Under Milk Wood

Kevin Allen's 'Under Milk Wood' opens in UK cinemas later this week. - starring Charlotte Church as Polly Garter and Rhys Ifans as Captain Cat. I am looking forward to seeing it. After 'Left Field' is published I am going to re-write my Dylan Thomas comedy - 'Spitting at the Sky' - first performed as a professional reading at the Dylan Thomas Festival in Swansea in 2004. I was a friend of the art critic, Mervyn Levy, who went to school with Dylan. He told me that the two of them shared a flat in Chelsea in the 30s and loved going to Marx Brothers films. They acted out the parts when they got home. He also told me that Thomas had been interred in Macy's morgue in NYC. Knowing this I set the play in Macy's and introduced Dylan to the Marx Brothers there. The cast in Swansea included Sion Probert, Stan Stennett, Liz Morgan and my friend, Anna Gilbert. John Yorke, then Head of Drama at Channel 4, commented: “a powerful and beautifully written piece of theatre, and I have to say that your mastery of language isn't far off Thomas' himself.” 

Toilet humour

Jeremy Corbyn is 'standing up the Queen', 'won't kiss her hand', 'refuses to kneel', 'didn't sing her song'. All archaic bollocks. The language itself is feudal. 'Privy' council is taken from the time when the monarch held meetings while he/she was having a shit. 'Cabinet meetings' were also held in the toilet. Maybe they still are. That long table may have been photoshopped. As co-founder of War Child I was once invited to have tea with the Queen. I wouldn't go and, as I was the lone republican in the charity, someone took my place. They returned to the office shocked and had moved slightly closer to my republicanism because, at that time, War Child was running a bakery in war-torn Bosnia. When told about this Phillip commented, 'I bet they steal the bread'. Then when the head of our medical projects said we also supplied insulin to diabetic children, he jumped in with, 'I bet they steal that too'. According to The Republic the annual cost of the Monarchy is £334 million. The feast that feeds off the people. 'Left Field', which covers my War Child years, has no references to the Queen. I promise.

Left Field cover

Russell Mills has created a great cover for Left Field. I am honoured that he has produced such an outstanding design, as effective as those I've admired on his covers for Don DeLillo and Milan Kundera. 

Left Field is to be published by Unbound in March 2016. Funding has exceeded 100%, but there is still time to pre-order a copy & have your name acknowledged. To be a book angel, click here.

Cover design: Russell Mills 

Brian Eno interview here

Sample chapter here   

                                                                                          www.davidwilson.org.uk

The Texture of Shadows

I have just finished reading Mandla Langa's The Texture of Shadows which, in his own words, "speaks of the invincibility of the human spirit. The possibility for people to go for broke and do things even if there is no reward." Amen to that! A great read. A powerful and unromantic account of the liberation struggle in South Africa. It is beautifully written—Mandla is both writer and poet. Check out the interview with him here and then get hold of the book. I have finished Textures on the day when Russell Mills has started work on designing the cover for Left Field. Mandla kindly offered a comment on me which will appear in Russell's work. I quoted from Mandla's book in my chapter, 'Rainbows' which is about my meeting Nelson Mandela: "Towering above his escorts, he was the freest man on earth, freer, certainly, than his captors who’d have to wrestle with their souls as cat’s paws of unjust power." Eugene Skeef introduced my own work to Mandla. Eugene is not on my book's cover, but he gets a whole chapter to himself!

Mandla Langa was winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Prize with his novel, The Lost Colours of the Chameleon

Dr Strangelove is alive and well

With the1962 Cuban missile crisis, nuclear war seemed imminent. If the missile-carrying Soviet vessels didn’t turn back from Cuba, there would be war. Jackie Kennedy recalled that she insisted on sleeping with her husband—not something she often did. She didn’t want to die alone. If she was scared, the rest of us had every right to be. That year the anti-nuclear movement remained the focus of my politics. I read Robert Jungk’s Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, the horrific telling of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with its account of the shadows of the dead imprinted on the earth. It left me in shock. The book’s title is taken from Robert Oppenheimer’s words when witnessing the first atomic bomb explosion in July 1945. He quoted the Bhagavad Gita, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I started to self-educate myself with all that was not taught at school, following Bertrand Russell’s axiom that ‘Men are born ignorant not stupid. They are made stupid by education.’ I read everything: from Marx's Capital to Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I joined CND and started marching against the bomb. Fifty three years later and Dr Strangelove is still scaring the shit out of me! Read more here in 'Left Field'.

Half the world is missing

'Left Field' is a memoir with many meadows, one of them containing the flowers and fields of the Croatian naïve painter Ivan Rabuzin. Some years ago as his London agent, I produced a BBC Arena film made during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. With Rabuzin's paintings came a homespun philosophy: ‘When a man looks at something, he just sees half of it. At every moment, half the world is missing to us so we must turn in order to see the second half. Everything depends on what we see and how long we see it. That’s how long we live. Unfortunately, for most of us, even when we are alive, we live only half a life.’ Despite selling truckloads of his silk-screen prints in Japan and with buyers like Woody Allen, it proved impossible to popularise his work in the UK. Croatia: The Artists' War was panned by the critics here. Giles Smith in The Independent said, ‘Most of his paintings look like the kind of Get Well card you might buy for someone you didn’t know that closely.’ Check Rabuzin's art out for yourself here. He liked to play Chopin when he worked though this video is set to Handel.

Exaro - holding power to account

The Guardian (21 Sep 2015) says that there are moves to bring to a halt police investigations into child sex abuse amongst Establishment figures. The role of Exaro - the news organisation whose work played a major part in bringing about the police inquiries - is being brought into doubt. The Guardian says "One complaint came last November over the presence of its journalist, David Hencke, a former Guardian reporter, at a private meeting for survivors and their representatives. A second complaint was made to another senior inquiry official three months later, alleging that the role Exaro was playing – 'seemingly with the assistance of panel members' –was 'causing havoc' among some survivors." If you check out the Exaro website you will see that they work meticulously in their exposure of corruption and bad practice at the highest level. What's more they conduct their work more honestly and rigorously than the corporate media. I have known David Hencke since he was a Guardian journalist and led the investigation into my allegations involving War Child. He was incredibly thorough and would not commit anything to public notice until he was sure he had a watertight story. He even investigated me and was right to do so. This is what Exaro itself says about David: "David Hencke led our exposure of senior civil servants who were able to avoid tax by working off payroll. The story won David the title of political journalist of the year. David was at the forefront of Exaro's exposure of secret recordings of a meeting where Rupert Murdoch made clear that he was aware that some of his newspaper journalists had paid bribes." Check out Exaro's work for yourself.