WIZ opens ‘Brighton Rock’s’ film festival with masterclass. Sold out.

20 June 2023

    #406

    “Looking back I feel as if I was never really there, that I was storing up all these experiences, gathering material as opposed to living it, always the author never the character in the book, which explains why I wanted to be a writer obviously.”  –David Keenan from This is Memorial Device

    #405

    “Let your heart break and drop the story” is attributed to author Pema Chödrön. Her quote is often cited as a prescription for the first and essential stage of recovery from devastating loss, life changing trauma, and inconsolable heartache. But this is curious advice for those who already are overwhelmed by sadness, rage, guilt, or shame. After all, when we are besieged by these feelings, how much more heartache can we bear?  As I think Chödrön would put it, the answer is that the story we attach to our feelings may get in the way of fully experiencing the depths of our emotional despair. The reasons we use to justify our feelings or explain why something bad has happened, inevitably create a narrative that revolves around victimization and blame. And the more we get caught up in a story that serves as a justification for our feelings, the more we get trapped—ultimately prohibiting ourselves to feel grief or rage that needs no justification at all. This is why unleashing our most ugly and fearful feelings can be so liberating. In those moments, we are freed from causality and intellectualization, freed from turning our feelings against ourselves, and freed from believing that finger pointing will make us feel whole through vindication or revenge.  When we learn to lead with our broken hearts, not our heads, we can find a profound solace for which we all yearn. This place is at the heart of soul. 

    Pema Chödrön Born: 14 July 1936

    #403

    ‘What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.’

    -Nicolas Abraham, Notes on the Phantom, 1987

    #400

    RUN AWAY

    …is what most human beings would like to do a great deal of the time. Running is the flight part of the ‘fight or flight’ deeply in our bodies and our past, it has been our protection, an evolutionary momentum and a biological memory deep in the human body that allowed our ancestors to survive to another day and bequeath to us, generations later, this day. 

    To want to run away is an essence of being human, it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice. To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship or from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance, thus allowing us a deeper honesty and sense of presence.  

    Strangely, we are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans, when part of us does not want to be here, or doesn’t know how to be here. 

    Presence is only fully understood and realised through fully understanding our reluctance to show up. 

    To understand the part of us that wants nothing to do with the full necessities of work, of relationship, of loss, of doing what is necessary, is to learn humility, to cultivate self-compassion and to sharpen that sense of humour essential to a merciful perspective of both a self and another.

    In the wild, the best response to dangerous circumstances is often not to run but to assume a profoundly attentive identity, to pay attention to what seems to threaten and in that attention, not to assume the identity of the victim. 

    Through being equal to fierce circumstances we make ourselves larger than the part of us that wants to flee while not losing its protective understandings about when it might be appropriate.

    We decide not to run not only because there are many who would be left behind who cannot run as fast as we can, but also because in turning to the source of the fear we have the possibility of finding a different way forward, a larger good, through circumstances, rather than away from them in some supposedly safe area where threats no longer occur. We know intuitively that most of the time, we should not run, we should stay and look for a different way forward, despite the evolutionary necessity. 

    Rarely is it good to run, but we are wiser, more present, more mature, more understanding and more thoroughly human when we realise we can never flee from the need to run away.

    ‘Run Away’ taken from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words By DAVID WHYTE

    #399

    “I don’t think people realise how the establishment became established. 

    They simply stole land and property from the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, 

    gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since”.

    TONY BENN 1925 – 2014. Served as a MP for thirty seven years.

    #338

    He who binds to himself a joy
    Does the winged life destroy.
    He who kisses the joy as it flies
    Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

    -William Blake 1757-1827

    ‘YOU HAVE FAILED AS AUDIENCE’ documentary, wins best film audience award @ Kinemastik Film Festival, Malta 2021

    #252

    ‘I turned down the OBE because it’s not a club you want to join when you look at the villains who’ve got it. Its all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest.’   –Ken Loach

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    #250

    ‘Alienation’ –I know it is there whenever I sing a love song, or recite a poem, whenever I handle a banknote or enter a shop, whenever I glance at a poster or read a newspaper. At the very moment the human is defined as ‘having possessions,’ I know it is there, dispossessing the human’  -Henri Lefebvre

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    #248

    ‘I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing, even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.’ -Thelonious Monk

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    #242

    Ché Guevara: 14th June 1928 -9th October 1967 
    ‘The powerful of the earth should take heed: deep inside the T-shirt where we have trapped him, the eyes of Ché Guevara are still burning with impatience’  -Ariel Dorfman

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    #237

    ‘I was so moved and so disturbed that when I left the theatre and attempted to put on my hat, I couldn’t find my head!’?? -Jean-François Lesueur after an early performance of Beethoven’s fifth symphony.

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    #234

    ‘Here’s to Britain’s young. You were ridiculed. Patronised. Demonised even. 
    And you may have changed history…’  -Owen Jones, writer, post election, 8th June 2017

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    #229

    ‘While there are still minds to be moved, imaginations to be stirred, a true song/film may yet perform it’s explosive life -enhancing function. We may yet be avenged’ -after Lindsay Anderson

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    #227

    ‘I don’t know how radical you are, or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough. 
    One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself’.  -Vladimir Lenin 1870 -1924

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    #223

    ‘Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.’  -Terence McKenna
    psychedelicsociety.org.uk

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    #216

    Stoned immaculate…

    ‘Benny Shanon’s controversial theory that Moses was under the influence of hallucinogens when he received the law. His paper, ‘Biblical Entheogen’s’ details parallels between the effects induced by the psychedelic brew Ayahuasca, and the Bible’s account of the life of Moses.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/05/religion.israelandthepalestinians
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Shanon

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    #214

    But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence,… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. – Ludwig Feuerbach

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    #213

    This is not a joke. If the Beatles had been black, what would they have been called? Niggers.

    (It’s suggesting that because the Beatles were white (like Elvis) they -particularly in America- were able to transcend prejudice of the essentially black music styles they’d appropriated.
    If they’d been black no matter how successful they were they still would have been called ‘niggers’.)

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    #205

    ‘I asked the producer what the budget was, the producer said: ‘I’ll tell you what the cocaine budget was $750 00’. 
    I thought for a second and said: ‘Well, its all up there on the screen’   -Michael Caine 1984

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    #203

    Louise Michel, ‘the grande dame of Anarchism’ was born on this day 1830.
    ‘Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance.’
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Michel

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    #201

    ‘Pizza is the staff of life. Without pizza and other fine Italian foods, there is no happiness, okay?’  -John Goodman from ‘Fallen’ 1998

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    #199

    ‘Your dark sunglasses, won’t make you Lou Reed,
    Your dark sunglasses just make it hard to see…

    Your dark sunglasses won’t make you look like…
    John Cale,

    Sterling Morrison, 

    or even…

    Doug Yule…’

    -Bill Baird mp3

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    #196

    ‘Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately, try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone. One question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what is: Does this path have heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through bush, or into bush. In my life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.’  

    -From ‘The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge’ by Carlos Castaneda

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    #195

    On artist Leonora Carrington: ‘Those respectable people, who for a dozen years, had invited her to dine in a prestigious restaurant have still not recovered from the embarrassment when they noticed that, while continuing to take part in the conversation, she had taken off her shoes and meticulously covered her feet in mustard’ -Alejandro Jodorowsky

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    #194

    Kill Hope!
    ‘How hard it is to kill hope! Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death. Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life. Once more it worms its way into one’s heart, to instill its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion.’ -Dorothy Strachey

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    #192

    ‘you have to understand,
    that no one puts their children in a boat
    unless the water is safer than the land…’

    from ‘HOME’ by Warsan Shire http://seekershub.org/blog/2015/09/home-warsan-shire/

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    #182

    As Tony Benn was fond of saying about grassroots social change: ‘First they ignore you, then they say you’re mad, then dangerous, then there’s a pause and then you can’t find anyone who disagrees with you.’

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    #179

    Tony Wilson (Factory Records) asked Sid Vicious if he wrote for the man in the street. He replied ‘I’ve met the man in the street and he’s a cunt.’

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