The Olde Trip To Jerusalem
The Mekons
The Mekons - The Olde Trip to Jerusalem
March 2011
38 posts
February 2011
26 posts
How empty life is and without meaning. — We bury a man, we follow him to the grave, we throw three spades of earth on him, we ride out in a coach, we ride home in a coach, we take comfort in the thought that a long life awaits us. But how long is threescore years and ten? Why not finish it at once? Why not stay out there and step down into the grave with him, and draw lots for who should have the misfortune to be the last alive to throw the last three spades of earth on the last of the dead?
Samuel Beckett's first book, Whoroscope, 1930
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What’s that? 1
An egg?
By the brother Boot it stinks fresh.
Give it to Gillot.
Galileo how are you 5
and his consecutive thirds!
The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler!
We’re moving he said we’re off—Porca Madonna!
the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-potatoey charging Pretender.
That’s not moving, that’s moving. 10
You are sitting in a room and it is dusk. Candles have been brought in that you may see to get on with the work in hand. Then you look up and try to see the garden that lies beyond. But all you see is the reflection of the candles in the window. To see the garden the candles must be shaded. Now that is what philosophy does, it prevents us from being blinded by what we know.
What would you say is the most important thing you have learned from your life, up to this point?
Don’t talk to strangers.
Play
0:32
From David Harvey's 'The New Imperialism', 2003 (!)
‘the most important prop to the US and British economies after the onset of general recession in all other sectors from mid-2001 onwards was the continued speculative vigour in the property and housing markets and construction. In a curious backwash effect, we find that some 20 per cent of GDP growth in the United States in 2002 was attributable to consumers refinancing their mortgage debt on the inflated values of their housing and using the extra money they gained for immediate consumption (in effect, mopping up overaccumulating capital in the primary circuit). British consumers borrowed $19 billion in the third quarter of 2002 alone against the value of their mortgages to finance consumption. What happens if and when this property bubble bursts is a matter for serious concern.’
Clearly and unmistakably there appeared the fundamental dependence of the most modern and physical and chemical theories on the mythological concepts of our Germanic ancestors, the style-congruence of tragedy and up-to-date finance, and the fact (bizarre at first but soon self-evident) that oil-painting perspective, printing, the credit system, long-range weapons, and contrapuntal music in one case, and the nude statue, the city-state and coin-currency (discovered by the Greeks) in another were identical expressions of one and the same spiritual principle.
