Tag: america

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Heroes in unlikely places

Was watching a great programme on tele this evening – Dickens In America, presented by Miriam Margolyes. It was a fascinating premise anyway, following Charles Dickens’ journey into the heartland of America in the mid 19th century.

But the best thing about it was the presenter – I was reminded again why Miriam Margolyes is one of my heroes, and in my ‘most like to meet’ list along side David Attenborough, Billy Bragg and, um some other people (Peter Ustinov was on the list before he died… if the list were just a fantasy one, he’d still be on it…)

There’s just something about Miriam that I warm to, that I admire greatly, and that makes her seem like one of the most marvellous people on the planet. Every time I hear her interviewed she makes me laugh uproariously, she’s got a fantastic grasp of the english language and revels in the art of speaking (her recording of ‘the queen and I’, in which she plays every member of the British Royal Family is the biggest-selling audio book in the world).

It’s all a bit random really – most of my big heroes are political and spiritual figures – MLK, Mandela, Gandhi – same ones as everyone, really. But there are a handful of people who make me feel like Britain isn’t such a dreadful place after all, that there’s something uniquely wonderful in our heritage here, and Miriam is one of those people.

So raise a toast to La Margolyes!

Soundtrack – Abraham Laboriel, ‘Guidum’.

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this toddler is learning patience

I forgot that beta-testing is all about ironing out hiccups.

rough outline of the day –

power supply arrives, box is working, box isn’t working, talk to bob, get box working, attempt upgrade, upgrade fails, reboot, upgrade half worked, retry upgrade, fails and buggers machine. Was it something I said?

So tomorrow is more techie-geekery in order to get loop-toys working to potential. And it all means that the trouble-shooting process for the end result will be that bit more secure and organised, more bugs will be ironed out, and the whole thing will be more stable.

It’s just that I want it working NOW! So I’m going to sulk of to bed instead.

Soundtrack – The Bears, ‘Car Caught Fire’ and The Psychodots, ‘Terminal Blvd’ – two amazing bands with 3/4 the same members – The Bears is The ‘dots + Adrian Belew. Stunningly great guitar pop in a very british early 80s Elvis Costello/XTC/Joe Jackson sort of way, filtered through american guitar bands like The Rembrandts, Husker Du and with Belew sounding just like Belew on the Bears album. highly highly recommended.

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When blogging changes your world.

I read loads of blogs.

From the blogs I read, I discover other blogs.

Some of them are just silly and hilarious (like this one, sent to me via BDB’s blog).

Others show the world-changing potential of blogs. Not ‘world-changing’ in the sense of ending the conflict in the middle east, or convincing the world to stop ignoring the hurricane devastation in central america, but world-changing in the sense that you see the world differently after reading them. They remind of what the world is really like, both good and bad, and take you out of your own concerns into a world where things are very different.

One such blog is All About Ali – the story of a woman’s battle with stomach cancer. This one I picked up from Pip Wilson’s blog – Pip has a fantastically benign form of tourettes, which makes him reiterate how lovely the world is on an almost hourly basis. He posts lots of pictures of lovely people, and the occasional inspirational link. And if you ever need to be told that you’re lovely and valued and special and a ‘beautiful human person’, Pip’s blog is the place to go.

Anyway, All About Ali is a deeply deeply moving blog. I recognise Ali and her hubby from Greenbelt. I’m sure I’ve spoken to her hubby on more than one occasion. We’ve certainly got quite a few fairly close friends in common. The blog is a beautiful and heartbreaking read, but gives you much faith in people. Have a read, and say a prayer for her. If the power of positive thinking, prayer, great friends and regular glasses of champagne count for anything, she’ll beat it no problem.

And now I really ought to do some work, having spent the last hour and a half reading blogs!

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A monumental passing…

Rosa Parks has died, aged 92 – she was the woman who on Dec 1st 1955 refused to move on a bus to the black seats, and her actions sparked the bus boycott that galvanised the entire civil rights movement in America. A truly amazing and remarkable action. I’ve no idea if she was a remarkable woman in the rest of her life – all the eulogies will probably say she was either way, though it’s a shame that ordinary people are so rarely allowed to do extraordinary things.

Which is a shame – there’s something in Rosa’s actions that should inspire us all – she was just a regular woman who had had enough. She wasn’t part of a planned assault on the bus boycott, she just wanted to sit down. She acted with strength of character, at considerable personal risk, and the chain of events she set of changed the course of American history. But she was probably just a regular woman. And that’s the magic of it. People like that are what Soren Kierkegaard described as ‘knights of faith’ – ordinary people living extraordinary lives. There’s nothing remarkable about them save the choices they make.

Anyway, Have a read of this Time Magazine article that listed Rosa as one of the 20 most influential people of the 20th Century.

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A recycled week!

This has been a busy week of recycled collective stuff – I’ve done the flyers and sen them off to the printers, written the press release, been tweaking the website (no doubt to be tweaked further as I change my mind about how I want to pitch the whole thing), and sent out the first gig date to all the listings people with the press release.

Now I’m trying to get some radio interest, and get the web-promo moving.

the thing I’m most proud of thus far is the look of it all – from the website to the flyers to the press release, there’s definitely a unified look and feel that says what I want it to say. What fun!

Tonight I’m playing a benefit gig for the Pitstop Ploughshares people, who disarmed an american plane that was on the runway at Shannon airport, bound for Iraq, and are in court for it next week. The whole area of civil disobiedience is a fascinating one – what actions are worth breaking the law over? – and I think protest at the illegal invasion and occupation of a country is as good a reason as any.

Hopefully the court case will raise the profile of the anti-war feeling in Ireland, where a lot of people are livid at it being used as a stopping off point for US planes on their way to Iraq. see warontrial.com for more details.

Soundtrack – Jenny Scheinman, ’12 Songs’; Shaun Colvin, ‘Cover Girl’.

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Religion…

The problem of religion.

Jyoti’s ever marvellous and provocative blog has a huge rant on it about the place of religion in politics. His contention is that religion is irrational and bad things are done in the name of God, and has no place being used to define political life…

The weird thing is that, as a believer, I at least partly agree. Not that all spiritual belief is irrational (clearly, that would be a weird thought for someone who aligns them self with the christian faith), but that the use of one’s faith to solely define one’s view of the world can end up in a very totalitarian view of the world.

This paragraph of Jyoti’s is interesting –

I’m an atheist. More than that, I’m a radical, materialist, proselytising atheist. That means that not only am I opposed to Christianity as an irrational pile of poop, I’m also against Hinduism, Buddhism, paganism, Judaism, Scientology, spiritualism, astrology and, of course, Islam. (I’m obviously not anti-religious people. Some of my best friends are believers, honest guv! Love the believer, abhor the belief, I say.)

Now, the last sentence is clearly an irony, but the strength of opinion expressed in the first half is very close to what I hear from devout thinking people of faith. It’s clearly not raving madness, but it is dogmatic to a slightly scary level.

One of the wonders of post-modernity is that we are now wrestling with the definitions of truth can something be ‘factual’ by untrue, or vice versa? Can two seemingly contradictory accounts of The Way Things Are both be true. We’re now able to wrestle with the concept of abstracting truth from its linguistic strictures, from it’s cultural contexts and examine things for what they point to as much as what they state. We can embrace the concepts of ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ truth, with infinite truth being essentially unknowable but anything that points to or describes in any way the infinite truth is ‘finite’ truth.

The deconstructionists told us that all language is a metaphor, that words resonate with other words, and within the context of the semantic buildings in which we bring them to life – so the word ‘dad’, on the surface means ‘the guy who impregnated your mother to cause you to be born’ but is on a deeper level going to mean so many different things to different people based on their experiences of father-figures.

However, we still have the tools of history, or literary criticism, of science and biology that can act as boundaries and sign-posts for our discussions, as bridges between our experience and the posited notions of the various religious traditions. So, when Jyoti says,

I don’t believe the stories about Jesus, Thor, Isis, Satan, Apollo, Vishnu, Allah, Buddha, Spiderman or The Great Pumpkin. They’re all lovely stories, and I appreciate the wit and wisdom of the writers but are they true? No. They’re mostly stories written by men to help shape their societies and keep the majority of ordinary people, especially women, oppressed. Apart from Spiderman, of course, that’s very egalitarian.

there’s some pulling apart that needs to take place – which of those stories collapse under scrutiny, and how? What is being brought to bear to cause them to collapse, and is what’s driving that motivation itself substantial

Would you want to live in a country under Scientological Law? Or Odin’s Law? Does either proposition sound like a reasonable way to frame a civilised country’s legal and social system? No? So why does it make sense to run a country according to Christian or Muslim myths? They’re no less ridiculous, random and invented.

Let’s me spell this out: the problem isn’t with fundamentalist Islam or right-wing US Christians or huge churches run by ex-Hitler Youth members.

It’s with religion itself

Enshrining irrationality at the heart of our societies, validating myths and letting them define our human rights is an act of supreme idiocy. We all have the right to live, to love and pursue our dreams and no-one should be able to deprive us of those rights by waving a crumbling sheaf of lies in our faces.

He then goes on to present two stories of people be tortured and killed in the name of religion, and comments –

That news story is from June 2005. That’s what happens when people believe 2000-year-old superstitions to be literal truth.

Look at the Muslim terrorist attacks on Britain and America. Look at the God-steered response by Bush. That’s what happens when old men hear their God’s whispering in their ears.

If religion had its way, we’d all still be cowering in caves, blinking fearfully at the ghosts and goblins in the darkness.

We need to step forward into the light of reason, to embrace the hard truths of our mortality and unimportance rather than the comforting bedtime stories about gods and everlasting life.

That means we must oppose the irrational whoever promotes it and whatever colour their skin happens to be.

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A very fine Big Idea

never let it be said that Britain doesn’t have a vibrant and burgeoning jazz scene.

Mark Lockheart is one of the busiest and most respected sax players in the country, and for his current tour he’s assembled a fantastic group featuring four marvellous saxophonists with a killer rhythm section. It’s pretty rare to see four sax players in a contemporary jazz setting in the UK – it’s not often that anyone can afford to take that kind of project on the road, but Mark has managed it.

Due to my having a gig on the same night, I won’t be able to make it to the London gig next thursday, so last night, Orphy and I headed out to Oxford to see ‘Mark Lockheart’s Big Idea’ play at The Spin, a weekly jazz gig at The Wheatsheaf in Oxford. I’d heard a lot about the gig from friends who’d played there, so was looking forward to checking out the venue too.

The gig was fantastic – playing mainly music from Mark’s latest album Moving Air, with Mark, Julian Siegel , Steve Buckley and Rob Townsend on saxes and bass clarinets, Martin France on drums John Parricelli on guitar and Dudley Phillips on bass.

Mark has a very distinctive writing style, that can be traced all the way back to the tunes he wrote for seminal british jazz outfit, Loose Tubes in the mid 80s. The horn arrangements are stunningly beautiful, and he made full use of the dynamic possibilities of having four horns on stage. Parricelli was on rare form, playing beautifully and blending with the sound of the horns magnificently.

Fortunately, the room was packed, and the audience were hugely appreciative. It’d be mad to suggest that Britain was in any way deficient in the jazz world – I guess the problem, as it is in most parts of the world, is a lack of places to play anything other than standards. The main jazz gigs in London are restaurant gigs, with venues like The New Vortex and Ronnie Scott’s doing their bit to promote interesting vibrant music. It’s still tough to find a gig, moreso now that the foyer gigs are the Festival Hall are on hold while the renovate the building.

So, in the spirit of last night’s gig, I’m going to offer you a beginner’s guide to the British Jazz scene – a handful of essential CDs that prove our place alongside the Americans and Scandinavians, while still all sounding uniquely British…

– The obvious place to start is with Theo Travis – his last two quartet CDs, Heart Of The Sun and Earth To Ether are both outstanding.
– Next up would be Ben Castle – his last album Blah Street is marvellous – clever, funny and intelligent in all the right ways.
– Of course Mark Lockheart who inspired this list in the first place – his latest, Moving Air is fabulous.
– And then there’s Mo Foster – any of his records are worth getting, but particularly Time To Think is gorgeous.
– Another one featuring Mark Lockheart, the Works is Patrick Wood’s amazing quartet – what Weather Report would have sounded like if they’d grown up in London. Beware Of The Dog is one of my favourite instrumental albums from any part of the world, not just the UK.

If you were to buy that lot (and I think you should), you’d have a pretty decent representation of why I’m excited about the future of British music, rather than wallowing in the despair that would ensue from burying yourself in the world of X-Factor, Pop Idol and the lame faecal mountain that is the pop charts.

Soundtrack – some tracks that I’ve been recording over the last three days with american fretless guitarist, Ned Evett – some really really cool stuff (to add to the stockpiles of other really really cool stuff that are sitting here waiting to be released!) – hopefully I’ll have an MP3 taster or two for you soon from this lot…

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Anti-terror laws or the repression of dissent?

George Monbiot, on the implementation of new anti-terror laws, referencing the arrest of Walter Wolfgang –
Had Mr Wolfgang said “nonsense” twice during the foreign secretary’s speech, the police could have charged him under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. Harassment, the act says, “must involve conduct on at least two occasions … conduct includes speech.”(5) Parliament was told that its purpose was to protect women from stalkers, but the first people to be arrested were three peaceful protesters.(6) Since then it has been used by the arms manufacturer EDO to keep demonstrators away from its factory gates,(7) and by Kent police to arrest a woman who sent an executive at a drugs company two polite emails, begging him not to test his products on animals.(8) In 2001 the peace campaigners Lindis Percy and Anni Rainbow were prosecuted for causing “harassment, alarm or distress” to American servicemen at the Menwith Hill military intelligence base in Yorkshire, by standing at the gate holding the stars and stripes and a placard reading “George W Bush? Oh dear!”.(9) In Hull a protester was arrested under the act for “staring at a building”.(10)

Read the whole article – the number of laws enacted and misused since the much-maligned ‘Criminal Justice Act’ of the early 90s is staggering. The suppression of dissent is surely one of the hallmarks of a repressive regime – just the kind of behaviour that Tony and his buddy Dubya are always telling us is threatening democracy in all them foreign lands where bad people threaten our ‘freedoms’. Just in the paragraph above, the catalogue of misapplication of laws supposedly enacted to prevent terrorism should be enough to get any self-respecting supporter of the democratic right to disagree with your leaders up in arms. How any labour or lib-dem MP can possibly be silent in the light of such behaviour is mind-boggling. As George points out, it’s taken the aggressive man-handling of an octogenarian at the party conference for most of us to wake up to just how pernicious the outworking of these laws is, supposedly in the name of protecting liberty.

I don’t know about you, but I’m less worried right now about bombers than I am about the enactment of these crazy laws. Parliament can do what it wants, without anyone having the right to respond with even their presence outside the building. No placards, no massed gatherings, all in the cause of getting rid of Brian Haw.

Time to start making some noise about it methinks. Perhaps a letter to your MP might be in order?

Soundtrack – Charlie Peacock, ‘Love Press Ex-Curio’ (I’ve had this for a few weeks now, and I think it’s actually released now as well – it’s a fantastic change of direction for Charlie, whose previous work was kind of funky singer/songwriter stuff, fairly heavily Prince-influenced in places and very soulful. This is a contemporary jazz record, featuring lots of the biggest names in the field – Ravi Coltrane, Jeff Coffin, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Joey Baron, James Genus, Victor Wooten, Kirk Whalum etc. etc. The sound is sort of Avishai Cohen/Dave Douglas/lots of other new york electric jazz peoples ball-park, and the writing and play are top notch. If you’re into that kind of thing, it’s a must, especially as all the ‘in the know’ types that you hang out with won’t have heard of it, and will be very jealous that you got there first when you play it to them.)

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A goodbye and a thankyou.

M Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Travelled and numerous other books about negotiating what it is to be human, has died.

The Road Less Travelled is one of my all time favourite books. I initially bought it as a joke – it was one of those books that you see celebs reading when they are trying to look like they are taking time out to get their lives together. Geri Halliwell photographed next to a pool reading it, etc.

So I bought it for $2 in an american bargain bookshop, and within half a page I was hooked. Peck’s basic premise that life is difficult, and so much of our mental anguish comes from the feeling that ‘it’s not fair’. If we only realised that being human was about dealing with those obstacles and difficulties, we’d be a lot more happy and productive.

A really simple thought, but a deeply profound one. The follow up book is perhaps even better – Further Along The Road Less Travelled – between the first and second volumes, Peck converted to Christianity, but must’ve pissed off a lot of conservative christians with his unorthodox take on the faith. This too I found profoundly inspiring.

Obviously I never got to meet him – nor did most of the millions of people who read his books, erroneously labeled as ‘self help’ (as Hugo points out, ‘his later work is filled with the notion that our transformation does happen not only through our own efforts (“self-help”) but in partnership with God and our community.’) I wish I had met him, I’m sure he was a fascinating bloke. I’d liked to have had the chance to thank him for his books, for taking the time to write them. there are probably loads of people out there with thoughts that could change my life, but most of them don’t get round to writing them down. He did, and for that, I’m grateful.

Fair-well, Scott (M. Scott? or just M.? Scott, I think).

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since when was constructive criticism a 'bias'

For the last few days, the news of Tony Blair’s whinging about the BBC’s coverage of the Katrina Disaster has been in the news – he claims it was ‘full of hate for America’, largely due to its overt critique of the Bush government’s response to it.

Since when was pointing out the abject failure of a government to do its job ‘Anti-Americanism’ – surely an anti-american stance would have been saying that the country deserved it, or would have been gloating over the scenes of the disaster. There was nothing of the sort of course, and the reporters seemed genuinely moved by the plight of the people they were reporting on. Indeed, it seemed more like their closeness to those who lost the most was the thing that was driving them to look for answers and that search lead them to the top of the pile. Bush even admitted he was at fault (when he realised it was one PR war he was losing tragically).

The history of Tony Blair’s relationship with the Bush administration is so sickening sycophantic that he doesn’t even seem able to admit when he’s beloved George has been so obviously shown up as not caring about the poor within his own borders. Katrina has revealed such a gaping sore at the heart of the American project, one that the vast majority of americans are sickened by and want to see changed. It’s by no means anti-american to point out that the one person with the authority to have done something about it chose to a) not do the preparation years ago (neither did Clinton), and b) delay the rescue attempts when the whole thing kicked off, despite them having a few days notice that it was going to happen!

to be labeled as ‘un-American’ or ‘anti-american’ has for a long time been the worst thing you can accuse someone of in certain sections of US life – they are words that have been employed to keep people in line to prevent questioning of the government, to stop people asking questions about the constitution, and to draw a thick line between those for us and those against us. Thank God there are now millions of Americans who are dissenting because they see it as their right and duty as Americans (OK, so all the nationalism leaves me cold, but for now, I’m seeing it as a big step forward from the blind support for all things Governmental…) – it’s great to hear Americans being openly critical of some elements of the ‘American Dream’ and the effects it’s had in creating a massive poverty problem within the US. In the same way that poverty in Britain has to be a concern for anyone who likes living here or claims to ‘love’ their country, those who claim patriotic allegiance in the States need to acknowledge that a country born out of the genocide of one nation and the enslavement of a continent to build its infrastructure is never going to just fall into being one with ‘freedom and equality for all’ (or whatever it says in the declaration thingie – i think I’ve got the ‘all men are created equal’ bit and the ‘justice and liberty’ bit mixed up).

It’s so sad to see the destruction of so much of the American south – New Orleans, Louisiana, the Texas coast… I’ve got friends who’ve lost their houses, some whose houses are still standing but in the middle of a sea of toxic mud, and I can’t even imagine what I’d do in such a situation. But I do know that I’d be expecting the people i’d been paying taxes to for so many years to do something to help put it right, and if they didn’t I’d be kicking up one hell of a stink, and anyone from the overseas media who helped to highlight the cause of those who’d been left stranded would be considered a friend and ally, not accused of anti-British sentiment.

Soundtrack – King Crimson, ‘Three Of A Perfect Pair’.

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