Very excited to have obtained a copy of this wonderful film made by Jayne Parker in 2001.
Choreographer Anthony Howell
Starring Quincy, Marcus and Ruby
Composer and Trombonist John White
Dogs trained by Mary Ray and Karen London
Producer Sally Thomas
Thanks to the BBC
Further credits at the end of the video.
And here is my Homage to the composer John White
Thousands of farmers are expected to join a rally in Whitehall as they protest against the Labour government’s extension of inheritance tax to agricultural property.
The government intends to impose inheritance tax on farmers. Previously, farming businesses qualified for 100 per cent relief on inheritance tax on agricultural property and business property. Changes could undermine investment as farmers will be wary of increasing the balance sheet as they will be liable to pay inheritance tax on it. There are also concerns that it could affect tenant farmers if landowners no longer benefit from having a tax exemption for farmed land. While farms may have a high nominal asset value – the value of their land and business assets – the returns from farming are often very low, so farming families may not have the reserves to pay for inheritance tax liabilities without selling off assets.
If anything explains why Keir Starmer met with Bill Gates recently, this terrifying change to farming land rights is it. Farmers will be unable to hand on their farms to the sons and daughters. The traditional family-owned farm will disappear. Industrial farming on a colossal scale will thus be ushered in. All livestock will be artificially altered to increase yield and comply with ridiculous Gatesian obsessions – seriously endangering the well-being of consumers. Hedgerows, coppices and coverts, meandering streams, all the distinctive characteristics of British farmland will disappear. The rotation of the crops will abandoned, and within fifty years, Britain will be a wasteland.
I am very much looking forward to this concert with poetry in Cambridge on Saturday 15 February!
A fine concert, but, for the record:
“Rail” travel in Britain has become so picturesque and seventeenth century. They should advertise it as such to tourists. Went to Cambridge for the concert yesterday by train to Audley End, then coach to Cambridge North (because of planned engineering work), train to Cambridge, and finally taxi to the venue. The trip back on the last but for 40 minutes the only means of transport began with coach at 11.55 to Royston, to find in Royston (wherever that is) the last train into Finchley Park – the only one into London – had been cancelled because of either a faulty train or a fault on the line or the sad death of a driver. There were (luckily) only three other passengers that cold and lonely night (which it was) we waited in the waiting room for an hour until the cab ordered for us by an intrepid young member of staff in a yellow jacket arrived for us and we piled in. We travelled for many miles through the deepest countryside with no mention of London on the signs as the driver played us Indian House. Finally at Finsbury Park, I changed to the tube, then at Seven sisters I changed onto a nightbus. Home by 3 am. If they changed the coaches to coach-and-horses type coaches it would have been the most perfect adventure.
Books 1-19 of the Runiad, my epic poem-in-progress, can be read here
Unfortunately, since the very sad demise of Denis Boyles, editor of the Fortnightly Review, the review itself is being re-structured and may not appear again until March. So the excerpts published there are falling behind.
So, for readers who wish to follow my progress, the link above brings you up-to-date with where I have got to now.
When the Fortnightly recommences, I will publish links to the extracts.
The contents pages give the page number for each book, and underneath the book is a scroll line. As you move your cursor along it the page numbers come up.
And what you are reading is only the first “fair” draft. The process of writing this poem is one of constant re-reading. Every time I re-read a book I discover things I need to change. In time I hope it will all be honed, but first it has to be “got down”.
*****
Other books of mine which can be read for free can be found on this link
It is no good. I can’t just publicise my own activities at this time. What is going on the Russian border and in the Middle East, as well as in the Sudan and elsewhere, demands to be addressed. I will be eighty this year. 2024 was most definitely the worst year I have ever experienced in terms of the state of the world. Yes, I have known worse years in terms of personal tragedy, but as far as I am concerned the world itself is in the most pitiful condition that I have ever known (and that includes the years that brought the destruction of Yugoslavia and the invasion of Iraq). Most of these tragedies are caused by the West. Both the USA and the UK are run by a two party system where there is actually very little difference between the two blocs.
How do we rescue genuine democracy from the deep state that enforces a uniparty upon us, however we vote? Politics has become a career that you embark upon if you wish to become a billionaire. In my view, things will only get worse unless we refuse compromise. Vote for Reform if you must, or vote for the Workers Party of Britain. But for heaven’s sake let’s get rid of the two smug middle-of-road entities which force a corrupt establishment regime upon us. To vote either for the Tories or for Labour is to cement to status quo that has got us into this mess. Kemi Badenoch, Keir Starmer – Yah Boo Sucks!
The Liberal Democrats were wont to occupy the middle ground between the Labour and Conservative parties. They always attracted far fewer votes than the two ‘main parties’. And yet today, it is precisely that middle ground that both Labour and the Conservatives seek to occupy. The theory, if you can call it that, is that unless you resemble the opposing party as far as you possibly can, so as to attract their swing voters, you haven’t a chance of getting into power. But if that is the case, why were the Lib Dems not the biggest party? To aim strategically for the middle ground leads to a form of communism by statistics. When dissatisfied, we kick the buggars out and get the other buggars and the same policies.
First-past-the-post democracy works best when there is a radical difference between the two major parties. This suggests that democracy should be a risky business. A genuine left gets in and implements genuine left-wing policies. Should these go too far, in the opinion of the majority, then, at the next election, the genuine right gets in and reverses the more unpopular policies, and then it may well implement right-wing policies, some of which may prove unpopular. And so it swings, between ideologies at variance with each other. Risky as it is, this is how it should be. It reminds me of Robert Graves’ wonderful poem, Flying Crooked:
The butterfly, the cabbage white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has — who knows so well as I? —
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.
Forever relying on caution and compromise renders democracy innocuous. A beltway elite, or a Westminster mob, get accustomed to running the show, installing their civil service apparatchiks and going hand-in-glove with shady security services. Matters rapidly become corrupt. On either side, they know that they are playing the same game. I say, avoid all persuasion that would have you vote strategically. Vote with your heart, however small the number of like-minded people may be who choose to vote the way you do. This is democracy’s only chance. Uniparty democracy is one colossal sham.
I’ve changed my handle at Youtube. So now I am https://www.youtube.com/@theanthonyhowell
Lots of videos here of performances as well as slideshows of painting projects and of course recordings of poems. Enjoy!
And also another place where there are videos of performances etc is https://www.anthonyhowell.org/Reading.htm
This is an irritated response to a post that was entitled “The Assad Regime was Ghastly but the West’s Favourite Jihadists HTS May Be Even More Bloody”
The Assad government was not “ghastly”. And it is an insult to call it a ‘regime’. That is just Zionist/US/UK propaganda.
Sunnis are the majority in Syria, yes. But a coalition of Shia, Christian, Druze and Alawite minorities constituted a larger electoral group. This is how Syria managed to protect its minorities. And as for imprisoning Sunni Takfiri terrorists, for heaven’s sake! What was Assad expected to do? We imprison terrorists as well. The same problem confronted Ataturk and the last Shah of Iran. Nobody has ever wanted an extremist and violent religious majority to win an election and then clamp down on every other sect. If you really want to call a governing body a ‘regime’ and ‘ghastly’ then look no further than the oligarch rulers of the Gulf, who invented Takfiri extremism in the late 19th century, in order to invent an external ‘scapegoat’ and deflect the populace from rising up against their own utterly corrupt elitist police states. It’s the same as when Europe sent its restive young men off to die in the Crusades. This coalition of minorities in Syria could not survive after Israel sponsored Al Qaeda, Daesh, HTS or whatever you care to call them, and America occupied the oil rich part of Syria via the CIA arming (in the name of a concocted ‘opposition’) brutal Takfiris while imposing sanctions. Not to mention the enduring sponsorship of these extremists by the ghastly opportunist Erdogan.
The result is the probable genocide of Christians, Druze, Alawites, atheists and Shia – and probably moderates of Sunni extraction as well.
What is happening is a tragedy, just as is Gaza, and it is caused by the USA, the UK, Israel, Turkey and the Gulf tyrants.
The problem is modern art. It’s completely finished. In art a cliché is a sin. Modern art has become a cliché. You cannot abstract from an apple tree in the manner of Mondrian. It has been done. It has been done to death. So bollocks to Pollock, abstract expressions etc.
Far more interesting these days to look at the paintings of Victor Hugo or Alexander Cozens. I call what they do, and I attempt to do, “Deep Art”.
To some extent Deep Art has been anticipated by the surrealists, though it is actually earlier than surrealism. Basically it is going in the opposite direction to modernism. Begins with some involuntary chaotic action, splotches, blots, found chaos, even a confused photograph, then works into that chaos to attempt to get somewhere. Not necessarily a figurative result but to a feeling of resolution in the artist’s mind.
Deep art is a departure. It is alchemy. Its primary aim is for the artist to lose consciousness of the self in the engrossment of making art.
This also reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci’s advice: to look at a wall – at its blotches and imperfections, and see what image you might discover there.
Deep art is done as a form of personal meditation. This is the only response to an “artworld” flooded by ambitious practitioners. That artworld only admits of a canon of megastars. Maybe twelve big names at any time. And that is innappropriate for the reality of the vast number of artists that there are in our world today.
There is also a special sublimity about deep art – particularly as applied to Victor Hugo’s paintings. This is to do with the sense that they work with suggestion, that, unlike Cozens, they never result in a completely figurative image. I go into this further in my essay, An Inquiry into the Sublime.
See also More on Victor Hugo.
Anthony Howell, 23/12/24
And at the Royal Academy in March
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/astonishing-things?sourceNumber=817685
See also:
Deep Art’s need for a Reservoir of Chaos
More recently, I tried reshaping the notion of deep art – to work it into my poem-in-progress, The Runiad:
xxx
This isn’t just about winning contracts; it’s about reshaping
x
The very nature of conflict. This is a struggle about who will sculpt
The basic ontology of conflict in the age of HyperWar,
Where kill-webs and machine-speed decisions could render
Human oversight peripheral, or even obsolete. But, as I see it,
There is a problem looming up with progress going this way.
The problem can be seen in modern art. It’s completely finished.
You see, in art a cliché is a sin. Modern art has just become a cliché.
x
You cannot go on abstracting from an apple tree in the manner of Mondrian.
It has been done. It has been done to death. So bollocks to Pollock,
Abstract expressions etc. Progress! It’s just so 20th century.
And it seems to me blind, and leading to the annulment of mankind,
So we need to go another way. More interesting today
To look at the paintings of Victor Hugo or Alexander Cozens.
I call what they do, and I too attempt to do, “Deep Art”.
x
To some extent Deep Art has been anticipated by
The surrealists, though in its beginnings it’s earlier than their time.
It is art rejecting the embrace of progress with a laugh!
Prefers to start from some involuntary acts, flung splotches, blots:
A chaos, that you may have come across, even a confusing photograph.
Work into that chaos and from there attempt to get somewhere.
Not necessarily to arrive at a result but to a sense, of what?
x
Of resolution in the artist’s mind or of something that
Suggests that it’s intended perhaps. Deep art is a departure.
It is alchemy. Its aim is for the artist to lose consciousness
Of self in the engrossment of mining it, of mining art
From a muddled, arbitrary mess. And so the deep artist is
Not bothered about swanning around Frieze. Deep art is done
As a form of personal meditation. This is the only response
x
To a careerist “artworld” flooded up to the gills by eager
Beavers. That world only admits to the canon of its megastars.
Maybe twelve big names at any time. And this is inappropriate,
Given the number of artists that are out there making stuff today.
So it’s an idealist gesture, a bidding adieu to the modernist
Notion of progress so romantically espoused by the futurists.
But just as they walked into a future that they could not see,
x
The deep artist stumbles backwards, backwards into a past
That can’t be seen. Because that artist faces the other way,
Anticipating horrors that progress would inflict upon us all,
As evidenced by the tractors that have come to block Whitehall,
Foreseeing the destruction of our green and pleasant land
By forces such as USAID obeying the command of shady NGOs
Owned by oligarchs so rich that they have morphed into lunatics.
x
From Book 19 of The Runiad
Biden pardons criminals, including his son – who would have incriminated Biden himself. These two judges are rotten to the core. But Biden is well-lobbied by the prison industry, which is a business which is massive and growing.
Surely pardons are designed for possible miscarriages of Justice? Miscarriages, rather than for freeing crooked cronies! Another sickening instance of the corruption of our times.
And now people are protesting!
anthonyhowelljournal 