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I love the look of fierce concentration
on the faces of musicians,
playing live,
struggling to hear the foldback,
straining to keep within
the bounds of the beat...
The rush of performance
and I think of my own struggles
to live life,
playing live,
no click track.
This is not a recording.
The energy and passion,
with the bum notes,
make me... live.
is a wonderful film which I can't recommend highly enough. Dublin. A busker. A Czech pianist, selling roses on the street to scrape a living. Not a great deal else. Subtle, simple film-making hung around wonderful music.
Out of the same stable as The Believer, Wholphin is a short-story mag for short films. They mailed me today about a great-looking film, showing on IFC this Monday at 9pm EDT. (I'd love someone to record it for me ;-) The spiel goes:
Back in 2000, western pharmaceutical companies began a massive marketing campaign to introduce a new product to the good people of Japan: depression. Before 2000, the good people of Japan apparently did not even have a word to describe sadness as a debilitating biological illness. So the companies had to coin a new word, "utsu," and create an appropriately catchy ad slogan to help explain the concept. They chose the phrase, "Does Your Soul Have A Cold?" antidepressant sales have since quintupled.
Mike Mills (pictured), director of Thumbsucker, has made an incredibly intimate film documenting the human effects of America's latest cultural export to Japan.
Catch the trailer here.
Technorati: Believer | Depression | Japan | Wholphin
Still on holiday here, and doing some clearing jobs around the house/garden that have been building up for a while. Which means I've had to go to the dump today - one of the finest, most joyous experiences in the urban environment.
You go heavy loaded, driving slowly, suspension almost topping out... and leave it all behind. The priests who preside over this sacrament at our local place are fantastic too - helping you with the bigger stuff, directing you as to which skip to dump stuff in, advising whether something ought to be recycled. Everyone drives away feeling lighter, happier, going home to a simpler, less cluttered place. It is distinctly sacred.
This isn't, of course, to be naive about the problems of urban waste. It is incredible to see the stuff people do chuck, when most of it could very well be posted on a site like Freecycle. At least they sort stuff for recycling now, which they didn't a couple of years back.
Trees sense a moment when the balance between night and day changes. The shorter days trigger the development of a suicidal hormone in each leaf which creeps down the stem to the joint with the woody twig. Here it stimulates the growth of a sphincter of brittle, hard tissue that gradually closes in on itself, cutting off the supply of sap. Thus deprived of water, the chlorophyll in the leaf disintegrates, and the colours of the leaf's other underlying constituents are revealed, before the stem joint finally snaps and the leaf floats to the floor.
From Wildwood by Roger Deakin
I love autumn, and this passage really struck me. I'd somehow thought that it was the 'core' of the tree that got rid of the leaf, but it appears that it is the leaf that takes the decision to die, for the better of the whole organism.
Somehow this struck a chord. Heat. Life. Lowering sun. Falling temperatures. Ice. Thaw. New life. And so it cycles...
I was privileged to go and share some stuff at Si Johnston's group here on the north coast of NI tonight, and one of the people there, who'd I spent some time with at the Soliton Sessions here last February, read a fantastic poem by the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Carl Dennis, which I just had to post. Click for the whole thing...
The God Who Loves You
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
I'm in Ireland at the moment, finishing a novel, staying with a great friend who lives on the north coast. Yesterday evening we went surfing - one of those things I enjoy but do not well - and when I got back I'd had another email from a regal friend containing an article from Anne Lamott. She's a great writer, and in a piece about Easter had written "Life happens, death happens, and then new life happens"; a beautiful summary of Christianity.
But it was this poem by RS Thomas that really moved me. I've been playing with a poem about the ocean since a few lines came to me while out in the surf in Polzeath, Cornwall, over the summer. And, as I think I've written here before, there's a section in the book I'm writing where the protagonist looks out at the sea and muses that humanity is really no more than an irritant on the surface of the earth, and that, having climbed out of the oceans millennia ago, the oceans are simply going to rise and take us back.
But Thomas puts things so much better:
I have this that I must do
one day; overdraw on my balance
of air, and breaking the surface
of water go down into the green
darkness to search for the door
to myself in dumbness and blindness
and uproar of scared blood
at the eardrums. There are no signposts
there but bones of the dead
conger, no light but the pale
phosphorus, where the slow corpses
swag. I must go down with poor
purse of my body and buy courage,
paying for it with the coins of my breath.
Technorati: Ocean | Lamott | RS Thomas | Surf | White Rocks
Excellent article in The Observer yesterday:
"There is evidence to suggest that this generation of parents who were brought up on videos and instant visual gratification are not going through cooing routines. There are fewer nursery rhymes, less song, storytelling and reading. All this is taken over by TV, which leaves parents free to think about themselves and to work late."
Spot on.
Technorati: Children | Facebook | Observer | Television | Technology
The graduate with a Mathematics degree asks, "Why does it work?"
The graduate with a Science degree asks, "How does it work?"
The graduate with an Engineering degree asks, "How does one build it?"
The graduate with an Accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?"
The graduate with an Arts degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?"
Technorati: Mathematics | Graduate
Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by the news today that Virgin Atlantic are soon to announce a free trans-atlantic service. On each flight, a small number of fee-free passengers will simply have to put up with being pinned into their seats having commercials fired at them for the entire trip. Like the NYT, the WSJ and London's FT, they are simply following the same business model that makes a free-to-use site like Facebook 'over $10bn': we get life without paying, as long as we put up with commercials.
Continue reading "Life For Free (as long as the poor keep buying) | Ad(non)Sense" »
Two stories on two pages in the Independent today:
Gaza's only Christian bookseller has been murdered by the Righteous Swords of Islam. As if Gaza didn't have enough problems, these fundamentalists think they're saving the world by killing off Christians. There are only 3000 or so left.
While in the US, 'church groups across the country are holding special "Halo 3" gaming nights'. Said one, "Halo is all about saving the galaxy from an invading force of aliens. And saving the world is Jesus' message."
This world is too f*cked up for me sometimes. I want to get off.
Technorati: Evangelical | Halo 3 | Islam | Fundamentalism | Violence
"In the first half of my life I fought the Devil. In the second half, I fought God."
Nikos Kazantzakis
Angst about sin and purity; worries about traditions and who's in and who's out; individuation, desperation to innovate, neophilia.
And now something... other.
I am exploring.
Technorati: Jung | Kazantzakis | Rohr
Don't know if someone at the BBC was having a laugh, or having a bad day, but despite the real score being just 12-10, it felt like 129. Nothing like beating the Aussies twice in a row in World Cup matches! How does that feel, Hirschy?!
Technorati: Alan Hirsch | BBC | England | Australia
Manuel de Landa, in his brilliant book A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History writes of the two skeletons that humankind have developed. Our endo(internal)skeleton "made new forms of movement control possible, freeing [us] to conquer every available niche." Later, around 8000 years ago, we then developed the urban exo(external)skeleton, whereby "bricks of sun-dried clay became building materials for homes [...] and defensive walls."
Snails have exoskeletons. A protective shell within which to hide. Our early cities were simply exoskeletal defensive structures to protect communities against constant pillage and plunder, thus allowing culture and community to grow.
Mammals have developed endoskeletons. Non-protective, they instead allow huge improvements in a body's motion control. We can stand, run, hold, sew, build.
So, in the manifestation of the Body of Christ that you are a part of, is that body endo- or exoskeletal? Is it there as hard external shell to protect and shield us from the plundering of 'the world'? Or is it an internal strength, allowing new forms of motion control, allowing a gathered people to join and stand and build?
The question is pertinent for all of our networks. Are they protective covers that help us feel connected, but prevent real engagement, and are they in fact in danger of being so big-boned that they crush us into inactivity?
Technorati: de Landa | Endoskeleton | Non-Linear History | Exoskeleton
As I have mentioned here before, I have recently written an article about Facebook (and other social networks) for Third Way. I sent a copy of it to a simian friend of mine based in the US – who I naturally keep up with mostly via the internet – and her response to a passage where I outline the danger of the Body of Christ ending up simply as ‘the buddy of Christ’ I found really engaging:
I think the Western Church has become something even worse than the “buddy of Christ” I think we’ve become the no-longer-interested-spouse of Christ. The partner who is so disengaged in the relationship that they are dissolved in apathy and not even interested in divorce but have resigned themselves to a love-less, passion-less living out the rest of their days. I don’t mean to be a doomsayer but I must say that is what strikes me when I interact with most people in normal American churches, not to mention the feeling that I get when I have to sit in a service.
I found this profoundly moving actually, and quite uncomfortable to read. Which usually means it needs reading and digesting slowly and thoughtfully.
There has been a lot of discussion - virtually around the web, and at almost every party/function/whatever I've been to in the last few weeks - about the digital tsunami that appears to be drowning people. Jonny is resisting Facebook (though in response I've set up a group to force him to give in) and I know other friends who are stripping their digital lives bear in an attempt to pull some kind of real life back. I think the next couple of years are going to be very interesting in this respect, and I think the whole nature of online relationships - and the connected quality of our real relationships hinted at in the quote above - are going to be tested vigorously.
Technorati: Body of Christ | Buddy of Christ | Simian
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