The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

We Turn From the Light to See

"We turn from the light to see."

Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows.

Technorati: Paterson

The Long Road | Restorative Theatre

I went to see The Long Road at the Soho Theatre on Tuesday night. It's a new play by Shelagh Stephenson based on her experience of working with Synergy Theatre and The Forgiveness Project in some of the UK's toughest gaols. It's been directed by Synergy founder (and brother of Jonny) Esther Baker, and follows the story of a family grieving the loss of their son, needlessly stabbed to death at a bus stop, and their move towards meeting the killer.

The people who know best say she's done a fantastic job:

"Esther Baker’s impeccably acted production confirms the play’s suggestion that restorative justice is far from a soft option."****’
Sarah Hemming, The Financial Times

"Rare and remarkable, this is drama that cries out for attention, and richly rewards it... The acting is tremendous."
Charles Spencer, The Telegraph

And she has. When a play leaves with questions about your own life and attitudes towards living it, and challenges you to re-think, you know it's proper theatre. What the hell would I do if it was my son who was stabbed to death? I'm afraid to even peer into that abyss, and hope I never have to, but for those in and around the criminal justice system, that's what they have to do. And what society demands they do in response to that does affect us all.

If you're in town, go and see it. With great talks around the issues before each Tuesday performance. On til 5th June.

Technorati: Esther Baker | The Long Road | Synergy

"The Man Who Betrays God is the Stronger of the Two"

I've been reading some Yeats recently. In his short play, Calvary, Jesus is confronted by Judas as he walks with his cross:

Judas: I betrayed you because you seemed all powerful.

Jesus: My Father,
Even if now I were to whisper it,
Would break the world in his miraculous fury
To set me free.

Judas: And there is not one man in the wide world who is not in your power?

Jesus: My Father put all men into my hands.

Judas: That was the very thought that drove me wild.
I could not bear to think that you had but to whistle
And I must do; but after that I thought,
'Whatever man betrays Him will be free';
And life grew bearable again. And now
Is there a secret left that I do not know,
Knowing that if a man betrays a God
He is the stronger of the two?

It's a strange play, from a strange poet, but this passage seems to encompass all the problems of free will and divine omnipotence so beautifully. I've yet to read Pete's new book - funny, my complimentary copy just doesn't seem to be forthcoming (the measly git) - but I wonder if we can see some of that fidelity in Judas' thoughts here: subverting God, precisely because God 'seemed all powerful'... and in that bizarre power-struggle of free will and knowledge, God allowing himself to be subverted. As I write in Signs of Emergence, I think Judas has been wrongly tarred by Christianity, and actually can serve as a very helpful, if troubled, mirror onto our own misconstructions of God and God's power.

Technorati: Jesus | Judas | Calvary | Rollins | Yeats

Cans Festival | Get Your Stencils Ready

"A street party of stencil art"

Leake Street, London Waterloo. 3-5th May.

Technorati: London

Slow Media ¦ One Day Poem

Beautiful piece flagged here. The lines of a poem appear and disappear on the floor of a pavillion as the sun moves, shining through precisely arranged perforations. The artist, Jiyeon Song, is concerned that we are rushing too quickly through our finite life, and missing so much by doing so.

Stem Sell Research

Not content with starting a whole new business model for selling music, Radiohead have also now worked to subvert the remix business by making the stems of one of their tracks, Naked, available here.

Nice touch. Release the DNA, see what evolves.

See what people have grown, and vote, here.

Technorati: Naked

Becoming Christian ¦ Kierkegaard

Another excellent programme from BBC's In Our Time, which this week looks at Soren Kierkegaard. It's a really good introduction to his thinking, and has some wonderful sections around the idea of subverting those who consider themselves to 'be' Christians, and how Kierkegaard considered this to be impossible...

There's also an honest confession from a secular materialist, admitting that, when it comes to love, 'Chrisitans have all the great tunes'.

Well worth a listen. And if you like what you hear, go buy Pete Rollin's stuff. He might be Irish, but he's right there when it comes to interpreting this for our time.

Time and Chance | Theology | Sport

It's been a huge day of sport in the UK. Depressingly the team I support got dumped out of a cup competition, and England were also beaten in a big rugby international by Scotland. But later on, Jonny's team - who've had literally hundreds of millions of pounds spent on players since being bought by a Russian oligarch - were beaten by a tiny side from a league below them, and dumped out of the cup too.

Joy and sorrow. Adrenaline and depression. Highs and lows. Season after season. It never ends.

Prospect, the politics/culture/arts magazine I subscribe too have recently begun a monthly sports column, having argued that it was about time it enjoyed the same cultural weight as the performing arts, and to be judged by the normal standards of public life.

I have a good sporting rapport with lots of people within church circles, and Jonny and Jordon blog some sports too, but, as in cultural life, it is really ignored as a theological locus, unlike literature, music or art. I'm beginning to wonder why this is. Part of the trickster in me wonders if it's just because the effete bookish types who ended up theologians were always the last to get picked for playground teams in school (though Camus had been a promising player). Perhaps it's something deeper.

Mentions of sport in the Bible are few and far between. Paul talks a bit about running the race... but it's hardly the taking part he thinks that counts. He races to win, not wanting to 'run like a man running aimlessly... I beat my body and make it my slave.' (1 Cor 9) We don't see Jesus ever doing something so frivolous as take part in a game of anything. Was this because society had such little time for leisure? As a Roman, Paul would have been more used to the idea of a successful culture creating leisure time due to its riches, and thus giving time for sport, for playful shows of strength and skill.

Hard edges of the church have looked down on sport in the past, seeing it variously as too sensual, too close to passion. And yet many of the UK's leading football teams can trace their roots back to evangelical men's clubs and the 'muscular Christianity' they promoted to keep the working class out of trouble and pubs. Perhaps it's harsh on those who gave so much to that work, but the hangover I've sensed seems to be a rather patronising attitude to sport: it's good for you, it'll probably keep you out of trouble, but it's got nothing really to do with faith.

Which leaves me wondering why I'm passionate about it, or, more accurately, why I've allowed myself to become more passionate about it, in inverse proportion to my proximity to evangelicalism.

I wonder if the answer might be in Ecclesiasties 9, where the sage says:

I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

Time and chance. These are the twin curses of the sports fan: all victories are temporal. Each season has to be fought again from scratch each year, and past glories mean little. And, no matter what we might say, so much is down to chance. That 'goal of the month', that incredible shot, that goal - we can claim some great skill, but really we know that 99 times out of 100 it would not have come off, would have scuffed off a boot into the stands.

And this is where I think sport gives us a great theological grounding: the race is not to the swift. God does not play for us, does not ram the ball home and his riches do not guarantee victory. The highs and lows, the passing seasons, are part of this marathon. We must enjoy them, and yet, as all sports fans know, not ride hubris-high and expect some final victory. Not yet. Not in this advent, in this now and not yet...

So I think it's about time sport was taken more seriously. I'm done with people patronising the passion, the partisanship, the emotional energy, longing for us to turn our minds to higher things. It's about codes, about being bound to a team. They had a word for this binding, this commitment to something in Latin. Religare. That's right. Sport is a religion. And, as such, informs faith. So, anyone want to bat some theology of sport around? Or it is just me convinced God is right into Man United? (Sorry, couldn't resist ;-)

PS - Nick Hornby, in his brilliant monthly column 'What I've Been Reading' talks about Ed Smith's What Sport Tells Us About Life in this month's Believer. Hilarious. And helpful encouragement that I'm not mad.

Technorati: Art | Chance | Prospect | Sport | Theology

Crazy for God | Frank Schaeffer at Greenbelt 08

"I'd rather be arrested for shoplifting than ever be an evangelical leader again. There was a certain basic and decent honesty about stealing pork chops that selling God had lacked."

It's only March, I know, but I'll put a punt on Crazy for God still being one of my top 5 books of 2008 in December.

The subtitle, "How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back", pretty much sums the book up nicely. Frank is, of course, the son of the massively influential Christian leader Francis Schaeffer, who was a profound influence on my parents and their generation's view of faith. Francis Schaeffer set up 'L'Abri' in Switzerland where everyone who was anyone hung out at some point in the 60's. The Rolling Stones, Led Zep, Os Guinness and every other star in the Christian constellation all passed by there to argue faith and culture with Francis and the L'Abri workers.

While Frank skiied, avoided school, hit on the scores of girls who passed through and scored with plenty of them, and his right hand too. This is what makes Crazy for God such a refreshing read: here's someone from the true Christian royalty actually telling it like it is, with all the sex drugs and rock and roll edited in. If you don't want the honest truth about a teenager helping a disabled friend jack off, praying for him to be healed by emptying a jar of oil over his head and ruining his clothes in the process, then this book isn't for you.

But if, like so many in the emerging movement, you've wrestled with your parents' faith, wildly oscillated between crazed commitment - and Frank does a very good job outlining how he did set up the Religious Right, and exactly what he thinks of it now - and total rejection, then you'll absolutely love it. Indeed, as the US heads into election fever again I'd say this should be required reading for all who are looking for their candidate to back up their faith perspective. Here's a book by someone who really knows, and has really been through it: extraordinary childhood, celebrity, acclaimed artist, teenage father, Hollywood director, jet-setting evangelical speaker... and he gave it all up, and had so much taken away, and did end up stealing pork chops.

It's a genuine laugh-out-loud read, moving, committed and written like the proper novelist he is (and if you haven't read Portofino, you must) and I'm really excited that he's agreed to come to Greenbelt this summer. That's reason enough to get your ticket now, before the March discount deadline ends.

Technorati: Francis Schaeffer | Frank Schaeffer | Religious Right

The Mergees - Sort it out Emergent, We Want an Award Ceremony

So the Oscars have been wept along to, and we've had the BAFTAs and the BRITs and the Grammys... I think people are missing a trick here. Come on Emergent, give us an award ceremony! We demand a tacky hotel and venue, with numbered tables, free alcohol and cut away shots to Andrew Jones as he shuffles when the Lifetime Achievement category approaches!

Someone should design a gong... I reckon a brass cast of a tea light should do it.

And the award for Best Use of a Video Projector in a Badly Lit Space goes to...

Further categories and nominations welcome. The 'Mergees' start here...

Technorati: BAFTA | Emergent | Oscars | TSK

There Was No Blood | Religion and Identity

Not the most romantic of movies, but we went to see There Will Be Blood last night. It's a terrific movie. If you haven't yet seen it, do. No matter how big your plasma screen, you'll need to see this one on the big screen.

Oil, Crude and Spiritual, are the two things two men are drilling for. Boring down into dangerous fissures within themselves and their communities, risking explosion and hurt to those around them. Daniel Day Lewis' extraordinary performance as Daniel Plainview, and Paul Dano's equally good one as revivalist revelation cult leader Eli Sunday are full of gutteral, primordial sounds, helped along by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood's score.

No matter how deep they dig, and what riches they bring themselves - crude or spiritual - it's real blood that they both know are absent. Plainview's 'son' is simply an orphan he took on, the brother that finds him a fraud, and the blood of Jesus that Sunday screams for never materialises into grace. There may be oil and wealth, but there is no blood, no family blood to root one of them, none of God's blood to save either. And so they fight and drill deeper into darker places.

This is, of course, a film about the American identity: a country built on escape from back-slidden families, a new puritan world with opportunities for all. A country built on, and sustained by, oil. Yet, it seems, a country at sea in its own quest for identity, for real history. As an outsider it seems the US is, more than elsewhere, a country in search of blood. Family blood - desperately trying to cling on to Scottish, Irish, African, Spanish heritage - and God's blood - desperately trying to divine Christ's blood to purify all the soiled ground beneath everyone's feet.

And, in the final instance, as in the film, there is blood. There always will be. In the madness of the consuming search for God's blood and our family's blood, we strike out and wound the other. If we get blood-fever, like Gold or Oil Fever, then blood we will find. Violent, painful and destructive. The same blood lust that wounded Christ.

Grace needs no drilling, no violence to the earth or the body. Instead, it seeps into us if we will seek the peace and silence to simply wait for it. Only then will it, in the mystery of the elements, become blood, binding us to God and our brother, allowing a gentle security of identity to take root.

Technorati: American | Grace | There Will Be Blood | Violence

Liverpool Nativity

I just watched the Liverpool Nativity on BBC3 tonight, and it was quite brilliant.

This was no cynical re-telling, but a contemporary, serious, politically aware take on the Christmas narrative, writ large as public spectacle. Thousands and thousands had turned out to the Dockside to join the spectacle, performed live throughout the city. What is fantastic about these events is that they appear to tap into the rich Christian root in our heritage - a heritage that I think people are beginning to see is vital to our coherent future, rather than being consigned to our past. I think this could be interpreted as a move into clear post-Christian water, where people are happy to be part of events like this without it being tied to 'the church'.

Christmas has always been about joining in the re-telling of stories, whatever distant orbit we have around belief in them. And this city-wide celebration of Liverpudlian music and theatre was just that - a risky, live, choral, sacred, communal event. It's in these moments that we are submerged into some wider consciousness... and realize why we live in cities - these urban exoskeletons that allow us new forms of movement quite impossible in smaller communities.

Technorati: Liverpool Nativity | BBC

God is a Londoner: Time Out

The usually so-antagonistic-its-almost-funny Time Out seem to have mellowed this year. They gave Greenbelt a great write-up as the 'best family festival' and this week have an actually really good series of pieces on religious London: Muslim speed-dating, living in a London monastery, Kensington Temple and a trip behind the scenes at the stunning Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Neasden.

Good on them.

Technorati: Hinduism | Islam | London | Time Out

His Dark Materials | PowerReligion

Andrew Jones posted yesterday about the imminent release of the first film of the Philip Pullman trilogy 'His Dark Materials'. (Why the hell has is been re-named? Durrr.... ) In the post he leans to siding with Matt Barber, who has written that Pullman's anti-theist stance is a strong theme, and thus Christians should avoid the films.

The other weekend my dad asked me my response to the same question - he'd had a very strong email from an Australian campaigner saying Christians should be actively boycotting the movie and protesting about it.

I totally disagree.

The books are a 'rich casket of treasures' - for children and adults alike. And, while one reading might be a strongly atheistic view, I think that Pullman is more interested in critiquing the 'power religion' exemplified by historic Catholicism and institutional Anglicanism. The villains of the book - though this is apparently watered down in the film - are the members of the 'Magisterium', the paranoid and power-mad government of religion, who fight to close down free thought and cut off children's souls to gain power for themselves.

And I have to agree with him. It's clearly powerful stuff, but no more cutting than Jesus' critique of the Pharisees as 'white-washed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inside are full of shit.' I heard Pullman in conversation with Rowan Williams, and was struck how both were egged on by 'fundies' on their own side... but both resisted their encouragements to slam the other. Indeed, Pullman admitted to being struck by the character of Christ, and said he was writing about him.

If we try to protect our faith from criticism like this, we seal it from the tricksters, and prevent it from being refined. If we truly believe it, we should allow our children to see the film, and trust that the truth will out. If we begin protests on things like this, don't we risk end up jailing people who let kids name their teddies Jesus? I hope the God believe in is more robust than that.

As I quote in the book, the trilogy ends with the hero Lyra, having 'killed God' urging people to 'work hard, all of us, to build the republic of heaven.' I think this is a fabulous metaphor: heaven as republic takes the power away from the high-and-mighty pompous white men who try to keep the gates closely guarded for only their own pure few. And that's something I can definitely cheer for.

Technorati: Golden Compass | Pullman | Northern Lights

He Who Gets Slapped

A strange and beautiful weekend.

We were down in Bristol, seeing some good friends. In one of those marvellous moments, I found myself taking the complimentary tickets of a multi-Oscar-winning animator to see the World Premier of the new score to the 1920's classic He Who Gets Slapped.

Will Gregory, of Goldfrapp fame, had written the score, which was performed to a projection of the film by the BBC Concert Orchestra, with a little help from Adrian Utley of Portishead and others.

It was brilliant. The emotional depth that music added to the silent film was stunning. And the film is simply brilliant too. Produced in 1924 - MGM's first production, and thus the first ever use of the lion in the intro - it had some wonderful 'special effects', and a rich and complex story about a cheated scientist who becomes a clown. I highly recommend catching it if you get the chance.

A friend and I turned our phones back on afterwards to be greeted with a whole host of missed calls and texts. My daughter had broken her leg. Slap.

Hats off to Wallinger

Perhaps my favourite living artist - so glad he's won the Turner Prize.

Eels | Quantum Physics | Many Worlds | Meaning

A quite brilliant piece of TV on BBC 4 tonight. Worth the license fee on its own, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives traced the journey of Eels front-man Mark Everett uncovering the life of his father, the eminent physicist Hugh Everett III. Everett Snr, in a radical challenge to the Quantum Mechanical orthodoxy of the day, proposed his 'Many Worlds Interpretation', in which parallel universes split off at each moment of decision. Derided at the time, he became depressed and withdrawn. He died young, and Mark's mother and sister followed soon after, his sister taking her own life, writing in her suicide note that she was 'going to find her father in one of his parallel universes.' He was a hidden man, who rarely spoke at home. It was only a few years before his death that his theory was finally accepted; it is only through this documentary that Mark discovers just how important a figure in science his father was.

And, strangely, I wrote a poem about Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation a few weeks ago. Which it seems timely to put here, and add to the probably already huge canon of poetic works on the subject ;-)

Perhaps I Prefer The Inefficiencies of This Universe
To The Cold Efficiency of Your Myriad Others

Relativity,
Two clocks moving apart
At light speed never separate
And, in time, are forever together.

Yes, Albert,
As soon as you Equalled the product of m and c-squared,
You locked us in:
No information shall travel faster than light,
Yes, our infinity, given a limit:
46.5 billion light years
To the edge
Of us.

But you are there, and I here,
And strangely, from each centre elsewhere,
A new spacetime arcs out,
Socking the eye with an infinite number of
Observable universes.

And thus, inevitably, an infinite number of you.

Some mother said I was unique, but now
A father’s physics wants me to believe in
Another me,
Beginning 10 to the 10
to the 29 metres far away.
Too far, and yet too close,
For my comfort.

Quantum physicist,
Hugh Everett III, what have you done?
“The existence of other universes
is inevitable”
Said your Many Worlds Interpretation,
Which denied too the objective reality
Of wavefunction collapse.

And I’m like, WTF?

You go on:
“Between 0 and 1:
A single random number
With all its infinite decimals,
Is expressed, computationally,
Longer
Than
The computational expression
Of the whole set of numbers
That exist there.”

Meaning?

Apparently this:
A universe of infinite parallels
May be more economic
Than a straight, linear,
Singular
One.

Meaning?

Somewhere you and I are together,
Though, in this universe, we are apart,
And somewhere else there are more in betweens
Than we could ever fathom.
And that may be more efficient
Than this.

And now my gourd is swirling,
Thinking,
What is love, and life and us,
Other than to trust in this membrane-thin world,
And chose to forego
In the infinite possibility
Of the efficient multiverse,
And dig long
And deep
For life,
And love,
In this
One?

Technorati: Eels | Parallel Universe | Everett

In Praise of Eccentricity

Just back from a wonderful weekend in the depths of Wales. I didn't find RS Thomas, or any great rural epiphany, but, in keeping with the joys of weekends in other people's houses, had a great time dipping into some books.

The most enjoyable was Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics*. It's an eccentric volume itself, but delicious for that difference. The Folio edition I was perusing began with a quote from John Stuart Mill:

"In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time."

The quote comes from his 1859 book 'On Liberty', where he regularly rages against 'custom', believing it leads to conformity, and thus lack of freedom:

"Even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes."

Eccentricity simply means 'having a different centre'. For this reason alone, and with no thought for wanting to be 'quirky' or 'different', I'd like to sing in praise of being eccentric. Within this definition it is only the eccentric who can speak prophetic criticism. It is only the eccentric who can, by the gravity of their thought, draw close and change the orbit of the masses. Bauman writes in Liquid Life of "the mind-boggling quandary of having to mark oneself out as an individual, while also remaining obviously an acceptable part of the group" and it is this pressure that draws us into predictable, one-dimensional orbits. Being such a satellite around such a large mass is safe, yes, but cold and life-less.

The force to break away from this comes in two forms. The greater force, perhaps, is the gravity of the a-centrics, the vacuous cult of celebrity that tempts us with ideas of total freedom: responsibility-free sex, rootless trans-atlantic existence and the exultation of form over content. But nothing can have no centre, save nothing itself.

So it is down to the eccentric, the differently centred, the 'dirty trickster' as my book would have it, to provide some alter-orbit. The physics is clear on this: the closer this eccentric orbit swings to the other mass, the greater its changing effect. Eccentricity is not an excuse for seclusion or flight, but an invitation to challenge the prose-flattened, cathode-ray world with some vital poetry.

[* The book. Not the online fashion store. Urgghhhh.]

Technorati: Eccentricity | Eccentrics | Mill | Sitwell

Storyquest | Lara Croft is no Wise Guide | Antisocial Behaviour

Storyquest is the national festival of story-telling and the spoken word, and runs for the whole of November. Alongside many keynote events, the organizers - the Prince of Wales' Foundation for Children & the Arts - are simply encouraging families to 'fill their homes with stories, capturing the moment when a story gets inside you and fires the imagination.'

One idea they have is to simply open an old photo album and start talking about the people within it - whether alive or dead. Doing exactly this is something I remember fondly from my own childhood.

With the heavy-handed 'National Literacy Strategy', story-telling has been rather gutted of its emotional heart. Reading is to be 'done' and stories are to be studied. This is a tragedy, not simply for the pure enjoyment of stories, but because - as Christopher Booker argues in The Seven Basic Plots - it is stories that forge our emotional and spiritual development. Remove them and you stunt growth and maturity.

Of course, people will argue that stories still abound in childhood. What is Lara Croft other than a story animated and controlled by the player? True. But the issue is the commonality. A child playing alone at a computer is in control of their own story. Left alone to navigate a world with no narrator or guide. And this, I am convinced, leads to a wounded and insecure heart that finds love and grace and appreciation of the other difficult. In other speak, it contributes to anti-social behaviour.

So turn the screen off, go grab a book, an album, or just your imagination, and tell someone a story. The fire is lit.

Technorati: Antisocial Behaviour | Arcade Game | Christopher Booker | Gaming | Lara Croft | Prince of Wales | Story-telling | Storyquest

Proximity | Escatology | SpaceTime Collapse

Last night I went to see Iron and Wine at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, where we were up in the gods rather; the night before I'd been looking for some theatre tickets for a Christmas show, and was shocked at how much it was going to cost to be anywhere near where we might see.

The brilliant folky-dub got me thinking about ideas of proximity, and the value we place on it. Being physically near costs. If you want to be at the front, within touching distance, you are going to have to pay a huge amount more. Sitting near the front of a meeting says something; the physical layout of the space insists on it. Most of us are left wallowing at the back, with restricted views.

And somehow my mind skipped to the second coming; it struck me that one of the most powerful arguments against a standard physical interpretation of the second coming is this idea of limited proximity. We couldn't all get anywhere near close. Rich and powerful Jews like Maxwell get buried in the hugely costly cemetery on the Mount of Olives outside of Jerusalem, overlooking the spot where Elijah is meant to return, and one feels that there would be a similar stampede for wherever the JesusShip™ decided to land.

We used to joke back in old-church about good deeds pushing you forward a couple of rows. No. Whatever we might think about eschatology, or post-life experience, SpaceTime must collapse, and ideas of distance and proximity will be irrelevant.

Strange where thoughts take you when you're tired at a wonderful gig.

Technorati: Escatology | Iron and Wine | Jerusalem | Proximity | Robert Maxwell | Shepherds Bush

Live

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.

Don't Even Think What the Theology Graduate Would Ask...

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

Has Old Father Thames Lost His Virility? | Sacred Rivers

Last night I went to hear Peter Ackroyd speak on the South Bank (pictured here), ostensibly about his new book: Thames, Sacred River. It was a fine lecture on the thread of the sacred throughout the history of humanity's interaction with London's river, followed by a hilarious Q&A led by the Times' Literary Editor, who had a torrid time trying to get anything much out of the old curmudgeon.

One recurring theme was the votive offerings that have been dug up from the Thames, covering pretty much every age for millennia. In more recent times churches have lined its banks, and one interesting observation by Ackroyd was the number of them dedicated to the Virgin Mary. There seems no rhyme or reason to this - and yet over the river's 240 mile passage there are over 50 churches given that name. Ackroyd connected this with the deeper history of the river as a place for fertility rituals: women would come to bathe in the Thames' waters before trying to conceive.

I got a brief chance to speak with him afterwards. I was interested in the idea of the sacred - in this case a river - as places for us to throw our shit. The votive offerings and the general detritus of society have emptied themselves into the Thames for so long, and I wondered if he thought the river would at some point call a halt and begin to fight back. "Of course not," he growled, "the Thames is cleaner now than its ever been."

Precisely. With its concreted banks and strict laws and worries about health and safety, the waters pass through the city now with no interruption. Nobody bathes, nobody enters the water. We pass over it atop buses and gaze down at the greying ripples. Our detachment from this river that has fed us and led us in worship for thousands of years, and carried off our shit, is now almost total.

The river-spirit flows through the centre of our capital in a well defended channel, leaving us dry. We cannot be fertilized by it now. We have, to corrupt Jung, purified 'Old Father Thames' to the point of sterility. Which makes me want to head to Putney and the boat houses, and have a swim.

Connected Post: Nature Watching in LA | Mango Body Whips and the LA River

Technorati: Catholicism | Fertility | London | Peter Ackroyd | Jung | Thames

Signs of Life in the Churches

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been really enjoying Roger Deakin's meditation on trees 'Wildwood'.

In one passage on 'The Sacred Groves of Devon', Deakin goes in search of the 'Green Man' - the woodland spirit of rebirth often seen carved into beams in old churches - in various villages. He notes the oddity of having a basically pagan deity carved into the very supporting fabric of these ancient Christian places of worship - "nowadays such an inspired conjunction would be called 'multiculturalism'" - but then goes on to quote a great piece of Ruskin:

"Go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statties, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which is must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children."

I had never appreciated this before. In the hundreds of tiny country churches - many built around the 16th and 17th centuries, we see local communities expressing, through their craftsmen, their faith and spirituality. Later, as more grand projects emerged, the masons were still able to throw their personal touches into their work through gargoyles and other features.

Have we lost something here? Are the warehouse churches that we throw up or rent just bland, interchangeable shells for an equally bland and interchangeable God?

Technorati: Deakin | Green Man | Megachurch | Ruskin

Helvetica: The Movie

Just what everyone has been waiting for: a well kerned, beautifully cut doc about the world's most ubiquitous greatest font. Helvetica. Showing at the ICA

Anyone up for a pilgrimage?

Technorati: Helvetica | ICA

Oiticica | The Mundanity of Beauty

I spent a wonderful afternoon at the Tate Modern on Monday, and caught the Oiticica exhibition. If you're in London, I highly recommend it.

I thought the curation was excellent: a full sense of progression in the artist's ideas. In the case of Oiticica, whose native Brazil is so famous for it's colour and flamboyance, this was all about the way that "gradually colour is liberated from the picture plane and given spatial form in further series of works, which include suspended paintings and reliefs, sculptural objects, penetrable environments and ‘habitable paintings’ - capes, tents and banners designed to be worn or inhabited while moving to the rhythm of samba."

With the heightened eye that wandering a gallery can bring, I was amused to find a highly fidgety and clearly very bored member of gallery staff in the same room as the piece above. Clearly beauty becomes mundane with time; I was transfixed as he texted mates, fiddled with his radio, munched a Snickers and scratched his nether regions. Brilliant.

Technorati: London | Oiticica | Tate

Tales of Two Buildings::Two Cities::The Divine Vision

Mika Brzezinski recently refused to lead with a story about P@&i$ Hi%ton over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a similar vein, Wired reported in 'A Tale of Two Cities' that a trawl of the web revealed more interest in the iPhone than the recent triple-attempted bombing on London and Glasgow.

Celebrity::Security::Gossip::War :: These are all the hallmarks found branded on the urban belly. We'd be foolish to try to pare them. London wouldn't expect us to stop and stare in the face of car bombs. Crowds and spectacles, criminality and terrorism. Londinium's clay has been trodden on and burnt by them for millennia. It's a wise and rooted place.

On Thursday and Friday I was fortunate enough to see the resurrection of two of the city's iconic buildings:

Gravity and Grace (1) ¦ Wild Blue Yonder ¦ Living Between Two Oceans

Last night I went with my good friend and doctor of film Gareth Higgins to see Werner Herzog's latest film 'The Wild Blue Yonder'.

It's a deeply comic, deeply environmental parable about space travel, aliens, shopping malls, complex math and hyperspace. And quite wonderful for it.

Speaking to Gareth afterwards, I mentioned that the path of the film reminded me very much of the wonderful children's book 'Penguin Dreams' in which Chongo Chingi flies into the air, and goes so high through space that he pops out back through the surface of his pool. Herzog uses the same trick in this movie: footage from a Space Shuttle mission is cut with mathematicians describing the theory of 'chaotic travel' to other galaxies... the 'astronauts' are then seen diving into this new world as the footage switches to incredible shots of divers exploring waters beneath an ice cap.

The metaphor is, I think, a beautiful one. As humans we live at the interface between two oceans: the seas below, and the 'ocean of the air' above. The tallest human construction is only a few hundred metres tall. Relative to the size of the planet, even Everest is only a minor imperfection; scaled down, Earth is smoother than a billiard ball.

We are, in many ways, but a minor irritant on the surface of the planet. And it will scratch us off with no thought unless we learn to live in peace. The dream of zooming off to another planet is satirized by Herzog very well here. It ain't going to happen. If it could have, aliens would have taken our fine earth by now. They tried. But no one came to shop for their trinkets.

It's a great film with some incredible footage and wonderful music, and reminded me very much of another environmental meditation, Baraka. What is particularly striking are the disorientating shots of zero-gravity living, and the parallels between floating in space, and floating under the ocean. But more of that in the next post.

 

Technorati: Wild Blue Yonder | Herzog | Penguin Dreams | Environment | Ocean | NASA | Space

London Olympics Logo | Newness Disturbs?

So, the debate over the new London Olympics brand has raged on for more days than a debate about a graphic really ought to... Hasn't it? Initially it was just the aesthetics, but, while many people mentioned it made them feel sick, but then some of the video pieces really did. The Mayor has waded in, and countless other alternative logos have sprung up too... The Press have refused to let it go, and the vitriolic response to it has been amazing...

But are we going to be proved wrong? Is this actually a bold leap into a new aesthetic that we will, by the time the Olympics come round, think was amazingly design-prescient?

Newness always disturbs us to begin with. The Olympics committee could have gone for something predictable and comfortable. We would not have been disturbed. But, as we know from emergence theory, without disturbance, nothing ever evolves.

With the advent of home-computing, 'everyone is a designer now'. And a peek at some of people's own goes at a logo do tell us just how badly visual ideas can be. So, Nic, tell me - is this a brave new world, is it 'in tradition', or just terrible?

Technorati: Logo | London | Olympics | Disturbing

Jesus, The Guantanamo Years

"From an American security point of view, it's not that reassuring to find a single male Palestinian with no hand luggage, traveling alone. I'm guessing Mossad has a file on me. It probably says I'm a bit of a troublemaker, and it almost definitely says I'm lying about who my real father is."

Abie Philbin Bowman's comedy hit from last year's Edinburgh festival comes to the Arts Theatre in London this week...

Technorati: 9/11 | Abie Philbin Bowman | Edinburgh | Guantanamo | Jesus | Arts Theatre

It Was 40 Years Ago Today...

Sgt. Pepper was released 40 years ago today. As I mentioned at a 'God's iPod' interview at Greenbelt last year, it's an album that has great memories for me. After various Thomas the Tank Engine LPs, Sgt. Pepper was the first record I really liked. I don't know how my dad let me, but I played his 'first edition' version, bought the day it came out, over and over. I was about 4... and ironically my older brother, now a DJ, would always turn to me to put records on!

The final track, A Day in the Life is, for me, quite simply the best song ever written. And hence was the only choice to go out on for the last Vaux service ;-)

Technorati: Beatles | Music | Sgt Pepper

Dave Eggers | Valentino Achak Deng | Sudan

I went to hear Dave Eggers in conversation with