They oy vey tour continued with some cool artefacts
But the vibe of the tour tended to focus on the negative.
But does it need to be this way?
Carrying on to some other interests…
And shopping…
And more oy vey
Other cultural events
We went to the cemetery and then an exhibition about it in town.
We also went to a load of churches, as one does.
And other religious sites with a nice view
etc…
Then we went to Poland.
We went to the Baltics and beyond. I don’t fly is at all avoidable, so we went by train boat and bus.
The Baltic states are in the EU, so the standard European brands are all present. You can buy Alpro. There is no lovely local soy yogurt maker.
Kaliningrad is a bit of Russia which is geographically disconnected from the rest of the country. It was slightly further away than I thought when I took this picture:
The sand dunes are called “Death Valley” because it was used by Germany as a prisoner of war camp. Not in World War 2, but a previous war, when the Split was part of Germany. They kept French soldiers in a terribly inadequate camp and many died.
The area closest to the Russian border is considered highly protected natural landscape that nobody is allowed to visit. This is also to avoid border incidents.
Vegan magnums is in the Baltic are "green smoothie" flavoured. This is dominated by artificial banana.
We went on to Liepaja, the European capital of culture for 2027. I promptly caught a cold.
I have questions. I'm not sure I want the answers.
The name of the butcher shop translates to “Two Knives”
There was some antisemitism about.
It later became apparent that I had accidentally embarked on an ‘oy vey’ tour.
The Bundists actually disbanded in 1920ish, except in Poland.
We did actually go to a Soviet building right after the Holocaust Museum to check out the view.
And we went to see some live laptop music.
The venue was extremely cool.
We also went to an organ concert.
We went to the circus festival to see a work in progress by the artist in residence. It was clowning mixed with acrobatics.
And we went to a tiny algorave (see: https://post.lurk.org/@celesteh/117065964496101000 )
And an organ concert on one of Europe's largest and most notable church organs. Almost all of the music was secular and by a Latvian composer, Imants Kalniņ (writer of the USSR's first rock opera). The other two pieces were by Aster Piazzolla.
Right next to the Vilnius ghetto memorial is a little café.
A bigger town had some vegan food
Zeppelins!
And some non-vegan food…
This doesn't seem kosher…
One of the churches had a lot of relics. I think, though, they were third class relics. Little medals given out to people who do pilgrimages. They also had a cherub that looked strangely like Trump.
The St Francie's church has a whole wall of relics (first class relics are pieces of dead saints), but despite this, St Francis's organ is not intact.
Sad!
Somebody queried that last toot.
This post to be continued….
I spent one week on a residency on a small farm on Slovenia, at Rizoma. My goal for this residency was to build out the database back end for the MOO project.
I’ve had the idea for a while that it would be nice to work at a more human pace in a more natural environment. I was working with a computer and definitely on the power grid, but in a room without artificial lighting. I kept to daylight hours. I spent a lot of time outdoors. I went for a few walks, made a lot of field recordings and did a very small amount of farm labour. A consequence of working at this pace is that it’s slow. I did not finish the project I set out to do. Working at a more human pace means being more realistic about time estimates. I should have allowed two or three weeks.
I have in my life, spent weeks at a time living out of a tent, but this has generally been on bicycle trips. It’s somehow easier to stay in a tent if everything is packed up every morning. There is not only novelty, but things stay put away and don’t slowly creep out over every surface.
I spent several nights wishing I had my own tent, until one morning, one of the farm cats came to wake me up, by climbing under the rain fly and clawing me through the tent. My own tent would not have withstood claws any better and I would have been upset to get holes in it.
The site had a composting toilet and outdoor showers, one of which faced out over the valley below. That part of Slovenia is very hilly. The farm is right next to cliffs. The acoustics of the valley and the cliffs were dramatic. It was a lovely space.
However I was not fully prepared for the environment. Slovenia has a lot of ticks. My one previous experience with ticks gave me Lyme Disease, an experience I’m eager to not repeat. I need to bring long, light, loose trousers, longer socks and long sleeve shirts.
Overall, the experience was very positive.
The outcomes of this experience are:
I finally wrote music for an album coming out soonish. I’ve been asked to create liner notes. I’ve been toying with the idea of just releasing all the programs that generated the music, bugs and all.
Here’s a rough draft of some words. Feedback is very welcome. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I’ve seen somebody dance about architecture and it looked hard.
Like a painter painting the same lake over and over, these are explorations of a set of algorithms for picking rhythms and pitches. They were mostly made during the first 60 days of the year 5786, between the holidays. They look to the year ahead, but are not burdened by hope.
As the year draws to a close, what stood out most was accelerated climate change. These pieces use algorithms, but ones that are handmade. I wrote all of the programs by hand on my own computer. Digital music will never be as low carbon as bamboo flutes, but it doesn’t need dedicated data centres either.
Thank you to Ellen Fullman for useful feedback.
This album is dedicated to the memory of Alex Lipkin, who died of climate change over the summer.
(Did I post here about my EP?)
These are my unstructured Error Camp thoughts, which are a few days out. My Error Camp visit was in a context, wherein I was struggling to finish a large project beforehand and working long hours and then set off for a long trip the day after I got home from camp. I’m writing these thoughts on a boat between Germany and Lithuania.
Error Camp and some other computer music gatherings (but, sadly not all) feel like building a temporary utopia. In some ways, it reminds me of my Masters Degree, where the most important conversations were in the hallways and around seminar tables, always right before the class began. The closer we got to the cutoff, the more it felt we were on the verge of a breakthrough. I spent years thinking about how to prolong that liminal moment. Our temporary communities are liminal moments in that vein.
But the liminal moments of EC are often non-verbal. It’s a shared activity. I wish we could stretch it out like a degree programme, but it’s also been intimately tied to the weather and climate. Britain is very seasonal and Error Camp seems structured around summer and festivals.
There was less dancing than I expected – I somehow missed the maypole. But there was more interaction with sheep. I may prefer cabin bunks to camping in a tent, but that’s a weak preference. I wish the cycle commute was less arduous or I was better prepared, which I could have been. It was good to be in a space and feel fully present. I appreciate the diversity of participants in skill and experience. I don’t live code very often and sometimes wonder whether I belong, but didn’t experience that this time. I was also happy to hear a clarinet and other instruments. The overlap between what’s included and my own practices seems to be growing, which I like for selfish reasons and also because I tend to favour wider focuses more generally.
The idea to make zines was brilliant. My family used to subscribe to many BASIC magazines, including one called Family Computing, so this was doubly nostalgic for me. I want to take this out to the permacomputing community. The weird language show and tell was also brilliant. I used to feel intimidated that so many live coders seemed to eventually write their own live coding language. This was a mixture of created and found, which felt much more approachable. (Also, it turns out that a small live coding language can be easier to write than I feared.)
There was a trend of restorative workshops – yoga, meditation, Deep Listening, harmonic singing. All of them rooted in corporeality. This feels both needed for our own well-being and like a direct and important challenge to California Ideology 1ideas like the ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ which pretends bodies do not exist in order to erase recognitions of embodied conflicts, like racism or conflict minerals in our computers. We are not brains floating jars. Our equipment has a real human cost, which requires some mindfulness at the very least. We are humans. Our music is human. We have bodies with needs and wants.
I have hopes – that we can take the spirit of sharing and building out into the world and grow a movement of digital sovereignty. I have fears of replicating the libertarian mistakes of past decades and of art washing. Art and activism should be able to operate in separate spheres, but we came to this camp at a moment of profound crisis. Our rights are in peril. The world is heating. At the end of June, a friend of mine died of heatstroke. He is the first person I know of to die of climate change, but he won’t be the last.2
And so, I want us to be part of the solution. I want our values to include this. We have good points about social justice, but vulnerability to heat is so closely tied to injustice, that it is not enough to say that we won’t replicate unjust hierarchy – we have to work to mitigate the material conditions of structural violence.3 Because of our relationship with tech, this is, to my mind, within the scope of things we should be working on and I see possibilities for valuable interventions, which have gotten positive responses on Mastodon.
Also, being in a tech/art space that is mostly free of microaggressions is probably why these events feel utopic for me. There are ways in which the world is getting better because we are making it better.
I feel energised and have perhaps too many ideas to carry forward: a busking organ tour via bicycle; a series of workshops with performances in the old Open Lab model, but with a focus on hardware sustainability; algorave busking flashmobs; more zines; and what about hardware turing machines controlling acoustic instruments?
The state of Israel is doing war crimes. It’s enacting human rights abuses. It is in apartheid state. The government is fascist. They are a rogue state. This is a genocide.
It deserves condemnation, protest and an end to military aid. You can help by participating in BDS, writing your MP, protesting arms manufacturers and many more actions.
It is morally good to condemn the state of Israel in the strongest possible terms.
However, please be careful when you venture into the use of metaphor.
It can be tempting to compare Israel’s current actions to past atrocities and occasionally this is even a helpful illustration. However, when you’re picking which historical crime to use, I’m sorry, but it is counterproductive, unhelpful, and morally dubious to pick the Holocuast.
Unfortunately, there are loads of past atrocities and thus you have a wide variety of ones to pick as your metaphor, but you should avoid any that include millions of dead Jews.
Why?
Using the Holocaust as a metaphor is called “Holocaust Inversion”. You can DuckDuckGo it, but a lot of the results aren’t very good, so this is a summary:
Holocaust inversion is ironic! Its edgy! But we know that when edgelords use terms like ‘ironic’ they mean ‘triggering.’
Netanyahu is not reading your posts, but Jews in your country are.
Jews living around the world are part of a diaspora. Many or most could immigrate to Israel, but they’ve chosen not to.
There was a lot of movement of Jews in the 19th and 20th century as people fled violence. Many or most diasporic communities include people who lost family members in the Shoah.
Your neighbours don’t need your edgy, triggering quips. Your neighbours are not responsible for the crimes of a fascist government thousands of kilometres away.
So why do so many people grab this as a metaphor?
When searching for references for this post, I found some material behind an academic paywall, so I want to quote a summary here:
“The Holocaust should have altogether put paid to anti-Semitism. It should have rebutted once and for all the principal anti-Semitic fantasy of malign Jewish power; it should have satiated the appetite of the most murderous anti-Semites for Jewish death. And yet instead it precipitated new anti-Semitic versions or tropes […]”.
It is a deeply puzzling question. In this chapter, Wistrich offers an answer to it by drawing on the work of the French philosopher, Vladimir Jankelevitch, who drew a connection between Israel, antisemitism and the Holocaust. Jankelevitch noted that the Holocaust had cast a shadow of remorse over the Europeans as they came to realise the magnitude of their crimes against the Jews. Wistrich argues persuasively that accusing Israel of behaving like Nazi Germany performs a psychological function for Europeans, because it acts as an “overcompensation mechanism” for discharging their latent guilt feelings about the “unspeakable crime of the Shoah”. Wistrich writes: ‘And what if the Jews themselves were no better than the Nazis? Why, that would be just wonderful. One would no longer have to feel sorry for them – after all, “they would have deserved their fate”.
Moreover, explains Wistrich, accusing Israel of being no better than the Nazis (and maybe even worse because the Jews failed to learn a lesson from their persecution) allows those with animus towards Jews to express it in the “politically correct” language of anti-Zionism. Thus, writes Wistrich, “those who accuse Israel of being a Nazi state kill two birds with one stone”.
One thing that’s missing from this summary is an exploration of the idea that the deaths of six million people should have been instructive. By this reading, Nazis were teaching us or doing us a moral favour by giving us a high ground. How lucky this could have been for us if only we hadn’t been too stubborn to take proper notice! And what is the solution for our failure to learn? More violence against us? This is part of why this argument is triggering.
Moreover, this mechanism of absolution of Holocaust guilt is similar to the assertion that homophobes are all secretly in the closet. It’s not true. Gay bashers are overwhelmingly straight. But if we believe that gay bashers are actually gay, then homophobic violence is a gay problem – something that gay people bring upon themselves.
The straight person who believes that gay bashers are gay never needs to change their rhetoric or their bigoted behaviour, let alone take actions to ally with LGBT people.
Blaming a community for their own oppression allows bigotries to fester and prejudice to grow. It leads to a situation that is worse for the community in question, including increased violence. And violence is certainly on the rise.
The US and the UK both failed to adequately respond to the refugee crisis in World War 2. We pat ourselves on the back because “we” won the war. (Spoiler: the Russians won the war.) But we also have our own guilt about our own atrocities. Britons invented the concentration camp. Nazis copied American ideas of Eugenics and Reservations. Ironically, the US’s “Indian Wars” are much more similar example to Israel’s current actions.
Meanwhile our failure to respond adequately to refugee crises has only gotten worse.
For some people, the injunction to pick a different atrocity will feel like an imposition. This could be a source of friction for you.
For me, I was raised in an environment with a lot of different social bigotries. When I feel a friction, that’s often a sign of some unconscious bias. Feeling something and not knowing why, for me, is an opportunity to figure out my values.
So if you’re feeling a friction, I’d really like to encourage you to sit with that difficulty for a while and query it.
Our emotions are neither good nor bad, but how we respond to opportunities to grow are what define us. Maybe this is an opportunity for you.
This is a long post, and all the way down here is the first mention of Palestinians. Instead, we’ve been talking about your Jewish neighbours, Europeans, North America and virtually everyone else aside from the people whose liberation we intend to support.
Sometimes, like with the Palestine Action ban, it’s our own governments that force us to lose focus on the goals we care about. But sometimes, it’s our own inability to actually focus our attention and effort.
I saw a picture the other day of some graffiti which said, “Gaza is freeing us.” But if we actually care about Palestinians, this is perverse.
Our first aim in any communication about the war should be whether it helps stop it and then whether it helps the victims. Decentring Palestinians to argue about a past war which Palestinians had nothing to do with, does not centre their needs. It does not aid Lebanese people. It doesn’t help Persians.
If you feel like you need a metaphor to talk about this war, I might first ask what the metaphor is intended to do. Is deliberately killing health workers, destroying schools, hospitals and universities is not clearly wrong enough without drawing a comparison?
But, again, if in the process of taking action to help stop the war, which could include participating in BDS, protesting, doing direct action, making signs and banners or putting those up somewhere or doing any one of tones of other potential things you can do, if you feel like you need a metaphor, do pick one that clarifies rather than obfuscates. Pick something other than the Holocaust.
Klaff, L., 2024. The three best chapters on holocaust inversion, recommended by Lesley Klaff. Fathom, 2024 (Winter).
(Scroll to the bottom for the video)
My friend Evan suggested that I could just remove all the organ electronics and replace the MIDI jack and this would likely work without posing a danger to my laptop. So I finally did.
I replaced the original batteries with a phone charging battery from Argos. It goes to a PD trigger – a USB C board that tells the battery something is using it and draws a steady DC voltage. I’m drawing 12 volts.
This voltage is then split to go to two buck stepdown boards. The one currently in use is 8v, because the part of the organ in the wind chest uses 8v. The other part of the system is not yet installed, but will run on 5v.
The actuators have three power cables, a heavy yellow ground and a red and a blue wire both at 8v.
Then there are the MIDI wires.
Fortunately, looking at the existing MIDI jack revealed which wire was which.
Simply compare the nail position with the MIDI spec.
Fortunately, this followed the spec, as the data changed too fast to be discovered via voltmeter.
The voltmeter did let me know that the PD trigger I bought has on and off labelled in reverse on the device.
The black thing on the breadboard is the new input MIDI jack.
And it worked.
So I brought it to the algorave and live coded it with SuperCollider.
The Queer Art of Failure by Halberstam is a key text for queer clowning and also is an excellent example of 20 year old queer theory with all its strengths and weaknesses.
The book suggests a political programme as much as a meant to analysis. ‘“Legibility,” writes Scott, “is a condition of manipulation” (1999: 183).’ (p 10) so we cope with that by becoming illegible. ‘Resist mastery. Here we might insist upon a critique of the “all-encompassing and global theories” identified by Foucault. In my book this resistance takes the form of investing in counterintuitive modes of knowing such as failure and stupidity; we might read failure, for example, as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing. Stupidity could refer not simply to a lack of knowledge but to the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of knowing.” (p 10-11)
But could this be both dated and kind of passive? ‘I do believe that if you watch Dude, Where’s My Car? slowly and repeatedly and while perfectly sober, the mysteries of the universe may be revealed to you. I also believe that Finding Nemo contains a secret plan for world revolution and that Chicken Run charts an outline of feminist utopia for those who can see beyond the feathers and eggs.’ (p 21)
No, but really, there’s a lot here to unpack.
‘Chicken Run is different from Toy Story in that the Oedipal falls away as a point of reference in favor of a Gramscian structure of counterhegemony engineered by organic (chicken) intellectuals. In this film an anarchist’s utopia is actually realized as a stateless place without a farmer, an unfenced territory with no owners, a diverse (sort of, they are mostly female) collective motivated by survival, pleasure, and the control of one’s own labor. The chickens dream up and inhabit this utopian field, which we glimpse briefly at the film’s conclusion, and they find their way there by eschewing a “natural” solution to their imprisonment (flying out of the coop using their wings) and engineering an ideological one (they must all pull together to power the plane they build). Chicken Run also rejects the individualistic solution offered by Rocky the Rooster (voiced by Mel Gibson) in favor of group logics. As for the queer element, well, they are chickens, and so, at least in Chicken Run, utopia is a green field full of female birds with just the occasional rooster strutting around. The revolution in this instance is feminist and animated.’ (p 32)
Of course, Halberstam was writing in the Bush years, when they said, ‘And yet if we must live with the logic of white male stupidity, and it seems we must, then understanding its form, its seductions, and its power are mandatory. Dude offers a surprisingly complete allegorical map of what Raymond Williams calls “lived hegemony.” ‘ (p 60)
The Bush years were indeed defined by an intentional ignorance, and a feigned benign folkiness, which sought to mask the violence. The ableist framing of stupidity, in retrospect, feels like the wrong analysis for then and especially now. Instead, one thinks not only of a good ol boy, but also Sartre writing about verbal play, by antisemites. Knowledge, ignorance and understanding is a game to them. This intentional ignorance is a privilege because truth doesn’t matter and reality need not touch them. Their unknowing is an assertion of power. They don’t need to know.
In his book On Bullshit, Frankfurt differentiates between lying and bullshitting by noting that liars are being deliberately unthruthful in particular points that they have to keep track of. Liars care about truth. Bullshitters, on the other hand, have no regard for truth or falsehood whatsoever and will fake whatever context is required.
Trumpism is grounded in bullshit. The knowledge gap shows that one is either pledging allegiance to the bullshit of others, or creating bullshit oneself. Lack of knowledge is power and facts are treason.
Halberstam goes on to talk about generational transmission. “De-linking the process of generation from the force of historical process is a queer kind of project…. We may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in order to start from a new place, not the place where the old engenders the new, where the old makes a place for the new , bit where the new begins afresh, unfettered by memory, tradition, and usable pasts.” (p 70)
The problem of lgbt people is sometimes articulated as too little history and a lack of intergenerational transmission. Whereas the problem of Judaism is too much history propagated as intergenerational trauma. So where does that leave the queer Jew? Groups like Queer Yeshiva, where I first heard this contradiction stated, seek to claim the history and by action, cause the old to make space for the new. Every generation reinvents Judaism.
Halberstam, also Jewish, accepts the queer blank state as given and seeks to use it as a model to divest themselves of all the burden of history.
But we have the same amount of history as anyone else. Catholic schools also transmit history, including a history (but not a present) of prosecution. And queers do have elders, histories and stories which are subject to an intentional erasure. We do not forget Oscar Wilde, but section 28 sought to impose amnesia. I think we can take it as given that Halberstam does not wish to copy that.
It’s also worth noting that Halberstam’s analysis predates the gayby boom. Childless queers were the norm when this was written, whereas now, it’s far more common for queers to visibly have kids, with their queer partners in their queer relationships. Indeed, it’s also much less common that a parent would lose custody for queerness, which was absolutely the case in the US before Lawrence v Texas. Blue laws in California weren’t enforced, but they were on the books. Every queer in a custody dispute was guilty of regular felonies.
“Edelman uses this sense of the queer in order to propose a relentless form of negativity in place of the forward-looking, reproductive and heteronormative politics of hope that animates all too many political projects. … The queer subject, he argues, has been bound epistemologically to negativity, to nonsense, to antiproduction, and to unintelligibility, and instead of fighting this characterisation by dragging queerness into recognition, he proposes that we embrace the negativity that we anyway structurally represent.” (106)
But if “the heteronormative political imagination propels itself forward in time and space through the indisputably positive image of the child,” (ibid) what about now, 20 years later, when that child asserts gender-nonconformity and non-heterosexual yearnings? Of course, the heteronormative imagination also, “projects itself back on the past through the dignified image of the parent, the queer subject stands between heterosexual optimism and its realisation.” (ibid) Which is necessarily complicated when the child, themselves, asserts the agency that scuppers heteronormative continuity. If no adult queer stands there, creating the barrier, then one must be invented to be excluded. If the kids are catching ROGD off of twitter, then social media must be banned.
But what does it mean for queerness as failure when my queer friends are having or adopting children and when those kids themselves come out? IS an eight year old who is certain of their nonbinary status really groping about in the dark like a lesbian at a 1930s Paris nightclub? Or have they found a new queerness on the daylight playgrounds they inhabit?
Can this, itself, be a form of hope in the midst of such intense repression and looming fascism? Are fighting for these nonbinary kids to have unimaginable queer futures in a somewhat less climate-fucked world? If so, how does the engagement of imagination within the play-failure of the clown enable this world building? Is it our adult world with it’s self-important reproductive drive that must be shown to have failed? Or is this failure so self-evident, so catastrophic, that the time to dwell on it is long past. Leave the navel gazing to the gerentocracy as it dies.
The forward looking hope of the previous generation of Nazis, confidentially singing “the future belongs to me” in ‘Cabaret’ is, itself, a historical projection. The Nazis of a century ago killed others. The current branch yearn also for their own demise, as they burn petrol like there’s no tomorrow, like they wish there to be no tomorrow.
Halberstam rejects optimism as a programme. “to simply repudiate the [social and systemic, rather than essential] connections between queerness and negativity is to commit to an unbearably positivist and progressive understanding of the queer, one that results in the perky depictions of lesbians in ‘The L Word’ or the reduction of gay men in film and on TV to impossibly good-looking arbiters of taste.” (p 98)
However, I would argue that what disrupts the reproductive child is not a shadowy queer blocking a hetero transmission, but rather a teacher shining a light on history, context and the skills of self articulation. This sounds optimistic, but it is not.
When this liberatory programme detours into optimism, we get the baggage and responsibilities dumped on to Gen X youth. We were informed, from basically the age of 10, that we would fix climate change, fix racism, fix all the world’s woes, thus relieving our elders from the burden of acting. Witney Huston sang this as an anthem:
“I believe the children are our future /
Teach them well and let them lead the way”
This heroic / optimistic abdication of responsibility could be accomplished by building up our self-esteem with empty puffery:
“Learning to love yourself
/ It is the greatest love of all”
An actual program of world improvement should empower youth to escape heterocapitalist structures, but they certainly can’t be left to do this alone. It’s not enough to fail to transmit normative power structures, but necessary to collaborate on their overthrow.
Is a revolution a queer failure? Is being ungovernable a failure? Or is a queer failure an act of sabotage of the machine that tries to crush us? Under the rubric of neoliberalism, solidarity is failure.
Please see: https://www.celesteh.com/blog/2026/03/09/organs-clowns-and-queers-delete-as-appropriate/
As winter is the off-season for organ grinding, the only event in January’s BOGA calendar was the open day at the Amersham Fair Organ Museum. This monthly event is free. The museum is set up like a giant cafe, filled with round tables and with a kiosk near the door selling sandwiches, tea and cake. Visitors buy their snack and settle at a round table in a large room surrounded by the loudest fair organs you have ever heard in your life.
The musical selection was highly varies Britania Rules to Waves, Onward Christian Soldiers, Rah Rah Rasputin, a Beatles song and many things I did not recognise. The major unifying factor is that everything seemed to be more than 30 years old.
The music was mostly played off of “books”. This is a format very similar to a piano roll, but in an organ-specific format for hole punching. Rather than being played from a spool, the holes are punched into tougher card, which is folded in a butterfly / Z form, so one card proceeds to the next. The start in a neat pile and finish in a neat pile. Using this format rather than scrolls allows for the use of thicker material and also allows arrangements to be arbitrarily long. This layout method was invented by Gavioli.
They were the makers of many of the organs at the Amersham Fair Organ Museum, was a Franco Italian venture that worked in both countries. It was Anselme Gavioli, heir to the family business, who invented and patented the book format.
I had the impression that Gavioli was really the major organ manufacturer of their heyday, but according to Wikpedia, they mostly survive in the UK.
Gavioli shut down in 1912, so many of of the books on the second shelf post-date the company that invented them.
By that time, they had moved to France and organ grinding in general had lost its association with Italians, which perhaps explains why there are so many German songs.
In the late Victorian period, as organ busking was a major form of employment for Italian migrants, London streets were also full of German brass bands. The large format organs have the presence of a full band and, indeed, many full band pieces are in their repertoire. For example, on the shelf you’ll see The Washington Post March, by Sousa – an American. The old German pieces may have made their way to big organs. As for polkas, they were already part of street organ repertoire.
One of the larger books on the shelf is an Al Jolson medley. was the star of The Jazz Singer and was the biggest star of the 1910s and 20s. He is best remembered now for performing in blackface. However, he was extremely popular at the time and his ‘style was “arguably the single most important factor in defining the modern musical.” ‘ (Wikipedia) Jolson was a migrant to the US from what is now in Lithuania in 1894 – part of a massive wave of Jewish immigration of people fleeing violence. [Obligatory Spivak reference goes here.] Anyway, there’s some minstrelsy archived in Amersham.
As to the organs themselves, the larger organs seem to be intended to mimic large brass or marching bands, in terms of amplitude, repertoire and available timbres. I only saw one relatively small organ, which was still bigger than mine. Like the MIDI repertoire that came with mine, the arrangements seemed to be based on wind ensemble, crossed with player piano.
Tthe 80th Annual Grimaldi Service took place on Sunday 1 February 2026, at All Saints Church in Haggerston. This is not the clown’s church. The Grimaldi service is too popular to fit in that smaller venue.
This turned out to really just be a mass but with some clowns in it. It had all the normal elements of a mass, but with some honking during the breaks. Before the service, the organist played some slow moving music with midrange drones. It was not at all like fair organ music. The opening hymn was Tis a Gift to be Simple but with the Shaker lyrics, Lord of the Dance, which are unfortunately seared into my brain from Catholic school.
One of the main readings was from Ecclesiastes, the list of binary oppositions. This was also a major theme of the homily and I guess the idea of clowns in church. I suspect there was intention to have this holding of opposites be an element in a joyful memorial mass. However, this is fairly normal in US culture where people have “celebrations of life” rather than “sad” funerals, because grief is a failure under neoliberalism. It’s too hard to constrain. It doesn’t make people into better workers but instead feeds an implicit, emotional demand for justice. Grief must be denied.
Christianity, which co-developed with neoliberalism and is the major spiritual underpinning of the ideas within it, is all too willing to accommodate this. Your friends will be back as soon as Jesus finishes his brief holiday.
Instead, clowning itself provides the rupture, making space for grief and complicated joy. Clowning is queer. Clowning disrupts or at least complicates power structures. Clowning has much more spiritual potential than anything the CoE has to offer.
![Let Us now remember all who have served in this profession and have passed beyond this life.
All: Rest eternal grant unto them O Lord / May they rest in peace.
All: Rise in glory. Amen.
The clowns will say the Clowns prayer
Dear Lord, I thank you for calling me to share with others your most precious gift of laughter.
May I never forget that it is your gift, and my privilege. As your children are rebuked in their self-importance and cheered in their sadness, help me to remember that your foolishness is wiser than our wisdom. Amen.
Act of dedication, said by all
O Lord, our G-d, we acknowledge you as our Father, ourselves as your children, our neighbours as our brothers and sisters.
We dedicate ourselves to your obediance and to the service of others and to our hearts and our minds, our wills and our work in the power of the Holy Spirit and in the name of JC etc Amen
[Lord's prayer follows]](https://www.celesteh.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/image-scaled.png)
Anyway, I felt alienated by the Christianity, as I should have known I would. The bake sale had nothing vegan. But at least there was a clown show afterwards.
Has been moved to it’s own post, but I don’t want to untangle the bibliography, so all of it is here.
Al Jolson (2026). Wikipedia [Online]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Al_Jolson&oldid=1341751665 [Accessed: 9 March 2026].
Cabaret (1972).
Ecclesiastes 3:1 [Online]. Available at: https://www.sefaria.org/Ecclesiastes.3.1?lang=bi [Accessed: 9 March 2026].
Frankfurt, H.G. (2009). On bullshit.
Gavioli (2025). Wikipedia [Online]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gavioli&oldid=1301641269 [Accessed: 9 March 2026].
Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. [Online]. Duke University Press. Available at: http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/1581/The-Queer-Art-of-Failure [Accessed: 10 February 2026].
Huston, W. (1985). The Greatest Love of All.
Hutchins, C. (2026). Newer-Looking Repertoire. [photo]. Available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/celesteh/55038200962/ [Accessed: 9 March 2026].
Limonaire Frères (2025). Wikipedia [Online]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Limonaire_Fr%C3%A8res&oldid=1323198570 [Accessed: 9 March 2026].
Sartre, J.-P. (1948). Anti-Semite and Jew.
Spivak, G.C. (2023). Can the subaltern speak? In: Imperialism. Routledge, pp. 171–219.
The Crazy Clown Church Service That Happens Every February (2026). [Online]. Available at: https://londonist.com/london/things-to-do/clowns-church-service-hackney-february [Accessed: 9 March 2026].
![Organs, Clowns, and Queers [delete as appropriate]](https://www.celesteh.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/55039107981_0760c9fdcc_k-825x510.jpg)