Staring into the darkness with absolute certainty
and on the first of september she came spiraling back
found myself adrift in the mire this long deep year so far, found I didn’t write to you at all, found that I only found words for world’s vile paroxysms in small crevices of time when I was meant to be elsewhere, in repose, or could stand to stop from scrolling long enough to post an instagram story.
maybe that is also w r i t i n g but i think i should be banned from doing it !!!
i wanted at least to show you some photos and say something about the radio i’ve been making because its nice when peope listen and i found a lot of small joy in the heavy click of my camera this year, but the things to say kept getting longer and cloudier and i couldn’t sit still.
in berlin our eyes got used to a darkness so perverse that it clarifies exactly what is happening and why, the hands every weekend around my comrades necks gloves with weights inside them.
the chicanery of trying to move with intention into a wall starts to drive me mad and i try to stay better connected with friends in palestine. their voicenotes prove quite amply that the conditions which previously already seemed unbearable was infact the israeli idea of mercy. one tries to make me laugh on a call and says with a dark grin maybe next you can fundraise for the flowers on our graves. months pass and i work out systems and make other friends here to finangle other scams over and over as the noose tightens on the simplest matters of solidarity (your surnames do not match, unfortunately we do not service banks with that code) you move from feeling spooked to outraged to feeling like a criminal to having no choice but to embrace the clarity and find a way. this is a universal swing for so many in our shoes. the ones we love are enemies of the state, & c.
for a good long while the only possible way through was to organise feverishly enough that daily life here in relative safety albeit surrounded by teutonic demons seemed a bit less obscene, and i became propelled entirely by the centrifugal force between the meeting and the demo and meeting, copying the others, who stopped for breath far less than i.
there were the blessed rooms that we filled with those who were strangers to us last summer, that is when we managed to avoid room bookings getting cancelled. what you intellectually understand to be Political and Cultural Repression at work feels in practice often rather like a prank tv show, a perverse sketch. nearly always they will not say so, not directly, what the issue is. other times someone tricks you, a link to your problematisch statement is enough. the upstanding citizen of the deutsches left comes bursting in red faced as we prepare the exhibition demanding we condemn what he wants us to condemn. that someone has emailed his wife the Kuratorin and we simply have to stop. a stilting exchange takes place in German, I grip at a roll of electrical tape in my hot palm and visualise the oesophagus of a toddler cast onto stones that i saw on an instagram video from Nuseirat and I look at this mans eyebrows wonder what he thinks god looks like.
you get used to an ambient feeling that you’re doing something very wrong and dangerous because the cops and the state and most of the people, in every neighbourhood except this one, keep reminding you so, with anything from a sideeye to a pepper spray in the eye. or a leather thumb. this experience, i choose to charitably interpret, has the cumulative effect of making everyone feel insane and sometimes acting like it. your sweet and tender thought criminals fill in the gaps where the friends who frowned or said its c o m p l i c a t e d used to be. we expect everything of each other and more, craving any moment of shared identification against the murder logic and the violence of its enforcement. hide your kuffiyeh clean your phone leave in groups. free association. still we bicker and fiddle and our egos inflate to the size of our houses (unbombed) pronounce our own names over and over instead of the dead. grotesque. distracted, no one is above it. how often we (big we, not just here, all of us everywhere ~ re f. us ing) grope blindly for the essentials: discipline humility or sacrifice, grabbing only ego, survival of the fittest, or rubbing up against each other even though it hurts and is useless, but for the base pleasure of friction. a competition to be the most. i survey all the nasty little holes that identity politics bores into the knotty boards of this one fatal floor we have to stand on, doubling as a raft now too, and look back at the blood inside the telephone and i. could. weep.
in august i take myself to Morocco alone, finally read, look at the world again with my eyes not my jaw.
i slept for 27 hours and there’s a day when i take a walk through the hills to the atlantic and draw literal lines in the sand to step over what nature thinks of all this, get chased by dogs as i try to run up a sand dune and just let them find me. they roll over and return to their owner in the navy outpost.
As well as some dusty pdfs i read two memoirs: Diane di Prima - The New York Years Recollections on my life as a Woman and Cosey Fanni Tutti - Love Sex Music.
Most signifcantly for now I read BURNOUT, Hannah Proctor’s unbelievably timely exploration of the emotional experience of political defeat, and then i read it again. the re-read has the sensation going back for more cake in the fridge after the birthday. it weaves in so many of the currents washing around me, glorious feats of zooming scale that can only be called a spiral. you know i do not say that lightly. i refuse to get into any of this further in the hope I can find time to give such a brilliant book its due in the writing of it. but go, go.
there’s a day when i am ambiently distraught (menstruating) and happen upon this old castle which was ruined (they lie gently and say jimmy hendrix was inspired by it and name cafes after him but he came here after that song was written and i like it even more for this) i learn that the young boys who run horseback rides are amazing at taking dramatic portrait photos in high sahara/atlantic winds because its the main thing they get asked to do. i watch them bashfully offer the screen up to each beautifully made up girl on hiss horses who has been waiting to get this pic and with sand in their face and so they furiously adjust hijab and make him do it again and again then she is happy and so is he in his way and off they go again. later i make friends with harim who drives camels that will only stand up if u say bismillah he is also incredibly good at taking phone photos. he laughs at my sandy pointandshoot i don’t want to ride but i do get an introduction to tchoubaka, his favourite camel, named for his blue eyes.
i come back with cosey’s work ethic and diane’s forgiveness of her father wringing in my ears. i loved her retelling of the moment when she tries to explain zen buddhism to him and he surmises, from the back seat of a car, that he thinks he understands: ‘you can never make a mistake.’
i walk around and chuckle at things out loud and don’t feel self conscious.
if being alone is an artform then i’m making some of the greatest art of my life
>now listen.
I’m not here to tell you what to listen to, but once a month I stay up all night and try to make a radio programme and in amongst all this fretting and fraff I made some shows that I am really proud of. Feels like maybe I’ve got a sort of format that is a little bit just mine, which is a nice feeling.
If you have time, make time for some of them, i love new spiral timesers to connect with and radio is the one thing that feels alright at the moment.
Each of these is its own little universe of (i hope) sound ideas. dig in x
March 2024 - Girls Against the State
In honour of international (working) women’s day, here is a special spiral survey of the most potent messages for now from visionary political women, historical to the present day, with music to match. We have contributions from friends and comrades in the fight for gender justice around the world, and historical vignettes on socialist feminists and revolutionary communists, the gals who squatted and occupied and burnt and built and planned, refused state, settler, sexual violence and institutional capture, women who faced down tanks or took up arms with babies in their arms; for freedom. The show includes some lessons from a decade and then some inside the sticky trenches of feminist anti-violence work, voice notes from inspiring cool geniuses, for an end to this world as we know it.
We get into the infiltration of the British and Spanish state into the lives of women activists through undercover policing and deceiving them into relationships, and hear from survivors organising against this sexual abuse. To bring an end to every prison, we start with how we treat each other. So says Assata: It is our duty to fight. It is our duty to win. We must love and support one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
April 2024 - Outer Focus: Derek Jarman
“For this my TWENTY FIFTH show, it’s finally time for another OUTER FOCUS, the sideways Spiral Times vertical where we burrow deep into the sound universe of one group or artist I adore. This month it’s the turn of renaissance man and apex homo Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman (1942 - 1994) who spiralled onto and off of this mortal coil in Aquarius season. Derek Jarman's work is a lens for making art in loving fury, a hugely prolific filmmaker painter activist writer costume set designer collaborator and dreamer of the luscious and the profane, the forever king of the english deviants. This show is centred around excerpts of a glorious rare recording of Jarman reading aloud his only narrative fiction work, entitled ‘Through the billboard promised land without ever stopping.’ Of his activism he says simply: “Never mind rocking the boat, some of us wanted to sink the ship of state” Let’s lean into the politically potent and psychedelically campy sides of Jarman-universe, straddling his spikes to lumber across the nuclear shingle of Dungeness, poke around outside Prospect Cottage, and witnessing his glorious whole-life-art through a collage I made of Derek’s voice, clips from his film work, interviews and wider sonic world. His approach to dying changed something of what it means to die. His garden blooms anew for everyone who discovers his work, and so he lives. If you are new here, I hope you stop to sniff the rust.”
July 2024 - Hope is a Prism, No more Prisons
A spiral unchained. Stirring sounds of many genres made by incarcerated people and music about prisons of all kinds. The poetry and philosophy of the prison, inmate organising, uprisings, breakouts, and daring escapes. Hear excerpts from a conversation I was deeply honoured to have with Ciarán Dawson, a former political prisoner and Irish freedom fighter who was imprisoned in Long Kesh between 1977 and 1983 during The Troubles, who participated in the “no-wash” and blanket protests that led to the Irish Hunger strikes, as well as dispatches on Palestinian Political Prisoners on staying mentally free. From London we will hear from Kelsey, a longtime comrade peer and inspo of mine in gender justice organising who is an incredibly experienced campaigner against prison expansion, and spellbindingly knowledgeable. How do we make better arguments to end prisons? We go deep on her incredible successes with grassroots campaigning, the practical work of abolition, and new frontiers opening up to countering state violence. No one is free until we are all free.
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hmu love you glory to those who fight. for a swift and merciful end to the horror and may all babies surf ecstatic on great wave of justice soon to come x