Spree

I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

Howard Beale, Network

Has not everybody at some point in their lives thought of spitting on their hands, hoisting the black flag and begin slitting throats?

H.L. Mencken

I'd always thought this kind of stencilling that I am doing on Bell's Bridge as some kind of 'spree'. In America, people who have had enough tend to go on another kind of spree, one which is a lot more bloody and deadly. My spree however is with words and images, not guns and bullets, but it amounts to much the same. I've had enough of the horseshit hidden in plain sight as I've had enough of all the people feeding on it from the trough of ignorance. Society is profoundly sick, and those who have made a success of this are profoundly sick too. Indeed, most success (if not all) is formed out of a sickness that grows in the head of the young child. Yet, success is not about this broken individual 'making it' but about the inter-dependent origination of all things. Success in other words, in Nature, is all about collaboration and community, not about isolated individuals and 'rankings'. At any rate, it pleased me to see that the word spree derives from the French 'esprit' meaning spirit. This is what is at work here: the 'holy spirit' as the whole and healthy unbroken individual who has woken up to the bullshit hidden in plain sight and who, with the strength of this nouveau esprit, sets to work about sharing the wisdom he has gained from this insight. The shooting spree-er 'wakes people up' by killing them, the stencil spree-er wakes people up similarly, but the killing done by art does not kill the body but only the false consciousness that has been implanted and solidified within that body. It is spirit, as essence and attention and tending the essential, that is at work in both cases. In the shooter's case, it is an unholy spirit, in the artist's the holy and wholly spirit. In both cases, the receiver of the spirit is 'awoken', yet if you cannot share that awakeness there's not much use. Hence my spree of the stencil sort.... the spray can being its own form of gun.

Truth With Grit in it

All transport sport, all sport deportation, all construction destruction, all constructs destructs...

All news noise, all movies a magic trick, all television televoyeurism...

All fashion swaddling, all pets barbie dolls, all smartphones smartdummies, all cars prams, all men infants, all women men...

All scientists rapists, all parents terrorists, all tourists traitors, Ronald McDonald a paedophile...

All bosses slave-drivers, all workers slaves, all meat-eaters murderers, all citizens cowards...

All cities factories, all offices boxes, all boxes coffins, all the earth a farm, all men farm animals, all women men...

McDonalds Withdrawal & The Unhappy Meal

Maybe soon, within the ever-burgeoning glossary of medical terms for abnormal disorders and addictions, the term 'McDonalds Withdrawal' will become standard. I say this because today, some three months after the coronavirus lockdown, McDonalds are re-opening its drive-thrus. And boy, did they come. The queues in my native city of Glasgow were embarrassing to say the least, with queues reaching down whole streets and round the corner. If you can imagine the queues for the movie Star Wars back in '77 stretching round whole blocks, then you're almost there, except here people were replaced with cars. And you kind of think that certain people have been praying (gnawing their hands) for McDonalds to re-open. Notably, parents who 'take care of their children' by taking them to McDonalds. I've seen it with my own two eyes, parents feeding their toddlers nutritionless cheeseburgers, chips, and coke, the so-called Happy Meal. I have in the past had discussions with managers asking them if they think that serving a toddler a happy meal is something of a form of child abuse. My queries as you can imagine have been met with surprise, the manager almost always retorting that their food is 'of a high quality'. Yet, to take your child to McDonalds, whether you like it or not, is like feeding your child crack. What with the McDonalds environment aimed squarely at children, the psychological heft of 'free' toys, playpens, and, now, table-top games consoles, of course they're going to like it. Of course, it's going to calm them down (for the moment), and of course you're going to think with the limited brain-span that most parents have, that you have done good. But you haven't. Like putting your child in a car, taking your child to McDonalds is a form of child abuse. Psychologically, biologically, ecologically, spiritually.

The happy meal by its mere existence suggests to the child subliminally that all other meals are therefore 'unhappy'. Not only this but the accompanying 'fun' in the form of fashionable toys and cartoon figures amounts to a form of psychological abuse: using positive images and text to deliver a product that is without nutrition and thus negative (since food by its very definition must be nutritious if it is to 'feed' you). McDonalds' food however does not feed as in 'deliver nutrition' therefore it is a lie as concerns 'food', fast or otherwise. This is how corporations like McDonalds thrive: by doing as the devil does and preying on the weak and the wounded (exhausted parents and children without the wits and werwithal to decide for themselves) and through employing mesmerizing devices like kaleidoscopic adverts, movie tie-ins, catchy jingles, toys and games, and all the beeps and flashes that fasten and fix a child's brain onto the target product. As far as this is concerned, and in terms of knowing food and developing a healthy relationship with food and all its ancillary logistics, McDonalds is an atrocity hidden in plain sight: a crime against food, a crime against animals, a crime against children, and a crime against the land. What more reason could you want to avoid these 'golden' arches that are actually yellow?

Insight of the Nutshell

Insight and vision is a hard thing to come by when you're surrounded by predators and parents, the 'predator' being the parent who turns you into some 'thing' that you are clearly not and the 'parent' being the corporate predator that pretends to service and provide. Yet, the real pro-vision is your natural aboriginal Self,  with insight and vision arriving through space and 'Being in Space'. This space must be accompanied by solitude and silence (as an absence of noise and distraction) in order to retrieve your natural capacities for seeing and understanding. This will allow you to penetrate the wall of obfuscation that envelops most companies, products and services these days. It will enable you to perceive with aplomb the horseshit hidden in plain sight and accordingly do something about it. Otherwise, you are simply enveloped within the fat-suit of falsity (the bomb-suit) that modern day society thrives upon, indeed needs in order to continue selling its shit. This bombsuit is your concocted self as a standalone entity, named, ego-fied and commodified, and ignorant at large. Insight and vision lead you out of this concoction and into truth, and truth opens everything up. Truth deconstructs the fat-suit and gets rid of it revealing a kernel behind. It is this kernel that I am concerned with here, nothing else. And this is the insight of the nutshell...

Responder

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. 

Viktor Frankl 




I am responding to  all the furtive messages and concealed directives that are imposed on us every day and everywhere in the city environment. Whether it's banners on the sides of buildings telling us how considerate their conctructors are or corporate slogans catching our eye (and mind) in the many deviously placed billboards here and there, the concealed imperative is everywhere. It's in the movies, it's in catchy tunes (and uncatchy ones), it's in our adverts, our telly programs, plastered all over our cities. And just like the John Carpenter film They Live if you distill these movies, ads, tunes, down to their essence, they tell us but one thing: CONSUME, OBEY, DIE, all in glorious capitals. Yet, as a living creature trying to be, I have a right to reply to this nonsense. As an animal I have a natural right to respond. No one can argue with that. Response, reaction to action, fighting back when attacked, is natural. Even science will confirm this to be true. I have a right thus to 'stencil' (as a form of 'wild and natural responding'), and to respond in the most appropriate way I can. An animal that is attacked by another animal doesn't get out a pen and paper, it fights back in kind and in the same way as the animal attacking it.

Response cannot be filtered through 'established channels' without destroying it. Response must be spontaneous: this is what response is. To be spontaneous is to re-spond. Telling you to 'respond through established channels' of the very medium you are trying to expose is like telling the animal being attacked to fight back by filling out a form. That is, it's absurd when it isn't downright insulting.

And so, this bridge that I have stencilled is nothing more than my response to all those messages hidden in plain sight and which most people swallow hook, line and sinker, without even knowing it. Not anymore however. The responder has stood up and responded.

The Birthday Present

As a 'revert' (someone who has within this inverted society reverted to the right way up) I have neither birthdays nor presents. The birth day is just another ego device, another illusion that purports to celebrate your birth but which actually does the opposite and celebrates the ego. Birth is not a matter of a single day, but a matter of constant continuation. Everything that is alive is birthed and renewed simply through Being. At any rate, my fiftieth birthday (I cringe as I say it) is approaching and so, in the spirit of the Lakota who state that you only become mature when you hit 50, I have commandeered a bridge (a bit like the artist Christo who died the other day, but a little less ostentatious and emphatically without the permission). The pedestrian bridge which crosses the Clyde is five minutes from my flat and with its 15 white pillars holding up its canopy I saw the perfect opportunity to share a little wisdom (that I had gained from my '10 years sitting on top of a hill') with the hoi polloi. God knows they need it. And so, Bell's Bridge is now weemikey's bridge (weemikey the wild that is and not the weemikey the over-domesticated and tranquillized). The Lakota have spurred me on as have all indigenous peoples that still struggle to live in harmony with Nature on this increasingly industrialized planet. And so, this is my present (not to me as the inversion would have it) but to everyone (who cares to raise their head from the trough). This is my birthday present where birth is every moment and the day is eternity. It is the opposite of Christo's work where he covers and decorates structures in all manner of swaddling invariably prettifying them. My work reveals what lies beneath, it does not cover over. My images and text reveal a truth that only Nature can present. It is a brutal truth by and large but that's the way it has to be. The birthday as man has fabricated it is nothing more than a Christo like venture insofar as it decorates a corpse and conceals the truth. The real birthday however is an uncovering and a revealing, an opening up and a de-concealing. So that truth may enter as naturally as light.

Fight Back

Whether its adverts for banks (HSBC, RBS, et al.) telling us how good they are (when they are in fact convicted fraudsters) or any number of profiteers lying to us bareface because they want us to buy their product or service, we are being psychologically assaulted on a daily basis often without our being aware of it. The corporate in its fake personhood (the corporation is legally a person with all the same rights but with few of the punitive measures for stepping over the mark) usurps the person and distorts it to the point of fakery. The real person (through which the Origin sounds) is thus displaced and replaced by the fake person as the corporation (through which the false resounds). Thus, we have considerate constructors, ethical banking, eco-consumerism, meat-eating priests, car-driving ecologists, caring scientists, responsible bookmakers, amiable rapists, and thoughtful murderers. People are so utterly stupefied by it all (civilization being a form of mesmerism) that they don't even bother anymore. My mesmerism and stupefaction however has been tempered by my pastoral excursions into full blown Nature. Nature has guided my body and my mind to safety and made it ferociously aware of predators, especially those predators that purport to be your friend. These are the worst kinds of predators who prey on the weak and the wounded, the stupefied and the mesmerized, whilst telling them that they're helping. Our society is replete with these predators who contaminate our bodies and infect our minds with their trash and corporate gobbledygook. These stencils are an active weapon in fighting back against these lies hidden in plain sight and re-minding people as in giving them their natural Mind back. Nature is bare Truth, Society is a candy-coated lie. Re-mind yourself of this every day, and soon you'll be fighting back yourself.