Isotopica

A play on words

Zoe Zarkovsi and Simon Tyszko engage in Word play or wordplay (also: play-on-words) being a literary technique and a form of wit in which words used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement.

Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names (such as in the play The Importance of Being Earnest, Ernest being a given name that sounds exactly like the adjective earnest). Word play is quite common in oral cultures as a method of reinforcing meaning. Examples of text-based (orthographic) word play are found in languages with or without alphabet-based scripts; for example, see homophoerate our accompanying nic puns in Mandarin Chinese.

Deleuze and food, time and chance, combine with a collection of pure data patches that algorithmically generate our accompanying soundtrack, the hidden hand of a god who simply never existed.

Le menu est la liste des divers mets qui composent le repas. Dans un restaurant, ou à la cantine, c'est l'ensemble des mets qui peuvent être servis pour un prix déterminé.

Par métonymie, le menu est le feuillet, le carton, le tableau, l'affichette, l’objet ou la brochure qui liste :

* les mets servis lors d'un repas : manuscrit ou imprimé, illustré ou non, il présente au convive la liste des mets et boissons qui vont lui être servis lors d'un repas ou d'un banquet. Cette pratique, qui remonte au xixe siècle, et qui tend à se perdre (sauf dans les réceptions officielles), participe à l'art de la table ; elle offre de précieux renseignements aux historiens de la cuisine ;

* le choix des différents mets pouvant être servi pour un repas au restaurant.

This particular episode revolves around a trip to the vet with Idoru the cat, during which we share a delightful conversation around topics of the day.

Our cycling conversation perfectly sets the scene for a program approaching the cutting edges of trans-species art research,  featuring tracks from a new album entitled 'Crane Cries', which revolves around a live recording emulating the sounds and intentions of cranes through string improvisation and unusual techniques, by the quartet of Estonian violinist Elo Masing, German violinist Dietrich Petzold, Portuguese violist and cellist Ernesto and Guilherme Rodrigues, who name each of the 8 tracks after the behaviour of cranes,  forming a flock, migration, fighting, ritual dancing, and nesting.This conflation of the chat with a cat on a bicycle, and the avian themed avant guard music is purely coincidental, and only came about when isotopicee Elo Masing sent this latest release hot off the presses from Berlin, which is available as a limited edition from various online outlets including Ernesto Rodrigues' Bandcamp site here.Yet at the same time Elo has been working for several years now with avian artistic tandem Kakaduu, Agapornis Fischeri, originally from Central Africa and now based in Berlin, Germany. Kakaduu established themselves as artists in London, UK, where they lived from 2009 till 2015. They have been active in the visual arts since 2010 and first gained recognition with the wood veneer and cardboard sculpture “Me and My Home”. Other well-known works include “My Cage” and “My Nightmares About the Cat”.Most recently Kakaduu been the worlds first birds to have produced a human musical record release with Berlin based WIG ensemble's unique album Music For Birds, which features in a future edition is Isotopica.

Much more to follow on our trans-species investigations to follow.

Meanwhileas it turned out, Idoru was not unwell, and her recent strange behaviour was simply one of those cat things, although the vet (at the amazing and wonderful animal charity The Blue Cross)   mentioned several time that Idoru was fat....Subsequently our new crash diet seems to have bought out the hidden kitten in both Voltaire and Idoru, and we have entered an exciting and new athletic phase under the aeroplane wing here at Phlight

Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone, The only truly successful left-wing British politician of modern times

......is an English politician who served as the Leader of the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 until the council was abolished in 1986, and as Mayor of London from the creation of the office in 2000 until 2008. He also served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Brent East from 1987 to 2001. 

Born in Lambeth, South London, to a working-class family, Livingstone joined Labour in 1968 Ken went on to become the head of the GLC.

The GLC began as an effort to rationalise London-wide planning, London in the 1950s could be a grim place. Large swathes of residential streets remained derelict after being bombed out during the war and the houses still standing were often squalid and overcrowded. Thick fog hung over the city and roads were dirty and dangerous…….

The GLC under Ken Livingstone was an an administration that successfully enacted a historically unprecedented radical program of successful and popular socialist policies, including massive investment in job creation, reducing public transport fares, the declaration of London as a nuclear free zone, saving over a million pounds annually spent on utterly cometic and pointless defence plans nik e hiding under a table before the bomb went off).

Arguing that politics had long been the near-exclusive preserve of white middle-aged men, the GLC began an attempt to open itself to representations from other groups, principally from women, the working-class, ethnic minorities and homosexuals but also from children and the elderly.

They initiated a raft of measures to improve the lives of minorities within London,  this included funding for groups such as London Gay Teenage Group, English Collective of Prostitutes, Women Against Rape, Lesbian Line, A Woman's Place, and Rights of Women, and the Ethnic Minorities Committee.

Understanding the clear evidence that the Metropolitan Police was an institutionally racist organisation, he appointed Paul Boateng to head the Police Committee and monitor the force's activities.[100]  the police he remarked are highly political organisation, noting that when canvasing police flats at election time, you find that they are either Conservatives who think of Thatcher as a bit of a pinko or they are National Front."[100]

An outspoken republican he politely refused an invitation to Diana and Charles Windsor’s wedding and the list of righteous achievements simply goes on and on, and of course 

Just as today our overwhelming right wing press rabidly attacked such egalitarian policies, snowflake like and steeped in patriarchal white privilege they moaned that such policies only served "fri...

a doctored image, not fake

The song Mr Dante Fontanna, comes from the 1966 film Fumo Di Londra a vehicle for Alberto Sordi and was composed by Piero Piccioni who was in turn pianist, organist, conductor, composer, and architect, he was also the prolific author of more than 300 film soundtracks. He played for the first time on radio in 1938 with his “013” Big Band, to return on air only after the liberation of Italy in 1944. “013” was the first Italian jazz band to be broadcast in Italy after the fall of Fascism. A facism which is unbelievably on the rise pretty much across the word, a phenomena not loosely connected with the climate emergency that is slowly enveloping us as millions flee wars and starvation at least partially caused by the climate disruption we are all ready seeing… 

I have often mentioned a proposed study into right Wing thought a disability, a deficiency in basic humanity and I guess in that case  fascism would be it’s cancerous analogue….

The music of Piero Piccioni to me represents that almost utopian period of optimism that sprang from the socialist post war settlement, the defeat of fascicm and the progressive redistribution of wealth creating a socially mobile and aspirational society that is in complete contrast to the , paraphrasing the UN Special rapporteur on extreme poverty in the uk he was describing an immiseration of millions of our people, and how the UK’s poorest people face lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

The description contains what has been called one of the best-known passages in English philosophy, which describes the natural state humankind would be in, were it not for political community:[22]

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.[23]

 

Yet Reading Corbyn’s words yesterday had my head spinning, as our dreams of a socialist revolution coming to save the many from the few met Jeremy Corbyn's absurd statement on his plans for an imaginary soft brexit.

This being both as absurd as Theresa May's "brexit means brexit”, and at the same time even more morally reprehensible, as his stance as leader of the greatest grass roots progressive movement in recent times, proves to be yet another tone deaf and deluded Blaire like dictator, feebly enabling and ‘respecting’ the most reprehensible political car crash and malign right wing coup in our political history.

Just imagine……

An internationalist ’Corbynism’, defeating the hateful, abusive, and isolationist Brexit, could have been the shining light banishing the rising reactionary and xenophobic tide across Europe and the world, as we linked arms with our fellow Europeans to fight the truly vital issues of capitalist climate and ecological catastrophe, and together sheltering the many resultant refugees from a dying planet we have played such a large par...

Today on Isotopica we are in conversation with co-founder of Extinction Rebellion Roger Hallam.

It is difficult to overstate the urgency and the scale of the climate emergency we are facing and so far Extinction rebellion seem to be the only international movement facing this head on through a sustained campaign of civil disobedience until our governments come to the table to formulate a plan to tackle this existential threat.

Ben sessa and I

in conversation.

ben

Drugs are central to my life. Just like you, I was born to a drugged mother, injected minutes after birth and repeatedly dosed throughout my childhood.

My patients are simply self-medicating. And who can blame them? Their medicines (heroin, crack and alcohol) work better than mine (Prozac) at blunting life's sharp edges

Dr Ben Sessa

Drugs help me get up and go to work, sustain me throughout the day and relax me in the evenings. I am a regular consumer of legal highs. Almost all of us are.

I work with children in a secure custodial setting, most of whom have used drugs before incarceration to have fun. I also work in an adult addictions service with people whose drug use is mistaken for the cause of their problems. It is not. Addiction is not about drugs. Rather, drugs slot neatly into a pre-drug maladaptive profile of failed opportunities and chronic exclusion of hope.

My patients are simply self-medicating. And who can blame them? Their medicines (heroin, crack and alcohol) work better than mine (Prozac) at blunting life's sharp edges. Nevertheless, I give them my drugs and help them off theirs. But in my clinical experience no drugs in isolation will eradicate mental disorder. Most psychiatric prescribing merely papers over the cracks of patients' symptoms with maintenance therapies that do not cure them. The core of their distress (childhood trauma, social exclusion, lack of education and opportunities) is hard and expensive to resolve. Prozac is cheaper and faster.

And I also work for the family law courts, assessing parents and children whose prospects are judged by court decisions based on their past or potential future drug use. But drug use and misuse are different. Most people take most drugs, most of the time relatively benignly. Drug misuse and addiction is not the drugs' fault. Simply prohibiting drugs and criminalising users is a grossly simplistic and dangerous folly. Our system for classifying drugs is unscientific, socially irresponsible and morally reprehensible. Our drug laws increase the harms, deaths, associated crime and even the usage of drugs. There is more scientific validity for homeopathy than prohibition. The arbitrary assignment of substances into classes A, B and C has no pharmacological validity, is patronising, dangerous and sends the wrong public health message. Drugs don't kill people. Prohibition does.

Yet our drug laws have persisted, unaudited and unaltered for 50 years despite clear evidence of their lack of efficacy. Why? This is a complex question that often leads towards unhelpful conspiracy theories. In wishing to avoid this, I can only assume successive governments sustain the destructive policy with my best interests at heart. It's enough to turn one to drugs.

Ben is a medical doctor providing private psychiatric consultation through Mandala Therapy Limited

Ben is a published medical and fiction author

Ben carries out psychopharmacology research with psychedelic medicines

Ben is researching MDMA Therapy for mental disorders

Ben publishes in the academic and medical press

Ben present regularly in multi-media platforms

Ben carries out medico-Legal family law expert witness work

Ben is co-founder and chair of the Breaking Convention conference.

 

Ben sessa and I

“I am perhaps one of the only psychiatrists in Europe or maybe the world who has officially and legally been injected with DMT, LSD, and Psilocybin” (by the most notable Professor David Nutt no less).

Ben is a medical doctor providing private psychiatric consultation through Mandala Therapy Limited 

Ben is a published medical and fiction author

Ben carries out psychopharmacology research with psychedelic medicines

Ben is researching MDMA Therapy for mental disorders

Ben publishes in the academic and medical press

Ben present regularly in multi-media platforms

Ben carries out medico-Legal family law expert witness work

Ben is co-founder and chair of the Breaking Convention conference.

In search of a cure or..

….at least a path forward, for my increasingly fraught and neurasthenic mind, I found myself deeply engaged by news of breakthrough psychopharmacological research into the once darkly state prohibited field of psychedelics. 

Facing the reality of a lifetime of cyclical depressions, each of greater length and depth, I finally turned to SSRI’s (prozac) after exhausting both myself and the more obvious yogic options. 

Despite my reservations and critical artworks**, I was pleasantly surprised to find them wonderfully life enhancing. 

For the first time in many years I was waking up without the malign and familiar abject fear and loathing that had crept up on my life like a slow and thunderous cloud. I was able to commit to people places and things without an expectation of being bought low by irrational  howling emptiness and crippling existential fear.

 

Yet there was of course a price to pay, mainly, as best put by the ever eloquent Mr P on his prozac times,  his relationship with his cock was rapidly becoming like that of an old married couple…

Of course it was a price initially worth paying and actually a treat for once in life not be be led around by a hormone crazed manic part of my body.

Sigmund Freud defined libido as “the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude… of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word ‘love’.”[4] It is the instinct energy or force, contained in what Freud called the id, the strictly unconscious structure of the psyche.

According to Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, the libido is identified as the totality of psychic energy, not limited to sexual desire, and as an artist, a human being, a poet (and perhaps a fucker whatever that may mean), I gradually started to slip into a daze of un affect, a nothing and an a-void.

At the same time the depressions were returning, 

Attenuated, muted, dull hauntings,

Ingredients.

An impending anniversary of revolution, one of the great films of the 20C, an assembled group of musicians, some professional, some not, a beautifully restored 150yr old cinema, a mastermind or two.

Mix the ingredients without any rehearsal or predetermination (in the style of Cardew's scratch Orchestra), screen the film and improvise (with collaboration from the audience).

Enjoy.

Today we listen to an edited recording from this remarkable event, one of many coming up to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution of Oct 1917.

Originally conceived as part of a cycle of films commemorating the revolutionary events of 1905, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin recreates in documentary-style the failed mutiny of the Black Sea fleet and the subsequent massacre of the people of Odessa. Innovative cinematography and editing techniques heighten the horrific nature of events.

Although banned outright in many countries outside Soviet Russia, the film became an international sensation, and has had a lasting impact on world cinema. The arresting sequence of the massacre of civilians on Odessa’s steps is one of the most celebrated, analysed, and quoted in cinema history.

The screening is accompanied by an entirely original soundtrack, devised and created in a direct response to the film. Late Junction presenter Max Reinhardt will lead an instant orchestra of professional and non-professional musicians, drawn from across London, to bring a contemporary response to an extraordinary piece of Soviet cinema.

Isotopica will be performing Spectre, a 12 hour live improvisation based around a Morse code rendering of the Communist Manifesto on October 17th as a part of these centenary events on Resonance Extra.

Spectre can be heard here

 

Dartmouth professor and astrophysicist Stephon Alexander describes his jazz epiphany as occasioned by a complex diagram Coltrane gave legendary jazz musician and University of Massachusetts professor Yusef Lateef in 1967. “I thought the diagram was related to another and seemingly unrelated field of study—quantum gravity,” he writes in a Business Insider essay on his discovery, “What I had realized… was that the same geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s theory was reflected in Coltrane’s diagram.” joshua jones openculture.org

in this episode, we bare this beautiful confluence  in mind

my dead brother stefan poses for this modernist autobiographical shot from around 1966 with both miles davis , herman neitze, and coltrane placed, artfully in plain sight

mind control through sound...

beta and gamma radiation....

a radioactive thunderstorm...

past life regression.... and much much more on isotopica.... like wow!