I said urgently, ‘Dr Blake Palmer, what do you think?’ He pointed to the newspaper in his hand. ‘About the prize?’ I was bewildered. What prize? ‘No,’ I said, ‘about the leucotomy.’ He looked stern, ‘I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed.’ He unfolded his newspaper. ‘Have you seen the Stop Press in tonight’s Star?’ A ridiculous question to ask in a back ward where there was no reading matter; surely he knew? ‘You’ve won the Hubert Church Award for the best prose. Your book, The Lagoon.’ I knew nothing about the Hubert Church Award. Winning it was obviously something to be pleased about. I smiled. ‘Have I?’ ‘Yes. And we’re moving you out of this ward. And no leucotomy.’ The winning of the prize and the attention of a new doctor from Scotland who accepted me as I appeared to him and not as he learned about me from my ‘history’ or reports of me, and the move by Dr Blake Palmer to have me spend less time in the hospital ward by using me as tea lady in the front office and allowing me to have occupational therapy, where I learned to make baskets, to fill toothpaste tubes with toothpaste, and, from a book written in French, to weave French lace, and to weave on large and small looms, all enabled me to be prepared for discharge from hospital. Instead of being treated by leucotomy, I was treated as a person of some worth, a human being, in spite of the misgivings and unwillingness of some members of the staff, who, like certain relatives when a child is given attention, warn the mother that the child is being spoiled, spoke pessimistically and perhaps enviously of my being made a fuss of’. ‘It will spoil her. Dr Blake Palmer will drop her and she’ll be back in the Brick Building in no time.’ My friend Nola, who unfortunately had not won a prize, whose name did not appear in the newspaper, had her leucotomy and was returned to the hospital, where, among the group known as ‘the leucotomies’, some attempt was made to continue, with personal attention, the process of ‘being made normal, or at least being changed’. The ‘leucotomies’ were talked to, taken for walks, prettied with make-up and floral scarves covering their shaven heads. They were silent, docile; their eyes were large and dark and their faces pale, with damp skin. They were being retrained, to fit in to the everyday world, always described as ‘outside’; ‘the world outside’. In the whirlwind of work and the shortage of staff and the too-slow process of retraining, the leucotomies one by one became the casualties of withdrawn attention and interest; the false spring turned once again to winter. When I was eventually discharged from hospital, Nola remained, and although she did spend time out of hospital, she was often readmitted; over the years I kept in touch with her, and it was like living in a fairytale where conscience, and what might have been, and what was, not only speak but spring to life and become a living companion, a reminder. Nola died a few years ago in her sleep. The legacy of her dehumanising change remains no doubt with all those who knew her; I have it with me always. * * * What do I mean by “Mentalist”? A ‘mentalist’, strictly used, is a mind-reader and mnemonist. But here (in the best colloquial tradition) I use the term to cover anyone who would now be stigmatized as chronically depressive (Keats, J Robert Oppenheimer, Dorothy Parker, Styron, Larkin, Paul Durcan, Stevie Smith), bipolar (Schumann, Churchill, Virginia Woolf, Puccini, Rothko, Elgar, Plath, Berlioz, Brahms, Hemingway, Lincoln), schizoid or schizophrenic (Gogol, Frame, Richard Dadd), conspicuously neurotic (Tchaikovsky, Poe, Kiekegaard, Shostakovich), alcoholic through creative anxiety (Sibelius), autistic (Newton, Satie) or displaying symptoms consistent with Asperger’s syndrome (Einstein, Wittgenstein). Note: if we are to exclude those whose malaise was exacerbated by syphilis, we have to say Goodbye to Hugo Wolf and Donizetti. Lead poisoning may also have been a factor in the manic depression of Michelangelo. I thank you. Stephen Jackson 
Contemplating the bellowing, behemothic self-pity of feebler souls brings me to Channel Four's seasonal mascot: a pompous, self-promoting, waddling, ageing bore called Darcus Howe. He is shortly due to appear on our screens again to bewail what an odious and contemptible country Britain is.
Does he have C4 shares? A fifty-one percent interest? Surely this can't be blackmail?
Listen, you fat old Walrus. Compared to the ignorance and bigotry that Mental Health Users face everyday (or would do, if they did not keep their secret and their past to themselves): you don't know you're born, and you never frankly did.
Alas. Service users, although consisting surprisingly often of more profound and eloquent people than you could hope to be, tend to lack your nose for self-aggrandisement.
More's the pity.
............................................................................My books, poetry, journalism, digital art, photography,
videos and more besides.
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Sunday, November 08, 2009
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Current mood:  validated
CATASTROPHES OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS:
Serves the buggers right.
(Oh, hang on! It's our money!)
Current mood: validated
The Large Hadron Collider’s woes have taken a faintly comic turn after the huge particle accelerator got broken by a piece of bread dropped by a passing bird.
 The Large Hadron Collider (left) and its arch-nemesis (right) Photo: AFP/GETTY/JOHN TAYLOR
The 27-kilometer (16.8 mile) LHC suffered serious overheating in several sections after the small piece of baguette landed in a piece of equipment on the surface above the accelerator ring.
Dr Mike Lamont, the LHC’s Machine Coordinator, said that a “a bit of baguette”, believed to have been dropped by a bird, caused the superconducting magnets to heat up from 1.9 Kelvin (-271.1C) to around 8 Kelvin (-265C), near the mark where they stop superconducting...
A failure like this, known as a “quench”, can be expected at around 9.6 Kelvin, CERN engineer Dr Tadeusz Kurtyka told The Register.
In theory, had the LHC been fully operational, this could cause a catastrophic breakdown like that which occurred shortly after it was first switched on last year. However, the machine has several fail-safes which would have shut it down before the temperature rose too high.
This would have forced it out of action for a few days, but nothing like the year-long breakdown last year’s quench caused.
As it is, the LHC was only undergoing test firing. Full particle-smashing duties are scheduled to restart this month.
When fully powered up, the LHC’s two beams of protons and lead ions hurtling around the huge circle at a fraction of a percent below light speed each contain the energy of a Eurostar train travelling at full speed, according to the Cern site.
It was this vast energy getting out of control that smashed the machine last time, causing a huge spillage of liquid helium and throwing two 10-ton magnets off their mountings.
The succession of technical problems the LHC has suffered has led some physicists, apparently in all seriousness, to claim that it is being sabotaged by time-travelling particles from its own future.
http:../../..www...telegraph...co...uk/..science/..large-..hadron-..collider/..6514155/..Large-..Hadron-..Collider-..broken-..by-..bread-..dropped-..by-..passing-..bird.html
Steve the Peeve doth Respond
[At this point the congregation may wish to rise)
Does anybody remember the hilarity that the World's Press had at the expense of the Hubble Space Telescope, when one of its original mirrors proved to have the wrong curvature by a couple of hundredths of a millimetre? "Hubble Trouble" and all that? And yet that splendid instrument has transformed, singlehanded, our conception of the unverse: its beginning through to its end.
If memory serves me right, the money that CERN's (i.e. Europe's) Large Hadron Collider cost dwarves the price of Hubble. Before they flipped the first switch there was a miniscule yet quantifiable risk that it might consume the solar sysytem in mankind's first artificial black hole. Such is the arrogance of theoretical physicists they couldn't give a toss: no one else was consulted but nobody was going to stop them playing with their latest Dinky toy.
Well, Dearly Beloved: in the event the machine died on us because of some soldering which would have shamed a fourteen-year old hobbyist. Next thing, it failed on all counts because "particles were travelling back in time to thwart its operation". (Question for the physicist dum-dums: how come this didn't happen with the original Big Bang?) Now an astute pigeon shows its appreciation in the most appropriate fashion. (Just a pity it wasn't something more visceral. They say guano brings you luck, and CERN needs all the luck in the world.)
The fact is that even since the schism between Einstein and Quantum Mechanics, theoretical physics has been a bloated and vainglorious pseudoscience on a par with Creationism, Freud and sociology: with as little evidence to support it. May we ask, please, for any evidence to commend String Theory? Next to nothing; but it ties up ontological loose ends that cannot possibly fit together. And this is the way that any pseudoscience works, from astrology to theosophy. Your calculations suggest that the universe must have a greater mass than observations imply? Dream up Dark Matter - which is unobservable and impossible to get a grip on. The universe is flying apart, faster than ever, when your theories suggest it should be decelerating or contracting? Create Dark Energy, for which, well ...ditto.
I think we can see where things are heading.
I suggest that the physicist who clamoured for this piece of junk to be built be made to repay its cost by cleaning out drains with a teaspoon. And as for that smug little gargoyle with the Dalek voice, get his carer to stick all those expedient strings where the sun don't shine.
I thank you.
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Saturday, October 17, 2009
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Current mood: satisfied
Category: Writing and Poetry
 Launched only this week: a brand new website, the summation of my creative life to date, and the avenue for work to come. Packed with writing, imagery, poetry and loads more: www.londondigitalart.co.uk. We designed it to be as entertaining and easy to browse as possible, so why not take a look?
Also on the same site: the final, full version of my book Dead People on Holiday, just ready for a publisher. Anybody who might be able to help me bring it to a much wider audience? Please contact me on stephen_jacks58@hotmail.com. Thanks .
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Sunday, July 12, 2009
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Current mood: satisfied
Category: Writing and Poetry
Sumptuous new book to buy:
Night and Day
My first Chapbook of poetry and imagery is on release to view, browse - and, if you'd like, to buy. You are warmly invited to check it out at: http://www.photoboxgallery.com/8799
This Chapbook is a light version, condensed and much more positive in tone, of my 150-page work, "Dead People on Holiday" - for which the blurb runs as follows: “The living”, it has been said, “are dead people on holiday”. This book is a ten-year testimony to one man’s living death, concluding in acceptance and at least the chance of a return to hope, love and a new life. The poetry here pulls apart the inner sadness of encroaching age and irredeemable failure, with a candour which for most of us has to be kept stifled, silent, perhaps barely even thought.
But this is a book which surmounts despair; and for the narrator here as much as for anyone else: if these are the ashes of a failed life, they are the ashes from which a phoenix can rise. And yes, someday it will.
Stephen Jackson’s fusion of his own poetry with digital imagery has been acclaimed as “hauntingly beautiful...tight, life-affirming”. His account has been called “fascinating and amazing”: with a texture of writing comparable to John Donne’s. 
TO VIEW THE FULL
"DEAD PEOPLE ON HOLIDAY"
1) Follow this link: http://londondigitalart.spaces.live.com2) Click on the album displayed at the top right, "Dead People on Holiday". This will show you the page mock-ups - but not in much detail. So now:
3) See PUBLIC FOLDERS ("Skydrive") immediately below that collection of layouts. Click open "Dead People on Holiday (images and poetry)". Click on each spread (page) to view it. Click again on this view to see it enlarged to full screen size.
...And yes: I am looking for a publisher
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Thursday, July 09, 2009
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Current mood: obsequious
Category: MySpace
  10 July 2009
Today Steve the Peeve has incurred the ire of My Space's moral guardians by attempting to upload a collage of the pornographic and offensive, degrading images of women that My Space's very own proprietor, Mr Rupert Murdoch, prints in his "family" publications across the world. The images I used came from The Sun (its famous Page 3) and the News of the World - two examples of the British yellow press produced by News International at Wapping in East London. These publications are regularly seen by children so young that they can barely read.
Upload much more on those lines, I'm warned, and my account here is liable to be deleted.
Fascinating to contrast My Space's smugly unperceptive primness with their Daddy's venality. By such action the My Space team implicitly condemn News International's* own tabloids as unacceptably "sexual explicit" and "unfit to be seen by children of less than thirteen years."
Little surprise at what the Guardian newspaper has today revealed of the News of the World's gutter turpitude. Meanwhile: does anybody have any beefs against My Space, or against the divine Rupert and his minions in general, that I could use as the start of a comical or serious press campaign? If so, simply contact stephen_jacks58@hotmail.com. Thanks.
* In the USA, aka the News Corporation
Fresh from today's GUARDIAN:
The Press Complaints Commission said today it would investigate whether News of the World executives had told the truth over the extent of phone hacking at the newspaper.
The industry watchdog's decision followed revelations by the Guardian about the scale of the practice, and that the NoW's parent company, News International, had paid £1m to those targeted by its journalists and private investigators they had hired.
A PCC spokesman said it would write to the Guardian and to the information commissioner to see what evidence both organisations could divulge about the practice.
The PCC said it would also investigate any suggestions of "further transgressions" since its 2007 inquiry into the use of subterfuge by journalists. That inquiry was triggered by the conviction in January 2007 of the News of the World's royal editor, Clive Goodman, and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, for phone hacking.
In its 2007 report after the convictions and after the resignation of the paper's editor, Andy Coulson, the PCC appeared to accept the News of the World's assertion that the phone hacking was limited to Goodman, and that he had kept the practice from his bosses.
Announcing its fresh inquiry, the PCC said: "The PCC has previously made clear that it finds the practice of phone message tapping deplorable. Any suggestion that further transgressions have occurred since its report was published in 2007 will be investigated without delay.
"The PCC is contacting the Guardian and the information commissioner for any further specific information in relation to the claims published today about the older cases, which suggests the commission has been misled [in] its inquiries."
From WIKIPEDIA:
The corporate history of MySpace has been a matter of some public dispute. When MySpace was purchased by News Corporation they also gained control of the editor's account (the Tom Anderson profile) from which all service announcements are made. Such announcements are not from "Tom Anderson" personally but from the corporate owned identity. It has even been claimed that Tom Anderson's role and image as MySpace founder and "first friend" is a public relations invention.
From BUSINESS WEEK:
News Corp. made it official on June 16 that MySpace's days as a highflier are over, at least for now. Just five weeks after naming former Facebook finance chief Owen Van Natta CEO of the social network, News Corp. (NWS) said it's cutting about 400 jobs. In doing away with 30% of his staff, Van Natta was none too charitable. "Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company," the executive said in a statement.
The remarks were an apparent jab at Van Natta's predecessor, MySpace Co-Founder Chris DeWolfe, who had resigned two days before Van Natta took over. Under DeWolfe, MySpace initially flourished, becoming the world's largest social network and catching the eye of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who bought it for $580 million in 2005.
...More from BUSINESS WEEK:Join MySpace.com and you'll automatically be befriended by [Tom] Anderson, who in 2003 founded the site with Chris DeWolfe to help connect musicians with fans. MySpace's popularity surged as hordes of young people used the site to connect with one another and to personalize pages with photos, blogs, and music. By mid-2005, MySpace boasted 22 million members and was bought by News Corp. for $580 million. Anderson, who holds a master's degree in film from the University of California at Los Angeles, continues to call the shots from within the House of Murdoch, adding features in a bid to keep MySpace "cool" (sic).
Twenty years on, Murdoch Jr echoes
father’s attack on BBC....By Ian Burrell, Media Editor, The Independent
Friday, 28 August 2009
Above: St James brings succour to the Beasts of the Field
James Murdoch, the heir to his father Rupert's global News Corporation empire, last night accused the BBC of undertaking a "chilling" land-grab of the media that posed a "serious and imminent" threat to the future provision of news in Britain.
Murdoch Jnr, who is News Corp's chairman and chief executive for Europe and Asia, warned that the dominance of the BBC risked creating the type of news media which George Orwell described in the novel 1984. "As Orwell foretold, to let the state enjoy a near-monopoly of information is to guarantee manipulation and distortion," he said.
Delivering the prestigious James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, he railed against the "authoritarianism" of the Government and its watchdog Ofcom. He criticised rules designed to uphold impartiality in broadcast news and advocated the system of self-regulation which applied to the press. The speech, which shocked the television executives, echoed the sentiments of his father, who delivered an outspoken attack on broadcasting establishment in the same venue two decades earlier.
Whereas Murdoch Snr's MacTaggart Lecture of 1989 had predicted the digital future, James Murdoch talked of the "digital present" and compared the media industry's conservatives to the creationists who rejected Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
In powerful language, he remonstrated against the growth of the BBC's news provision on the internet. "Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet," he said. "We seem to have decided as a society to let independence and plurality wither. To let the BBC throttle the news market and then get bigger to compensate."
The criticisms reflected his father's comments earlier this month that News Corp's newspapers must begin charging for their online content, a strategy undermined by the BBC website's presence as a vast source of free news. "It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news," James Murdoch said last night. He claimed that "the threat to independent news provision is serious and imminent".
The corporation's governing body, The BBC Trust, had an "abysmal record" in overseeing the organisation's activities, he said, citing examples of the BBC's expansionism. "The scale and scope of its [the BBC's] current activities and future ambitions is chilling. Being funded by a universal hypothecated tax, the BBC feels empowered and obliged to try to offer something for everyone, even in areas well served by the market." The growth of BBC Radio 2, he said, had damaged the radio industry by taking listeners already well-served by the commercial sector. "Performers like Jonathan Ross were recruited on salaries no commercial competitor could afford, and audiences for Radio 2 have grown steadily as a result," he said. "No doubt the BBC celebrates the fact that it now has well over half of all radio listening. But the consequent impoverishment of the once-successful commercial sector is testament to the corporation's inability to distinguish between what is good for it and what is good for the country."
Broadcasting, Murdoch complained, was constrained by an "authoritarian" degree of intervention by Ofcom. He compared British media regulation unfavourably with systems in Germany, India and France. "The problem with the UK is that it is unhappy in every way: it is the Addams Family of world media."
He contrasted the regulation in broadcasting with the self-regulation of the press, praising British newspapers for being "fearless and independent" and suggesting that the aim of achieving impartiality in broadcast news by balancing opinions was unattainable. "The mere selection of stories and their place in the running order is itself a process full of unacknowledged partiality."
Murdoch, 36, is non-executive chairman of BSkyB, whose Sky News service is subject to tight controls on impartiality, unlike the unashamedly right-wing American channel Fox News, also part of the News Corp portfolio. Twenty years ago, Rupert Murdoch's MacTaggart Lecture was characterised by his claim that television was a business and should not be the preserve of a publicly-supported duopoly of the BBC and ITV. Yesterday his son, ended his own speech with a similar homage to capitalism in the media. "There is an inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a better society," he said. "The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit."
Lofty words, James. Now try watching your very own Fox News. Or try listening to the educated Americans, from anywhere other than the Far Right, who find themselves with too little (or no) other choice.
Far from promoting pluralism and diversity, asset-ravenous James and his dad will not be content until they and they alone possess or pervade the entire world: like headlice, perhaps, or cholera in the Nineteenth Century.
Alas, unlike smallpox and ringworm, they represent our future.
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Monday, May 25, 2009
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Current mood: ecstatic
Category: Music
This lifetime's journey for me, which must by definition remain unfinished, is what gives me more delight than anything else in the world. But now a word on Opus 10.
For all Chopin's transformation of harmonic possibilities over the corpus of his music (and surely his awareness of tonality prefigures Wagner's) this study is above all the homage of a disciple of Bach, taking the first of the Forty-Eight and elevating it through the possiblities of a titanic instrument for a new century and a new age.
The Pachmann grows on you over time, even if it's surely the inadequacies of technique that force him to make Chopin's piece into something it palpably is not, given the most liberal reading of what the composer actually wrote. Just a pity, then, that Martha Argerich has not been put first here. I thought that Murray Perahia might be my favourite for this Etude, but now I'm not so sure?
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Saturday, August 02, 2008
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Current mood: contemplative
Category: Art and Photography
[TalentDatabase.com]
You've just been featured!
From: TalentDatabase.com Sent: 18 March 2008 13:46:06 To: stephen_jacks58@hotmail.com
Congratulations. Your listing has just been featured on the main page of the Computer Portal channel in the TalentDatabase. You may wish to verify this listing displays your latest contact and biographical information, as well as freshly uploaded samples of your best work in the portfolio section. Expect thousands of people a day to check out your talent listing; our editors think that you deserve it! Acknowledgments and testimonials from the community drive talent listings to the top of the searches. You should take the time to invite those already familiar with your work to see you featured. Even non-talent types can create FAN / ENTHUSIAST listings to comment on your skills and ability. As you drive traffic to your listing, your talents will be exposed to thousands within your specific industry. Whether you are looking for a job, customers, partners, sponsors, producers, agents or fans…this "exposure" is what TalentDatabase is all about. You can show off your featured status on your website, blog, myspace page, etc. by copying and pasting the code below:
Please take the time to make this work for you, and good luck... well, with your level of talent…who needs luck right? ........Jimi ....Beach
Editor-in-Chief
TalentDatabase ...... ...See me now on:
DAWN
What can it mean, to be alive? Ask the bird – that sings in adversity In loveless Autumn's withered, immemorial gardens Where land (larval, leathery, newly dead), exhales. The air is as sombre as opal, unlit and undiscovered. A silent cat, with serpentine eyes, stalks; ...And still the bird sings.
MUD LOVE
Love should be like a hatchling butterfly: Tearing free from worn-out skin, Bursting with new blood its once-crushed wings, and Ready to surpass the sky. But middle age brings whiskery lust, for us Or feathery, like dust - gristly with intimacies: Mumbled in judicious teashop undertones, to a furtive Crumpling of nylon macs, or pitched against a public Squall of brats. Either way: you know you ought not to be there, Caught in the light. You ought to know better. Shouldn't be out, not at your age, where you can be seen and shamed.
Decrepitude is melancholy: warm, dark, moist - Primal, I suppose; like your abode before you were even born. What inner child survives, in me? Ah, mine wouldn't die. Mine didn't grow. It reposes, clenched fist of a foetus that it is, gripping My life's misjudgements, binding them tight. A lifetime's chatter fills my ears. My silence is big enough to swallow worlds. Yet still I need to feel another's hand.
Addled love is a clock cranked backwards. A crab scuffling sideways Writhing, worming pinkly on a skewer like a caterpillar: Awaiting resurrection as a soft-boiled egg To be absorbed into the dark belly of the earth.
To see the latest combination of my writing and
imagery, brought together in a publishable format,
visit: http://londondigitalart.spaces.live.com
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Friday, April 04, 2008
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Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
FORGIVE ARCADIA
I’m presenting this because it’s I project I’m eager to see made - and so far (despite noble warblings from the BBC about how it deserves to be made) we’re getting nowhere... Collaborators, please! Whether CGI people (possibly Maya or Cinema 4D?): or anyone else who can help me get this show funded, and on the road...
A short fictional film about air, darkness and escape - with poetry, music, digital animation, and a little live action. Duration: maybe ten minutes.
What it’s
about
Its starting points are the dreams and fantasies of a man who finds himself alone in the grey heart of a city. From these he gains a better grasp of the limited options that his future has to offer.
The poem suggests that there might be the possibility for redemption in the most desolate circumstances. Through words, and through a movement from oppressive gloom to illusory light, a story is told about a being starved of human contact. Out of a nondescript and grimy world comes the possibility of salvation – if only in your own imagination.
The film is autobiographical, and based on the author’s experiences of squalid rented accommodation in East London which helped to precipitate a major psychiatric collapse. Something of the film’s connexion with reality is that, in today’s "Cool Britannia", these are the conditions in which more and more people find themselves trapped.
What would it look like?
In terms of its tone and appearance, the piece has affinities with two memorable works: Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and also the beginning of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Where it seeks to differ is in creating an ultimately life-affirming parable which appeals to the experience of countless urbanites today, and an experience with which all can identify. Through its themes of coping or failing to cope with lost youth, lost hope, dire surroundings and surviving desire, it charts an adventure of human imagination which has a wide (one hopes, a universal) resonance.
About the author
Stephen Jackson studied Psychology, Logic and Metaphysics at the University of St Andrews. He was trained as a professional visual artist at what was then Sunderland Polytechnic.
Stephen Jackson worked as a researcher for Christopher Nupen’s film documentary on Schubert, The Greatest Joy, the Greatest Sorrow, which won the Crystal Prize at the 1994 Prague Festival. Since then he has worked as a freelance writer on music and arts for most of Britain’s leading newspapers and specialist magazines: including The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, Classic CD Magazine and Time Out. The author of biographies of Schubert and Shostakovich, he has been a major contributor to nearly a dozen publishing projects: as writer, editor or editorial consultant. Having worked single-handedly on the development of Rapido TV’s first foray into the classical music jungle, he went on to help update The Rough Guide to Classical Music on CD, one of the three market leaders in its field.
Since 2001 he has developed as a published poet and digital image-maker. "My themes include relationships, the human form, our natural environment, and the withering effects of time: including our conception of beauty, its celebration and its loss.
"I’ve tried to address the inner fears that each of us must tackle: including mortality, the need to make sense of what’s been gained and given up, and all those walking wounded in the universal and (some might say) necessary battlefields that litter human aspirations and language. There are few outright winners here, except of the most ephemeral kind. The tiny obsessions of early middle age: the games all of us sometimes have to play…these are my canvas."
STORYBOARD
Presented here in portrait format, for higher image quality - but for easier viewing, you can print each page out.
         
Theme and Tone
There is the possibility for redemption (if only through imagination) in the most desolate circumstances. Through a poem, and a movement from oppressive darkness to illusory light, a story is told about a lonely man.
Era and Place
Timeless, or rather nondescript; but there is a sense of everything being old and cluttered: decorative and homely once, now grimy and grey. Through this, images of heaven blaze with a deep chromatic lustre.
Format
Digital video, transferred to DVD or whatever formal is most appropriate.
Techniques
Voiceover with some music: live action footage plus digital animation – there are both real and created, manipulated images here.
Visual models/exemplars
I note these for their sense of alienation and dislocation.
1) (For Hackney) The sinister lithographs of Fuseli and Odilon Redon (e.g. Redon’s Winged Pegasus).
2) (In terms of film) Jeunet and Caro (Delicatessen more than Amelie et seq). 3) Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. I have running through my head his image of the hero sailing through cloudscapes, above a land of dirt and ominous, towering monoliths.
4) David Lynch. The nightmarish indoor shots (in terms of décor, lighting and composition) or Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. The Disneyesque fairy who descends in a luminous bubble at the end of Wild at Heart, is maybe also worth bearing in mind.
5) Orson Welles’s atmospheric gloom in A Touch of Evil or Citizen Kane – the contre jour scene in Thatcher’s library, for instance.
6) Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). Here the visual style is so powerfully recognizable that to copy it slavishly would discredit anybody’s own work. But some things are worth noting - the monochromatic interior gloom lit by slashes of distant sunlight: the intrusive wide-angle camerawork, which always seems to crowd in on the heroine’s face whilst being almost infatuated with static, squalid, trite and inanimate objects: Polanski’s obsessive attention to near-microscopic detail and mechanistic background sound: his use of telling detail, extreme close-ups and also the roaming movement of the camera, like a dog following or prowling or sniffing round a room. It is significant that much of the action is viewed from waist height, or POV from right behind the heroine, so that human faces are often missing. A sense of numb voyeuristic scrutiny, which is both involving and dehumanising.
Music
1) Waking music and cloud music: phrases from the opening moments of the Prelude to Richard Wagner’s Parsifal. This, with its notion of transfiguration, is crucial.
2) Interlude between ’Orchid’ and ’Heaven’ sections: Bloslovi, dushe moya or Nyne otpushchaeshi from Rachmaninov’s Opus 37 All-Night Vigil (often called the Vespers). I envisage a conflict between this achingly simple music and, outside, the thunderous racket that, making the glass of my window throb, would keep me awake and miserable at three in the morning. Industrial cacophony and sirens are a part of this, but also other music - one pounding band was later identified to me as Elephant Man. Also the hectoring chatter, the relentless shrieks and bellowing, of metropolitan local radio. Recording a sweep through the waveband would suffice to show... Such were the Londoners who took it for granted that they "owned the air", when I craved no more than privacy and silence.
3) Conclusion of poem: it might be best to have no music. But if we opt for something unobtrusive, it needs to be indeterminate, hard to make out, noncommittal (like the poem). The easiest option, as marked in the Shooting Script, would be more of the Rachmaninov Vespers. Other options: the second (slow) movement of Szymanowski’s Symphony No 4, which has the quality of shifting veils. Or there’s eerie fidgeting in the first movement of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony.
4) At the back of my mind: the tinkling jingles of ice-cream vans, versus the brooding sobriety of Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead.
The genesis of the original poem was thanks to a friend and mentor, who set me the creative challenge that the first lines of the piece describe. There are no prizes for guessing that this is an autobiographical work, referring to one of the worst periods of my life. No prizes, either, for guessing that I hated where I lived in Hackney: I’m sorry if that offends anyone, but it is intrinsic to the poem, the film, the experience, the recovery. The outsiders whose habits, lives and lifestyles helped inadvertently to brutalise my mind and my existence had little regard for my feelings, still less my needs, when they could have made a difference. In the end, of course, nobody is to blame; it’s that London, one of the world’s most overcrowded cities, is also the loneliest.
Stephen Jackson
So, there you go. And don’t forget to drop a neutron bomb on
Background to a Final Shooting Draft
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