Moved To Blogpost: Renamed The Brown Eyed Beggar
Hello to my loyal readers and brilliant scribes.
Just sending out this message for anyone who has recently subscribed to this blog and also to make those aware I have moved that I have changed my blog name and poetry persona.
I am so grateful that you have all chosen to read my work over the past 4 months. And i am extra grateful to those of you whom read my Facebook page and subscribe to here.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Brown-Eyed-Beggar/220063078046588
I am notifying you that I have left WordPress and I am at Blogpost on Google.
I shall continue to remain on this blog in a dormant basis to read all your work and give the feedback to all you amazing writers.
However the main reason I have decided to leave WordPress is its sheer unreliability and puritanical attitude to sensual and erotic art.
Recently I had been suspended from this account due to technical issues and had one of my other blogs on this account removed. I have been on Google’s Blogpost for many a year and it appears to far more reliable and tolerant of free speech and expression.
You can continue to follow my work here:
http://thebrowneyedbeggar.blogspot.com/
I hope you decide to follow me and subscribe on Blogpost.
Thank you all. xxxx
Nat Williams xxx
‘A Map of Skulls & Roses’ – by N. Williams ©
Luna Rosa
The Lady
Is still as night
Does not flinch
And yet in her I see
.
Fury and movement
Sentiment fixed in frame
a painting or photograph
Blurred and yet piercing
.
Something phenomenal
I had not yet seen
Yet believed with all my heart
That forced me to doubt my beginning, my start
.
The Lady
With the map on her back
so she can travel the world
a landscape of roses and skulls
.
A map of roses, of love
and all the emotions made immovable
Like a painting or photograph
imprecise and yet intense
.
Something unparalleled
I had not yet felt
Yet whispered with trembling lips
She forced me to doubt my reason, my art
.
The Lady
is a silent furnace
does not flicker nor fade
always burning
.
In the dark places of the earth
her motions make you certain
Life is for love and learning
and yet in her I see
.
Something incomparable
I had not yet spoken
Yet it dwelt in the recesses of my mind
A map of skulls and roses
.
- By N. Williams ©
The model in the image is the hypnotic Luna Rosa who is an internationally renown performer.
http://www.exoticlunarosa.com/
http://www.facebook.com/fansofluna
She has also started an awesome duo called THE BUXOTICS with LouLou D’vil.
‘Ode To Resilience’ – by N.Williams ©
Photograph taken by Robert Gladys/ Fractured Photography 'Cherry La Voix'
Within her soul a torrent rush
Like rising waters to the shore
That seeks out dreams to stall or crush
.
And draws the lady out to war
To battle daemons of her past
Such nightmares drag her on all fours
.
To make the heart reflex too fast
Bring forth a sweat upon the brow
For Terror is the first and last
.
But to her soul she made a vow
Not to give up hope forlorn
To turn to buoyancy and bow
.
To take her spirits shred and torn
And stitch slight sails to ride the blue
Such waves she would adorn
.
To build a vessel sure and true
And place in it her heart’s desire
And not forget they were her jewel
.
So when the thunderstorm transpires
She’d raise the sail against the wind
And burn fierce as a voracious flame
.
So Fate and Hope they would conspire
To break the tempest’s rage in two
The wind and cold, they would retire
.
Within the tempest
Bravery was born
Defiance was her father
Within the tempest
Bravery was born
Reliance was her mother
.
- By N.Williams ©
See more of Robert Gladys work at:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fractured-Photography/227293458080?sk=info
http://fracturedphotography.com/
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Check out the scandalous Cherry la Voix and her salacious music at:
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Occupy Wall St – Breaking the collective stupor & media blackout
Everything we’d been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like “Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?”
Perhaps, it’s not surprising. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we’re all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.
So Why are people occupying Wall Street?
There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. But what is even more depressing is why the media have covered the protests so scantly. Perhaps they wish not to upset financial sponsors? Perhaps they simply had other more important things like the Part conferences in the UK to cover….
Or maybe not. It is shameful that there has not been enough attention given to the occupiers in US cities. And it reeks of censorship of information. Of course how do you nip a realisation of a fact in the bud? You stop the spreading of information to the masses. Anything that would knock them from their stupor and idiotic diet of X factor, America Pop Idol and Friends.
It seemed the time has come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an “economy” is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before. Occupy Wall Street are trying to rectify this, make sure the debate is not twisted or fades. To make sure we never forget.
What we’ve learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the “third world debt crisis”. But the global south fought back. The “alter-globalisation movement”, was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of “austerity”.
I welcome these occupations of Wall Street as the awakening to the American psyche to the founding ideals of democracy. That it is not big business or oil, politicians or hedge funders who run a nation, but the people. A people not distracted by or limited in their choices. A people not bogged down in debt or a ruthless rat race of endless and wasteful production. But a people realising that just because they have I-pods and TV’s, blackberries and diesel jeans doesn’t make them free.
In Praise of …QuaDror
To continue my series and focus on great artists and architecture I am happy to share with you a visionary designer seen in the New York Times.
The designer Dror Benshetrit of Studio Dror presents QuaDror, a space truss geometry that he invented and patented. Although the words “space truss geometry” may not sound sexy at first, QuaDror’s potential is impressive: its interlocking, load-bearing members function at several scales, from the small (a table base or room divider) to the large (a bridge support or structure for a house).
When used in multiples, these forms are not only as stable as a solid cube (while using only 20 percent of the volume), but also have acoustical properties, as in a highway sound barrier. But the application about which Dror is most excited is that of emergency housing.
The QuaDror Home is a kit that includes instructions, tools and QuaDror universal joints — to which structural members (of wood, bamboo, etc.) can be attached. Because these pieces take up so little room, Dror estimates that 1,750 of the kits can be shipped in a single 40-foot container.
It is estimated that 72 percent of the world’s population live in slums or favelas. These dense urban areas are almost always riddled with inadequate shelter. There is also a rise in the frequency of natural disasters, leaving populations with the need to rapidly address emergency housing issues during the transition to permanent development. QuorDror Homes offers a solution that could be instrumental in upgrading existing slums and could also provide a more resilient structure for emergency housing.
Small, sturdy houses can be built with whatever local materials are available, making them even more cost-effective, not to mention sustainable. The first QuaDror Home kit is just beginning production, and the studio hopes to build its first houses in Sierra Leone and Brazil next year.
QuaDror is a result of physical experimentation with forms. Initially inspired by the aesthetic and flexibility of this geometry, we soon realized the structural integrity of the interlocking beams. A flow of ideas for design applications then came to mind. Inspired by the tremendous power of design to improve living conditions, we investigated fundamental principles within a set of parameters.
Boosted by a team of experts, we conducted rigorous analysis and research, from an inter-disciplinary approach. We discovered the overwhelming strength of the geometry. It results in 30% less material when constructing I-Beam metal frames for different scaled projects, and 40-80% less material when using concrete for highway retaining walls. The engineering of the QuaDror Universal Joint combined with a simplistic physical force allows the whole-system to show unseen load-bearing capacity, great energy performance and minimum deployed volume. Specific and generic at the same time, QuaDror is a unique structural joint that can adapt to many conditions and configurations.
Their development strategy is driven by the tremendous opportunity to address the global and fundamental issue of habitat for our contemporaries and children. This invention connects us to our work, giving us the wonderful opportunity to look at our lives in terms of our legacies rather than our activities.
The geometric system of a QuaDror Home is based on four identical L-shaped pieces of various embodied elements assembled with the help of the QuaDror joints. The L-shaped pieces can be delivered with the joints or made of material available in the local environment. Both options allow for integrating a cultural and ecological context in the final design of the building. We are enthused to estimate that 1750 QuaDror kits – i.e. 1750 homes – can be shipped in one 40-foot container only. The studio is now working on manufacturing the QuaDror Home prototypes.
The initial research for this structure has been supported in-house through other projects; if they win they would use the prize money to deploy the first prototypes in Sierra Leone, Africa. They are already in discussions with Shine On Sierra Leone, a local NGO, to develop a birthing center and housing for the surrounding community. One team member has been working with the organization for five years. They plan to work with local experts to deliver the product rather than becoming an agent on the ground themselves. They have also solicited the help of engineers at ARUP who work to deliver solutions in this space.
Dror and his team represent an important part of the design community: the artist-designer, inventor-creator, people who are operating intuitively to discover new solutions. They don’t set out to solve a problem, but they are deeply inspired by unlocking universal processes. Through rigorous investigation and a love for charting the unknown, a powerful discovery can be revealed. They then draw from a larger community of experts to better round out its application. Through right action and right deployment, the QuaDror universal joint has a kind of an intrinsic value to make the world work for 100 percent of humanity.
‘LEARNING REGENERATION’ – by N. Williams © [a reading]
A poem about my father’s illness and death.
Featured in my book The Unloved.
Don’t blame politicians they’re just the managers…not the owners
Globalisation. As a word it has existed since the 1960s and is a household term. But what does globalisation mean? It has become a buzzword that many use to describe everything that is happening in the world today.
The dictionary definition is: Globalisation (n) is the “process enabling financial and investment markets to operate internationally, largely as a result of deregulation and improved communications” (Collins) or – from the US – to “make worldwide in scope or application” (Webster). The financial markets, however, are where the story begins.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the business model termed the “globalised” financial market came to be seen as an entity that could have more than just an economic impact on the parts of the world it touched.
Globalisation came to be seen as more than simply a way of doing business, or running financial markets – it became a process. From then on the word took on a life of its own. Centuries earlier, in a similar manner, the techniques of industrial manufacturing led to the changes associated with the process of industrialisation, as former country dwellers migrated to the cramped but booming industrial cities to tend the new machines.
But this is where the anti-globalisation side gets stuck in. If these practices replace domestic economic life with an economy that is heavily influenced or controlled from overseas, then the creation of a globalised economic model and the process of globalisation can also be seen as a surrender of power to the corporations, or a means of keeping poorer nations in their place. In the current economic crisis this is an important point as it shows why we are in the current predicament.
Here are some points about the system we have been enthralled to for all these years:
1. Developed nations have outsourced manufacturing and white collar jobs. That means fewer jobs for their people. This has happened because manufacturing work is outsourced to developing nations like China where the cost of manufacturing goods and wages are lower. Programmers, editors, scientists and accountants have lost their jobs due to outsourcing to cheaper locations like India.
2. This comes from the fact that Capitalism never solves any of its problems. It simply moves them around the globe via credit and cheap labour. These contradictions art coming to the fore now, with low rising wages, poor pension provision, rising welfare coasts and a deadly concentration of jobs being focused in the service industries.
3. Globalization has led to exploitation of labour. Prisoners and child workers are used to work in inhumane conditions. Safety standards are ignored to produce cheap goods. It is put forward as a great liberation lifting people in developed nations out of poverty, but it is in fact exploitative and is a ploy to allow financiers and the manipulators of credit to have access to the global source of labour. This would allow them to force workers in nations to compete in a race to the bottom and destroy collective bargaining power of the lower and middle classes.
4. Job insecurity. Earlier people had stable, permanent jobs. Now people live in constant dread of losing their jobs to competition. Increased job competition has led to reduction in wages and consequently lower standards of living.
5. Companies have set up industries causing pollution in countries with poor regulation of pollution. Think of Chinese companies in Africa with copper mines poisoning the water supplies of lakes and villages.
6. Fast food chains like McDonalds and KFC are spreading in the developing world. People are consuming more junk food from these joints which has an adverse impact on their health.
7. The increase in prices has reduced the government’s ability to sustain social welfare schemes in developed countries.
8. Multinational Companies and corporations which were previously restricted to commercial activities are increasingly influencing political decisions.
9. The ‘benefits of globalization’ is not universal. The rich are getting richer and the poor are becoming poorer.
10. We can talk about consumer spending, booms and busts, but none of this means anything if all the goods are made abroad and wages are continually squeezed at home by a feral elite in command of all the credit and liquid assets.
By N.Williams
‘The Nazarene Cuckold’ – by N.Williams ©
Oh Joseph with your mind confused
Because your wife’s divinely used
Her legs were only sanctified
To grant a saviour that would die
But in your heart you doubt the tale
That God did make her wail
And in your heart grows bitterness
A tinge of odd salaciousness
That if Jehovah spread her thighs
The world would learn that truth a lie
By N.Williams ©
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water” – The Legacy of John Keats
Born in 1795, John Keats was the eldest of London innkeepers Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Keats’s father was killed in a fall from a horse in 1804, and his mother died in of tuberculosis in 1810. An orphan at 14, Keats was stricken with a grief which tempered his childhood energies and brought about an early maturity and a sense of responsibility toward his younger siblings, George, Thomas, and Fanny.
Their maternal grandmother, Alice Jennings, earned the de facto responsibility of caring for the Keats children, and Jennings appointed merchant Richard Abbey as their guardian. A rigid and disapproving man, Abbey prevented the children from accessing their inheritance, limited Fanny’s correspondence with her brothers once she was forced to live with his family, and as a result suppressed much of the history of Keats’s childhood that was left.
Keats’s had decided to pursue medicine and was genuinely interested in the field despite the pressure of Abbey. At age 15 he began his apprenticeship to a doctor outside of London, writing poetry on the side. The early years of his medical career proved a miserable time for Keats.
And hence may have contributed to his foray into the Romantic view of life. Leading to him rejecting all the values of the age of enlightenment and instead putting an emphasis on sensuality and beautiful before cold rationalism.
As a “dresser” at Guy’s Hospital in an era lacking painkillers and antiseptics, Keats’s duties included the physical restraint of patients during surgery and subsequent cleaning and re-bandaging of their putrid and often infected wounds. The overwhelming spectrum of human suffering he saw brought about a hypochondria in Keats, and more alarmingly, periodic descents into suicidal depression.
Although Keats’s stint in medical work damaged his mental health and limited the time he could devote to poetry, he developed an increasing number of social connections that widened his literary prospects.
During his first years of medical work in London, Keats befriended Leigh Hunt and Joseph Severn, both of whom would become influential figures throughout the remainder of his short life. (Incidentally, Hunt’s periodical The Examiner granted Keats his first publication, “To Solitude’ (1816), before their acquaintance.)
Keats was known for his generous spirit, vivacity, and rich sense of humour—all qualities which his posthumous idealization as a frail genius fails to reveal. Though his publications were still quite limited, the support, in print and through companionship, of Hunt, Shelley and others led Keats to conclude that that he could sustain a poetic career without his medical wages. And so he embarked on a full time literary career giving us some of the greatest poetry, Odes and scrpts written in the English language.
Before he died of consumption it can be said that Keats gave the English a sense that they could be a full of flare and vigour as the French and Italians. Where emotion and the movement towards aestheticism were flourishing all over Europe, Keats injected in to th English literary world and consciousness a desire to return back to natural world, legends and folklore.
An appreciation of the beauty around us in the world would bring forward the manifestation of a new more desirable existence for men and women. This was indeed a relevant and potent message in the period of Industrial Revolution and Commerce. What his poems and the purpose of his writing were saying to the first Industrial power he called home was, that trade, military conquest and political supremacy were not sufficient for a healthy sense of place and feeling.
By N.Williams
‘The Folly of Sanctions’: Syria & the EU
I must say that from the beginning of the Syrian uprising I thought the West, for good or ill, was relatively peripheral to how the situation would unfold. That still seems to be so. One may still posit the idea that will be Turkey, Russia and Iran that will exert the main pressures upon what occurs. So this begs the question what do the EU think they achieved with their sanctions last Friday? I wish the Syrians well. Their current situation is tragic. But try as i might I cannot see a realistic course of action available to the West that could significantly improve their situation.
It’s hard to tell what most Syrians – rather than just protesters, or spokespeople for the protest movement – actually want. And there isn’t really any way of knowing short of credible opinion polling. And even if such polls did suggest a clear majority of Syrians were in favour of sanctions, the issue wouldn’t necessarily become morally clearer. Opinion polling regularly showed that a majority of Iraqis were in favour of the invasion and occupation in 2003 and 2004, for example – but who now thinks that was a good idea? Hardly anyone, either in Iraq or in the U.K. (again, if the polls are anything to go by).
I would generally be against such sanctions, because they do tend to end up hurting the population. The sanctions applied on Iraq were described as ‘genocidal’ by a senior U.N. official; the milder sanctions on Iran have exacerbated hardship and suffering; and the previous sanctions on Libya led to an acute shortage of life saving and other medicines (among other things), which threatened a major public health crisis, according to the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
This is not to say I think I know better than Syrians what’s good for their country. But as Monbiot in the Guardian stated, we ultimately have to make our own ‘moral choices’ – and I see sanctions (beyond things like an arms embargo, which would be justifiable) as little more than collective punishment which, once applied, can be hard to remove, even if they do end up having a bad to catastrophic effect on the population. That’s because the people tasked to make these decisions/those who have a strong influence over them – the form the sanctions take, how long they’ll be applied for, etc – don’t give much of a crap about ordinary Syrians, and are operating from far less noble underlying considerations.
Economic sanctions (to the extent that they’re real) are designed to slow or stop a whole economy (whole, as in “economy of the leaders” but also “economy of the people”). If my moral judgment stalls short of letting me stop another country’s economy through bombing, it must be indeed lead me to question stopping it in other more nuanced ways.
It is one thing to destabilise the regime leadership but quite another to destabilise the demographics of the whole country. Sanctions and isolation of regimes is not the way to go because what have they got to lose when their backs against the wall and these sanctions hurt the Syria people, they also encourage the country melt down when there needs to be compromise. With Syria’s flawed borders, demographic tensions and external influences of the Saudis and Iran, this would be deadly. Think Iraqi sectarianism times a thousand. Isolating the regime does not help the local people of these countries it makes the situation worse as we have seen , the people who pay for this with their lives are the innocent people of the country as we have seen time and time again. Additionally the regime can probably circumvent any sanctions by smuggling in and smuggling out goods along its long coastline.
Furthermore, the west’s experience in dealing with Saddam shows sanctions can’t remove a thug from power. When sanctions were imposed against Iraq they did not weaken Saddam’s power. Ironically, the sanctions strengthened his power as Saddam was able to enrich himself through the black market. So what are the alternatives? The West should stay out. These EU sanctions should be reconsidered and withdrawn and military action completely ruled out. We need to listen to the Syrian people and at the same time not forget them. Facilitate dialogue between Turkey, the Assad regime who have close ties both strategic and economic and the anti-government forces.
“The Syrian people calls on the United Nations to adopt a resolution to set up a permanent observer mission in Syria,” activists said on their Facebook page “Syrian Revolution 2011.
“We demand access to the international media, we demand the protection of civilians,” they said.
They also called for human rights monitors, which isn’t a bad idea. And diplomatic sanctions are far far better than economic or any other types since they hurt the government, not the people.
‘The Depth of the Dance’: A Portrait of Pina Bausch
Pina
Production year: 2011
Countries: Germany, Rest of the world
Cert (UK): U
Runtime: 103 mins
Directors: Wim Wenders
Cast: Malou Airaudo, Regina Advento, Ruth Amarante
The work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, who passed at the aged 68 of cancer in 2009, had a divisive and frequently violent starkness. Nevertheless, as director of her own company in Wuppertal, south of the Ruhr industrial region, she inspired a devoted following at home and abroad, and proved to be very influential. I have watched a film which had been made in 3D and without as a dedication to her craft of dance and life.
The beauty of the film made by Ernst Wilhelm “Wim” Wenders is that his imagery and gaze on Bausch’s work has the same essential, uncluttered and wryly funny quality as the work itself. Some will come to this film full of knowledge of Bausch. For others, it will be as fresh and novel as Wenders’s approach to turning dance into cinema. Both, I think, will find it entrancing and truly inspiring. Being a series of dance sequences, scenes and interviews I found it did justice to the Bausch legacy and doctrine. That dance were the breath the words of live. Moving literature.
Bausch was born in the German city of Solingen in 1940. Her early training was with the choreographer Kurt Jooss, best known now for his expressionist anti-war ballet The Green Table. Winning a grant to study in New York, she worked with a range of choreographers before returning to Germany. Working with her own company, she quickly established an international reputation. From 1974, she collaborated closely with the set and costume designer Rolf Borzik, whom she married. Borzik died in 1980.
Bausch’s influence stretches far beyond the dance world. Her admirers include the directors Peter Brook, Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage, the singer Bryan Ferry, and the actors Fiona Shaw and Richard Wilson. The film-maker Pedro Almodovar is another fan: his 2002 film Talk to Her begins and ends with scenes from Bausch works. The autograph that appears in the movie is Bausch’s own, given to Almodovar six years earlier.
Her main theme was relationships, regularly tinged with an atmosphere of violence or shame. Bausch’s men were often in drag, while her women were regularly dressed with exaggerated, fetishised glamour: impossibly high heels, corset knickers, 1930s evening dress. The performance style was intensely personal, with a sense that these dancers were acting out their own troubles and fears.
One of my favourite of her great works and dance pieces was Café Müller, created in 1978, drawing on her own childhood memories. As a child, she played in her parents’ restaurant, watching but not understanding the relationships between the adult customers. In the piece, everyone is needy but nobody manages to connect with anybody else. One couple dance together, the man lifting his partner, swinging her across his body before putting her down. They repeat the move, not stopping even when they reach the wall – which means that the woman is repeatedly smashed against it. A playful step becomes a battering. Such imagery led to detractors stating that Bausch simply was a proliferator of pain. Pain for pain’s sake.
Yet Bausch created images that stick in your mind: the carnation field, the couples whose games get stuck in a rut. Her performers were committed, daring and raw. Audiences argue about Bausch: exasperated by her fractured collages, or swept along by her creation of pictures, of relationships, of unspoken atmospheres. One thing must be acknowledge she never shirked from the reality and suffering of existence. She laid out humanity bared in all its hellish torment, both self created and externally inflicted. Perhaps the reason many dance critics disliked her works was that they felt uncomfortable at a truth being presented. That the way we relate as humans is brutal in its primal nature and that suffering and pain are in fact necessary. For development, learning, truth seeking and art.
‘The Unloved’ – by N.Williams ©
This is the anchor piece in my collection of poetry around which issues and themes much of the book is written.
http://www.ahstockwell.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=371
The unloved are those who do not fit convention in deed and thought. The girl with the rose tattoos, the boy with glasses like milk bottles ends, the hobbo who hangs around Liverpool Street station drinking whiskey or the mother in Kenya with a broken back and soul and too many mouths to feed.
Give me your poor, your tired and hungry masses
Give me your unbeloved
Lend me your ear for those who the whip lashes
Listen to a call of hope thinly threaded
Those driven from jealous ridden lands
The persecuted numbering as many as the sand
On the scorched beaches of some Middle Hell
Some distant paradise
Their suffering I cannot suffice
Open the gates for them
Pardon their souls
Nourish their hunger, nurture their hope
Lay down a table in the midst of tier troubles
Let us negotiate their peace lest their crimson cup runneth over
Veto their suffering
Those who the pendulum swings to slow
Those whose prays seem unanswered go
Orphans of heaven they are
Yet no cloud holds for them a cradle safe
From the Demon of Death and his swinging mace
Give me your scared, meek and weak
Give me your unloved
Beg for them that some future realm, is thier inheritence to keep
Pity the unloved
By N.Williams ©
A reading of ‘Djimon Djimon’ – by N.Williams © feat.Ibrahim el Minyawi.
Here is just an audio recording of my poem Djimon Djimon that has been a firm favourite at so many Open Mic nights in London.
Lyrics: http://shiningcityonthehill.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/djimon-djimon-by-nathanael-williams-%C2%A9/
‘And you may have roses too’ – by N.Williams ©
I clutched you in my hollowness
And felt the furnace of your breath
And promised an absurd utopia
That your lust for life would be sated
And you may have roses too
In Kensington Gardens
The breeze was cool and slow
And soothed our furrowed brows
It pledged comfort, harmony and truth
And roses growing on a balcony
Those times would be a legacy
A constant stream of laughter
The minute aspects of lives entwined
Aspirations turned to institutions
But these roses have thorns
So forget the words and lustre of that vision
You are gone
And all that’s left is my hollowness
And promised dreams of delicacy
That your lust for life would be sated
And you may have roses too
By N.Williams ©
‘The Looking Glass’ – by N.Williams ©
Looking at her,
memorising every curve.
He brings her in closer deep within himself,
nuzzling and sucking her fleshy mounds,
In his mind
not wanting to stop.
Not wanting to pull out
Out forth from utopia and to sinister realism
She is a taste of life and liberty,
a liberty of depth and risk,
a savory taste to be acquired,
one he can not go without.
Come feed on me she tells him,
until you are filled,
and yet
and yet you will be left wanting more.
His desires through the looking glass.
By N.Williams ©
‘Strength & Beauty’ – An Interview with Shanyn Pollard
LauraMay Taylor ©
The champion of the Miss Pole Dance Canada 2011 competition’s professional division is 31-year-old Shanyn Pollard from Grimsby, Ontario. Pollard was one of 14 competitors in the division at the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver on the 10th of this month. She surpassed the competition in sublime fashion and swept the awards table clean by winning four honours: Best Entertainer, Best Pole Tricks, Best Costume, and first place in the professional division. She will be off to Budapest, Hungary, to represent Canada at the 2011 World Pole Sport Championships next month on October 1st.
She is an athlete who symbolises the sheer athleticism and the dedication required for pole fitness. Pole dancing can help women to better connect with their bodies and their sensuality, and from solicitors and mothers to nurses and teachers, it can create profound positive changes in a women’s life and psyche with regards to her physicality. I spoke to her about how the call to the pole combines fitness, art, sensuality and athleticism.
How did you find Pole Dancing? Or how did it find you?
I discovered pole dancing shortly after having my second child back in 2005. I wanted to get back into shape without having to go to the gym and had seen pole dancing on TV. I thought it would be a lot of fun.
What are your hopes for the 2011 World Pole Sport Championships on October 1st in Budapest?
I’ve already surpassed my expectations by winning Miss Pole Dance Canada 2011 and am thrilled to be going for the experience of it all.
For you is pole dancing purely a fitness and art form? Or given its origins is there still a sensual or even sexual element?
Pole dancing for me is all about pushing my physical limits. Whenever I see something that looks impossible to do, I make it my goal to learn how to do it.
Do you see yourself as a role model to women looking for sexual empowerment?
I definitely think that women can see how confident I am in myself so it’s a possibility for sure. I guess it depends on how they perceive my performances.
Do you feel being an international athlete you are sharing a part of yourself as an individual or representing of your country?
I’m sharing a part of myself, my journey to get to where I am now and my ambitions to get even further in this sport. I represent my country as well; making it to Worlds is a huge honour. If it wasn’t for Miss Pole Dance Canada, I wouldn’t be going.
Some dancers have argued that if pole dancing was made an Olympic sport it would lose its creativity and become regulated. What’s your view on this?
I have mixed feelings on this topic. As much as I’d love to see something that we work so diligently at go mainstream to that extent, I just don’t think it would maintain its originality and flare. On the other hand, we often find that there’s not enough standardization at this point, so it could benefit the sport.
Where/who do you get your inspiration from?
I get my inspiration from music. I’ve never been trained as a dancer so listening to the music and moving to it is a very personal experience for me; very raw and pure.
Describe your dance style in one sentence.
My dance style is high energy yet graceful with a touch of attitude.
What are your training regimes?
It depends on what I’m training for and if I have any injuries. I usually do High Intensity Interval Training 4-5 days per week for an hour each along with pole training 3-5 days per week for anywhere between 2 and 6 hours. Stretching and dance training vary.
What sports diets do you have to help you enhance performance?
I have celiac disease so I have to stay away from any products or foods containing wheat and I’m also quite intolerant to dairy which limits my consumption of anything containing dairy products. Other than that, I eat nutritionally dense foods. Fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds and lots of protein.
What are your favourite moves? How long did it take you to nail those?
I love the reverse grab because it feels like flying. It’s a relatively easy move and I learned it within minutes, but it fun each and every time I do it.
Who are your favourite dancers out there now?
Oh boy! I admire so many, but Oona Kivela is probably my favorite right now. I can really relate to her style. Pantera and Alena Downs inspired me from the beginning and will always continue to do so. Each woman is so unique in their style and the story that they tell, there’s just too many to list.
How important is the costume element in performances. The making of the dance into a spectacle?
Costumes play a big role as well as props. Like any story that has to be told, it can definitely help to portray some of it through these elements. I like to make sure that I’m comfortable first and foremost and that nothing’s offensive, but I like to have fun with it as well.
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Shanyn Pollard has a studio called Shanyn’s Artistic Strength Studio (SASS) in Stoney Creek, ON.
‘Cradle to Cradle’: The Circular Business model
In spite of the shock of the financial crisis it has been business as usual for many companies in 2011. The financial crisis should have shown many in the financial sector and big business that it is long term growth that is the true path to wealth. And that wealth for all is better than kingdoms of air for the few. An agenda of environmental sustainability must be the driving force behind companies, so they can begin to think and behave in new ways. Advances in technology must be seized and utilised in a world facing the twin challenges of climate change and resource depletion.
An increasing number of leading business figures are shrugging off the old model, based on debt-fuelled consumerism and the notion of endless natural resources. It takes courage and vision to break the mould of an out-dated business model but this is what will be needed if more ‘enlightened enterprises’ are to emerge, able to achieve both long term sustainable profits and a positive environmental footprint simultaneously. In other words, “thinking green” can be a good thing for the bottom line.
Most corporate environmental journeys start with that approach: quantifying the carbon footprints, identifying ways of reducing it through minimizing waste, recycling, changing to renewable sources of energy, and setting incremental targets to improve performance throughout the manufacturing and distribution chains. But it isn’t a philosophy of change, merely looking in isolation at everything that a company does, rather than looking holistically at the entire business. Then they discovered a philosophy that did make sense.
That philosophy is called Cradle to Cradle®. In 2002, German chemist Michael Braungart and American architect William McDonough heralded it with their book ‘Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things’. Its central premise is that products should be conceived from the very start with intelligent design and the intention that they would eventually be recycled, as either ‘technical’ or ‘biological’ nutrients. Time Magazine has called it “a unified philosophy that – in demonstrable and practical ways – is changing the design of the world.”
It models human industry on the natural world, in which materials are nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms. It’s a philosophy that uses nature as a metaphor for how we can redesign everything that we do – including manufacturing industry – to be more eco-effective.
It brings a new methodology to the design of processes, products and services, by looking at raw materials both in terms of their intrinsic value and how, at the end of that product’s useful life, they can be taken apart and recycled – or “up-cycled” into products that may have a value and sophistication beyond that of their original use. Simply, it’s a philosophy of birth-to-rebirth.
To put it another way: the language of conventional sustainability says that we should hold onto products for longer – whether it’s a car or a mobile phone, and to therefore conserve the world’s resources. However, this approach only slows change, and goes against human instinct. After all, do you really want your laptop to last twenty-five years? Or to be using the same mobile in a decade from now?
Instead, Cradle to Cradle® makes planned obsolescence respectable. It encourages consumers to buy more products, but to do so from innovative companies that have policies in place to recycle old products, turning waste into new products or into nutrients.
That closed loop philosophy doesn’t necessarily mean turning old products into identical new products. It means designing products that can be disassembled and used and used again in a continuous and virtuous cycle, where the intrinsic “value” of each component is preserved or enhanced. The Cradle to Cradle® philosophy therefore eliminates the concept of waste, and we are working towards a time when all waste or worn-out carpet becomes a source of nutrient, designing in features that allow old carpet to be entirely taken apart and reused.
The important thing is that Cradle to Cradle® not only makes good environmental sense but is also good for business.
By N.Williams
‘Singing in the Rain’ – How England’s rainy skies can be harnessed for energy Independence
Researchers at the University of Bolton have developed a device that has the ability to capture energy from the sun, wind AND rain. Yes you heard me correctly RAIN! Looks like England is set to be the energy goldmine of the world, for there is plenty rain here to be harnessed for electricity. The innovative generator is made out of ribbons made from a piezoelectric polymer that generate energy currents when disturbed, and are also coated in flexible photovoltaic (PV) film that helps the device seize energy from the sun as well. In its current state the device can only generate small amounts of electricity but the researchers see a future where pine cone shaped structures will aid the nation’s energy independence with thousands of ribbons vibrating in the wind and rain and soaking up the sun.
Elias Siores at the Institute for Materials Research and Innovation was one of the researchers on the project and said that the team’s goal was to get over the problem of renewable energy being sporadic. A field of wind turbines is great unless the wind isn’t blowing and a rooftop of solar panels can be helpful unless it is night-time. Their new generator could help solve these problems by allowing one device to capture energy from a multitude of sources. “What we wanted was something that can take energy from different elements,” he told NewScientist. If successful the team could be on the path to creating a line of clothing that would generate energy with your own body movement and the elements in the world around you additionally!
‘Are we but little gods?’ – by N.Williams ©
Are we but little gods?
To sit upon our thrones of dirt
And order to and fro
The minions that we’ve raised in tooth and claw
And bang the drum of liberty
As long as he and she is free
To criticise and to condemn, but not to see
Are we but empires of clay?
To stretch our will across dust and sand
And likewise see our power flee
Like all the warped certainties of time
Turn and tear at our own bodies
And names we once held true and dear, we sully
Enthralled by expedition of pride and folly
Are we but ruins waiting to be made?
The fading of a certainty
A sunset in the West
A shadow cast upon our face
By the sunrise of the East
That brings with it humility and reality
To see the crumbling of our self made deities
And bid farewell to explorer’s glory
Are we but little gods?
To sit upon our thrones of dirt
And order to and fro
The minions that we’ve raised in tooth and claw
And bang the drum of liberty
As long as he and she is free
To criticise and to condemn, but not to see
By N.Williams ©
‘Auf Wiedersehen to all that’ – by N.Williams
I do not particularly see myself as “pro-Europe”, in fact I may go as far to say that I consider myself not so much a Eurosceptic as someone who actually does not believe in the idea full stop. I feel neither European nor does a flutter happen in my chest when I see the golden ring of stars or hear the anthem. I am content in the feeling that I shall never be or consider myself to be European or continental. I am British and more specifically English and feel that my specific heritage and family history could only be a British story.
It is a tale that would confuse the average European viewer. I hold no contempt for Europeans or the Continental flavour. My own choices and likes contain enough bourgeoisie tendencies of Continental Europe and of its art and music. But what I speak of is the institution of the European Union in its current incarnation. Its lack of accountability and the manner in which it fails to take into account the wishes of its many differing populations which has made this crisis all the more potent. Now millions of citizens in Germany, Greece and all over the Eurozone and Union have been for sometime considering the meaning and connotations of the Union. This could be seen even before the financial crises and dawn of government deficits when during the ratification of the Lisbon treaty many populations chucked out or showed doubt over the idea of more integration.
Watching grown men (and Merkel) trying to defend the indefensible, to push water uphill, to pretend they’ve got the answer to perpetual motion whilst they are in fact floundering and – in so doing – compounding the grief for millions of their own constituents, is – I am afraid – a real ‘pass the sickbag’ moment. They are defending their own monstrous vanity, or hubris. Any number of trashed European lives is acceptable collateral damage, as compared with them having to admit that they got it wrong. That more federalism is not the answer. Clearly you don’t have to have a Phd in economics to see that throwing other people’s money at the problem is not a solution; it is kicking the can down the road.
Greece is, de facto, in default today. As Nicola Horlick said on last Thursday’s BBC’s Question Time, a default would be “Lehmanns times 1,000″, but every alternative would be worse. Right now we are sacrificing ordinary European people – especially Greeks – as cannon fodder, pretending black is white, to defend the Merckel/Sarkozy hubris that the Euro is somehow an infallible project to be defended at any price.
Time has been bought, as you say – but surely weeks rather than months. Then Greece will default, and Portugal and Ireland are likely to follow. Then Spain will come under pressure, then Italy. On the other side of the Atlantic QE has failed completely; unemployment is higher than ever, homes are worthless, poverty is at record levels for recent years. Having the UK Issuing euro-denominated bonds is like a broken finger in the dike. If any of us knew the way out of capitalism’s crisis, we could possibly take it. But, even if there was a willingness to work together, no one knows what to do. This breed of ravenous capitalism has left such a trail of destruction.
But it is not only a case of ego. Many in the European elite cannot image a future without more European integration, more federalism and institution building. It is a lack of imagination and an emotional issue. This emotion for them this is the slow death of a dream, a Europe that had emerged out of WW2 with consistent growth and political stability. They saw their nations torn by war and wanted a united EU that could banshee the memories of WW2 and the bogeyman of excessive nationalism. But as I have stated the very dogmatic and arrogant push towards more unification has ended up creating and bolstering a spirit of populist nationalism movements and sentiments in their member states.
The real loser will be the larger European project: ever-closer union. The rich northerners who now find that they have apparently signed up to a deal whereby they have given an unlimited personal guarantee to the debts of the feckless south, in most cases without any national referendums about whether they might care to put themselves in this position, will be questioning whether they should ever let their own governments sign up for any further half-baked EU nonsense without such a referendum. And in nearly all imaginable cases, the results of such future referendums will be “no”, because the credibility of the EU itself is now shot to pieces. Surely a common sense approach would be swallowing of pride allowing Greece to default and reinstate the Drachma. If this leads to other southern European states doing likewise, all the better. To save Europe, Federalists must think differently about how their continent need be united. Otherwise it shall be Auf Wiedershen to all that!
