Dunbloggin, for now

After a few relentless months, even the laid back pace of the Isle of Man gets too much.
This blog is no longer achieving what I want it to, and I'm too bored, bemused or bewildered to do much about that right now.
So -off to somewhere warm to sit under a tree and do very little for a while.
Back in a week or two, hopefully able to record this madness some call Mannin with a little more wisdom, a little less world-weary pessimism and frustration, and a lot more wit.
See you later.

Damp squib

More evidence yesterday that the evangelical lunatic fringe is in recession.
I’ve blogged once or twice on the desperate efforts of the Scripture Union to recruit smaller and smaller kids, and how despite Education Department support they’re failing. ‘Take the Smarties and Run’ – must be the most popular game in some junior school playgrounds these days.
Now see http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=11214 , and a near relative at http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=28288&area and discover that even the most barefaced bible-blaggers this island can churn out are losing. Also, nice to see them admit what we’ve always known, that the numbers attending their annual hyped-to-hell-and-back ‘yoof fest’ are minimal.
Once the usual visitors (three or four extended families from a part of England best known to medical experts for extensive inbreeding) are detached we’re left with….....what exactly? Half a dozen preachers trying to outshout each other, any kids too young to stay home in case someone from the DHSS peeks through the window, recognises them as the same kids they’ve already counted as some other godbotherer’s and cuts the whole congregation’s benefits…....and that would be about it.
Think about this – if expecting up to 100 is their biggest year yet, what must the real figures have been in previous years? Also bear in mind, after unfortunate incidents in early years which only went unreported due to favours being called in, the organisers don’t let local media on site to look around or take photos. Thus all reports and pictures are from the organisers themselves.
For off-island readers, Firestarter is run by some dubious characters from the island’s most notorious evangelical cult, with much of the cost underwritten by even more dodgy folk. This year they’re back in their old venue – a campsite set up with grants from government and churches which was meant to cater for a fictitious Christian tourist trade.
Last year the whole freak show moved to St. Johns, heartland of the local BNP and godbothering rednecks. Not sure why – could have been part of a concerted effort by the island’s most notorious faith-biased parasites to establish the site of the Tynwald Ceremony as ‘Christian’, though more likely because there was a government grant going begging or the usual campsite actually expected them to pay all the gas and electricity bills they ran up.
Might have been because the white-flighters who hang out at the golf club bar next door complained when howling godbotherers drowned out their vacuous drunken rants. Might have just been because Ramsey’s RNLI volunteers point blank refused to pull any more dozy Christians out of the water, where they had a tendency to go paddling late at night (while blissed out after marathon prayer-fests) then get right out of their depth.
Anyway, they’re back up here. Sadly I have a previous appointment in a sunnier clime, so when the inevitable happens and the golfers and godbotherers bump into each other again I won’t be there to see which sad act comes out on top.
Oh, and you might want to take a note of the sponsors too. There’s really no excuse for this nonsense, so no respectable business would go near it.

Subsidising the abusers

Yet more evidence of the insidious merging of public services into faith-based centres of excrement today. See http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/allwelcomeatfami.xml - on the surface just another clumsy attempt to keep the music service going at the Department of Education and Institutional Child Abuse. But note the junior choir venue at the end of the press release.
I don’t get it.
On the one hand the absolute dregs of the local zombie-worshipping community whine because the Manx government won’t let them turn every school into a makeshift church (so that the parasites running the cults can pocket all the collection without having to maintain a church building). On the other, the DEC yet again pays to use church buildings which would otherwise be empty, and thus keeps them going with yet more quiet public subsidies.
We shouldn’t just object to yet more public money being given here to a homophobic organisation. We should object to something advertised as a public sector service being offered from a premises dedicated to perpetuating a misanthropic view of humanity.
We should also object to Manx education department premises being hired out to parasitical hate groups posing as religious organisations, while the same premises (thanks to the private prejudices of education department staff) are not available to groups who fight for human rights or to otherwise benefit humanity.
This isn’t public service. This is public subsidy of sexist, homophobic, neo-colonial, anti-democratic (and eventually anti-human) thinking.

Never mind the Arts Council, I was the Dog's Bollocks

I had the wierdest experience yesterday. Don’t think I’m going to recover from it in some time.
Really got back a sense that, once in my life, I did something not just good but damn good. Excellent, a one-off, no-one else could have or has done it.
The thing is, 28 years ago in Belfast I founded a thing called Calamitous Clown Collective – a performance group that did clown shows in community centres, schools, in the street, at small town festivals…..places like that. Doesn’t sound much, except you have to know what Belfast was like at the time.
Absolute hell! Two communities who only communicated with each other to kill each other, a police force riddled with protestant paramilitaries and a death squad operating with state impunity to assassinate political undesirables, no law and order on the estates except that dealt out by the Provies or the UDA….
..and somewhere in this mess kids were trying to grow up and parents wanted that to happen without them being too screwed up, which wasn’t going to happen in schools and an education service run totally on sectarian lines - as was access to most government jobs, while outside the public sector were simply no jobs at all.
I was working there with an arts group that somehow did work on both sides of the sectarian divide. We’d ask kids ‘What do you want to do’, and ineviably they’d answer ‘This is Belfast, you can’t do anything’. So one day I got pissed off and said ‘OK, if you can’t do anything, let’s try the maddest, most outrageous thing we can, and if we fail, doesn’t matter cos you can’t do anything anyway but we still had the best laugh trying…’
And one kid said, ‘well, you couldn’t put on a circus show in Divis Flats’ ……and next Christmas we did, and we went on performing all round Ireland.
Which pissed off serious art bores somewhat, because the style of clowning we did was faster, louder, fuller on than anything anyone had ever seen ....... anywhere….. ever! Street kids from the Falls and Sandy Row with all the black humour you develop from those places, really going for it. Not so much Marcel Marceau or those baggy pants saddoes in the proper circus, more like Chaplin on speed performed by the Sex Pistols or Motorhead.
Wow, the English ‘alternative theatre’ types and the Dublin mime mafiosi hated it – almost as much as kids and Northern Ireland’s hardcore punk community loved it. We could, and did, blow anything else the ‘proper’ arts and theatre community could produce off stage.
There’s one BBC Northern Ireland TV clip I’d kill to see again. A TV producer and the manager of the Undertones put on a street festival in Belfast – mostly punk bands, and the Arts Council tried to hijack it. Welfare State International – then the UK’s leading cutting edge dangerous ‘alternative theatre troupe’ (at least to Guardian readers) were putting on some big performance in Botanical Gardens, and came marching down the street with their ‘rather droll’ version of a clown brass band just as the cameras were about to roll on our show. The entire street went silent, seething as WSI honked and bashed their way past, for all the world like an STD at an orgy.
I was fuming, more wound up than usual at their cheek, so as they passed the crowd and got to the top of the street I flew on stage and yelled ‘Never mind the Arts Council, we’re the Bollocks' as we went storming into our act. That street erupted like a riot kicking off.
Fecks sake, this was 'only' a clown show. Small kids fidget and get bored at the clown rich parents book for a birthday party. But here were hundreds of not just small kids but grown adults pushing each other - and even armed coppers - out of the way to get closer to the stage. I'd been at quieter Clash gigs than this!
And a year later it was all over – for me anyway. I had an accident performing, plus other heavy stuff happened and I had to give it all up, move away.
I knew the show went on. I knew some of the guys in 1985 put together something called Belfast Community Circus, which evolved, got serious and is now teaching circus arts to folk all around Europe, but I lost contact and never had a part in it.
Then yesterday at Peel Carnival some Northern Irish street performers looked strangely familiar. I recognised the full-on aggressive style, the dramatic build-up of the tricks, even my old bed of nails. It was like it must be for errant parents seeing a kid you were parted from at birth, fostered, all grown up and doing stuff to make you proud, without even knowing you.
I’m boasting, but I don’t care. I MADE that, I brought it to life and it brought joy to others. Seeing that one good thing from my distant past – almost forgotten, made me realise I neeedn’t care about all the petty crap going on around me, needn’t be dragged down by all the nonsense jobs and halfwit employers I must endure for the foreseeable future to look after my family. Because just once I created something so unique, so great, that no-one else could have done it. And it’s still excellent, still bringing nothing but joy to those who do it or experience it.
My Mona Lisa, my punk as fuck Sistine Chapel.
Never mind the Arts Council. Never mind anything. Yesterday was the dog’s bollocks.