A full day completing the music videos, plus new loops for Spotify Canvases. Charging though new videos for 'Daytime Teevee' and 'More', but everything was tweaked a little bit. 'More', like many of these, is something of an animated placeholder, like 'Breakfast Of Delight' or 'How Lonely', yet I've managed to add a few things to make them more interesting and linked to the song. At very least, the whole video should sing and dance.
I went out for more shelf supplies in the afternoon. Passing the railway station, a man was huddled in a corner, facing away and trying to dress his lower half in a Union Jack with all of the awkwardness and embarrassment of someone changing into a swimsuit in public. I thought that this was connected with the football match, the roar of the stadium and scattered police officers indicating that a match was on. Then, on the corner opposite the Crewe Arms hotel I wandered into a tiny far-right demonstration, with an equally sized counter protest opposite. There were perhaps 20 people on each side, and two blue-clad community police officers to 'keep order' on a protest which was Lilliputian in every sense. One counter-protest placard said 'DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING' - an amusing copy of a protest sign in a Father Ted episode. The real scene match the mood of that mock-scene exactly.
Still, the sentiment was concerning. It's a busy junction. Occasionally, rarely, a car would beep support for the proto-Nazis. As I walked home a car screamed its horn and the passenger shouted an expletive to us pedestrians about 'paki's'. I wondered what the 1930s was like in Germany, for ordinary and concerned citizens. I wondered about the rise of such anger, the trickles before a third world war. Trickles seen as valid and just, as though a forthcoming cataclysm is somehow a good thing. I have two sides to my personality, a full gamut of extreme emotions and ideas, and a narrow, controlled centre of logic and reason. Politically, I'm moderate to the core.
For me, all protest is violent. The very act of opposing is a tiny violence. Peace is to ignore, be passive, to go with the flow. This I gleaned from my meditative, Buddhist-like, years of my 20s. I grew tired of fighting, and became content with surrender. This is, perhaps, the message of Buddha, yet I was never quite convinced of the philosophical truth of it. Is the Dalai Lama content to have China now own his country? No, he protests. Without any protest, we are rocks tumbling in the void. My protestations are in art, and hopefully sharing ideas or revealing truths. Most protesters never change the world (have any?), their actions primarily serve to make them and their peers feel better.
At home I continued to work on the videos. All are now done in draft; excellent. I can now charge on.
