Blog – Page 34 – stevelawson.net

July 9, 2005

The corruption of Islam

A commenter on the guardian news blog said this in relation to the newspaper coverage of the bomb attacks –

“The media is being foolish and dangerous in terming these terrorists as “Islamists” – will further aggravate feelings between followers of Islam and the rest, the former feeling they are unfairly and stereotypically being classified as murderous maniacs and the latter associating terror with the basic religion.”

And certainly questions are raised about the way such things are portrayed. Have people ever talked about the IRA as ‘Christian Exremists’? Do crazy cult leaders like David Koresh and Jim Jones get labelled as Christian? I wonder if they do in those parts of the world where Christianity isn’t the dominant (though nominal) faith.

Clearly, the behaviour of terrorists is completely out of step with the basic beliefs of Islam, just as running weird death-cults and murdering for the IRA is fundementally anti-christian, and the suggestion that what drives these people to commit attrocities like this a true understanding of their faith is very misguided.

As reported in the Guardian today, The Muslim Association of Great Britain have condemned the attacks,

“Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: ‘Our faith of Islam calls upon us to be upholders of justice. The day after London was bloodied by terrorists finds us determined to help secure this justice for the innocent victims of yesterday’s carnage.’ “

The rubbish part of this for British Muslims is that the sickos who perpetrated the bombings have stolen the arguments about Israeli occupation in Palestine and US occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan away from them. Any Muslim now who sticks their head over the parapet and talks about those issues is going to be labelled by a certain section of the British populus as terrorist sympathisers.

It’s more important than ever that we make Muslims feel particularly welcome in England, that we make it known that there’s no way in which we hold Islam responsible for inspiring these dreadful killings, and that we won’t allow discussions over the geopolitical mess in the middle east to be made taboo by these murderers.

July 9, 2005

Looking forward to tomorrow's gig.

And in other news, I’ve got a very intersting gig tomorrow, in Hackney as part of the Spice Festival. The gig in question is the Solo Summit, at The Bullion Theatre.

It’s going to be a lot of fun, and lots of my favourite musicians are on the gig – Orphy Robinson, Cleveland Watkiss, Filomena Campus, Tunde Jegedi, Celloman (Ivan Hussey), Pat Thomas and just added to the bill, BJ Cole! What a lineup that is!

I’ll be playing solo, as well as looping and processing Filomena and Cleveland, so will be kept nice ‘n’ busy. I love the idea of a gig designed to explore the various ways that people perform solo, and am looking forward to stealing some ideas from all the people there!

Soundtrack – Wheeler/Konitz/Holland/Frisell, ‘Angel Song’ (one of my most favouritest albums ever, a hugely inspiring CD, featuring some of Bill Frisell‘s best playing)

July 9, 2005

MPH Response to the G8

here’s the Make Poverty History campaign’s damning response to the G8 – despite them being pretty close to the government in the run-up to the G8, they’ve not pulled too many punches in their cricitism.

Has anyone seen a full statement from Bono and Bob? I saw a soundbite bit on the TV last night with them spouting some crap about it being ‘the beginning of the end for poverty’, to paraphrase Churchill, but I want to see a full statement before blogging about them talking bollocks…

July 8, 2005

Campaigners reactions on the G8

the Guardian Newsblog features this collection of comments on the G8 outcomes – naturally, it features a lot of pissed off activists. We’ve been led to expect a lot, and been delivered hardly anything. The Africa declarations are the same as had been agreed before the summit. Nothing new, no trade reforms at all, no further ground on debt cancellation, and no move on the conditions of debt relief. And the aid package is the same as it was – with trade reform and proper debt cancellation, it would help a lot. Without it, it’s far too little far to late.

Make G8 History.

John Hilary, of War on Want, puts it best: “On debt it is a 10th of what we were asking for. On aid it is just a fifth. On trade it has gone totally backwards. The G8 has turned its back on the world’s poor.”

Blood is on your hands, gentlemen.

July 8, 2005

Latest news on the bombings…

From the BBC new site – that’s a page that acts as a bit of a hub for the latest news on the bombing. The death toll has risen to ‘more than 50’ – they still don’t know how many are going to be pulled out of the Russell Square crash.

One of the odd things that happens with tragedies and disasters is that place names take on a different resonance – Columbine, Lockerbie, Hungerford, Dunblane, Burnley (forever tainted by getting a BNP councillor in a local election a couple of years ago), Aberfan, Faluja, Dresden, Hiroshima…

Kings Cross already has had a huge fire which took a lot of lives.

Now Russell Square and Tavistock Square – two of my favourite places in central London – have a new resonance. Russell Square is where I get off the tube when I go into town. It means that a) I get to walk through the lovely square itself, and round past the British Museum and b)I get some much-needed exercise, walking a mile further than I would otherwise walk.

Tavistock Square is a particularly tragic place for such an event, as it’s a peace garden. There’s a statue of Ghandi in the middle of the square, and I’ve been there for candle-lit peace vigils before now. You can’t get much further from peace than a bus being blown to bits. I can’t imagine what the people who saw it happen must be feeling. That’s going to stick with you a long time. We’re so used to footage of people in the middle east crying hysterically at the sight of buildings and vehicles that have been blown apart. When it happens in London, it all seems like a bad dream. But it’s the same pain, the same trauma, the same confusion. Maybe we’ll see the pain of bomb-footage from round the world with fresh eyes again after this… who knows.

here’s some eye-witness accounts of what actually happened – the reporting on this has been so mixed, with some news agencies being guilty of the most heinous speculation, like they are hoping it’s going to be a bigger and bigger story. The BBC news web-site remains just about the best place for up-to-date info.

Soundtrack – Kris Delmhorst, ‘Songs For A Hurricane’; Tom Waits, ‘Real Gone’.

July 7, 2005

explosion mayhem in London

Good lord, the shit has really hit the fan in central London. Bombs going off on tube trains and buses – loads of them! I’ve not heard word that anyone I know is hurt or involved as yet (The Small Person is working from home today). To keep up to date with events, keep an eye on the BBC News frontpage – it’s being updated fairly frequently at the moment.

This post on the Guardian newsblog is being updated every few minutes as well, so is worth keeping open and refreshing.

Or, if you’re in the UK, just put the TV on! (EDIT 12.43 – actually, give up on the TV coverage, it’s crap speculative nonsense)

July 6, 2005

The illusion of the MPH campaign.

The march at the weekend in Edinburgh was there to try and convince the G8 to change trade laws to favour the poor, to attempt to make extreme poverty history.

How is that different from previous G8 meetings? Seattle? Genova? Has Blair’s government succeeded in sidetracking the debate about the legitimacy of the G8 as an organisation by making a bunch of conditional offers and fudged statements about poverty reduction, so instead of telling the G8 to fuck off, we’d start asking them to help?

I’m feeling very uncomfortable about the whole thing right now. Uncomfortable that I hadn’t really thought about it in these terms til I started musing on the state of affairs with the protestors in Scotland, and found myself thinking of them negatively as disrupting the process, rather than positvely for disrupting the process. Are we naive to think that anything will change?

Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?

I so hope that something will change. We’ve seen in South Africa that the impossible is possible if the will of the people is overwhelming. Can it happen this time? Is anything going to cause the psychotic murdering moron in the White House to recognise the need for change that might damage the billions of his oil business scumbag friends, but will ultimately save the planet? Is he ever likely to join the dots between poverty, war, climate change and US cultural imperialism?

These are dark days, blog-peoples, dark days. And here I am listening to Bruce Cockburn singing songs he wrote over 20 years ago that spell out what’s happening now.

Nothing changes.

Maybe the people smashing shit up in Scotland have got the right idea. I dunno. Answers on 100% recycled paper postcard to the usual address….

July 6, 2005

Last Night's gig.

So last night was the gig with Theo Travis and Orphy Robinson at The new Vortex in Dalston.

The old Vortex, in Stoke Newington was a vital element in London’s Jazz-life. Along with the 606 and The Bull’s Head, it was one of the few places where you could regularly get to see the best of London’s jazzers playing in a small club for not much money.

So when it close about 18 months ago, it was a bit of a loss. There was talk for a while of it opening up in Hackney’s ill-fated Ocean venue, but then that went belly-up, and it looked like the Vortex was no more.

So it’s great to have it back, just off the A10 in Dalston. Very easy to get to, nice room, all back how it should be.

The fun thing about this gig was that it was the first time that Orphy and Theo had met, let alone played together. I’ve played with both before, obviously, so I was the link.

I set up with a mic on Orphy’s vibes so I could loop him, though had to be judicious so as not to loop Theo too (Theo’s loop-ideas are so incredibly well formed, that bits of his flute and sax cropping up in my loops is not really desireable).

Anyway, the gig went superbly well – we played a bunch of tunes from Open Spaces, and a load of improvs, with Orphy playing vibes and piano (I’m still not sure how well piano works with the thickness of sound that Theo and I get – I remember spoiling a duo gig with Jez at Greenbelt one year by putting far to many layers down and not really finding that gorgeous sparseness that is there on Conversations)

The audience was tiny, as per lots of midweek gigs at the Vortex, but David, the owner, loved it and wants us back for a weekend gig.

The only downer was that I was feeling steadily iller and iller as the evening went on (and not in the Beastie Boys send of the word ‘ill’ either)… I’m still not sure if I’ve beaten this cold or the worst is yet to come. We’ll see.

Anyway, it’s great to see The Vortex back happening again – check out the programme here.

Soundtrack – Tim Berne live at the QEH

July 5, 2005

Reasons to be blogging, Part Three

…as Ian Dury would no doubt have sung if he’d written the song today.

The world of blogs, or ‘blogosphere’ as geeks call it, is now HUGE. As in very big indeed. And there are as many reasons for doing it as there are bloggers, I guess.

My reasons are manifold – partly cos I enjoy writing, partly to sort out the thoughts in my head, to make me clarify what I’m thinking on any given subject into a form that I’m willing to submit to public scrutiny, which is the next reason – public scrutiny. I realised in the mid-90s during my Front-Row-Hands-Up (that’s FRHU for short) pentecostal church time that I knew very few people who didn’t all believe the same thing. And a lot of those people only had friends who didn’t believe the same thing as them in order to try and convince those friends to agree with them. This was clearly a rubbish way to go through life, and a supremely arrogant one. So I now actively look for places to find out what other people think and try and make sense of it. If that means that on occasion I drift into intentionally mindless relativism, that’s a small price to pay for actually being open to the possibility that I might be wrong! So I like the email that I get in response to blog posts, and I love the discussions that ensue over in the forum. I guess I should enable comments, but it would just encourage The Cheat to post rubbish, so I’ll not to that just yet.

Which reason are we up to? er, four I think… another reason is that as a music fan I’ve often wondered what’s going on in the heads of the people whose music I listen to. So this is here to hopefully provide the overly wordy and sometimes dull-as-shit open-ended sleeve-notes to where the music comes from. The music is the soundtrack to the inside of my head, and this is the literal interpretation of that. So you really ought to be listening to me whenever you’re reading this, to get the full effect.

Other reasons? To keep friends around the world up to date with what’s going on in my life, and then just cos I get a kick of of the idea of a couple of hundred people a day reading what I’ve been up to. It’s an odd experience that was only open to newspaper columnists in the pre-blog world. I like that, being the Benign Narcissist that I am.

Anyway, the best blog-reasoning I’ve read of late is the one on Richard Herring’s marvellous blog – his blog is a great daily read, sporadically very funny, and worth adding to your list of feeds, if you have one. And if you don’t, you’re wasting lots of time by having to look up all the blogs you read every day.

Soundtrack – right now, it’s a me-loop – I’m doing some practice for tonight’s gig with Theo and Orphy. Before that it was a recording of Tim Berne’s gig at the QEH in 2003, with David Torn on guitar, which is fantastic.

July 5, 2005

Commentary on Live 8/MPH

here’s an excellent Blog-post from Barky’s blog – it’s a measured questioning of some of the fundementals of the Live 8/MPH aims and methods, whilst be largely supportive of the movement.

He highlights that the existence of the G8 is a big part of the problem, and also flags up the slightly worrying move within the MPH organisation to sideline the anti-war protestors at the march on Saturday, despite the rather obvious and catastrophic link between war and poverty.

What definitely needs exploring here is the distrust of the Stop the War Coalition of many anti-war protestors, myself included. I’m not a fan of either the Muslim Association of Great Britain or The Socialist Worker’s Party, whose muddled combined agenda seems to be driving the movement. Maybe it was the coalition who were sidelined, not anti-war sentiment per se.

Anyway, the blog post is food for thought.

Soundtrack – Kris Delmhorst, ‘Five Stories’.