What does freedom mean to you? The freedom to be needs to be matched by the freedom from having to be. You can’t be forced to be yourself, otherwise freedom itself becomes the tyranny.
Author Archives: John B Ledger
Share a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life. Garry Sykes. Who passed away earlier this year. He taught me on my Bachelors degree in art at Barnsley College. Although it was a Bachelors degree, this wasn’t a university education. Barnsley is a post-industrial town, and certainly not a university town.Continue reading
Self-hate
I can’t explain how much self-hate I experience towards myself on a daily basis, without wanting to punch you, kill you, expose myself to you – anything to prove what a piece of worthless wank I am, so as to justify my non-existence. It’s been a driver in my mental make-up for most my adultContinue reading “Self-hate”
A Uk bank holiday in 2024
HEAD HELD DOWN Negativity isn’t a perception of a world outside, it’s a projection of that world inside: how you feel about yourself, as you continually manoeuvre the inner furniture, trying to feel at home. This reminder gives you rest-bite from the habit of being hard on yourself. But it splutters and withers as youContinue reading “A Uk bank holiday in 2024”
My secret love of rocks
Like many kids who have been allowed the space to be interested in things, I had fleeting fixations. Having initially been WW2 obsessed, collecting and subsequently breaking Airfix models, I went on to be obsessed with snakes, fossils, and trees. When I started secondary school in 1995 I came to the conclusion that the onlyContinue reading “My secret love of rocks”
The waste that calls your name
If everything up here is exposed, then this bleached landscape is the necessary negative of the urban spaces below where addiction has become the modus operandi; where every stone is upturned, leaving no secrets, no mystery, no object to desire, just short circuits to quick fixes. …and it’s for good reason I come here, onceContinue reading “The waste that calls your name”
The mistaken belief that pain will end: Blur’s ’13’, 25 years on
To speak with admiration of Blur still stokes fear of criticism, even to this day. I’ve read enough critiques of their class tourism in the 90s; the ease with which they simultaneously pantomimed the working class whilst being socialites in the Camden scene to make me feel like the only culture I’m allowed to talkContinue reading “The mistaken belief that pain will end: Blur’s ’13’, 25 years on”
Re-reading Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s ‘cognitarian subjectivation’ 13 years later.
Around the time of all the stuff kicking off in 2011, the student protests, the English Riots and the Occupy movement, a friend, noticing that I was projecting slightly more nervous energy than usual, suggested an article by a writer I’d never heard of. I’d only started reading in my mid 20s. After the financialContinue reading “Re-reading Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s ‘cognitarian subjectivation’ 13 years later.”
The ascent (Black Hill)
Where do you go when the direction, momentum, you indirectly, but nonetheless wholeheartedly placed your future state of being within, dissolves into thin air, and you see nothing in front of you? You go sideways. Westwards. Up here…scouring for answers. The moors are plural. One moor is every moor. But the Moors is a stateContinue reading “The ascent (Black Hill)”
“When we awoke it was spring”
The above line is taken from the film ‘London’ by Patrick Keiller. Spring means more to me than I realise, if I’m foolish enough to let it slip me by. I see it specifically in the former mining areas of South and West Yorkshire, the rolling fields that still separate the sporadic built-up areas, alwaysContinue reading ““When we awoke it was spring””
John B Ledger 