nevermind the bricolage

information

from here. As is this,

 

aspiration

dont f@*k with god

Am leading a three week course on the Bible: Holy Scripture or Holy Mess? I think tonight will be the weird verses from the scripture night and will journey from there to how we read and interpret texts. No, surprisingly I am not a literalist! The above image is a take on one of those weird verses, of which there are many.

cover version

 

Bit late posting this one--bit of a facebook/youtube sensation, but a novelty cover version that is cool in its idea and execution.

religion for atheists

Alain de Botton - Religion for Atheists from Incl. on Vimeo.

The Dalai lama, a spiritual leader, is writing about ethics without religion, Alain de Botton, a philosopher is writing about relgion for atheists. Both point to shifting cultural views about the role of religion in society it seems. As an insider, the Dalai Lama strives to make sense of religion in a globalized, digtized world, as an outsider, de Botton, is attempting to recover something of religion's contribution to the shaping and developing of both society and individuals. I think we need both voices right now. The sound quality on the video is not that great, but de Botton, whom i have heard speak a couple of times, is always a good voice to have in ones ear.

dead?

According to a piece by Cerentha Harris on the Herman Miller site, Fast Company's Kit Eaton, declares that within five years the laptop will be dead. God, rock, now laptops? We are quick to declare the death of things which we feel have been super-ceded or rendered obsolete by socio-cultural developments, but ...Things seldom die as quickly as we might hope they would. Now it could be argued that there is a good case for this particular prognosis. After all, it wasn't that long ago that we were all running home to our desktops, and who can forget the toilet-lid shaped Apple portable laptop that was cutting-edge cool not so long ago? Eaton's point is that we are coming to the natural end to the life of a particular form of technology.

Things in the digital world are changing rapidly and we seem to be moving towards the table era in many regards, but I wonder. The obstacle for me with complete dependence upon the iPad is the typing issue. I do quite a lot of written stuff still and while I do occasionally use an external keyboard, I find it quite hard to type on the iPad.

For a while it was the desktop/laptop permutation which shifted to the laptop/tablet form many now operate with. The desktop seems to have morphed into an interactive entertainment access point rather than being a static computer, so who knows where we go from here with regard to laptops. I can foresee their end, and if nothing else, the hand-writing seems to be on the wall, but as with most declarations of death--you need to ascertain that breathing has stopped first before it is called, and while it may be gasping, it seems their might be a little life left in it yet.

isolation

Earlier in the week I said that I was reading The Last Holiday, Gil Scott-Heron's memoir, as a sort of devotional this week in advance of the MLK holiday tomorrow. There is a particulalry poignant section in which he describes standing in his mother's room after she had died,

"I was repulsed by my lifelong insistence on fucking isolation. Some of it has been justified by a real fear of the consquences awaiting those who befriended me and drew close, tried to settle within an umbrella's ceiling of cover. When I was younger, everything in life was an experiment and a new thrill. On a rainy day, you could find the high-end joy of another body, another soul, squeezing shoulder to shoulder, giggling, sharing warmth deliberately, two midgets who gallop on marinette legs, now jammed in a space that posed a challenge for one. I loved that kind of silliness, but life has taught me that I have to avoid that kind of close. There was no one I could be close to now."

I can relate to that tendency to isolate, it is very easy for me to withdraw and isolate and I can disconnect very easily, too easily sometimes. So I was deeply affected by this section as I saw something of myself in it. I also realized that when it comes to the music we enjoy, there are probably things that are appealing to us, perhaps even unconsciously, beyond the music itself. When I explore the musicians whose work really appeals to me, I discover much in their lives that has echoes of my own journey. That is not to say that all the musician's I like have the same tendencies or emotional and mental issues that I do, just that sometimes there are unspoken impulses that make themselves known in the music and that perhaps contribute to why it is that I like this or that artist and not others.

culture madness?

I came across an interesting article on The Morning News site. It originally appeared in the Boston Globe and was about the DSM--The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness--it's like the Bible for the psychiatric field, a compendium of the more than 350 ways they have determined that our minds can fail us. The article focuses on a little compendium of illnesses catalogued in the back of the book, about 25 little-known illnesses. They are called 'culture-bound' illnesses and what is described are a number of conditions that up until now have been regarded as mental issues that are cultural--i.e. culture-bound. The article names a couple--susto — a distinctly Latin American fear that one’s soul has panicked and left one’s body. Or pibloktoq, also known as “arctic hysteria,” in which Greenlandic Inuit strip off all their clothes and run out into the subzero Arctic tundra. The argument that is laid out in the lengthy piece revolves around the desire, amongst some in the profession, to abandon what is considered by them to be a relic from a colonial age. At its heart the question is about whether or not it is time to view the West as a culture, as well as to consider how much culture plays in the manifestation of mental illness.

I have read many times that melancholy is a particularly British malady--something backed up by a number of books, and writings since the 17th century when a sort of cult of melancholy arose in Britain. What is also highlighted in the article is the fact that the 1994 edition of the DSM contains no British or American culture-bound illnesses--i.e. other cultures may or may not have them, but we don't. But off the top of my head I can think of any number of conditions--Chronic Fatigue for instance--that you would be hard-pressed to find in many other less developed environments and societies. I think culture influences us profoundly and deeply much more than we might care to realize. it is another argument I suppose between universality and particularity. Anyway, the article is well worth a read and I would be interested in responses to it.

wes is back

 

The trailer for Wes Anderson's latest film. I love his fascination and attention to detail. His films are like visits to a curioisty shop or something.

pitti

Twice a year, Pitti Uomo, the definitive Italian menswear tradeshow draws stylishmen from all around the globe--would love to go and check this out. In the meantime, this helps.

like an endless piece of paper

"The iPad is like an endless piece of paper." So says David Hockney in advance of his exhibit at the Royal Academy. I love the way Hockney embraces technology and finds ways to incorporate into his process and practice, be it polaroids or ipads. I was never a huge Hockney fan, but of late i have grown to appreciate his work more and more--I love the colour and, these days, the topics--his love affair with Yorkshire in recent years has produced a wealth of amazing stuff. I also like the scale--he goes grand, creating massive pieces that demand attention.

The idea of the iPad as an endless piece of paper is a compelling one--reminiscent in one way of scrolls from an earlier textual age, but also less bounded or framed, like traditional paper is.

The Last Holiday

When Gil Scott-Heron passed away quite suddenly last year, I think a lot of fans received the news with heavy hearts and, at the same time, a sense of relief that a man who had obviously struggled so hard to overcome the forces plaguing was finally at some rest. The thought of no new music, especially after his brilliant 'comeback' album I'm New Here, was hard to consider--the music world had lost a vital and unique voice. So it was with great delight that I downloaded, The Last Holiday: A Memoir from the man himself. Given his struggles the idea of a published memoir seemed almost too good to belive but Jamie Byng the director of Canongate, the publishers and a close friend of Heron's revealed that The Last Holiday, completed a year before Heron's death last May, was nearly 20 years in the writing, a process that caused its author no end of angst and entailed some dramatic re-writes, including the scrapping of several chapters told in the third person by a narrator named The Artist.

The title refers to Martin Luther King's National Holiday--a venture inspired and spear-headed by Stevie Wonder but something with which Gil was heavily involved. In fact the book doesn't move much past that event and Stevie Wonder's Hotter than July tour, but maybe that is a good thing. In that sense it looks to be a bit unfinished--mch like the man, sadly gone before all of his work was done.

There is a poignancy about the release of the book in this week before the MLK holiday and reading it has taken on something of a devotional tone for me. If you liked Gil Scott-Heron you need this book, and if you don't what are you doing reading this blog?:)

starman

 

Bowie turns 65 today--I'm afraid of some of them too.

Epiphanal Orient(ation)

I spent some time with an old friend over the holidays who has spent a lot of time outside of the UK working around the world in fairly exotic locales. Our conversation was a 'decade-catchup' so we covered a lot of territory, but inevitably I suppose our talk turned to technology and its effects upon us all. My friend showed the phone that had been purchased in a Muslim country, which came complete with the Koran and a device to help the user find Mecca when it came time to pray.

Today is Epiphany, which, in the Western church, has pretty much become synonymous with the stoy of the Magi, the 'wise men' from the East, who guided by a star, come to worship and bring gifts to the Christ-child. I was thinking about this event and my conversation with my friend and the idea of facing in a particular direction to pray. The early church used to face East to pray. The word 'east' is a synonym of 'orient' which is Latin for East--to come from the Orient is to come from the East. Orient is also an obscure name for the coming Messiah in the book of Zechariah--he is called the Orient. But it has been changed, and is usually translated as Branch, sometimes Dayspring (i.e. where the day springs from--the direction of the rising sun), but I have seldom, if ever, heard him referenced as Orient. The early church prayed to the East, to-ward the Orient, toward the place where promise, and light and love emanate from. St John of Damascus, said of the practice,

"It is not without reason or by chance that we worship towards the East. But seeing that we are composed of a visible and an invisible nature, that is to say, of a nature partly of spirit and partly of sense, we render also a twofold worship to the Creator; just as we sing both with our spirit and our bodily lips, and are baptized with both water and Spirit, and are united with the Lord in a twofold manner, being sharers in the Mysteries and in the grace of the Spirit.Since, therefore, God is spiritual light, and Christ is called in the Scriptures Sun of Righteousness and Dayspring, the East is the direction that must be assigned to His worship. For everything good must be assigned to Him from Whom every good thing arises."

To orient ones life meant essentially that you would move toward God, to connect, as John of Damascus said, the spiritual and the physical, to that which shapes our lives. The wise men coming from the East, suddenly takes on a different tone--they don't just come from geographic east, they come from the direction of God, to the place where God has become flesh and entered the world.

rocketjuice and the moon

 

Damon Albarn's latest incantation machine, featuring Flea and Tony Allen--his work always sounds similar, but each incarnation has its own intesting dynamics--this stuff is coming in Spring they say.