Tag: Blog

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The problem with statistics

Inexplicably, the bombings in London – committed by four British guys – have reawakened the frenzied debate about asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.

A lot of the papers today have covered the story about the government’s failure to meet their asylum targets – that is, they wanted to be deporting more people than were coming in.

The problem with this is that it gets people thinking about numbers and net gain to the population and about those who are categorised as illegal or legal, as economic migrants (is that what anyone who moves to live nearer to their work is?) or terrorist wannabes, instead of focusing on lives.

So it’s apt that the guardian news blog today re-high-lighted the story of Verah Kachepa, and her four children – whose case made front page news during the last election because some odious lying tory scumbag (that narrows it down to, er, all of them then) doctored a picture of Anne Widdecombe protesting on behalf of the family so that it then displayed some crap about controlled immigration, like so –

So this week, Ms Widdecombe, George Galloway and other are calling for this family to be allowed to stay, once again.

We know their story, we’ve seen them in the press, we’ve heard her interviews. The trouble is, there are thousands of stories like this, and crass government targets gloss over the personal stories of threat and tragedy and torture and persecution and good ole fashioned wanting a better life for your family, in favour of quotas and soundbites and the fear of driving the country to the right by being soft on immigration.

This weekend, I had a long conversation with a whole load of 60+ essex residents, all of whom typified the muddled racist rhetoric of middle england. Lots of talk about the colour of their neighbours, mixed in with the problem with muslims but still acknowledging when challenged that none of the problems were anything to do with race or religion and that just as many people have trouble with antisocial neighbours who are white and british born as those who have trouble with immigrant neighbours. When given the language to unpack their situation, race became far less of a feature in the complaints, but the governments statistical chat is lost on a middle england populus who only tell stories about troublesome neighbours when they are definable as ‘them’.

I really hope the Kachepa family are allowed to stay – to deport them would be inhuman, as inhuman as many of the other deportations that go on to try and keep the quotas met. Quotas are bad enough when we’re talking about traffic wardens dishing out enough tickets. When it comes to whether or not to send someone back to a situation where they face persecution or even death, let’s drop the stats and hear the story. If it means we miss the targets, so what?

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Telling us what anyone with half a brain already knew

A report today by Chatham House and the Economic and Social Research Council has reported that Britains involvement in Iraq has put us more at risk from terrorist attacks. It’s what those of us in the anti-war camp have been saying since before the war happened, and it’s been proved time and time again by the terror alerts, and now by the terrible bombing in London on July 7th.

But do the government come clean? Are you kidding? This is the new Labour spin machine at work here. So here’s John Reid to peddle the moronic party line,

“And the idea that somehow by running away from the school bully, then the bully will not come after you is a thesis that is known to be completely untrue by every kid in the playground and it is also refuted by every piece of historical evidence that we have.”

OK, what are the similarities between acts of terror and bullying. Are we talking about big kids attacking small kids for no reason? Er, no. Are we talking about people who want to take the equivalent of our dinner money, or assert their place in some kind of playground heirarchy? Er, no. So the bully analogy means nothing.

You can’t describe a group of people retaliating for a war waged on Arabs as bullies. Their methods are horrific – this isn’t any justification of bombings, suicidal or otherwise – but their motivation is not to grab the UK’s dinner money. It’s the actions of the voiceless. Those who feel for whatever reason, their point is not being heard. Mix that in with a load of crazy exteme fundementalist ranting that gives moral credence to the attacks, and you’ve got a potent cocktail. The answer is not to wage war, but to remove the reasons for war. Bully metaphors are just bollocks.

As usual, Jyoti got there before me, with another fine blog on the same story.

Also a must-read is this week’s cover story in The New Statesman, about the islamic tradition that has spawned the extremists – it’s on the cover story page, but I’ll try and find a more permanent link.

and if you want to read the whole report here’s a link to a PDF of it.

Soundtrack – Edgar Meyer/Bela Fleck, ‘Music For Two’.

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Some Sunday thoughts

It’s been an odd day today. Had two bits of news that are life-changing for the people involved. One good, one bad.

One v. good friend just had a baby – everyone concerned is well, and it’s probably the most powerful event ever in the lives of all concerned.

And at the other end of the scale, another v. good friend just found out that his mum probably has days to live. She’s been ill for a while, but it doesn’t really make the finality of such a prognosis any easier to swallow.

The two extremes of human experience – one ‘hello world’, one ‘goodbye world’.

Dave The Vicar was talking this morning about the 23rd Psalm – ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…’ etc. Focussing in on these first couple of lines, he unpacked what ‘I shall not want’ means – rather than it being a statement of overabundance, or some prosperity nonsense about having everything I might ever want, it’s a statement of completeness in God. Completeness in good times and in shit times. No promises of solutions, just the promise of presence.

For most people the absolutes in life – birth and death – are some of the most spiritual of times. Contemplating our own mortality in the light of the dimming candle of a loved one can beat the fundementalist out of the most ardent of hellfire-and-brimstone fundies and make the most hardcore athiest doubt their convictions. Death is too big for any of us to be certain about, but there’s something within the human experience that suggests there must be more. So certainty dies and we look for hope. The hope of life beyond death.

And birth kind of completes the circle – I think it was Billy Joel who sang that life is a series of hellos and goodbyes (shit, did I just quote Billy Joel on the blog? somebody shoot me), and I think the hellos can help make sense of the goodbyes. It doesn’t take the pain away, but the circle of life is complete. We’re all born, we all die, we all have a finite number of years to try and make sense of the world. If we know that a person has acheived something in their life, be it as personal as having a good relationship with their family or as huge as the Mother Theresas of this world, we can rest assured that they didn’t live in vain. They’ve done what we all seek to do – the search for meaning and significance. And as just about all funerals testify, everyone has had an impact on someone.

And at this point, the belief in a life beyond death makes the significant life and the death that follows seem just as significant for the person departing as for the ones left behind.

And it makes the process of bringing a new person into the world a little less scary – The Shepherd of the Psalm is on your side, at the begining and at the end. It doesn’t guarantee an easy ride – far from it – but it does help when drawing up the roadmap. Facing the potential for significance in a baby and knowing you’re responsible for where they go is the start of the journey. Looking back on a life well lived is the end of this part of the journey.

So I pray for both of them – giving thanks for the baby, and for wisdom for the new parents. And then for peace and consolation for the one saying goodbye.

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First entry from new toy

For a while now, TSP and I have been wanting to get a laptop between us – I could use it for travelling, and TSP could use it for writing when away.

So on Thursday I nipped into the Apple Store on Regent’s Street in London, and on the advice of Photographer Steve, asked if they had any ‘refreshed’ stock – that is computers that have been bought, but then brought back within the 30 day returns period. They are fully checked, reformatted and warrantied etc. as new, just 10% cheaper than the brand new ones! Result.

So we’ve now got a 12″ bog-standard bottom of the range iBook between us, which it has to be said, kicks ass. OSX 10.4.2 is fantastic! It’s called ‘Tiger’, but I haven’t found the ‘install Seigfried and Roy theme’ button yet that makes everything orange… I’m loving some of the features in OSX – the dashboard and expose features are really cool, and the way Safari handles RSS is very cool indeed. I still have to connect to the net via an ethernet cable plugged into my pc, as we’ve not set up wireless or anything yet, but thus far, it’s much coolness.

Soundtrack – Tracy Chapman, ‘Tracy Chapman’ (came across her singing ‘Thrill Is Gone’ with BB King earlier on today, and her voice sent shivers down my spine, so I borrowed the CD off TSP as I’ve only got her stuff on vinyl)

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Some great news for London radio…

It’s amazing how one discovers news these days. I was just looking at the stats for this ‘ere blog, and saw in the search strings that lead people to the site ‘Jon Gaunt Leaves Radio London’.

Aha, thinks me, is this just one person’s wishful thinking, or is the ridiculous waste of airtime finally making a move?

So I google the same phrase, and find this post on the londumb.co.uk message board, saying that very thing, that the rancid bigot is finally doing the decent thing and leaving Radio London.

Let’s hope Simon Lederman or Eddie Nestor gets the mid morning phone in slot – both have sat in for scumface and done a great job before now.

So, to Gaunty – good riddance. I care not where you end up, so long as it’s not anywhere that I would normally frequent. I hope it’s daytime telly, then hopefully I’ll never have to suffer your loserdom again.

And as you’ve got kids, give ’em a hug, give ’em a kiss… and don’t forget to tell that we’re glad to see you go.

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My Global Footprint

Got this from Barky’s blog – calculate your global footprint.

If everyone lived like me, we’d need 2.6 planet earths to sustain us all – here’s the results –

_________________________________________
CATEGORY GLOBAL HECTARES

FOOD 0.7
MOBILITY 1.5
SHELTER 1
GOODS/SERVICES 1.4
TOTAL FOOTPRINT 4.6

IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 5.3 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 2.6 PLANETS.

________________________________________

sobering stuff.

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blog tweaks

I’ve just tweaked the ‘individual archive’ view of each post on the site so that it now has all the links and stuff on those pages as well, not just on the front page.

The monthly archives are still in the more raw format, otherwise the pages would be just stupidly long, given the rather rabid frequency of my blog-life at the moment (it’ll slow down soon, I’m sure, worry not).

Anyway, it’s mainly cos so many people seem to be linking into individual blog posts of late, that I wanted whoever was visiting those one-off pages to get the full effect.

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Another great post about the bombing

I’m an avid reader of Jyoti Mishra’s blog – he’s eloquent, and full of righteous anger at the shit that’s going on in the world.

His latest blog entry is fantastic – he highlights the false dichotomy drawn by those who suggest that to draw parallels between the daily killings in Iraq and the London bombings is to be on the side of terrorists. He points out that it makes perfect sense to hate all such killing, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the US/UK military in Iraq.

I remember just after the Sept 11th terrorist attack on New York, there was a TV discussion programme on which a young, eloquent Muslim woman commented that hers and many others primary grievance against the behaviour of western governments, media agents and public opinion was the ongoing view that Asian and Arab lives were fundementally less important than western lives. That Arab ‘collateral damage’ is unfortunate, whereas Londoners blown up on tube trains warrants days of mourning and blanket media coverage.

The same could be said of just about any area of foreign policy from any European country or the US – that self-interest has been elevated to the point where pressure is applied to countries to destroy their very infrastructure just to make conditions favourable for western investors.

Her point could not be more striking than it is at the moment, and Jyoti’s blog highlights and explores it fabulously.

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And after the gigs, The reviews!

This was quick – the joy of the internet – here’s a lovely review of the Vortex gig from Tuesday night with Theo Travis and Orphy Robinson. Very nicely written.

And if you can read Italian, there’s a lovely review of Grace And Gratitude, in the ‘No Warning’ E-zine. Luigi Ametta who writes it has been very supportive of all the music of mine that he’s heard, and this looks to be another lovely review (though so far I’ve only read the Google translation, which is pretty garbled…)

If you’ve been to one of the recent gigs, please post a review in the forum, and if you’ve bought one of the CDs, you can post those reviews in the online shop.

Thanks!

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The Solo Summit

So last night was The Solo Summit a mini festival-within-a-festival as part of Hackney’s Spice Festival.

The idea was to have lots of performers on different instruments and across myriad styles all playing solo. As it was, it was that and a whole lot more – the solo performances spawned some really interesting collaborations as the mini-sets overlapped.

Due to the current mess of bomb-scares and transport disasters in England, a few of the performers were either late or didn’t appear at all, so the set was being re-jigged all evening, and as a result even more time was freed up for new combinations of players. The initial three long sets became four slightly shorter sets, and each set seemed to take on a character of its own.

The first set began with Tunde Jegede on Kora, who was then joined by Cleveland Watkiss, who was using my loop set-up to great effect, layering vocals on top of Tunde’s gorgeous Kora.

The rest of the set was three of Orphy’s students, Renel, Yao and Michael, two spoken word artists and guitar/bazouki, respectively, who played some marvellous music. My set dove-tailed into the end of Michael’s, as I took a short solo over the end of his last piece. I then played Grace And Gratitude, and went into The Kindness Of Strangers, which Orphy joined me on, with my loop gradually fading after I’d left the stage and Orphy took over for his solo spot. End of set 1.

Set 2 was very different – mainly guys from the London Improvisors Orchestra, it started with harpist Rhodri Davis (playing music a fair bit removed from his work with Charlotte Church!), Bass Saxist, Tony Bevan, flugal horn from Claude Deppa and electronic bleeps ‘n’ squawks loveliness from Steve Beresford. An interesting set with moments of magic, a very long way from the opening set! This stuff is really a stretch for the audience – they seemed to stay with it though, which was great.

Set 3 was back to many of the performers from set 1, with the addition of Pat Thomas on piano (an insanely gifted musician) and Steve Williamson on Sax. I played another duet with Cleveland, and a trio with Cleveland and Tunde on a track that they’d be playing as a duo, which worked beautifully. I had it set up that I was able to loop Cleveland in the usual way, so that gave us a lot of scope to loop ‘n’ layer and have some fun, and it came out superbly well.

By Set 4, we were about an hour ahead of schedule (whoever heard of a gig running ahead of time???), but my ears were getting a little fatigued after such a long time of intense listening. I listened to BJ’s set from just outside the main auditorium, where the processed ambient pedal steel wafted beautifully around. The set grew with the addition of more and more musicians, til most of the LIO guys were back on stage making a glorious racket. Cleveland then joined them, and once I’d turned up his mic, was able to add a vocal percussion loop to it, and start to inject a key centre into the melee. I joined in on bass, and the whole thing gradually mutated from free soundscape to twisted funk/swing groove thang, providing a space for the rappers/spoken word guys to rejoin the party. As the musicians peeled off one by one, the loop faded, and it ended with just bass, acoustic guitar and the two voices. One heck of a journey from the free to the funky. I look forward to hearing the recording of that one too!

All in, a fine evening’s music. A smallish crowd (hey, that’s brit-jazz for you), but an enthusiastic one with a fair amount of stamina!

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