And so it goes.Apparently according to official news reports,Iceland is on the verge of bankruptcy;which must be terrible news for all fat,dim people out shopping for turkey flavoured potato burgers.of course the current international financial imbroglio is no mere laughing matter,it is however an occasion for loud cheering and for exuding schadenfreude;the sort of schadenfreude this city will feel come FOOOO Day next May when the least of all of our lives'burdens leave office.People,and perhaps mostly the fat dim sort who were genetically engineered to vote for only Stasi candidates marginally less dim and fat than themselves,thus feeling "included".The groaning moaning wobbly folk no doubt will spontaneously recall what a jolly "listening" council the stasi used to be and how they really,really,honestly ,erm,listened.Didn't hear anything mind,but,boy,could they listen.it all probably got drowned out by the chorus of wheezing hippopotamuses munching on their NHS prescribed lard defficiency supplements after suffering from calorie withdrawal symptoms when asked to stop eating for a moment and use their primary facial orifices for something else,like asking questions of their stasi creators.When the last banker in the last branch of the last bank sees that it is 4 o'clock,gets up,switches the light out and finally shuts the door;it is only then that the rest of mankind will realise what a complete and utter waste of time capitalism and the "free"market delusion actually was and how amazing with hindsight the level and depth of attachment most of us had to the liars,swindlers,fraudsters,rip off merchants,hoodwinkers,cheats,decievers,snake oil salesmen,con artists,spivs,downright crooks,userers,licensed thieves,oppressors of widows and orphans and general detritus of mankind that one can only hope are finally going to be swept into the gutter of history,them and their degenerate system which has actually achieved nothing and is,now exposed as being actually worth,absolutely nothing;"yeah,say it again",capitalism,what is it good for ?Now when that happens the holiday season will be upon us once again and with FOOOO Day to look forward to in May;life really just can't get any better than this,Well,perhaps if Spurs and Newcastle bith get relegated?

Rhetorical question;if rugby league,pro and am.are so intrinsic to this city and district's cultural life why does the soon to be out office Stasi's official "cultural Tragedy,er,strategy document"make no mention whatsoever of rugby let alone any other mass participation sport in its pages?Then again,the Clarence Park Free Festival and all the work of the music Collective isn't mentioned,neither are the literary arts and practsing artists,etcetc.So much for culture,new stadiums,new pools,new anything,oh and by the way the stasi blame directly and unequivocally the Pugney's parking charge protest campaign for inflicting the losses on the stasi's budget.If local newspaper letters pages are straws in the wind of public opinion then what we read are the equivalent of nails in the stasi's coffin come next May.That much is inexorable.They've about 200 days left and counting.They are now in a terminal state of decline and entropy,that the best and kindest thing to do is wreck by any means possible,demos,protests,letters,leaflets,chaining to the gates,and an unmitigated torrent of vitriol and denunciation all their works,all their plans all their endeavours.To get drawn into their criminally insane pantomime committees,meetings,is risible in the extreme.What on earth is the point or what can be gained by succumbing to such weakness.The stasi are on a ventilator until May;help switch it off a.s.a.p.The socialist/pretend voodoo politics of the stasi are awaiting their last rites,their cretinous ineptitude likewise,their unforgivable hostility towards groups and individual artists who simply never bowed down and worshipped at their unholy altars are now of only passing concern.And in the great big wide world out there,the U.S.Congress is still refusing to self delude itself and buy into another big lie.Goodnight,and good luck.

And here we go...700 hundred billion dollars!Best news I heard since learning that Maggie thatcher really has taken up residence in cloud cuckoo land.Although that probably makes her the best qualified to run present day"Airstrip One".That grey,amorphous overcrowded sliver of eternal despondency some of whose citizenry still endearingly refer to as "bwittan" or "yukay?"or "yes im fine thank you how's yourself?"The whole thing's just a load of cojones,it really is.Buddah'd end up with existential dread just thinking about the whole eviscerated pantomime.I mean,finance capitalist create a fully blown capitalist economic crisis.And what does the putative War criminal whitehall regime announce on the basis of their wisdom,experience and fitness to pretend to govern,yees Bears really do defecate in woods.A quick rendition of "I was Kaiser Bill's Batman" and the whole of the conference floor mimicking Generalissimo Brown's sctoch yuk,yuk,yukkety yuk,as he appears fully at ease with the world and his own shrivelled intellect at not only appearing to be that stupid,but actually confirming to the discerning world,that yes he is stupid.And so it goes.on the far more quotidian level,our own recipients of 30 pieces of ideological silver,Herr Buchhandlung und Frau Baustellen are using the manchester Symposium to escape.Although it'll be The Great Escape we'll all be whistling when those to incompetents are finally turfed out of office come next May.Who knows,and I'm really loking forward to the double peolpe's celebration of VE day and FOOOO Day.O is for off and out and office;the eff is for really,terribly sincerely.To state that the Stasi are cynically trying to divert the local electorate's attention from this city's impending financial doom and ruination,by creating a non issue is like observing that Labour defecates on the working class and has done since 1914;oh no!really?and what evidence is there for this outrageous assertion.Erm.the entire recorded history of 20th.century Britain for a start.I digress.Really?A Tory councillor made some stupid statements on hisa own blog.Panic panic moral chaos.The leader of the council then harangues the guy in the council chamber and writes to that guy's party leader.blah blah waffle waffle.Still that's far more important and relevant than say,the stadium that will never be or the Temple of the great white elephant down by the river,or the institutional cultural apartheid being enforced by council officers against the literary arts and artists.And so it goes.I'm only kind of sorry that I won't be allowed to vote for Sarah Palin this fall.Really.

Is part of our culture.Eh?Is part of our culture,is what usually appends any statement or official response to any matter or question arising from,say difficulties surrounding our Rugby League clubs,professional or not.Also any other form of organised sporting activity.The statement or response usually ends with,working together with the council.Yes they do put together with.They don't do grammar.Know what i mean,eh?yer what,ang on.The stasoid leadership,or if you prefer,Fuehrungschaft,really ought to pack up their old kitbags right now and take their thirty pieces of silver with them and go spend their amoral remuneration say at snowscape or somewhere of equal cultural validity.No money,no ideas,no plans,no nous,no understanding of anything remotely cultural,no honesty,no openess,no dialogue,no debate,no innvation,no discussion,no responsiveness,no adaptability,no trust,no confidence,just about sums up Box,Jefferey and all their stasi henchmen,bootlickers,lackeys,toadies,hangers on,spies,saboteurs,traitors,informers,careerist sycophants and the imbeciles who pretend that things are somehow remotely different from all the aforementioned.Get rid,be off,be gone,now and forever and all their cretinous architectural drawings for The Temple of The Great White Elephant now being thrown up,i.e. vomited into existence down by the river.Why don't they go and do something marginally less hollow and meaningless,like go on a demo with placards proclaiming the territorial integrity of that other American State by the name of Georgia on the Black Sea.there's only one thing more loathsome than a megalomaniac and that is a failed megalomaniac.And boy do we have them in"spades" in this city,running this city,running it in the sense of running it aground or slap bang into an iceberg.The sound you hear emanating from city hall these days right up till May2009 is the sound of deckchairs being rearranged on the Titanic.WaDrowning,or just waving frantically goodbye?Both,hopefully,prayerfully.

"A confederacy of dunces",by John Kennedy Toole is a seminal work of modern fiction,well not just "modern",fiction in general.The title is borrowed from Jonathan Swift."When a true genius comes into the world,you shall know him by this sign;all the dunces will be in confederacy against him".The sheer human poignancy of Toole's work is that he was already several years dead when the book first appeared.Artistic endeavour and all its inherent and attendant frailties took their toll ofJKT.In 1981,"Confederacy.."was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.JKT was buried in 1969;his Mother it was who campaigned,lobbied and obsessively contacted those who eventually succumbed to her wishes that her son's book be published.The only extant copy she had at the time was densely typed carbon copy papered version.And so it goes,to borrow Vonnegut's aphorism.What gets people to be creative in the first instance,seriously,determinedly creative is at one and the same time the wellspring of their eventual destruction in one form or another.The success of someone's work after they've died is,to put it mildly one heck of a son of a bitch to use an americanism.Nothing worthwhile can ever be achieved without pain and sacrifice.The Stoics were merely observing and commenting upon an invariable certainty,an indivisible truth.Genius hurts,creativity bleeds,if you want calm rationality unencumbered by emotion,by passion,by extremism,then it's best you avoid creative persons;if you ever find yourself getting in their way,either through obduracy on your own part or simply because you are non creative trash and wouldn't grasp genius if it were placed in the palm of your hand,step aside,spare yourself the wrath that will surely ensue.The point of revolution is revolution;the purpose of art is ,art!And so it goes.The only people actually capable of running,organising and manging arts/cultural festivities are the creators of said art/culture.All else is failure and mediocrity.Invariably.Cities like our dear old Wakey are run by the very same "confederacy"that's better off being left to their own non creative devices and entertainments.That usually involves coloured crayons.Lots of 'em.tried Red yet,anyone?Ther,there,mummy'll collect you at dinner time.

For those of us who weren't around in '29,or during the Reagan/Thatcher era and all the collective capitalist insanity;this is what a recession looks like!The key concept,as people who engineered unrepayable loans to millions of low waged americans keep pointing out,that word is ,"confidence".Hence,"confidence trick".the proverbial trick is to engender "confidence".It is a variable and at various stages throughout history,like today for example,confidence wanes.Secular,scientist superstitions spread like a plague.One idiocy reinforces all the other prevailing idiocies.Very often the most seemingly intelligent,articulate,educated,well versed and prominent people espouse the fashionable doctrines of the day.Twenty years later the very same people get to make documentaries questioning themselves as to how they managed to get things so wrong.They invariably do;get things wrong.The bigger the lie the more likely they are willing to fool themselves,and because of their social pre-eminence others follow suit,out of habit rather than conviction.False consciousness.Denying the inherent and irreconcilable dichotomy between the objective material interests of labour and those of the forces of Capital.it is basic economics.This is how the world works.The diverse ideological representations that come and go like so much ephemera merely construct symbols or pictures whereby most people can "digest" what otherwise would merely seem as immutable and non negotiable.Totalitarian.Which of course the capitalist mode of production and consumption is in reality.Hence notion like "the american dream",hence new fascism(sorry,labour)and its quixotic programme of americanising us whilst bizarrely uniting politically with failed stalinist and fascist staes with whom we don't even have a shared culture of any description and have been outside of our historic ambit.Who really gives a doss about Poland,Hungary,Slovenia?Yes,but their political,i.e.unreconstructed fascist/communist activists now have a role in governing us.In return we get a recirocal deal.Only post Soviet Russia appears to be acting truly rationally.No one will ever die defending Georgian soil.that is unless the "american dreaming" White House instructs its trusted puppet regime in London to enter into what would be a third illegal overseas adventure.In theory and in practice none of this is beneficial for the unchallenged functioning of Capitalist accumulation.Dead people don't shop at Wal Mart.This is contradiction.And on the more mundane level it all ends up right at our front door and out there it really is Wakefield.Perhaps they were thinking about the place back in the days at the Vatican when they first invented the notion of purgatory.Somewhere between life and ,erm just about what we're all going through right now.

And here we go!Still about 240 some days left before freedom dawns over this benighted city.How much additional damage to commerce,industry,culture,literacy,numeracy,reasoned debate informed by fact and all the other good things in life will the ailing stasi regime still be able to inflict before their terminal departure into Hades and those very special reserved areas for lying,cheating,duplicitous,dishonest,disreputable,bigoted,self aggrandising,obdurate,antidemocratic politicians?the curt response no one knows,for certain,still at least they'll meet up with Barak Obama and claim to represent the rest of mankind and itsa highest ideals.Burn,baby burn to paraphrase the Hudson&Ford hit of all those years ago.Quite how an illegal breakaway bunch of separatists resorting to armed rebellion against the constitutional government has managed to get up on its haunches and stick its unwelcome snout into just about everyone else's problems with such monumental incompetence and stupidity,is surely one of the enigmas of the USA and its hideous history.And on a more mundane level,next time you encounter the detritus from building sites and the mountains of blackbagged rubbish,remember that the stasi politburo member responsible is also in charge of "culture" in this city.And in response to this,the Artistic community,painters,poets,musicians,haberdashers etc.will be putting together an alternative waste disposal strategy to the council.it's about time that all areas of heretofore council only areas of competence should be fully opened up to all and sundry and key positions and seats on the boards be given primarily to those who have absolutely no understanding of  nor interest in the subject in question.In other words,the stalinoid cultural tragedy document,since its publication firmly hidden away from public view and scrutiny,should inspire others to dream the dream;fatness and stupidity are the future.And the future has already happened.

Pity the poor deluded,failed imperialist powers of the old,fading,decrepit,decadent West.Aw,diddums,won't Ivan let you play in his backyard?bad boy Ivan,it's not nice not to let the NATO family feel welcome.It's my DNA and inherited traits playing up again.Still,it makes a nice change from the Bay-shing games and all the ideological duplicity.I wonder what military crisis will hit the proverbial fan in four years time just as the Borough of East Ham celebrates in public at being regenerated at the rest of the UK's expense.I do feel that the Egyptian underwater men's volleyball team will use Wakey as their training and acclimatisation base and so bring er..vital?tourist income into one of Britain's least impoverished small cities and beacon of the north.Either that or it just won't happen at all unless you count the Peruvian Hermaphrodytes 60metre mountaineering squad not being able to find suitable facilities in Peckham.The T'chipwrapper recently carried a press release announcing the forthcoming 3rd.Morley Lit.Fest.Third!No doubt that comes as somewhat of a revelation to all the stasi whom I corresponded with £ years ago trying to draw their attention to the less than certain plans for the first Morley Lit.Fest.Wakey is surely by now the largest conurbation in the UK that does not have a lit. or lit.style festival.Must be down to the dearth of the literary arts and artists that other boroughs simply don't have.The National Year of Reading trumpeted by the dysfunctionally venal Herr Minister Balls ought to have had its most active,involved expression in the host local authority,Wakey was historically predestined to lead the way,was it not?No.Better the slovenly,philistine,uneducated,cholestrol overdosed,under achieving,drugged up to the eyeballs,monosyllabic,shambling,identityless citizens loyal to the eternal stasi regime,better all that than the horrific alternative as I've proposed of a literary arts centered festival that would be the envy of Yorkshire.For years the former Soviet Union threatened Solzhenitsyn with deportation to stasi run Wakefield.I mean,poor old Alexander stuck between choosing from a Red dictatorship and its mistreatment of writers,that and remaining in the Soviet Union.And so it goes;is that a ship's smoke on the horizon?