Some wise words for a New Year
I guess this is the season for thoughtful posts marking the change of a year. A month or so back, I read this article by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth). For me, it’s about as wise as you can get.
Posted on Tuesday, 30 December 2008 by Paul | Posted in spirituality, theology | No comments
London to Glasgow by train … in 5 minutes
… OK with some help of a time-lapse camera. This little gem was on the BBC website today.
Posted on Monday, 15 December 2008 by Paul | Posted in uncategorized | 2 comments
Foundation on Small Ritual
Steve Collins has done a write-up of the service put on by Foundation at this year’s Greenbelt on his excellent SmallRitual site. We’ve only just become aware of it (sorry Steve). He’s uploaded some videos of the event, one of which is below. Well done to all co-Foundationeers for all the hard work - sorry I couldn’t be with you this year.
foundation ‘babel’ - free from steve collins on Vimeo.
Posted on Friday, 5 December 2008 by Paul | Posted in altworship | No comments
Anna Maria Jopek and Friends with Pat Metheny
I was first introduced to jazz guitarist Pat Metheny after listening to New Chautauqua in 1979. I have not stopped listening to him ever since, although my enthusiasm has waxed and waned somewhat. The jazz purist in me was somewhat shocked as the Pat Metheny Group developed into a jazz-pop fusion: its rich arrangements and soaring chord-sequences were sometimes bordering on the excessively lush. Yet I have continued to take guilty pleasure in listening to him, especially on long car journeys when I’ve need something really rich to pick me up from the road’s tedium. I still prefer those albums and tracks when he expresses (or returns to) the purity of his roots. His earliest albums (before the era of PMG) remain favourites, including his first, Bright Size Life, Watercolors - with bassist Eberhard Weber, another of my favourite jazz artists. I also very much like Pat Metheny Group, the debut of PMG, and some of their earlier albums, although I find that I easily tire when listening to their later work - it’s uncomfortably close to stadium rock for this jazz-o-phile. Then there are some gems of collaboration (such as Beyond the Missouri Sky with Charlie Haden). Another excellent work of his is the solo album, One quiet night which has a wonderful solo guitar arrangement of Ferry cross the Mersey, as well as a lot more besides.
The biggest find of the month, however, has been his collaboration with Polish jazz singer Anna Maria Jopek on an album called Upojenie. It’s a mixture of Metheny and PMG standards, rearranged by Jopek and friends, but with Metheny still playing guitar. It also includes Jopek’s versions of other Polish songs. I don’t speak Polish, so cannot vouch for the lyrics, but it sounds absolutely delightful. There is still the guilty pleasure at some of the lushness, but there are also some interesting surprises with nu-jazz-esque synthesizer programming mixed-in, so a few new horizons open up. I’m amazed I haven’t come across it before - it was released originally in 2002.
Whatever my inner-jazz-purist may make of Metheny’s work as a whole, one benefit of his willingness to be non-purist in his own approach to the art is that he has opened up some new vistas by these collaborations and helped people like me to discover outstanding potential in artists like Anna Maria Jopek. If you can - go listen. Oh and of course it goes without saying that he is one of the best jazz guitarists on the planet today.
Posted on Thursday, 27 November 2008 by Paul | Posted in music | No comments
+Rowan on Advent
Thanks to Ruth Gledhill for this great piece of vintage Rowan …
Posted on Tuesday, 25 November 2008 by Paul | Posted in spirituality | No comments
Last.fm
For those readers of this blog who have yet to discover Last.FM, you don’t know what you’re missing. First, you set-up an account on the last.fm website. Then you download the last.fm software for your computer - there are good versions available for the Mac, PC and Linux operating systems and, from my observations of the Linux and Mac versions, they work pretty much the same.
Two things then happen: first, whenever you play music using the music player of your choice (in my case, iTunes for the Mac and Amarok for Linux), details of what you are playing are sent to your account on Last.fm. A profile is then built up of your listening tastes. Eventually, last.fm is able to construct a “personal radio station” of music which is akin to the stuff you’re playing at home. With time, it can get very accurate - although if you’ve got very catholic taste, such as I do, you may find it can be a bit random in what it plays.
Better still, you can also use the last.fm player to play “tags” of certain kinds of music. In particular, I listen a lot to the ECM records tag. This plays a glorious selection of eclectic and innovative musicians, broadly coming out of contemporary jazz who have typically recorded on ECM records at some point. (People such as Jan Garbarek, Keith Jarrett, Eberhard Weber, and so on.) But you choose your own. When I get tired of listening to my own collection, and want to look for inspiration for new CDs to buy, this is where I get it. If you really like a piece it’s playing to you, you can click on the icon in the tray and it will bring up not only the piece and album details, but link you to Amazon or iTunes where you can order it there and then.
My last.fm software is also supplying the data for the ‘currently listening to…’ sidebar on this blog - so it’s a relatively up-to-date feed of what I’m really listening to: warts and all.
Posted on Tuesday, 25 November 2008 by Paul | Posted in geekism | 1 comment
MC Paxo vs Dizzee Rascal
The most sublimely funny part of the coverage of the Obama victory yesterday was in the extended edition of Newnight when things got to the point where we saw bro Jeremy gettin down wiv da kids. Check it out, yo’ll be crippled, innit. I think they should give “Mr Rascal” a guest slot fronting the next edition.
Posted on Thursday, 6 November 2008 by Paul | Posted in humour, politics | No comments
Obama and the religious factor in American politics
It would be entirely wrong to assume that Barak Obama’s victory in the American presidential race indicated a decline in the religious factor in American politics. The Democratic party have had to learn, again and again, that to ignore the strongly religious component in their country’s culture is to court electoral defeat. The practical problem they face, however, is that the religious Right have managed to capture their political constituency by a simple message of “pro-life or not”. Whilst this is an easy enough message to understand, my conversations with many American evangelicals suggest that for many of them, this is the win-or-lose question into which the whole of their understanding of politics has been poured. As a result, the resurgent evangelicalism among the Baby Boomers has served to boost the fortunes of the Republican Right - all a candidate needs to do is be reassuring on the Big Question, and the evangelical vote can almost certainly be counted upon. This was exemplified by the interview which Rick Warren, pastor of the megachurch Saddleback in Lake Forest CA, conducted with the two candidates back in the summer. You can see the responses to the question “at what point does an unborn baby get human rights in your view” by both Barak Obama and John McCain here. Barak Obama starts out by saying that answering the question from “a theological or a scientific point of view” is “above my pay grade”. He then clearly says that his is “pro-choice” but also would like to see both a limiting of late-term abortions (if the health of the mother is not under threat) and also at ways in which the number of abortions could be reduced. John McCain comes straight back with “at the moment of conception” without any hesitation. The church congregation cheer. The right answer has been given to the Big Question.
Yet today we have a new President Obama who has been elected by a majority of about 2:1 of electoral college votes, and McCain failed to achieve nearly all of his electoral targets, whilst Obama did better than anyone would have believed back in August. What is going on? Well the economy and the quality of his campaign probably won the election for Obama, and a variety of factors lost it for McCain, including the economy, the quality of his campaign and the choice of Sarah Palin. Palin is another interesting factor in the basic religious question, since she was in the ticket to reassure the disappointed Right enough to get them out to vote for a non-Evangelical Republican candidate. The problem was that she clearly had neither the experience nor the intellect for the job, and this quickly became clear to most thinking Republicans and swing-voters. Her evangelical credentials were impeccable however, even if a little tarnished by Troopergate.
This returns us to the initial question of the religious component in this election. Which way, if any, did it go? Beliefnet seems to be pointing to a likely set of circumstances: namely, that Obama managed to forge a faith coalition of his own. This comprised the non-Evangelical mainstream denominations, who were worried about a wider range of ethical concerns than solely abortion - it is important, but not the Big Question; the fact that Obama, in ways more apparent than McCain, has a clear, active and thought-through Christian faith, founded on an Evangelical conversion with a strongly experiential component; and perhaps most significantly, what is called “The Rise of the Religious Left”. This includes elements within the broader-Church Evangelical constituency which we could identify as “Emerging”. Then lastly, of course, he could rely on votes from the Black Church constituency, which too often has been either divided or unregistered. There are echoes of a Martin Luther King effect here: mobilising black evangelical churches politically is quite an achievement, and perhaps it takes a black candidate or cause to do so.
Both from the perspective of politics and the religious landscape of America, it seems as though we have witnessed a change of historical era. Unlike the last Democratic presidential triumph (Clinton, 1992), here it seems as though permanent changes in American religion itself have participated in the process which allowed a non-white American citizen to enter the White House as President. Although this unique set of circumstances will probably never recur, the religious politics of America are on the change.
Posted on Wednesday, 5 November 2008 by Paul | Posted in emerging church, politics | 1 comment
Thoughts at the end of a momentous day
Well, here we are at the end of Day 1 of rebirth of the planned socialist economy. One thought that’s been lurking at the back of my mind for the past week or so is this: since the banking crisis has forced world capitalism to accept its limitations and, in the last resort, to surrender itself into the protective arms of the governments of nation states, I guess that’s about it for an unregulated global world economy, and in many ways, for the dream of globalisation. What, today, does ‘globalisation’ mean? Certainly not what it was widely thought to mean until about a month ago. If so, then we need to do some philosophy - or at least some re-evaluation of some philosophies which, until this all happened, were taken almost as givens.
So what is the intellectual stock value of Francis Fukuyma and Jean Baudrillard tonight? Both, in different ways, argued for ‘the end of history’ as the global economy took over the reins of the world from the hands of state management.
Perhaps today we’ve witnessed a point when history just ‘restarted’.
Posted on Monday, 13 October 2008 by Paul | Posted in politics | 2 comments
Style in the New Economy
Good morning comrades!
Well today is the start of a new era, with the return to a state-managed economy and the final, petering-out swawk of Thatcherism. Now if this sounds a little like overstatement, just consider: by the end of today, it is likely that the banking system of Britain will be committed to becoming state-controlled and state-backed. Politically it isn’t possible to pour such unheard-of amounts of money into banks without ensuring that the Chief Investor (the State) has control over its investment. It appears that over the weekend, even those countries which appeared to balk at this step, have been forced to fall largely into line with the actions of Britain. Comrades Brown and Darling have their political stars in the ascendent, internationally and domestically. In terms of economic theory, as it pertains to Western democracies, Capitalism has bowed to inevitability of Socialism rather than face a total meltdown of the world financial system.
Now I’m aware that there are a lot of people out there, not least those working in the City of London, who were born after the year 1979. (Historical note: this was when Margaret Thatcher’s government was elected to power in Britain). The New Order which has emerged in the past week might leave many younger adults culturally and stylistically at something of a loss as to how to present themselves in the economic environment our New People’s Republics (of Britain, USA, etc…) So, some words from an Old Lag on these pages will, no doubt, help as people get up and dressed for their work this morning.
Your Dress Code
In the bin needs to go your natty suit, Italian-styled jacket, soft-leather booties or shoes, white shirt and silk tie. Embrace neo-Punk. What need is the following (and today’s stock-traders may wish to take note of the companies who will be called upon to supply the new People’s Uniform):
- Trousers (US: Pants) — Black or dark blue drainpipe jeans with definite signs of wear, ideally turned up at the ankles to about mid-calf length
- Tee-shirt — Either Che Guevara, Anarchy in the UK, or something with a quote by Ginsberg or Marx, unwashed and definitely un-ironed, over the top of which you should wear…
- Woollen jumper — ideally knitted by your mum, gran, or aunt, with cigarette-burns, unravelling at the cuffs and elongated in length (to just below the crotch) through washing many times on unsympathetic wash-cycles **without fabric conditioner**: hard water is better than soft, giving that true Hammersmith Palais look. Should have the texture of cardboard.
- Underwear — Y-fronts: the older the better, if you must wash it every day, don’t make a point of telling anyone
- ESSENTIAL — Doc Martin 1460 8-hole boots *in black only*
- ESSENTIAL — a Donkey Jacket, as worn by true comrades on picket lines in the golden years
With your donkey jacket on, you will look sufficiently a part of the New Lumpen Proletariat to do some hot deals in the trading rooms today.
Your Accessories
With the turn of history’s wheel, you will need to completely re-evaluate all the other items you may have got used to carrying about with you. There’s an immediate problem here with electronic items which were produced by the old capitalist economy. The New Socialism is emphatically not anti-technology, but some rethink on the effete stylistic elements which had grown up in the era of the fat cats…
Take, for example, your iPod™. If anything symbolized the era of unrestrained individualistic capitalism, it was this little box. So as of today, you should rebrand it a statePod. In addition, you need to get rid of those wussy white earplugs. This change may be more difficult to manage than most, as all options were designed to be either discreet or linked to the capitalist style economy. But a careful look up on internet army-surplus sites should produce the right kind of replacement:
Out:
In: 
Of course, you will also have to do a major replacement of your listening tastes (partly because the sound isolation of the cans above is such that everyone will hear what you’re listening to). Delete all that Lounge, RnB, Ambient and NuJazz. In comes anything recorded in Britain between the years 1976 (the arrival of Punk) and 1981. Essential listening as you get out of the underground and walk to your dealing room is London’s Burning (The Clash), Ghost Town (The Specials), and, probably most appropriate of all: Babylon’s Burning (The Ruts).
Your Politics
Of course, the ability of political parties to weather economic changes and to completely re-invent themselves for new circumstances is nothing new. At the moment Gordon Brown is safer as Labour leader (and possibly as Prime Minister) than he’s ever been. So the Conservative Party needs to do some serious re-alignment for the new Socialist Order. This won’t be too difficult after turning into New Labour just a couple of years ago. This new change obviously means dumping David Cameron and making a truly inspired and innovative leadership appointment for the New Political Era.
Tory Leader: Yesterday’s man …
Tory Leader: an Inspired Choice for the New Era …
Your investments:
National Savings Certificates
Doctor Martens
Army Surplus Stores
Your Charitable Giving
Just because you’ve just lost 55% of the value of someone’s investment portfolio and will never see a personal bonus again in this life-time, that doesn’t mean that there’s any excuse to be ungenerous in this new economic era. There will inevitably be some time-lag before the State manages to take control of all aspects of social security, so consider, particularly those causes which may have fallen through the grid (or who had invested in Icelandic banks), especially those who are presently facing a greater-than-usual number of calls for their help at this difficult time; for example, the Fat Feline Protection League.
Summary
Well, that’s a start. Now you know how to roll up to work, (with a copy of the Financial Times cautiously wrapped-up inside a copy of the Socialist Worker ) without suffering stylistic death. But this is only a survival guide. There is now ample opportunity for other old geezers to offer further stylistic advice in the comments below to help our younger colleagues to survive stylistically in the New Keynesian era. Over to you …
Posted on Monday, 13 October 2008 by Paul | Posted in humour, politics | 7 comments
