{"uri":"https://octothorp.es/","term":"politics","thorpes":[{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/post-apocalyptic-pastoral-and-post-industrial","title":"Post-apocalyptic pastoral and post-industrial","description":"I’ve lifted the term “post-apocalyptic pastoral” from a book review by Goodreads user Terry from Toronto who effectively seeded my reading list by citing Richard Jefferies’ After London: or, Wild…","postDate":null,"date":1762840708541},{"uri":"https://justatheory.com/2004/08/portland-kerry-ralley","title":"Portland Kerry Rally","description":"Julie and I just got back from the Kerry rally at the Tom McCall Waterfront Park in Portland, OR. According to the Kerry Blog, there were ca. 60,000 people at the rally. Julie and I waited till the last minute to go, and for a while there thought we wouldn’t get in. But we did, and heard the second half of Kerry’s speech. As we made our way through the city afterward, we overheard some other folks saying they’d arrived at 8:30 and never got in. We felt very fortunate. I think it was just dumb luck to have found the entrance we did.","postDate":null,"date":1774808645456},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/armageddon-gospels","title":"Armageddon Gospels","description":"Earlier this week I was privileged to watch a sneaky advance screening of Armageddon Gospels. Armageddon Gospels from Foolish People is a new film written and directed by John Harrigan, in which a group…","postDate":null,"date":1762469457311},{"uri":"https://jshwlkr.info/posts/2025/idiots-delight","title":"Idiot's Delight  ·  jshwlkr.info","description":"The infuriating timelessness of Vonnegut.","postDate":null,"date":1774099200653},{"uri":"https://lucybellwood.com/powerful-perfect","title":"Powerful > Perfect – Lucy Bellwood","description":null,"postDate":null,"date":1770470472109},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/pattern-recognition","title":"Pattern recognition","description":"The fabric of reality is fraying in England: the old queen is dead, a disgraced prince has been ousted by the new king, his older brother: Gormenghast is changing, and Gormenghast both relies on and demands…","postDate":null,"date":1763224744760},{"uri":"https://lucybellwood.com/heroics","title":"Heroics – Lucy Bellwood","description":null,"postDate":null,"date":1774321238869},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/individualism-over-community","title":"Individualism over Community","description":"Much has already been said about the championing of individualism over community by the likes of Thatcher and others from the 1980s onwards. It is — and continues to be — a weapon used to divide and…","postDate":null,"date":1762782461935},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/englands-dark-dreaming-part-three","title":"England’s Dark Dreaming (Part III)","description":"I’ve now finished the first 5 of my England’s Dark Dreaming series of drawings. I wish I could show you them at their full size—one metre high—rather than the relatively small digital photographs…","postDate":null,"date":1762699599865},{"uri":"https://justatheory.com/2004/10/fineman-analysis","title":null,"description":null,"postDate":null,"date":1748892907249},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/famous-painting-attacked-by-protestors","title":"Famous painting attacked by protestors","description":"A world-famous painting, worth millions of pounds, has been savagely attacked by activists earlier today. The activists have been arrested by police, who arrived swiftly on the scene to assess the damage…","postDate":null,"date":1762725024299},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/may-day-2024","title":"May Day 2024","description":"From The Guardian in 2011: May Day is a conflation of three traditions. An ancient Celtic and Germanic one in which peasants who had managed to survive the winter celebrated the beginning of better…","postDate":null,"date":1762738662405},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/diggers-moss-and-bacon","title":"Diggers, Moss, and Bacon: a round-up for February","description":"My creativity and inspiration have been very limited of late. Sometimes this just happens, and at other times there’s a definite correlation with what’s going on in the world. In this particular case…","postDate":null,"date":1762752613443},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/artists-are-controlled-by-words","title":"Artists are controlled by words","description":"Politicians try to control debate with phrases and concepts - you know they’re at it when you suddenly start hearing all the members of one party laboriously forcing a particular set phrase into their…","postDate":null,"date":1762748577257},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/thoughts-on-uk-general-election-2024","title":"Some thoughts on the UK General Election 2024","description":"Late last week in my current Hove & Portslade constituency the Labour MP (and now cabinet minister) Peter Kyle was elected with a reduced majority, and the Tories were pushed into third place behind the…","postDate":null,"date":1762746836379},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/dreams-of-englands-future","title":"No one dreams of England’s future any more","description":"No one seems to dream of England’s future any more, just its imagined past. When the post-modernists proclaimed (again) “the end of history” what they should have been announcing, in England at least,…","postDate":null,"date":1762761412792},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/imagining-a-more-utopian-future","title":"Imagining a more Utopian future","description":"I’ve written about imagining progressive alternative futures here before, mainly as ways of breaking out of the chains of capitalist realism (most are tagged as Mark Fisher and/or Acid Communism if you…","postDate":null,"date":1762886986143},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/on-being-a-serious-artist","title":"On being a Serious Artist","description":"A lot of online advice for artists is framed around the trappings of corporate capitalism: building your brand, hitting self-imposed targets, maximising sales through targeted marketing, and so on. If…","postDate":null,"date":1762745419842},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/more-on-the-weird","title":"More on The Weird","description":"I have mentioned “The Weird” as a concept before, and I wanted to expand on the idea, particularly after reading We Demand An End to Capitalist Realism (which you really should read right now, it’s…","postDate":null,"date":1762840675642},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/if-you-want-a-picture-of-the-future","title":"If you want a picture of the future, imagine humans having to face watching reboots – for ever","description":"This blog post is mainly concerned with the overlapping and/or adjacent spheres of hauntology, folk horror, the weird/wyrd, and other related subject areas, but the conclusions can probably be expanded…","postDate":null,"date":1762757993467},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/strange-fascinations","title":"Strange fascinations","description":"I have a confession to make: I don’t particularly like some of the new nature writing. Some of the old stuff bores me too. I should probably clarify that a bit: I don’t want to read piles of books…","postDate":null,"date":1762061216946},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/crafting-utopias-with-ursula","title":"Crafting Utopias with Ursula","description":"Yesterday was St Swithin’s Day and it hasn’t rained for days. The Met Office has issued its first ever Red Warning for extreme heat, predicting that “exceptional, perhaps record-breaking, temperatures…","postDate":null,"date":1762605027778},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/culture-wars-episode-1","title":"Culture Wars, episode 1: The Fascist Menace","description":"In a post here back in 2020—entitled Albion: utopianism and the post-apocalyptic pastoral—I mentioned that culture and the arts are the main way to inspire someone about a political viewpoint: Despite…","postDate":null,"date":1762835240975},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/andor-welcome-to-the-rebellion","title":"Andor: welcome to the rebellion","description":"For obvious reasons this post contains spoilers for all the episodes in Andor season 2. I wrote about season one of Andor back in April 2023, and wrote about whether a capitalist corporation like Disney…","postDate":null,"date":1762542995139},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/a-multitude-of-futures","title":"A Multitude of Futures","description":"I’m starting to see more people talking about the need to imagine the future, which is both fantastic and absolutely necessary. What follows is a series of quotes and outward links with some of my…","postDate":null,"date":1762706895957},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/prefiguration","title":"Prefiguration","description":"Back in 2020 I was discussing the out-of-print novel Albion by Brenda Vale and musing on what I’d taken from it, and I wrote: The problem with modern democracy is that it has thoroughly convinced…","postDate":null,"date":1762561440518},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/re-enchantment-in-deep-england","title":"Notes on re-enchantment as resistance in Deep England","description":"Yesterday I posed a question on Twitter as a short thread that I’ll reformat here for easy reading: I’m trying to put together a vague explanation for the increased use—by artists (such as myself),…","postDate":null,"date":1762797130037},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/stargazy-on-zummerdown","title":"Stargazy on Zummerdown","description":"Update: August 2024 - There is now a copy of Stargazy on Zummerdown on the Internet Archive which is now embedded above. Update: October 2023 - the YouTube copy of Stargazy on Zummerdown has disappeared.…","postDate":null,"date":1762621785157},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/acid-renaissance-update-3","title":"Acid Renaissance: update 3","description":"Back in the 1970s there seemed to be such a myriad of ideas about potential shared futures, exploring all aspects of the political, social, and cultural. The aim of neoliberal capitalism of the 1980s onwards…","postDate":null,"date":1761521647150},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/psychedelic-gothic-in-acid-renaissance","title":"The Psychedelic Gothic in Acid Renaissance","description":"In a recent blogpost Ellen Rogers wrote of her current Gnosis project: It’s taken me 4 years to try and articulate what this project is about, but I felt like I was repeatedly going back to square…","postDate":null,"date":1762888754422},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/acid-communism-acid-renaissance","title":"Acid Communism; Acid Renaissance","description":"I’m a visual artist, so this brief piece about Mark Fisher’s draft introduction to his planned book Acid Communism (sadly never to be realised due to his premature death) examines the concept from…","postDate":null,"date":1762886914996},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/arts-tech/posts/what-amazon-needs-to-do-next","title":"What Amazon needs to do next","description":"It all started when Amazon removed the “Sales Rank” from all gay & lesbian books (apart from homophobic books which now appear at the top of an Amazon search for “Homosexuality”).  The…","postDate":null,"date":1762718505484},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/looking-for-a-new-way","title":"Looking for a new way","description":"I've been thinking recently about how artists (and musicians and writers) use social media, about how nearly every “how to use social media as an artist/writer/etc” article talks about your “brand”…","postDate":null,"date":1762856138315},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/departure-lounge","title":"Departure lounge","description":"When you’re planning to move home there’s suddenly a day when the place that you’ve called home stops being home in some intangible way, and it instead becomes a departure lounge, and then you feel…","postDate":null,"date":1762761184940},{"uri":"https://justatheory.com/2006/04/why-stay-in-iraq","title":"Should We Withdraw From Iraq?","description":null,"postDate":null,"date":1771921534554},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/the-stories-we-tell-each-other","title":"The stories we tell ourselves about the world are important","description":"This blog post contains spoilers for the 2023 TV series The Fall of the House of Usher and probably for season 1 of the 2022 TV series Andor. The recent TV series The Fall of the House of Usher is a…","postDate":null,"date":1762738781540},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/englands-dark-dreaming-part-two","title":"England’s Dark Dreaming (Part II)","description":"I'm increasingly convinced that the country is temporally fractured, and we should be expecting a visit from Sapphire & Steel any time now. Everything seems to operate on skewed oneiric logic. Everyone…","postDate":null,"date":1762834013635},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/digital-worlds-and-gardens","title":"Digital Worlds and Gardens","description":"Back in August I wrote about a lot of online advice for artists is framed around the trappings of corporate capitalism, and my deep-felt aversion to the call to adopt these trappings in the documentation…","postDate":null,"date":1762889709925},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/signs-of-a-growing-distrust-of-us-web-platforms","title":"Signs of a growing distrust of US web platforms","description":"Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed several people from the US who run personal websites making or pondering decisions about whether they should move their websites onto a non-US server. And what’s…","postDate":null,"date":1762710567333},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/acid-renaissance-update-1","title":"Acid Renaissance: update 1","description":"As work steps up on my new series of artwork, Acid Renaissance: Albion’s True Standard Advanced, it’s about time I provided an update on the ideas and thinking behind it. First of all, Acid Renaissance…","postDate":null,"date":1762752242819},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/tagged","title":"The Artist’s Notebook","description":"The Artist’s Notebook is Paul Watson’s studio journal containing notes on his ongoing artwork and related research, giving an insight into his creative process and artistic practice.","postDate":null,"date":1762553063360},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/albion-utopianism-post-apocalyptic-pastoral","title":"Albion: utopianism and the post-apocalyptic pastoral","description":"The problem with modern democracy is that it has thoroughly convinced everyone that you only get one chance to improve society every five years. Didn’t succeed this time? You’ll have to wait another…","postDate":null,"date":1762740775876},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/the-ghosts-of-christmas-futures","title":"The Ghosts of Christmas Futures","description":"2018 has been my most financially successful year as an artist, primarily due to my England's Dark Dreaming book (fewer than 75 copies left at time of writing!). However when I say my most financially…","postDate":null,"date":1762749954610},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/anarchism-in-speculative-fiction","title":"Anarchism in Speculative Fiction","description":"One of my first Mastodon posts was a request: Looking for recommendations about speculative fiction (SF/F, pref. short stories, but novels are fine) set in anarchist communities or dealing with anarchist…","postDate":null,"date":1762874102237},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/radical-futures-in-mainstream-science-fiction","title":"Radical futures re-emerging in mainstream science fiction","description":"I’ve mentioned here before that back in the 1970s and 1980s there seemed to be a myriad of ideas about potential future societies in popular (mainstream/children’s television) science fiction: hallucinatory…","postDate":null,"date":1762726386234},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/easier-to-end-capitalism-than-imagine-the-end-of-capitalism","title":"Is it easier to end capitalism than to imagine the end of capitalism?","description":"I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to…","postDate":null,"date":1762742070546},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/month-notes-sept-2025","title":"Month Notes,  September 2025","description":"I’ve just returned from a fortnight-long holiday in Greece—a long weekend in Athens, followed by ten days on the island of Naxos—and I’m feeling fully relaxed for the first time in as long as I…","postDate":null,"date":1762881428011},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/paul-watson-interviewed-by-callum-sutherland","title":"Interviewed by Callum Sutherland","description":"Back on 19th November 2021 I was interviewed over Zoom by Dr Callum Sutherland (pictured above, on the left) as part of his research. Callum is a Research Associate at Glasgow University’s School of…","postDate":null,"date":1762886493411},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/about-the-web-in-2024","title":"About the web in 2024","description":"A day may come, as Aragorn might have said, when I finally get back to blogging about my artistic practice — the entire raison d’être of this blog — but it is not this day. I don’t want to…","postDate":null,"date":1762890708899},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/englands-dark-dreaming","title":"England’s Dark Dreaming","description":"A few days ago on Twitter I was thinking out loud about the film The Witch, which I watched on Saturday evening, specifically about its relationship to the theme of Folk Horror which is getting some interesting…","postDate":null,"date":1762781286082},{"uri":"https://lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/deep-england","title":"Deep England","description":"On some days, when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest, it is said that you can glimpse the mythical land of Deep England, particularly if you read the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, or the Daily…","postDate":null,"date":1762839356481}],"bookmarks":[]}