8 track

Songs to Sing and Play

Posted on Saturday the 20th of September, 2008 at 11:05am



Been having a revelatory time playing music of late - greatly encouraged by new friends Isis and Seth of the wonderful Breakfast Song. Next, I need to start actually singing in front of folk (apparently). So, to get me started, I made an 8track of acousticy songs I secretly sing and play when no one is looking...

Songs to Sing and Play (in 3 Parts)
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Published Poems (2004-2006)

Posted on Sunday the 14th of September, 2008 at 6:14pm
Thought it was high time I got my act together a bit and actually started sending poems out to journals again after a few barren years where life has just been too full all round...

I had a fair strike-rate first time around! Agenda is probably my favourite, because it was the first big one and it was founded by Ezra Pound, who is one of my poetry heroes! But then again, Chapman is Scottish... :-)


With thanks to Patricia McCarthy (Agenda), Patricia Oxley (Acumen), Joy Hendry (Chapman) and Nicolas Soames (Naxos Audiobooks/Times Online)
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The Ugly of War

Posted on Monday the 8th of September, 2008 at 8:35am
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Worth remembering in these high-fever election times...

I'll let him speak for himself – he is already eloquent enough.



The Ugly of War (audio)

The original video can be found here, at the excellent Guardian
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8 track

New Music from 8tracks

Posted on Saturday the 30th of August, 2008 at 9:50pm
As you may or may not have heard, the bodalicious Muxtape is no more. Sigh. Well, they say they'll be back, but somehow that seems optimistic. Still, the splendid Opentape project has decided to strike back for the kids and extend a pleasingly brash come on to the R.I.A.A. Let's hope the latter come to their senses before too much longer and see that they have no choice (if they want to survive) but to work out some new, creative systems to recompense artists in the brave new world of the internet, where music will be shared. They have the most effective distribution networks ever invented ready to work for them, and yet they spend all their time and an awful lot of money trying to rein it all in. Their shareholders should fire them...

Anyway, in the meantime, we have 8tracks! Now, they claim they are legal - so I guess we'll see, eh? The King is dead, long live the Blair/Bush... (Ooops, "little bit of politics", as Ben Elton used to say).

So, without further ado. Here is 'Rascal Tracks - Numero Uno':

115

Twelve cuts from my new faves Breakfast Song, Welsh harp music, Enur and M.I.A remixed, the awesome Tinariwen, some rarer things from Thom and the Radioheaders, Portishead for comparison, mediaeval Andalusian sacred song, and - lest we forget - the incomparable Smiths, live in their home town...

Sing, ye all, and be merrie!
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Glastonbury!

Posted on Tuesday the 24th of June, 2008 at 10:18pm



Well, after some meetings in Birmingham that I found pretty fractious and trying, I was totally psyched to land in Glastonbury for the Solstice weekend with my friend Lokabandhu... And, man, what a trip!



Met assorted witches, druids, pagans, hippies and general goddess-loving folks – all delightful and hospitable to this weary pilgrim... Found the graves of Christ and Mary Magdalene AND King Arthur and Guinevere in the abbey (!)... Talked spaceships, Celtic Orthodox Christianity and the debatable pleasures of urine drinking with strangers... Sipped from the Chalice Well, the Red and White springs sprung from cruets brought by Joseph of Arimathea containing the blood and sweat of the dying Jesus... Worked a shift in the Pilgrimage Centre... Ate fresh honey from a hive after a 'Shamanic' journey that involved entering the hive mind and getting covered in pollen and meeting the Good Honey Mother... Danced in torrential rain to live genuine, 100% New Age music... And, of course, climbed the wondrous and windy Tor... All in the beautiful Somerset countryside – no one does summer quite like England, it has to be said – lushly, ludicrously verdant and overwhelming with wild flowers. A real restorative for the heart.




(Cover of my latest album: 'Shadowmancer')

ps. In honour of the forthcoming, famously crusty Festival at Glastonbury, here are two wee pics I took on the streets: a heartbreakingly lovely Paddington Bear shaming us on the recent violence against immigrants to these shores – and a dubiously attributed 'Banksy' on the controversy around Jay-Z's headline spot at the usually rather 'white' festival.

       
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Ashamed of My Country

Posted on Thursday the 12th of June, 2008 at 11:24am
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Last night the British parliament narrowly voted to increase the length of time someone can be detained without charge under provision of the 'Counter-Terrorism Act' – from 28 days to 42 days. When I watched the vote, I felt a real, aching sense of sorrow and of shame. What a world we are making...

It's strange (and actually generally pleasant) being back in my root country for a while – it's only just now beginning to feel a bit familiar again, rather than alien or a ghosting dream of the past. I suppose one gets used to a place – and I have got used to America. I'm under no illusions about how similar developments could go in the U.S., where civil liberties are also being systematically eroded under the guise of 'protecting' us; but, for today at least, I feel glad I don't live in a culture that is prepared to go quite this far...

I think it's most important to remember that this isn't an abstract discussion. So here's an account by Rizwaan Sabir, a student who was recently subjected to this kind of detention with no due cause, of what it's actually like to be detained... It is the audio from a short video posted last night on the guardian.co.uk website, in response to the vote.

What it's like to be detained without charge (audio)

You can watch the original video here:

What it's like to be detained without charge (video)
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The White Cliffs of Homer

Posted on Monday the 9th of June, 2008 at 8:33am
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Having clambered across the South Downs with my friends...





And having seen the sea and the shore in their magnificence...





We did come across the God of these islands...
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New Muxtape!

Posted on Saturday the 10th of May, 2008 at 9:48am
Hey hey, Peeps,

This isn't exactly cultural critique... But it is most definitely groovy:

muxtape



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T.V. and the Terror of the Strange

Posted on Saturday the 26th of April, 2008 at 9:51pm
And speaking of entertaining, I want to talk about televison...

Since I was a kid, I have had a secret, not-very-guilty love affair with T.V. My mum used to always say I'd get square eyes. In Britain back then, there were 3 channels, and they only ran from late afternoon till around midnight. Then Channel 4 came and brought beguiling things – pink triangles to designate sexually explicit content (we all pored over the newspaper listings to see what shows carried the intoxicating little symbol), anarchic new comedy, fantastic, dangerous, music, and American sport – mainly football – which I'll come back to...

Anyway, since I arrived on the east coast, very sad, sorry and not-a-little-lost, I have been greatly consoled amongst the busyness of days, and the business of re-constructing a life, by... CABLE! Now it says a lot about a country that people can get more publicly (and, in the end, successfully) worked up over the Patriots v Giants match at the end of the regular season not being due to be shown on basic Comcast, than they do about, say, the 3 trillion dollar war...

However, I shall not be any kind of European snoot on this one, because a) as I said it has been a great boon in a time of trouble, and b) it's just way cheaper than Sky in Blighty, and I can actually watch a lot more football (soccer) over here...

The thing that has struck me most forcibly about my own T.V. habits (sport aside), is that most of the shows I have been captured by – from both sides of the Atlantic – have been about 'exile', in some form or another. The revamped 'Doctor Who' and the magnificent 'Life on Mars' from the BBC – the seriously enjoyable 'Life' and the slow-burning-always-improving 'Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles' from NBC and Fox respectively. (b.t.w., check out this for the latter!) It's all been therapy of a kind, honestly...

On the U.S. front, 'Life' interested me most, I guess. Apart from being edgy, very funny, well played, shot and written, it was just so thoroughly, unusually, unmoralistic... In that sense – though it's a far cry from it culturally and visually – it reminded me a lot of 'Hill Street Blues' (again recalled from Channel 4's heyday in the '80s). This is not, I would submit, the usual state of affairs for U.S. network television. Which is hardly an earth-shatteringly original observation, in itself, but any mainstream digression from the sorry norm is worth noting and, in my view, trumpeting to the heavens.

I want to compare this with another cop show of sorts on Fox, one of my B-list watches – 'Bones'. Now, I never saw this when it first started just before I left the U.K. – I think I was put off by David Boreanaz (never liked Angel, except when he was mean). But I have kind of got into it here – I was always a sucker for "will-they-won't-they-get-together" sub-plot shows ('Moonlighting', 'Dempsey and Makepeace', etc.), and the writer's strike meant I had to find something to watch! (Praise the Lord for Hulu.) And, to be fair, it is very good fun indeed... Surprisingly, it's also (for a show that airs at 8pm) pretty risqué in its themes at times – even habitually so. Which is what I wanted to talk about really...

You see, Bones, I think, does something quite disingenuous, that also says something about American (and general shared 'western') culture. It appears to be liberal, open-and-fair--minded, reflective of contemporary issues – but , in fact, it's pretty conservative and (the real disquieting bit) negatively judgmental about the fringe cultures it takes a look at through the show's storylines. I will admit right away that I usually suspect anything owned by Rupert Murdoch of being tainted by a certain hypocritical tabloid prurience - and in the case of Bones I think Fox walks a fine line between representing sub-cultures and actively undermining them.

Take the episode in the present series that looked at the erotic fetish of 'pony play' – 'Death in the Saddle'. Now this isn't something I've ever tried or am, I guess, ever likely to (though you never know your luck!) – and I don't grudge the show its understandable quotient of 'Hey, isn't this weird?'; for most people, it doubtless is. Indeed, for a while I thought I was getting an intelligent enough representation of the ongoing tension between Brennan and Booth over his distaste for fetishes generally, and this kind of horsing around in particular... Until the final scene that is. At that point, the writers (to my eye) just abdicated all their responsibilities and pulled the finally unquestioning moral card from their collective pocket. It's not that it's wrong, we are told by an impassioned Booth, it's that it's a poor substitute for love (presumably between two heterosexuals, without helmets).

When he came out with this, I expected Brennan's usual opposition to him to sustain – even for her to point out his naive, apple-pie, idealistic view of romantic love in the face of his own bitter experience as a man... But no. Instead, rather out of character, Brennan acquiesces to his petulant rant and, just in case we don't get it, she actually says in the most soothing, affirming, motherly of voices, "You're right..." Cue the nice closing music, the nostalgic view of the diner window and our two potential lovebirds framed in the comforting light of Old Timey values that stand firm in the face of so much modern strangeness that leads, after all, to ritualised horror-murder in the woods...

Now maybe I'm over pony playing this – and I'll be first to say I am as guilty as the best of them when it comes to upholding the romantic myth against all the evidence – but for Pete's sake! I mean, sure, Booth's character is consistently the unreconstructed man's man with a sensitive side (ie. he's allowed his feelings for his son, which are natural, ok, and not, obviously, subject to misconstrual as homosexual...), but this capitulation of Dr. Brennan, the scientist, the dispassionate one, the voice (hitherto) of a sane and altogether healthy allowance of human diversity? What were they thinking?

Well, I suspect they weren't. I think this kind of thing is a detectable strain in so-called liberalism in the U.S. – and it represents the most consistent undercurrent in American morality: when family values of a mainstream conservative kind are up for question, what seems at first only a noticeable tendency to sentimentalism in the culture shows its very vicious little teeth.

And it is not just a Republican thing. Just watch Hillary and Barack shift in their own naturally ambiguous history when the tolerance debate arises – be it about religion, race, or sexuality. Of course, the last of these is the first and easiest target – the place where all the terrors come home to roost with us. Most kinds of 'deviation' cannot be legitimised on our screens – they may be taken out of their muddy holes, dusted off, picked over and analysed (both passionately and dispassionately), but the conclusion is always, depressingly, the same. That way lies chaos, perversion, and death as the ultimate disorder of society and of the soul. Oh, I know, we must all be distracted from our sorrows, and I am no different. But need we be quite so craven, just so afraid?

Of course, this is hardly restricted to America as a state of human affairs. And there are, despite what some of my European friends may think, equally unconsidered tendencies at work elsewhere in the west, never mind in other world cultures where, it seems, sexual repression and a new fierce morality is on the rise. But I am here and glad for it, and at present America is what I know, or at least what I am most exposed to. So, having said my piece, I think I shall stop now and go turn on my lovely little Slingbox, and watch my newly beloved Red Sox battle it out with whatever monsters come their way tonight...
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First Words and a Second Wind

Posted on Saturday the 26th of April, 2008 at 9:02pm
I've been meaning to start a LiveJournal for ages. But I was suffering from Web 2.0 fatigue. And iWeb 08 broke my website (thanks, Apple!), MySpace is so slow it hurts, Blogger is all for work, Wordpress gets hacked, like every minute...

But now I have a renewed interest in some personal blogging, mainly prompted by my enthusiasm for the wonderful new Flock 'social browser', and by having to think (and blog) a lot more in my job about the nature of the internet and where it's going... So, I have been looking for a good home – and LiveJournal it is!

Once I get the main website going again, I'll maybe blog there more generally, but this space is for something I've had in the back of my mind since moving to the U.S. – to engage with American culture as it comes at me and I respond, react, pursue like an entranced capitalist goose, run in the opposite direction!

I wasn't sure about the presumption of this before, but now I've completed a probationary two years, I feel marginally qualified to say something. I hope it will be, at the very least, entertaining...
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