“Sweet suffering succatash!” Mel Blanc, as the three-time Academy Award-winning Sylvester J. Pussycat, Sr. might have lisped to Tweety Pie in one of those wonderful Friz Frelang , “Looney Tunes” cartoons.
It really is as mad as that, after all. Norneverland really is the land of lunacy all right. Here’s the latest revelation to ponder on just in case anyone is thinking that the magical land is like anywhere else on our planet. It isn’t , by a very long shot.Apparently , something called “Antrim Council”, which may possibly be a collective of those educated magpies we talked about earlier, has a practice of handing out thousands of pounds to be burnt on the annual bonfires every eleventh of July.
Just roll that around your brain for a moment and allow the madness of that act to marinade a little while I explain.This little squib of information has actually appeared as a feature story in one of the newspapers sold daily across the land to anyone who can still read those strange little collections of symbols and glyphs .It’s obviously included as a humourous lampoon so that the natives can laugh gaily at their own curious little absurdities. You know how it is , Norneverlanders think there is nothing quite as well-developed on this little flat planet as their wonderful sense of humour and their ability to kick a ball.They love to laugh at themselves a lot.
It has been revealed that more than £6,300.00 of ratepayers money has been spent on wooden pallets to burn on the bonfires. That’s right …they’re literally burning the ratepayers money in huge, colourful gouts of yellow and orange flames.About £1000.00 was also spent on wood and fuel to accelerate the blazes and of course there was also the hiring and fueling of mechanical vehicles to help build the huge towering edifices. Additionally some £2,600.00 was spent on flute bands to play salutary music at the events ,as the charredand sooty flakes of banknotes peeled off into the nighttime skies. I suppose there was also money allotted to clear up the charred mess after the event.
I know some have been thinking that the wooden pallets had been donated free by tree-hating faeries during the darkness of night and the constructions were magicked to fruition by wand-wielding, chanting monks, as dawn broke. Who could actually believe that anyone would actually pay for any of this? Paying, indeed , to burn their hard-earned cash.Well…of course , they did.
They’re not the first people to burn money.The KLF {K Foundation} did something like this as some vague artistic statement way back in August 1994.The art/rock project of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty set fire to a million pounds {that’s ” £” sterling} on the isolated Scottish island of Jura and filmed it as a sort of one -off video art installation. It can still be seen on YouTube .
The “work” was toured extensively with screenings and discussions afterwards as to the meaning and symbolism of the act. I kept wondering what I could do with a million quid as I schlepped to work back then with the mortgage hanging overhead like some doomed cloud…. and where would I get a million quid in the first place should I want to burn it.This was the kind of arch- japery and mad conceptualism that had led me to abandoning my Fine Art course over forty years ago ,in pursuit of something else where I mightn’t starve to a rickle of bones in some garret.Now here it was all these years later and bonfires have become some kind of artistic symbols, constructed as annual , cultural artifacts, somewhat like a more impermanent “Pop-Up” version of the Great Pyramid of Giza or maybe Stonehenge , paid for by the public purse .Who knew that Conceptualism had such support in the Council of Antrim and that the minions struggling with household bills, health care and education were willing to sacrifice even a little bit of their hard-earned cash to show their support for the arts?
Maybe there is some little hope for the advancement of culture and the arts in the philistine ,darker corners of Norneverland, after all…if they don’t burn the place to the ground first.Who would have thought it?
Harry – the 11th Night bonfires (ar kulchur) are manifestations of so much anti-social behaviour and mores.
I hardlly knew where to start analysing the phenomenon until I came across the “True Confessions of a Bonfire Builder”
https://telawrenceblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/the-loyalist-bonfires/
and then dissected it.
https://eurofree3.wordpress.com/2015/06/23/11th-night-bonfires-in-northern-ireland/
With so many crimes it’s no wonder our beloved PSNI doesn’t know where to start and our great council has thrown up its hand in despair and started throwing banknotes at the bonfire builders!! Anything for peace!!
You mean “protection money” ,ben …..to protect the kulthcer ?
Yes of course harry!
‘Sweet suffering succatash !’
What a dash this verbal souvenir from the Fabulous Fifties still cuts !!
Once again, GRMMA, Harry, a chara for reminding one of the deathless vocabulary of the Dreamdecade, the decade most hung out to dry in that most warped of political entities, the Free Southern Stateen.
Like a dusty carpet, the soi disant cognosenti on Liffeyside like nothing better than to whack the living daylights out of the Fabulous Fifties, the font of all the woebegone FSS’s imagined woes, till it is literally grey in its fabric face.
That is why the Dreamdecade is universally known South of the Black PIg’s Dyke as: The Drab Decade.
So christened by the Finest Mind of the Free Southern Stateen and acknowledged expert on the Faded Fifties: Fintan (b. 1958). Here be precocity and/ or precociousness, indeed !
Yes, indeed, that Fintan. He of the Highest IQ in I-land who so likes to line up the o’tools of his trade, his endless supply of shovel-ready cliches leaning against the gable-wall of The Unionist Times. (So many cliches, so little wall).
The Drab Decade, according to Fine Minded Fintan (b. 1958), where the non-Church of Ireland, the non-Shoneen mindset last held fin de siecle sway, wallowing in its last miserable hurrah.
He would know, he would. This mensa man who famously makes up the minds of the mindless and who so loves to diss the Dreamdecade. The most technicolour of all tenyear spans with a soundtrack from the heavens on high, when the Seraphim and the Cherubim had to jostle for position in the Hit Parade with other girl groups like the Shirelles, the Supremes, the Chordettes and the Crystals.
One wonders does Fine Minded Fintan (b. 1958) even know the ABC of the Dreamdecade? It would indeed be of interest to put him to the litmus test, from A to Z and taking in S for Succotash along the way..
Starting with A for Alkali.
That pool of poisonous water in the arid landscape of Arizona, that backdrop for hundreds of horse operas, where the toxic nature of the green stagnant liquid needed no other punctuation mark than the sightless skull of a long-dead, long-horned steer to mock the parched throat of Cowboy Joe. Yes, pardner. Cowboy Joe of the upturned, empty canteen.
All the way from A via S to ……Don Diego de la Vega himself.
Si, senor, the man with the medium-sized dagger tucked inside his left boot for emergencies, with a versatile cape used variously as a blind, a trip-mat and even (gasp) as a disarming tool itself. The man with the weighted hat who could and would throw it, Frisbee-;like, as an efficiently substantial warning to enemies.
Hombres y mujeres, it ees my great honour to give you ze original Border Fox, ze masked man who made ze biggest mark of ze Dreamdecade…..
Z for Zorro.
PS If the Infallible Fintan (b. 1958), pronouncing ex-cathedra from his weekly pulpit, can be so askew about the Fabulous Fifties, I ask you what else he is equally cockeyed about?
Have you got a decade to spare?
Yes Mighty Perk …..more intellectual heft per square inch in every Looney Toons frame …the sublime, neglected artistry of Mr Frelang and his co-conspirators in the studios of inspired lunacy…the 1950’s were a peak period of toonery.
I was always more of a Cisco Kid or Tenderfoot/Sugarfoot kinda guy…
And it can only get worse….should we be able to see the audit reports from other Council areas….I think so ! Newly formed Causway Coast and Glens had begun the auld tribal shenanigans again ,wishing to stick their unwelcome symbols of dominance in Nationalist areas.I have virtually given up on ever reaching accommodation here as reasonable and rational Unionism seems to be an oxymoron…..In being with them and trying to reasonably co-exist we end up in a perpetual cloud cuckoo land . Unionism’s raison d’etre is this contrived entity , without it they cease to have a meaning and I honestly look forward to a reunited country where will have to behave like mature adults and take responsibility for their increasingly illogical actions.
“we end up in a perpetual cloud cuckoo land” –
I think a lot of people are starting to feel like that Sèamus because of having to cope over and over again, day in day out, with a very warped mindset that is obsessed with the same old, same old.
Instead of trying to cope with it we need to find a way to circumvent it –
i hear on this morning’s radio that the Nolan Show are now getting stuck into the “debate”. One of the councuillors defending the” spend “have just now stated the the wooden pallet is now a cultural item in its own right .needed to properly constuct the bonfire . In years to come it is possible that small reproductions of wooden pallets may be seen hanging on silver chains around the necks of stout Norneverlanders as a cultural totem like the fainne in the lapel of Irish speakers.
The British government’s large financial supplement to Northern Ireland should be conditional.
I mean if someone supplements your income to help your family survive,
would they tolerate you spending that money on frivolous things?
I think not.
Of course the British government has a vested interest in keeping this so called culture going.
Amazing here we are in 2015 and we have Neanderthals walking the earth still