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Boris Pontificates on Booze

Boris Johnson holds a rather unique place in my heart, largely just by being a Tory MP that doesn’t make me physically sick. He seems like a sweet soul, though I’m certain that he’s way more together than his bungling public persona would suggest – he’s an MP and a magazine editor and I doubt he could function too well as either if he were as scatter brained as he makes out… well, at least not as a magazine editor (it seems like there are several MPs with quite severe learning difficulties, if their policy decisions are anything to go by).

Anyway, Boris has a blog – sadly, it’s not updated as often as it would need to be to be truly interesting and marvellous, but there is this great article about the changes in licencing laws – he has a lovely turn of phrase.

Soundtrack – Finley Quaye, ‘Maverick A Strike’.

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Hey, moron, what took you so long??

I guess it had to happen eventually, Right wing ‘christian’ extremists blame the Hurricane on New Orleans’ party people – apparently New Orleans is the worst place in the world right now for sin, as they allow Gay Pride parades and Mardi Gras celebrations. As a result, according to the dickheads at ‘repent america’, God has punished them with the Hurricane.

Interesting that there’s no mention of global warming in their report, nor have they chastised God for punishing the poor and ignoring the manifold sins of the rich and powerful. No, because as we all know, on the Sin-hit-parade, being Gay is far worse than robbing the poor to fund your classic car collection. So long as it’s ‘legal’, it’s fine for the wealthy to keep twisting international trade laws to destroy the lives of the poor. All the world’s problems can be blamed on gay people. Thanks for making it so simple.

This reminds me of a very wise quote from a friend of mine about George Bush – ‘the problem with Bush isn’t that he’s a conservative evangelical Christian, it’s that he isn’t conservative evangelical enough’ – the culture of conservative evangelicalism in the US have utterly dispensed with their supposed respect for The Bible as the authority in deciding what’s right and wrong. The entire Biblical narrative follows the story of God holding leaders to account for their mistreatment of the poor. All the way through, ‘disobedience’ is as much about justice, about failing the poor and the marginalised as it is about personal piety.

And what about Grace? At what point will these so-called christians get down of their soap-box and acknowledge that the Christian story is one of God’s grace towards the entire created order. We fail, we get it wrong, and we look to God and she says ‘don’t do it again’.

I have two conflicting responses that immediately spring to mind – the first is to disown myself from anything labeled as ‘christian’, in the hope that I’m never going to be tagged as anything to do with these psycotic fuckwits pretending to speak on behalf of God. The other is to put more energy into reclaiming the concept of ‘christianity’ from the madmen… I guess this post falls into the latter category, but tomorrow I’ll be back to calling myself a messianic taoist and disowning the fascists… :o)

Soundtrack – The Rough Guide To Franco (After playing with Duncan and Rise at Greenbelt, I’m going to be hitting the African CDs pretty hard, trying to get myself comfortable with all these marvellous rhythms!)

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Those groovy Scandinavians do it again…

In an idea nicked from a library in Sweden, Almelo library in Holland has set up a ‘living library’ – yes, you can actually book time with “gay men and women, “non-criminal” drug addicts, disabled people, asylum seekers or Gypsies.”

The idea is to allow conversations with people that are often misunderstood, victimised or marginalised, to spead understanding and tolerance.

What a fantastic idea! I love it. However, the best bits are a couple of the quotes in the article –

“We want to help people learn about all sorts of minority groups,” Mr Krol said. “We even have a politician people can borrow.”

The most popular request the library is currently receiving receives at the moment is for a gay Turkish man, but Mr Krol emphatically denies running a covert dating agency.

But read the whole article is great. The Dutch and the Scandinavians are often branded with the stereotype that they are PC to the point of lunacy, but I think this scheme really is marvellous. I’d love to go and book conversational time with interesting people I don’t understand at my local library. Maybe Mosques in London could just set it up as a way of letting the rest of Londoners understand a little more about muslims. I’m sure it’d be popular (though sadly I’m also sure that security would have to be fairly tight, as it’s the kind of scheme that parts of London’s scumbag populus would like to disrupt).

Anyway, for now I’ll keep hiring myself out for interesting conversations about bass guitar, with demonstrations thrown in, for just £25 an hour, or £40 for a two hour sesh!

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So, about this immigration thing then.

“they come over here, taking our jobs”, goes the familiar racist nonsense about ‘immigrants’. I wonder if any of the people using that argument refuse to buy cheap veggies from the supermarkets who employ immigrant workers in huge numbers at wages virtually no-one in the UK would work for.

This article in today’s Guardian contains a few fascinating bits of info from a report commisioned by DEFRA –

“The reports say that between 420,000 and 611,000 temporary workers are employed to harvest and pack produce in farm factories around Britain in the course of a year. Previous government estimates, based on a census in June 2002, said that 62,000 temporary workers were employed in the sector.”

and

“All the suppliers we interviewed said there had been a dramatic change from UK nationals to foreign workers in recent years and the reason was that they needed workers who were more desperate,”

and

“The significance of the study is that it shows the connection between concentration of retail power and deterioration of conditions for workers,”

So, the issue is one of supply and demand, it seems – people want cheap veg, the supermarkets want massive profits, a large number of people in the new EU countries want jobs, and are willing to work harder for less money than Brits, so a supply chain is established, in which the ones being ripped off are the immigrant workers and the farmers. The Supermarkets get their profits, the consumers get their cheap veg, but the workers get low wages and ever decreasing protection under law, and the farmers get lower and lower prices for their produce.

So what’s the answer? Well, as far as we can, avoiding supermarkets seems like plan. If you can, buy local, buy from the farm – that cuts out the middle man, and also takes the transport and related pollution figures out of the equation. If you can’t, try an organic box scheme. Some of the alternatives are pretty expensive, and will require some budget juggling, but buying less stuff is the best way to save money, rather than buying cheaper crappier versions of the stuff you were going to buy anyway. Buying food with no nutritional value doesn’t really help anyone, no matter how cheap it is.

We’ve got some changes to make round here to get our shopping habits to where they should be, but we’re on the way, step by step…

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Ah, 'proper' jazz.

Just in from a fine gig (getting sprayed with hot water in the car notwithstanding)

When I saw Jason Yarde at Greenbelt, he mentioned that he was playing at the Progress Bar in Tufnell Park tonight, so I thought I’d head down.

For some reason I thought Jason did some heavy electronics with his sax (dunno what lead to that assumption, but still). In fact, tonight’s was an almost entirely unamplified gig – only a little bit of reinforcement from a GK amp for the bassist. Drums and sax were both unmiked.

I’ve always has an affinity for trios, especially chordal-instrument-less trios, so Jason’s sax/bass/drums line-up had me hooked from the start. Stylistically, it was pretty free – tending to hover around a particular root, but not modally. Jason’s armoury of techniques on Alto and Soprano sax is pretty incredible, exploring lots of skronks and squawks and percussive noises as well as more note-based improv stuff.

Just before I left, Denis Baptiste joined for a tune, and played just about the free-est stuff I’ve ever heard from him too – full-on New Thing At Newport squealing for part of it. Fab stuff indeed!

Then had to leave, as I had a bin bag full of damp washing in the back of a broken car and really needed to get home.

But if you get a chance to hear Jason play, jump at it, he’s amazing.

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take these broken things…

as Mr Mister would have sung if they’d been round my house now. Washing machine, broked. Car, broked. Just waiting to see what’s next.

Washing machine is going to cost £65 plus parts and labour for lil’ man to come and fix it (despite it only being 18 months old, and therefor it ought not to break with normal use…)

Car is properly knackered. Lots of things wrong with it, the latest is that the coolant system is leaking into the blowers for the heating fans inside the car. End result, engine overheats, and fans blow hot water over the passengers when the heater is switched on. Not good.

The car’s far too old and crap to be worth fixing, sadly, so it’ll be off to the scrappies soon, and we’ll start trying to find a replacement.

Anyone in blog-world selling a car? :o)

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another murky step into the digital realm for the music industry

OK, so follow Napster’s model, HMV and Virgin are starting to offer a subscription download service – basically you pay £14.99 and you get access to all the tunes you want. As long as you keep paying, the tunes stay active. If you stop, the tunes are disabled.

This SO doesn’t work for me at all. I don’t like the idea that you have a licence to play something, rather than buying it. I don’t even like the fact that iTunes MP3s are disabled for sharing. There need to be incentives for listeners to buy music, that we all know, and I’m not sure that crippling the digital formats is going to make people feel positively disposed towards them.

For one thing, it just gives software monkeys something else to target their energies into – beating the encryption. The easiest way is clearly going to be to re-record the audio off the track into another format. This can be done very easily if you have an external soundcard, and the software to do it internally is already readily available. If some little hacker-chimp comes up with a one click version of this, it’ll mess up the entire market in crippled files. Is it already out there? I’m guessing yes, and I just haven’t heard about it yet…

And how does it work for the artists? Someone downloads two hundred albums in a month, to add to their archive. how is their £14.99 divided? Is a set fee paid for each track? per album, a percentage of that person’s subs? All seems to be a really crap way of trying to put a stranglehold on downloads that isn’t going to work.

So what incentives work? A feeling of closeness with the artist? Cool packaging? Web-access that can be only got at through the enhanced CD? or just making downloads cheap and easy. And with that, I point you to the downloads page in my online store – three of the albums there are no longer available anywhere else.

Soundtrack – Andy Thornton, ‘The Healing Darkness’.

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The horror of Katrina

So much for ‘walking on sunshine’… The true horror of Hurricane Katrina may not be fully realised by the rest of us for a few weeks to come, when the body count starts to rack up, but in New Orleans and Biloxi at the moment, it’s all too real.

I’ve got at least one friend who is missing in NOLA – bass player friend who decided to stick it out there. Seems like a lot of people without good transport or community around them thought they’d ride it out, before they realised how bad it was, and by that time it was too late. I just hope Stew is OK.

Here’s one horrific report from a local New Orleans station, WWLTV.

My thoughts and prayers go out to anyone who has friends or relatives caught in this mess…

Soundtrack – Charlie Peacock, ‘Love Press Ex-Curio’ (nu-jazz project from noted CCM singer/producer, featuring amazing all-star cast (including Victor Wooten and James Genus on bass) – really lovely stuff, full review to come soon…)

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Inconsistency?

So, London Underground have banned an ad featuring Jerry Hall holding 12 men on leashes.

LU said it “breaches our advertising code relating to the depiction of men, women and children as sexual objects.”

Which is quite clearly bollocks. Ads all over the underground depict women as sexual objects. At certain times of the year, depending on what kind of products are being advertised at the time, most women in ads are depicted as sex objects. There’s a huge double standard at work here. I have no desire to defend crass reality TV shows that have Jerry Hall ‘training’ men – it’ll be unwatchable shit anyway – but I do get really annoyed when advertising standards people pretend that women being sexually objectified hasn’t become the norm in advertising. Ads where it doesn’t happen are pretty rare. Yes, the occasional bloke gets in there too, but for the most part, men are portrayed as aspirational symbols to other men (equally destructive in its own way, given that their airbrushed adonis bodies are utterly unobtainable to 99% of blokes, in the same way that the huge-boobs-tiny-waist look is impossible for all but a handful of women, and for celebs is pretty much always airbrush enhanced).

Advertising is an almost entirely morally bankrupt area, and it’d be great to see LU – who own an enourmous amount of ad space – take a sensible stand on what’s acceptable and what isn’t. This time, they’ve missed the mark by miles.

Soundtrack – Andy Thornton, ‘The Healing Darkness’ (a great bunch of songs, that I first heard in their infancy months and months ago (maybe years ago, even!) – I’m not on this one, more’s the pity, but it’s still fantastic, and well worth getting)

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