Saturday, 8 September 2012
India beckons!
I am on my way, not quite to Cambodia yet, although that may be just next year, I am now on my way to India, the visas are here, the tickets are booked, we have all the money we will need, we take off from Manchester to Kerala in one month, we will be there six weeks!
I am a british citizen but my partner is Swedish, the internet Led us to beleive that the visa process would be long, drawn out and a pain in the ass. Not so! We went to Birmingham to hand in the forms in person, I had my visa in three working days and my partner, who had to fill in a non resident form had hers in five. Im sorry but I think that is great service, hats off to VFS for sorting it so well, if this is indian paper pushing well, bring it on, this was easy.
The subcontinent will mo doubt be a challenge but one that I relish, I will be updating here and also pictures on www.shotaday365.blogspot.co.uk and pictures, films and reports on www.slur.tv
Check it all out, I'm going to make it very entertaining.
L.
Tuesday, 4 September 2012
I have been successfully discontinued!
I have been thinking about the atmosphere in corporate britain today, by corporate I mean any large company, any corporate structure with local, regional and national management heirarchies.
The sum of my reflections is simple; as a low level worker you are utterly replaceable, they genuinely do not care about you. It makes no difference how good you are at your job, you are dispensible.
At my place of work one complaint will result in one of the directors ripping our general manager apart, even though we have about three thousand people a week through the doors they seem to think one compaint is statistically significant, bizarre!
Even though I have constantly excelled at my job I am no more secure than anyone, in five weeks I leave for India for a couple of months and I can not wait, I may come back here at christmas but we will see, I am soon to be successfully discontinued!
L.
Sunday, 1 July 2012
quod me nutrit me destruit. ( what nourishes me also destroys me. )
Some things seem to be necessary: drink, drugs of all kinds and excess in general. While this is true only in moderation, excess in moderation, what a strange concept.
Yet it is so, too much excess will in time destroy, too little excess will tire and bore. So it would seem we should find the right level of excess.
The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. (William Blake)
quod me nutrit me destruit.
(What nurishes me also destroys me.)
Monday, 23 April 2012
Saturday, 3 March 2012
This week
This week we will be getting out and doing some filming for slur.tv, we are going to make a short documentary about a homeless man called Nathan, the angle will be slightly different than the usual run of the mill homeless documentary. While dealing with the issue we will be focusing on the person rather than the issue as a faceless whole.
There are other projects in the pipeline too, we will be going to Sweden in a couple of months and London is on the cards as well.
Watch this space.
Monday, 6 February 2012
Hashish farm in the Riff mountains, Morocco.
I was recently in the Riff mountains in Morocco, this area until recently produced the vast majority of the hashish consumed in the world. In the last few years the relative lawlessness of Afghanistan has meant that they have taken over the title of the biggest producers but the Riff still produce massive amounts of the world's hashish.
Some of the most famous forms of hashish are produced here, King Hassan is one and Double Zero is another, these forms will cost you thirteen to fifteen euros a gram in coffeeshops in Amsterdam.
Anyway, back to the Riff. I was in a beautiful little town called Chef Chaouen, a few hours drive into the mountains from Tangier and from here I walked another couple of hours outside of town up into the hills where I was met by my contact. The contact is not what you would thinbk of as a drug dealer, more like a farmer really, which is actually what these people are.
We eventually arrived at a small building with an outdoor area, complete with table and a massive pile of weed drying in the sun; and two indoor rooms, one where hashish was made and tested by buyers and another where it was pressed into blocks and stored.
The business end first, I was offered two types of hashish, one known as pollen which is the press, unpressed hashish: light brown in colour and granular in nature; and the pressed form already shaped and wrapped in plastic wrap ready for swallowing and smuggling. These were both available for thirteen dirham a gram which was about one euro, or the other option was the creme de la creme of moroccan hashish, the King Hassan which cost about six euros a gram.
The deal done we now move into the first room where I am to get to make my own hashish. A large pile of dried weed is placed on top of a membrane stretched over a large bowl. This is in turn covered by another sheet of plastic and then I get to drum the top gently with two sticks, this first gentle beating will produce the better quality King Hassan or Double Zero hashish, later drummings will produce lower quality(but still very good) hashish.
In the other half of the room are a variety of people sat around a table, testing the hashish they have bought, as well as the Kiff, the traditional mixture of tobacco and weed smoked by so many of the Moroccan men for so many generations.
The hashish produced, known as pollen looks like this.
When I was done I was led out the back of the farm, to avoid people coming in, always discreet, and walked through field after field of plants before starting on the walk back down the mountains to Chef Chaouen.
L
Thursday, 2 February 2012
Mutantur omnia nos et mutamur in illis (All things change, and we change with them.)
It's been a while since my last post and as the title suggests, things have changed but others have stayed the same. Looking back on the early posts in my blog, I was not in such good shape at the beginning, events shape the man and I was seriously depressed; this has changed. The aim of the blog was to chart my progress to Cambodia and I will probably still end up there and will still have this as an aim but first I will aim to live elsewhere, maybe Spain, and to carry on travelling as often as I can.
I have a new job on the horizon now, working with a new website which will be arriving on the scene soon, slur.tv, my job is to create visual productions, slideshows and documentary film for the site, about anything interesting and from anywhere in the world, it is going to be great and I'll get to train my creative muscles.
L
I have a new job on the horizon now, working with a new website which will be arriving on the scene soon, slur.tv, my job is to create visual productions, slideshows and documentary film for the site, about anything interesting and from anywhere in the world, it is going to be great and I'll get to train my creative muscles.
L
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
I met Chris tonight.
He was shaking like a leaf so I bought him a coke; he’s staying tonight in the same hostel as me but tomorrow is uncertain as he does not have a penny to his name. This was a man genuinely wracked with anguish the like of which I have seldom seen, he has had a business for ten years and has just done a months’ work worth twenty-eight thousand pounds only to find the bigger business he was working for has gone into voluntary liquidation leaving him, a man of thirty something from Ed Balls constituency, with literally nothing.
This is what homeless people are made of, this happens.
It is a human tragedy and yet on so small a scale that almost no-one will ever know about it, let alone care, yet to Chris the scale is monumental.
He was shaking because he had just had an epileptic fit and his recent diet of noodles and stress no doubt exacerbated the situation. All I could do was buy him a coke to provide him with some sugar to hopefully help in the short term, no help tomorrow when he has nowhere to sleep however.
I feel guilty for being a bit down this week through pressures of my own, they are nothing like this. The owner of the liquidated company screwed him over because he could, they had spoken today, and the owner took his call from Marbella.
I really hope and pray that Chris has a support net to catch him, I really hope he does not end up on the street, I wish I could have helped more. Life is many things from tragic to wonderful but it is seldom fair.
L
He was shaking like a leaf so I bought him a coke; he’s staying tonight in the same hostel as me but tomorrow is uncertain as he does not have a penny to his name. This was a man genuinely wracked with anguish the like of which I have seldom seen, he has had a business for ten years and has just done a months’ work worth twenty-eight thousand pounds only to find the bigger business he was working for has gone into voluntary liquidation leaving him, a man of thirty something from Ed Balls constituency, with literally nothing.
This is what homeless people are made of, this happens.
It is a human tragedy and yet on so small a scale that almost no-one will ever know about it, let alone care, yet to Chris the scale is monumental.
He was shaking because he had just had an epileptic fit and his recent diet of noodles and stress no doubt exacerbated the situation. All I could do was buy him a coke to provide him with some sugar to hopefully help in the short term, no help tomorrow when he has nowhere to sleep however.
I feel guilty for being a bit down this week through pressures of my own, they are nothing like this. The owner of the liquidated company screwed him over because he could, they had spoken today, and the owner took his call from Marbella.
I really hope and pray that Chris has a support net to catch him, I really hope he does not end up on the street, I wish I could have helped more. Life is many things from tragic to wonderful but it is seldom fair.
L
In a previous post I mentioned reality.
How very blasé of me; what is reality.
Everything we experience is so intensely subjective that one single answer for that surely cannot be possible. I can watch something unfold before me and yet when I discuss this with the person by my side they have experienced it in a different way than I have despite the event being reality happening in front of us both. So many other factors affect the event and how it is translated from the eyes to the brain and it is of course our brain which defines how the entire world around us is experienced. Even here our brains simply define what can be experienced of the world around us, how much we can take in and understand. If we were to ask a dog how the world looked it would be in black and white but we would be unable to put into words much of the extra sensory information such as smells which we can never experience and so do not form a part of our reality.
Our minds are a limiting system.
Our minds limit what we can see, feel and sense in this world. What most people experience, I believe, is far from the full gamut of our world.
Have you ever wondered how certain artists can paint pictures with such vivacity and passion of a scene which to our eyes contains none of the elements the artist sees, an example would be starry night by van Gogh. I believe that certain people constantly experience the world as in a painting by van Gogh, this is how they relate to what is around us all. We mere mortals who are destined to see the world as our minds limit it can reach briefly up to the heights lived in by these artists using such mind expanding drugs as LSD. Maybe this is why many artists are slightly unhinged in our more conservative view of the world.
“All vasentlig konst kommer ifran nagonstans gemensamt, utanfor oss alla som vi all kan har tillgang till.” Ockie Nidsjo
How can we be anything but conservative? We simply don’t see in the colours they do.
L
How very blasé of me; what is reality.
Everything we experience is so intensely subjective that one single answer for that surely cannot be possible. I can watch something unfold before me and yet when I discuss this with the person by my side they have experienced it in a different way than I have despite the event being reality happening in front of us both. So many other factors affect the event and how it is translated from the eyes to the brain and it is of course our brain which defines how the entire world around us is experienced. Even here our brains simply define what can be experienced of the world around us, how much we can take in and understand. If we were to ask a dog how the world looked it would be in black and white but we would be unable to put into words much of the extra sensory information such as smells which we can never experience and so do not form a part of our reality.
Our minds are a limiting system.
Our minds limit what we can see, feel and sense in this world. What most people experience, I believe, is far from the full gamut of our world.
Have you ever wondered how certain artists can paint pictures with such vivacity and passion of a scene which to our eyes contains none of the elements the artist sees, an example would be starry night by van Gogh. I believe that certain people constantly experience the world as in a painting by van Gogh, this is how they relate to what is around us all. We mere mortals who are destined to see the world as our minds limit it can reach briefly up to the heights lived in by these artists using such mind expanding drugs as LSD. Maybe this is why many artists are slightly unhinged in our more conservative view of the world.
“All vasentlig konst kommer ifran nagonstans gemensamt, utanfor oss alla som vi all kan har tillgang till.” Ockie Nidsjo
How can we be anything but conservative? We simply don’t see in the colours they do.
L
Monday, 10 May 2010
Tempus omnia sed memorias privat (Time deprives all but memories)
Time is a strange concept really, I gave it bit of thought quite a few years ago then left it alone. What I came to is probably not original but I think it can be thought about anyway.
You see I know there are both cyclical and linear theories of time but I was thinking about it in a slightly different way, I was thinking of time as a great big sphere, the surface of the sphere would be what is called the “fabric of time”. This would allow for the theory of time to be both cyclic and linear depending upon the factors which rolled the sphere along the surface of reality.
Here of course comes the idea that there is no history or future, history exists only in the memories of the people who experienced it or in the imaginations of those who hear or read about it and in both cases these second hand, subjective experiences bear no relation to what actually occurred, if anything did actually occur.
The future is nothing but fantasy, or in the best case scenario, one of an almost infinite number of possibilities dependent upon how the sphere rolls and where the subject is on the surface of reality. (Reality is a concept to be dealt with in another post)
The phrase I used to be able to quantify this concept was “a constantly evolving present”, this being in reality unquantifiable in terms of how long this present lasted simply because the only methods we have of quantifying the passing of our lives is the totally human created concept of, you guessed it, time.
The method we have, the only method we have, of quantifying and thereby limiting our lives is the passing of the arbitrary minutes, seconds, hours and years. We have created a concept without which the entire fabric of western society would fall apart and our western lives would become worthless, and yet I have no memory of taking a part in this creation, yet we define ourselves and in some degree our usefulness to society by this very concept.
They do believe I am a thief
Because I take my time,
My time,
The time I give them from my time
becomes their time.
My time is running out,
I shout,
I need more time
Show me a sign,
Show me the way
To seize the day
Because I must make a stand
or die today.
Once we accept that this very chalice of a concept is used to control and limit us in our everyday lives then we can find an answer.
John Paul Sartre had an answer.
He talked about perfect moments when everything comes together so perfectly that the world in unison around us for just one moment and the perfect life is to strive for a series of these perfect moments leading from one to the other throughout our existences.
I am less ambitious. I simply recognise the amount of time we spend doing the kind of things we either hate doing or possibly even more insidious, simply find boring and tedious. I would call this Grey Time and I would like to try and eliminate as much of this as possible from my own life, Grey Time is time wasted in the most heinous fashion, because we are convinced we need to have this time, we are fooled by proverbs like “something good to those who wait” and “ the meek shall inherit the earth”.
Micheal Ende wrote in Momo about the men in grey, the time thieves. These men are invisible to us and yet they gradually coerce and convince us to save more and more time, but save it for what for the more we save the less chance we will ever have of using it. We are not saving time; they are stealing time from us.
The men in grey are real.
Strive to make your time red, orange or even yellow but at all costs avoid spending Grey Time and if you must save time, make sure you use what you have saved, they have enough already.
L
You see I know there are both cyclical and linear theories of time but I was thinking about it in a slightly different way, I was thinking of time as a great big sphere, the surface of the sphere would be what is called the “fabric of time”. This would allow for the theory of time to be both cyclic and linear depending upon the factors which rolled the sphere along the surface of reality.
Here of course comes the idea that there is no history or future, history exists only in the memories of the people who experienced it or in the imaginations of those who hear or read about it and in both cases these second hand, subjective experiences bear no relation to what actually occurred, if anything did actually occur.
The future is nothing but fantasy, or in the best case scenario, one of an almost infinite number of possibilities dependent upon how the sphere rolls and where the subject is on the surface of reality. (Reality is a concept to be dealt with in another post)
The phrase I used to be able to quantify this concept was “a constantly evolving present”, this being in reality unquantifiable in terms of how long this present lasted simply because the only methods we have of quantifying the passing of our lives is the totally human created concept of, you guessed it, time.
The method we have, the only method we have, of quantifying and thereby limiting our lives is the passing of the arbitrary minutes, seconds, hours and years. We have created a concept without which the entire fabric of western society would fall apart and our western lives would become worthless, and yet I have no memory of taking a part in this creation, yet we define ourselves and in some degree our usefulness to society by this very concept.
They do believe I am a thief
Because I take my time,
My time,
The time I give them from my time
becomes their time.
My time is running out,
I shout,
I need more time
Show me a sign,
Show me the way
To seize the day
Because I must make a stand
or die today.
Once we accept that this very chalice of a concept is used to control and limit us in our everyday lives then we can find an answer.
John Paul Sartre had an answer.
He talked about perfect moments when everything comes together so perfectly that the world in unison around us for just one moment and the perfect life is to strive for a series of these perfect moments leading from one to the other throughout our existences.
I am less ambitious. I simply recognise the amount of time we spend doing the kind of things we either hate doing or possibly even more insidious, simply find boring and tedious. I would call this Grey Time and I would like to try and eliminate as much of this as possible from my own life, Grey Time is time wasted in the most heinous fashion, because we are convinced we need to have this time, we are fooled by proverbs like “something good to those who wait” and “ the meek shall inherit the earth”.
Micheal Ende wrote in Momo about the men in grey, the time thieves. These men are invisible to us and yet they gradually coerce and convince us to save more and more time, but save it for what for the more we save the less chance we will ever have of using it. We are not saving time; they are stealing time from us.
The men in grey are real.
Strive to make your time red, orange or even yellow but at all costs avoid spending Grey Time and if you must save time, make sure you use what you have saved, they have enough already.
L
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Dia de Los Muertos
I have come to believe that the best we can ever do is to stumble through life, roughly, hopefully in the right direction.
Then of course it has to be asked what the right direction is. We are told often which direction society would like us to stumble in but if it is right is another question and right for whom?
The opening monologue of Trainspotting springs to mind here, and I paraphrase horrendously;
Choose a career
Choose a washing machine
Choose a wide screen fucking television
Choose life
Well I chose something else
What do we ever choose entirely for ourselves in this world? When all is said and done, what do we get out of our choices? You need to work till you are sixty five with two weeks holiday a year, then finally, when you are too old and knackered to make proper use of your time, and then you can relax, and die.
Fuck that!
Marcus Aurelius said, “We are but shadows and dust.”
He was right, how long after our deaths will we be forgotten? Even if we do something truly extraordinary we will unlikely be remembered for ourselves, everyone knows who Einstein was and what he did but who actually knows him, who alive now can actually claim to know what he was like?
When we die we become electricity passing from synapse to synapse in the minds of those who actually knew us, and then, when they die ? In the words of Jim Morrison,
“I want my kicks now before the whole shithouse comes tumbling down.”
Dia de los muertos
Today I live
Everyone around me is black-clad,
Faces painted white and skeletal.
Chanting
Moving
Writhing.
Festival of shadows,
Ornate coffins carried aloft
Through village streets.
Darkness celebrated, highlights life.
Today I live.
The more time I spend in the shadows
The more I appreciate the light,
Shining
Burning
Blinding.
Breaking clouds,
Banishing shadows from corners
Filled with people
Dressed in black.
Today I live.
Then of course it has to be asked what the right direction is. We are told often which direction society would like us to stumble in but if it is right is another question and right for whom?
The opening monologue of Trainspotting springs to mind here, and I paraphrase horrendously;
Choose a career
Choose a washing machine
Choose a wide screen fucking television
Choose life
Well I chose something else
What do we ever choose entirely for ourselves in this world? When all is said and done, what do we get out of our choices? You need to work till you are sixty five with two weeks holiday a year, then finally, when you are too old and knackered to make proper use of your time, and then you can relax, and die.
Fuck that!
Marcus Aurelius said, “We are but shadows and dust.”
He was right, how long after our deaths will we be forgotten? Even if we do something truly extraordinary we will unlikely be remembered for ourselves, everyone knows who Einstein was and what he did but who actually knows him, who alive now can actually claim to know what he was like?
When we die we become electricity passing from synapse to synapse in the minds of those who actually knew us, and then, when they die ? In the words of Jim Morrison,
“I want my kicks now before the whole shithouse comes tumbling down.”
Dia de los muertos
Today I live
Everyone around me is black-clad,
Faces painted white and skeletal.
Chanting
Moving
Writhing.
Festival of shadows,
Ornate coffins carried aloft
Through village streets.
Darkness celebrated, highlights life.
Today I live.
The more time I spend in the shadows
The more I appreciate the light,
Shining
Burning
Blinding.
Breaking clouds,
Banishing shadows from corners
Filled with people
Dressed in black.
Today I live.
Saturday, 30 January 2010
Batam al Ghul (the belly of the beast)
Here in the west we are exactly there, we are in the belly of the beast. We are incredibly lucky in many ways even if we are kept in the dark, often by ourselves.
I have known people here to grow up and even grow old ensconced in the belief that they are not only in the belly of the beast but also are the centre of everything, both political, cultural and moral. Many, if not all of the judgements we make about what happens in other cultures is judged using our perameters and there is a total inability to see the world through someone elses eyes.
This may well be a mechanism to make our lives more bearable and as such it is of course valuable but in a world where we do this there can never be true equality between the different worlds which coexist upon this chunk of earth.
Again we are not designed to strive for equality for our fellow man, this is a luxury we construct in the richer, more egalitarian parts of the world. Strip us of the things which keep us comfortable and safe and our real desires will and do shine through.
We are hardwired to survive at all costs, including the demise of others. This is our reality when stripped of everything else.
Most parts of the world are at least closer to this than we are. You look after yourself and your family because there is no social network to look after you if you fail, and people do fail.
The belly of the beast or the priviliged west?
You decide.
If you can make it in the developing world, you can make it anywhere.
I have known people here to grow up and even grow old ensconced in the belief that they are not only in the belly of the beast but also are the centre of everything, both political, cultural and moral. Many, if not all of the judgements we make about what happens in other cultures is judged using our perameters and there is a total inability to see the world through someone elses eyes.
This may well be a mechanism to make our lives more bearable and as such it is of course valuable but in a world where we do this there can never be true equality between the different worlds which coexist upon this chunk of earth.
Again we are not designed to strive for equality for our fellow man, this is a luxury we construct in the richer, more egalitarian parts of the world. Strip us of the things which keep us comfortable and safe and our real desires will and do shine through.
We are hardwired to survive at all costs, including the demise of others. This is our reality when stripped of everything else.
Most parts of the world are at least closer to this than we are. You look after yourself and your family because there is no social network to look after you if you fail, and people do fail.
The belly of the beast or the priviliged west?
You decide.
If you can make it in the developing world, you can make it anywhere.
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