“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s” - William Blake

“If capitalism makes ugliness inevitable, I’ll prove it wrong one chair at a time” - William Morris

thx you for reading

Two sassy Williams. Both English. Both vaguely annoying in their earnestness but also a little adorable for it. One known for, amongst a big cauldron of creative endeavours, mystical side-eye. The other considered much of the Victorian world he inhabited absolute tat and didn’t he stop harping on about it. The lives of William Blake and William Morris didn’t quite overlap historically, but obviously shared an awful lot in how they approached things. Between them they conjured a sea of quotes and aphorisms that capture the role of craft and art in life. These two I see as a continuation of one another, and have jotted down a couple of times in moments of doubt over the years.

The first quote, well, many people have made a similar point over the years, and yes, we are all tied up in a whole knot of systems we certainly didn’t create. But there is a point in there about sticking to the things you want to see and believe in, that is useful in its mad purity. Then Morris basically fills in the unsaid - we are all under capitalism for better or worse, and it produces dross in every aspect of our lives, both digitally and physically. Every time I click a consent form when online (at least 10s of times a day) I acknowledge I’m ok with being fed digital garbage in order to see the thing I want to. This is also Morris’s inevitable ugliness. Deep in wherever we are in history at the moment, struggling to make sense of so many grim patterns of performing that have been created by the tech-centred/social media focus of work today, performances that make you question people you respected, that eat greedily at your sense of self, deranging your dopamine, performances that very quickly send the word ‘nope’ rattling across your synapses…. These, these, these are all inevitable uglinesses.

Last year Noah Davis had his retrospective at the Barbican. His life, tragically short, was a lesson in ignoring what you see that is awful, and doing what you believe in (and is positive). Davis’ approach in his paintings set out simple, pure - in a Blakean sense - principles: no spectacle, no great explanation, no irony, no shouting for attention, no trolling or gimmicks. It is an expression of building the thing you want to see (a museum for exceptional Black art in a working class part of the city), an expression of profound beauty in the everyday. Ordinary parts of life radiating for what they are, without glitz or glamour. An unassuming dedication to the craft of art and an ongoing warmth to humanity. If I’m honest, I’ve slightly rolled my eyes at the space that Blake and Morris take up in the art consciousness of the UK, but here it felt like I was encountering their principles and it was humbling.

At a similar time I had been putting together the zine for the Dekmantel and thinking of extending my writing to here. In my head I wasn’t convinced about substack, but it was a way of beginning a different way of engaging with my audience and what I do creatively. At that time I had been reading about fan clubs and I wrote about them in that first letter. The way people engaged with the things they loved, and created their own thing around these things was, to me, a better form of connection than the more atomised one we generally experience today. And it led to actual new things being created: I mentioned a library of vampire fan fiction that exists for the results of the thousands of Dracula fan clubs. Today online you follow people whose work you like alongside every banal aspect of life and it all fights together for a few fractions of your attention. Global disasters collapsed next to work out tips, next to cocktails, next to Epstein, next to tacos, next to two years of creative endeavour… and as of a couple of weeks ago, TikTok was folded into a new company that is an extension of the US government with all the horror you can imagine that goes with that at this point in time in regards to ICE and surveillance capitalism.

There is no comparison here between the positivity of Noah, the two Williams and this idea of mine, just a reminder that we must do better to step beyond the horror show. The idea was to take the template of the pre-internet fan club, and update it for today. It’s taken much of a year to figure out what this club should be and how to run it. But here goes.

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Hello to the Almighty Rhythm Power Organization.

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The details and way of signing up is all here - callsuper.net

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Open to anyone, it can be free, it can be paid. It is an evolution of last years A Rhythm Protects One project, to something that is built around us, and I can work through.

It will connect how I sell tickets for parties (which hopefully keeps things more word of mouth between us) and share what is inspiring me (essentially embracing WhatsApp as a social network) to physical things I make such as printed matter and CDs and Tees.

Along the way I have decided against using substack as the tool to build it around. That said I have enjoyed writing out thoughts and observations here this last year so this, in its current form, will continue. <3

thx u for reading