THOSE FUCKING PITCHFORKS

Down the fucking garden looking for my fucking pitchforks and torches again.  Is there no let up, no reprieve, no rest for the mere wicked like me.  I'm cussing and swearing to myself about those fucking BBC employees getting all that money for sitting around on their fat fucking arses enjoying themselves at the expense of the hardworking TV licence payer.  They should be ashamed of themselves parading their opulent wealth to the impoverished austerity plebs in this economically thriving Britain.  Wait a minute; economically thriving Britain, impoverished plebs?  There seems some contradiction there.  Never mind I haven't the time or the energy to think about that now; I'm too fucking angry about these rich bastards.

Oh, there's Dave the fucking supercilious twat next door tending to his pretty little garden and always minding everybody else's business.  What's your problem Dave?  I don't suppose you give a fuck about those BBC presenters ripping off Britain and wallowing in money stolen from the proletariat.  It's the likes of them what make you and me so poor.  Well I guess you think you're one of the well off with your nicely mown 30 square foot of Roundup and your potted peculiars decorating your front porch.

What was that?  DUP, £1 billion pounds?  Billions gifted to Israel every year?  Lashings of money to the Chinese for an uneconomic Nuclear power plant?  50 billion railway extension?  What the fuck are you talking about?  I don't know about those complicated political matters, I'm just a normal guy who's fucking angry about the BBC presenters.  I hate Dave.  He always has to spoil a good soap box diatribe with some stupid esoteric facts that no one in their right mind gives a fuck about.  Why do I care about Neoliberal political philosophy?  I'm just a poor ignorant peasant.  I leave that stuff up to the experts running the country.

Now where did I put those fucking pitchforks?

A LETTER TO THE CEO OF THE COUNCIL

Social cleansing and democide.

Dear [Chief Executive Officer]

As a child I was bewildered by images of Nazi death camps.  How could ordinary people end up building railways, infrastructure, and camps to oppress and murder swathes of other people?  I have given this phenomenon a great deal of thought over the years.  There is a lot that has been studied and written about this aspect of the human condition.  Many perspectives contribute usefully to a better understanding of how these disasters come about.  Those perspectives involve psychology, sociology, political theory, statistical analysis, mathematical theories, emergent behaviour, complex systems, fiscal policies, and so much more.

Having found myself financially vulnerable I naturally turned to the Council (amongst others) for whatever assistance was deemed reasonable in today's society in Britain.  I have been attempting to deal with Boston Borough Council for over a year now and I am deeply shocked at what I have encountered.  I refer you to my letters of 10 April 2017 and 8 June 2017 to remind you of some of the issues that are currently impacting upon me.  It seems that the Council's attempts, with their current methods and paradigms, to address and ameliorate the situation are, in fact, exacerbating matters and peculiarly escalating the convoluted, inconsistent, deceptive, and harmful mode of operation.  It seems analogous to a fermenting decomposition that is out of control.

Being somewhat knowledgeable and experienced in software development it is interesting to note that there is a phenomenon referred to as software decomposition.  It occurs when software is constantly altered in an attempt to remove what are called bugs.  Without a proper overview and a deep understanding of the underlying structure the net effect is that the "fixes" increase the complexity and throw up more unexpected and unrelated errors.  The software begins to decompose.  From my perspective in dealing with the Council this phenomenon is quite evidently occurring within the Council.

At the start of this letter I referred to that old cultural icon of the Nazi death camps.  My reason for that reference was to draw attention to the decomposition of British society today.  We are building a sociopolitical infrastructure which is emulating the guiding of the most vulnerable people via procedural railways to virtual incarceration and ultimately psychological and physical destruction.  Grenfell Tower was not a random accident.  No amount of looking for someone to blame is going to resolve the problem.  That would be akin to thinking you could have stopped the Aberfan disaster by finding the one stone that started it all.

So what has brought me to writing this letter to you?  What scale of disaster could possibly have occurred that is so serious I should be writing to the Chief Executive of the Council, my Doctor, my local MP, and others alluding to social cleansing and democide?  It is a remarkably minor incident.  I have been sent a Summons.  Taken out of context, as if everything else were functioning well, the Summons could be viewed as a minor incident which could be handled perfectly satisfactorily in its own right like a parking ticket.  Taking it out of context, however, would be to deliberately ignore the underlying problem and consequently be aiding and abetting the catastrophic context in which it exists.

What is remarkable about this Summons is how small and inconsequential it is in itself; like a small stone in the Aberfan disaster.  I don't know if it is normal practice for the Council to Apply to the Courts immediately the first month of Council Tax becomes overdue but it certainly seems extreme and ridiculous.  It is all the more surprising that the Council, who not only know I do not have enough money to live but have written to me acknowledging that fact and we are in discussions about the situation and I have been assured this would not happen, that they instigate this procedure attaching £75 of costs thereby increasing the debt they wish to impose by 284% for being a month overdue.  Wonga springs to mind and I didn't even borrow the money in the first place.

What could possibly be the meaning of discussions if the Council ignore the content of the discussion and carry on as if nothing had occurred?  In fact it isn't even that is it?  This action is clearly a consequence of those discussions.  It has somehow been unusually prompted by the current events and communications between myself and the Council.  It is, in fact, a startling "up yours" announcement from the Council.  And the disturbing thing is, it is done with legal instruments.  The Council are using the law to actively abuse me.

Not only have the Council hounded and assaulted us for over a year but I have written to explain that.  The Council, for fear of being exposed, immediately addressed the issue albeit insufficiently.  The Council have driven one of us to the point of attempting suicide.  [Dave] has consequently left the area because he cannot survive in this town and has found a more supportive community in Wales.  So the Council didn't quite succeed in killing him but they did get rid of him.  On a national scale this is social cleansing which is not only recognised internationally as a crime against humanity but it is also, in specific cases, clearly counter to any and all espoused and postulated values and intentions.

It really is quite stunning to any sentient, conscious, or rational entity that the Council could have caused such harm to a member of the community and, having been informed of the consequences of their actions and recognising their part in the events, they should not only continue the same behaviour but escalate it to the point of lying to me in a meeting and consequently scraping the bottom of the barrel for any trace of the same mechanism of assault available to them by issuing an Application to the Court for the paltry sum of £40.77.

It really is as if they are entertained by the harm they are causing.  Their behaviour is reminiscent of a child poking an injured bird with a stick.  It has an air of being so innocent, so child like, it lacks even the faintest trace of personal responsibility.  It is fundamentally institutionalised sociopathic behaviour.  It is attempted murder by any general sense of the meaning of that phrase quite regardless of any delineated definition in statute law.

The bigger issue here and what equates to the same constructs that give rise to genocide is that the DWP are also failing and the medical profession is hamstrung  with respect to addressing or dealing with the catastrophic harm being perpetrated by this current Government through its various bloodsucking tendrils via institutions like the Council.

I will be a little harsh here by way of attempting to convey my position clearly.  You may, and certainly some do, find it amusing that I would get so distressed by such a petty bureaucratic vexation.  But the malicious humour would only be a disguise for the inherent inner knowledge of the fundamental transgression against what it is to be human.  Nothing but a human could snigger or scoff at such a self evident, self contradictory, and cruelly harmful state of affairs.  Not only are you party to killing us but you want to hide that fact from public view by way of hiding it from your own conscious awareness.  You want impunity to continue to destroy those around you.

The current limited paradigms by which our culture attempts to interpret these events are now the cause of the problem.  Somehow we have to move beyond this simplistic, rather ignorant, anti-intellectual, dogmatic, authoritarian, oppressive, and catastrophically destructive mode of operation.

To conclude by bringing this letter to what could be interpreted as a more practical level I will explain what needs to happen.  The Council, in line with their purported intentions, need to pay the full rent on our current home.  They need to clear us of any Council Tax Liability.  The DWP need to provide whatever is required to meet the financial demands placed on us by this society to have the bare essentials to live in a half way civilised manner.  The NHS needs to put some serviceable resource into attending to the psychological and now physiological damage that has been inflicted on us by the actions of the Council and the DWP.  Then we could achieve a stable situation in which my daughter and I could recover and begin to be a productive asset to this community.  Failing that, your only justification for being employed is to continue to do harm to us to keep your job.  It is a salient observation that it cost this country well in excess of £20,000 to deal with [Dave] for the three weeks following his attempted suicide because you couldn't afford him his statutory pittance to live.

Do something creative and humane about this please.

Yours sincerely

RECOIL

Still image from the film Recoil.

Recoil is an abstract non-narrative film possibly more relevant today even than it was in 1981.

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Recoil is a short 10 minute film made by Nik Allday in 1981.  The concept originated with raw material of video feedback and some sparse nuclear bomb footage available at the time.  The idea was to represent in abstract form the cruel chaotic dysfunctional nature of the human condition with all its potential for self destruction.  It was conceived as a manifestation of wretched anger, fury, and regret.  A story board was constructed and the diagrams created and slowly the concept began to take shape.

Title screen.

The sound track needed to dynamically compliment and substantially echo the tortured demonic soul of the film.  Cabaret Voltaire seemed like a natural choice and so Nik approached Stephen Mallinder with the project to see if he would be interested in assisting in creating the audio component.  Cabaret Voltaire inhabited part of an old factory in Sheffield at the time called Western Works where they had their sound studio.  Mal seemed to like the idea and so work began and multiple tracks were laid down.  With Nik's conceptual perspective and Mal's creative talent and technical skills a masterpiece of distorted, rhythmic, cacophonous, soundscape was manifest and mixed down to a master quarter inch tape.

Some credits.

All the raw visual material was transferred to high contrast black and white film and the editing began.  It took many weeks of dedication and endless late nights to cut the film, coordinate the sequences, and to meld the abstract construct into the contiguous, throbbing, undulating, violent, distorted, and nihilistic masterpiece that is Recoil.  At the time of its initial release there were various reactions some of the more memorable being that it should have a health warning and that it would be better called the migraine machine.  There were one or two voices that claimed it was a work of genius too.

Apart from a few private viewings in the late 1980s Recoil slowly vanished into obscurity languishing in some inaccessible oblivion.  Life continued and Recoil became a distant nostalgic memory alive and well in my mind but out of reach in the real world.  Until, one day, I found a worn out copy in a box in a garage.  The hunt was on.  I searched through the rotting mass of furniture, collapsing cardboard boxes, old art work, and even a decaying cat corpse, and eventually located several almost archaeological remnants of the original material for Recoil.

16mm optical sound track in good condition.

I was delighted when I found the original quarter inch tape of the soundtrack but to my horror it had degraded and was suffering what is called "sticky-shed syndrome".  This appears to be a problem with a limited batch of tape produced in the late 1970's which used an unstable binder.  Fortunately I eventually located the original master 16mm optical track along with the original master 16mm visual film.  On further inspection these masters, shown above and below,  were well protected by their inner wrapping and appear to be in almost perfect condition.

16mm film only with no sound track.

I managed to get some equipment to view the rather worn out combined film that I found first and have extracted some still images as shown bellow.

Stills gleaned from the film.

Having contacted a variety of archive film experts it appears the two separate masters can be digitised and combined into a digital master and reproduced for a fee.  Help bring this piece of Art History back to life; contribute to this project now and please share this page because it's the only way other people get to hear about it.  You can donate by clicking the link below.

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