They’re at it again. There’s a sector of our so-called “artistic community” who insist on operating strictly on terms that equate their freedom of expression to some school project approved by teacher and headmaster. Already when the Stitching case first came to light we had many a protest about “the death of expression” and mock funerals. J’accuse had taken a very clear position back then – this was a case of the law’s transient provisions needing a re-application and updating in accordance with the mores of society. What we also found obnoxious was the niggling need of our “artists” to obtain a “nihil obstat” from every authority before staging “provocative” pieces. In my not too humble opinion they missed the point completely. Provocative pieces HAVE to be staged without authority’s acquiescence. Take to the streets if necessary – under pouring rain in the midst of Valletta commuters declaim all the “fucks” you like and picture as many “vaginas and penises” as your might require to provoke.
Instead our artists will sit and weep in a corner and when they are not bemoaning the lack of funding for their social projects they will be telling us how all that they have to say and do is being suffocated by that behemoth called CENSORSHIP.
Enough I say. The Stitching appeal was based and framed within the context of the old laws. Why are we surprised that the court was consistent in upholding the ban? Isn’t that why the laws were changed in the end? Have things really remained the same? Is our artistic community suffering the pains of further censorship? Like hell they are.
Go ahead and stage the bloody piece.
Howl. Allen Ginsberg.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer after noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-ings and migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago, who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom, who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices, who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles, who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity, who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes, who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz, who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp notism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury, who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy, and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia, who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane, who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years. What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob tainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave- ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time! Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street! Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am I'm with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother I'm with you in Rockland where you've murdered your twelve secretaries I'm with you in Rockland where you laugh at this invisible humor I'm with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter I'm with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio I'm with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses I'm with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica I'm with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx I'm with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss I'm with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse I'm with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void I'm with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha I'm with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I'm with you in Rockland where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com- rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I'm with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep I'm with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free I'm with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea- journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
19 replies on “Fu*king Censorship”
Well written my friend!
Fine Jacques have it your way. 1. We did not stage protests or fucking funerals. we staged rehearsals of the play in various places to audiences of various ages. We have and can stage the play 2. When a court upholds a ban, that ban lives on. Yes we can ‘publish and be damned’ but things have gone beyond the point of merely staging the play. The point is that I want to show that our judges are not worthy of being in their position. I want to show that the o called expert on Human Rights in Malta who opined all over the legal journals with his screwed up interpretation of the play can’t even understand the text let alone comment on. I want to tell that master pornographer Fr Joe Borg, who thinks its ok to take excerpts from the play out of context read them to hundred of thousand of xarabank viewers 9 and translates for those who don’t understand), where to get off. I want to tell Ex-Chief Justice Mifsud Bonnici, who is suddenly an expert in English Literature to finally F off and let us get on with living. so yes this member of the ‘so-called artistic community’ is going to go on fighting because as it is those b*stards up at university, that menagerie of Judges down the road in republic street and that woman in San pawl tat-targa will continue to hold her head up high and quite rightly tell me that no Malta is not Europe
Il-lozbric twila dik ta’ Ginsberg, man! Zejziet, zobb, bajd u suf, so there! LOL
Divorzju, parla Agnesi. Malta…Europe…Malta…Europe. Tonio Borg. Malta…Europe…Malta…Europe. Grrrrrrrrrrrr!
Chris. I can see where you are coming from and you will be surprised to find out that there are many points on which we agree. So let me try:
1. To begin with I stand by my position with regard to the lack of importance of this appeal judgement because of the change in the laws. So first of all the main reason I am not wont to kicking up a fuss is that the other arm of the state – the government – has seen the flaw and moved to fix it.
2. As for the case per se and the approach of the court I had gone on record ages ago that even a minimum appreciation of the literary and dramatic value of such pieces would lead the court to stop thinking literally. The problem is one of interpretation of the law and not of the law itself. I remember writing that by the standards of the court we should also ban performances of Macbeth since there is not much difference between parts of Stitching and Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here” scene.
3. I would not exactly consider Fr Joe Borg as a standard for anything beyond being a regular guest on Bondi’s programmes as an “expert” of sorts. I do not know who the woman in San Pawl tat-Targa is and unfortunately I might have to agree with you that some judges (and not just Jojo) might not have the same literary approach as is required to get a proper feel of the average man’s appreciation of literary messages.
4. Fight on! You have all my backing for what it’s worth (I am often called an armchair critic though in quite a Don Quixote way I do feel that my pen/keyboard can be much more powerful than anything else).
@Peppi. Zgur ma qrajthiex kollha. Qisek qorti kostituzzjonali… trid tikkumenta u mank tindenja taqra l-iskritt.
One question from one that has no idea of the law.
Does this mean that if Stitches is performed today, and someone would take the producers to court, under the new law, the court would not find the producers guilty of anything and thus, at last, Stitches can be performed in local theatres on this island?
It means two things. Firstly that in order to produce the play there is a new system in place that allows the producers to be their own “censors” insofar as classification is concerned. Secondly you will always be open to the possibility that some dumbfuck decides to literally interpret a play – not necessarily blasphemy or obscenity in that case but even, let’s say, contemplation of murder and proceeds to report it to the authorities. In which case other laws (and interpretations) will come into play. This kind of test will always be there – we just have to hope that our judiciary get a bit more “literary” and a bit less “literal”.
I have not read the Appeals Court judgment and doubt if you Jacques or the other commentators did. Therefore I will refrain, at least now, from commenting on the judgement. However I think the main point to be discussed is not the “literal” vs the “literary” view but the limits of freedom of expressions in the light of the values of society. I also deplore the stupid ad hominem comments on Fr Joe Borg, Judge Mifsud Bonnici and others.
Assumptions David assumptions. I did read the case, I do think the judge were more concerned with literal than literary reading of the law and I do think that the final judgement distorted the concept of freedom of expression. As for stupid ad hominem comments I am sure that others can defend themselves perfectly without you making a hash of it.
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As I stated previously, the point at issue was the protection of values and the limits of freedom of expression. I quote the conclusion reached by the learned judges of the Court of Appeal after examining European Court of Human Rights judgements
“Hu, ghalhekk, li l-Bord ta’ Klassifika f’dan il-kaz agixxa tajjeb u korrettement. Il-projbizzjoni tal-produzzjoni teatrali tad-dramm ma kinitx wahda kapricjuza jew esagerata f’dan il-kaz, izda kienet tirrispondi ghal bzonn socjali tal-protezzjoni tal-moralita` pubblika fis-socjeta` Maltija, kif
ukoll ghal bzonn illi d-drittijiet ta’ haddiehor jigu protetti.”
The fact that I am not happy with the reaction to the decision has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with the substance and content of the case. In actual fact I do believe that the learned judges have made quite a hash out of this situation and that an appeal to the Strasbourg courts will indubitably rectify the unfortunate and absurd situation that such a judgement creates.
The law cannot and will not be an arbiter of literary content and taste and we cannot let the right to feel offended prevail over the right to express oneself.
Every day in hundreds of faith establishments across the island there is staged a ritual during which, members of a congregation actually believe that the body and blood of a god made man is transubstantiated. It is a metaphorical celebration of what they would call the victory of life over death. The moment somebody attends one such ritual and claims to be offended by the gory implications of what is after all a very bloody affair you will suddenly stop declaiming these learned judges and the dangerous precedent that they have set.
I can only agree on one thing David, that people like you need to be protected from the danger of being offended by such plays as Stitching. Which is why I believe that a clear warning on the ticket and before the performance should suffice to keep you safely ensconced away from any challenges that the brutal reality of the world might throw your way.
Ite missa est.
If the law cannot be an arbiter of literary taste, are the infinitely wise judges in Strasbourg to Biblically wash their hands off this case?
We know that according to Maltese, European and international laws there are limits to freedom of expression as is the case of obscenity (the leading United States case Miller), and also the reputation of others (as in libel and defamation laws). There also similar laws in many countries against offending others (hate legislation, and the UK Public Order Act, blasphemy laws and others).
The relevance of transubstantiation to the Constitutional Court Judgment on Stitching defies all forms of human comprehension. In the thousands of years the miracle described as “body and blood …. is transubstantiated” (I think it is the other way round) has been celebrated and in the whole wide world where similar ceremonies are held, no one has objected to this aspect of the celebration as being gory.
Since ita missa est is old hat, I will end with immorru fil-paċi ta’ Kristu.
What’s this Dave? A battle of seniority? For that matters plays and dramas have been held for much longer than what you call a miracle. You must feel really uncomfortable in your lose-lose situation because either you have not read Stitching and are speaking from your arse or you have read it and find it offensive (incidentally the court does not find Stitiching offensive or blasphemous – it simply accepts the assessment of the Film Board) which simply shows that you have as mediocre a grasp of literary metaphor as the average man. Which makes sense in the end.
You do not want to limit freedom of expression in case of obscenity you want to apply the socialist scythe of collective ignorance … “if you cannot understand it, then it is best not put on as a show.”
And by the way … it’s itE missa est.
Do judges qualify as average men? Is Stitching staged for unaverage men?
I do not think you read the judgement carefully. I quote again:
“Ma hemm ebda dubbju li l-produzzjoni kienet xorta twassal il-messagg li trid tibghat kieku uzat kliem, qawwi iva, izda mhux necessarjament li jikkontjeni dagha, oxxenitajiet, perversitajiet, u dawk li huma insulenti u espressjonijiet tassew degredanti jew razzisti u dan ukol u fil-konfront ta’ diversi persuni minhabba n-nazzjonalita`, is-sess,it-twemmin, u stat taghhom fost affarijiet ohra, anke fuq imsemmija.”
Ikolli nammetti, sieheb, li ghandek ragun. Ma qrajthiex kollha ta’ Ginsberg. Pero’ naf li xi hadd kien hazzez “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by censorship” fuq dik ir-rampa originali li tinstab Balluta Bay, in the heart of Maaaaaahltaaaah’s tourist hub. Dejjem dehrli li kienet xi ftit ezagerata bhala stqarrija, izda helwa fl-istess hin, hemm, mitfugha ghall-gharrieda taht dak il-bini kitsch colonial by some budding Banksy (naaaaaat!). Ta’ Ginsberg ma qrajthiex kollha. Altre cose, si, pero’. Next stop Stassers (laqam ghal Strasbourg fost id-diaspora Britannika dan). Pleasures yet to come, eeeeeeeeh…
Strassers (bl-“erre” wara t-“te” with Mussolini)
Boq!!