Tag: iona

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One thing to improve your life…

I occasionally get asked by students what the most important skill I’ve learned since I left college and went professional as a musician is. The answer often surprises them – learning to touch-type. I can’t even begin to imagine how long it would take me to do all my admin/web/email/etc. stuff if I couldn’t touch-type. Even keeping a blog would be unfeasible given the length of time it was take to get any thoughts down on the page.

The method I used was Mavis Beacon’s typing course – it’s only $20, and will save you that much in work-hours in the first three days after you’ve finished the course.

Go on, learn to type properly!

Soundtrack – listening through a load of the old duet sessions that inspired the idea for the Recycle Collective – earlier on it was stuff with BJ Cole, now it’s stuff with Andrew Booker.

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Religion…

The problem of religion.

Jyoti’s ever marvellous and provocative blog has a huge rant on it about the place of religion in politics. His contention is that religion is irrational and bad things are done in the name of God, and has no place being used to define political life…

The weird thing is that, as a believer, I at least partly agree. Not that all spiritual belief is irrational (clearly, that would be a weird thought for someone who aligns them self with the christian faith), but that the use of one’s faith to solely define one’s view of the world can end up in a very totalitarian view of the world.

This paragraph of Jyoti’s is interesting –

I’m an atheist. More than that, I’m a radical, materialist, proselytising atheist. That means that not only am I opposed to Christianity as an irrational pile of poop, I’m also against Hinduism, Buddhism, paganism, Judaism, Scientology, spiritualism, astrology and, of course, Islam. (I’m obviously not anti-religious people. Some of my best friends are believers, honest guv! Love the believer, abhor the belief, I say.)

Now, the last sentence is clearly an irony, but the strength of opinion expressed in the first half is very close to what I hear from devout thinking people of faith. It’s clearly not raving madness, but it is dogmatic to a slightly scary level.

One of the wonders of post-modernity is that we are now wrestling with the definitions of truth can something be ‘factual’ by untrue, or vice versa? Can two seemingly contradictory accounts of The Way Things Are both be true. We’re now able to wrestle with the concept of abstracting truth from its linguistic strictures, from it’s cultural contexts and examine things for what they point to as much as what they state. We can embrace the concepts of ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ truth, with infinite truth being essentially unknowable but anything that points to or describes in any way the infinite truth is ‘finite’ truth.

The deconstructionists told us that all language is a metaphor, that words resonate with other words, and within the context of the semantic buildings in which we bring them to life – so the word ‘dad’, on the surface means ‘the guy who impregnated your mother to cause you to be born’ but is on a deeper level going to mean so many different things to different people based on their experiences of father-figures.

However, we still have the tools of history, or literary criticism, of science and biology that can act as boundaries and sign-posts for our discussions, as bridges between our experience and the posited notions of the various religious traditions. So, when Jyoti says,

I don’t believe the stories about Jesus, Thor, Isis, Satan, Apollo, Vishnu, Allah, Buddha, Spiderman or The Great Pumpkin. They’re all lovely stories, and I appreciate the wit and wisdom of the writers but are they true? No. They’re mostly stories written by men to help shape their societies and keep the majority of ordinary people, especially women, oppressed. Apart from Spiderman, of course, that’s very egalitarian.

there’s some pulling apart that needs to take place – which of those stories collapse under scrutiny, and how? What is being brought to bear to cause them to collapse, and is what’s driving that motivation itself substantial

Would you want to live in a country under Scientological Law? Or Odin’s Law? Does either proposition sound like a reasonable way to frame a civilised country’s legal and social system? No? So why does it make sense to run a country according to Christian or Muslim myths? They’re no less ridiculous, random and invented.

Let’s me spell this out: the problem isn’t with fundamentalist Islam or right-wing US Christians or huge churches run by ex-Hitler Youth members.

It’s with religion itself

Enshrining irrationality at the heart of our societies, validating myths and letting them define our human rights is an act of supreme idiocy. We all have the right to live, to love and pursue our dreams and no-one should be able to deprive us of those rights by waving a crumbling sheaf of lies in our faces.

He then goes on to present two stories of people be tortured and killed in the name of religion, and comments –

That news story is from June 2005. That’s what happens when people believe 2000-year-old superstitions to be literal truth.

Look at the Muslim terrorist attacks on Britain and America. Look at the God-steered response by Bush. That’s what happens when old men hear their God’s whispering in their ears.

If religion had its way, we’d all still be cowering in caves, blinking fearfully at the ghosts and goblins in the darkness.

We need to step forward into the light of reason, to embrace the hard truths of our mortality and unimportance rather than the comforting bedtime stories about gods and everlasting life.

That means we must oppose the irrational whoever promotes it and whatever colour their skin happens to be.

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'Forward With Technology'

or ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’, as advertising men speaking cod-German say.

I’ve just bought meself an Oyster Card – prompted largely by the announcement that the cash price of tube tickets is going up, but oyster tickets are coming down. I guess the plan is to get more people prepaying for tickets, topping up either automatically or online, and therefor not clogging up ticket-halls with huge queues, and getting people in and out of the tube network quicker. Either way, the price decrease is welcome, and the increase isn’t, so I’m getting an Oyster card.

And what’s more, Oyster cards make a great bleeping noise when you go through the barriers. Very satisfying.

Britain’s public transport is currently a shambles. Well, not all of it, but certainly the london tube, and the national rail system are nowhere near of the standard they could and should be. Both are pretty much crippled by PFI, or the threat of PFI… The selling off of the Tube was one of those things that nobody, save people managing investment portfolios, wanted. Everyone except the government recognises that what’s needed is huge investment, on a level that won’t be profitable to the tube enough for it to work under private investment. That’s because the benefits won’t be felt by the Tube itself. it will be of benefit to London, make it more attractive to tourists, render cars a pain the ass, and generally improve access for all Londoners, but the necessary renovations will cost billions of pounds.

And I haven’t even started on just how far short of the legal requirements for disabled access the Tube system falls. Somewhere less than 10% of the stations are wheelchair accessible. What it must be like traveling by tube for a disabled person I dread to think. There’s no way that the PFI funding is going to prioritise disabled access – there’s no money to be made in helping cripples get round London, of course. They can just get their mobility busses, and rely on friends to ferry them around. Clearly their independence means nothing in this most modern of modern capital cities.

Anyway, I will soon be Oyster-boy, swanning in and out of tube stations without a care in the world.

Soundtrack – KD Lang, ‘Ingenue’.

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Autumn, the time to start bass lessons…

…or so it seems. I’ve had a major influx of new students over the last few weeks, as well as a few who I haven’t seen since before the summer starting back up again. It’s most enjoyable, as they cover the span from total beginners to fairly advanced, young to old, disco to metal. I love the variety of things I get to work on with my students, who all bring with them their own questions and musical challenges and obstacles that I then help them to negotiate.

I’ve never understood why some teachers won’t teach beginners – for me, teaching a total beginner is hugely rewarding and in many ways much easier than trying to undo the damage done by years of dodgy self-taught habits or even worse, rubbish instilled by a bad teacher elsewhere (which 9 times out of 10 comes from a guitarist who teaches bass as well to make some extra cash, but is inadvertently risking hospitalising their students due to the dreadful left-hand technique they teach).

What’s far more important than the experience level of the student are their expectations and the extent to which they click with the way I teach. I occasionally get students who want to learn in a more formally structured way, doing graded exams and working on specific pieces out of books. I won’t put students through the grades, as I’ve not seen any advantage in them at all – the material isn’t particularly enjoyable, nor are the pieces particularly good examples of the styles they are working on (why learn a piece in the style of Bob Marley, when you can learn a Bob Marley tune?), and the skill set they engender is not one that is going to help much in any playing situation I can think of. This mistake with grades is, as I see it, that the classical model is based on the need to learn a fixed repertoire – if you’re learning to play an orchestral instrument, there are certainly pieces that you will be expected to play, a range of pieces that are written with a very specific understanding of the instrument in mind. That makes it fairly easy to codify and grade that skill set, and to come up with set exercises that demonstrate the degree to which a particular musician is able to play that repertoire.

if you want to be a musician in a band, it’s much more about your ability to play within the style of the band you’re in, to bring something new to it, to respond to a very wide range of musical communications – learning songs off CD, dealing with poorly written chord charts, improvising, writing, playing tunes that don’t make ‘sense’, getting a dirty screwed up sound in order to give the song more edge… all things that are pretty much unique to a situation. There are of course fundamental ‘rules’ of music theory, harmony, rhythm and such like that apply across the board, but they can be taught via any style of music, and don’t require an externally established set of exam pieces to demonstrate whether you can do them or not. You, as the musician, need to be able to make instant value judgments about your playing in relation to the situation and make adjustments accordingly.

So I choose the specifics of each teaching course with reference to the taste and playing situations of the student in question – the route I’ll take to teach theory is different for students who play only metal compared to those who play in church. the material is the same, the approach and the examples are very different.

There are a few things I always stress with students, that seem to be woefully absent from most teaching scenarios, musical or otherwise. The first rule is, if you don’t understand something, say so because it’s my fault not yours – I’m being paid to make sense, not to rant. if that was the case, you’d just buy a video so at least you could pause it and play it again. If a particular student doesn’t understand what I’m on about, the onus is on me to come up with a new way of explaining the point in question, not on them to stress over it until it all becomes clear.

The second rule is to contextualise everything. I’ve had a lot of students turn up who are great at practicing, but dreadful at applying it to actual music – that connection has never been made, so they can run up and down endless scales, but have no way of turning it into basslines, melodies, ideas. If the stuff was practiced in context in the first place, you’d never end up in that situation. If a particular exercise can’t be placed in a context, it’s not worth doing. There’s plenty of music to be played that can be contextualised.

Soundtrack – Erin McKeown, ‘Grand’.

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Top comedy gig…

TSP and I are determined to make up for the fact that we missed all the great comedy stuff at the Edinburgh Festival that we really wanted to see.

So last night we went to The Banana Cabaret at The Bedford in Balham. We knew it was a nice venue from going to the new Kashmir Klub there fairly regularly.

The headliners last night were Milton Jones and Gina Yashere – obviously a v. popular choice judging by the ‘standing room only’ situation by the time we arrived. It was also extremely smokey and we were reconsidering our decision… until the first act came on, John Fothergill – a regular on the London comedy club scene (apparently – I’ve never been to a comedy club before, only comedy gigs in theatres), and a very funny man.

Then came some poor bloke who pretty much died on his arse – given that I’ve only gone to Comedy in theatres before now, the standard of live comedy I’ve seen has been very high – people like Eddie Izzard, Lee Evans, Ross Noble, Rhona Cameron, Barry Cryer etc… hang on, I have been to a comedy club before – Club Senseless in Crouch End, but their booking policy is so choosy there’s never going to be any rubbish there either (I’ve seen Rich Hall and Rob Deering there – both top pros).. so, that doesn’t really count. Where was I? Ah yes, poor bloke dying on stage – it’s not that he was dreadful, he just wasn’t very funny. Which just goes to confirm my response to anyone who ever says ‘you should do stand-up’ after one of my gigs. No I shouldn’t. If I’m not funny, but vaguely friendly and endearing on my gigs, I can still win. People will like me, enjoy the music, and smile a bit, and that’s a success. If you’re not very funny but just come across as a nice bloke at a comedy gig, YOU’RE RUBBISH! there’s no halfway measure. No-one can say ‘shut up and player yer guitar’. They just get impatient for the next act.

So I’ll stick with making people laugh between songs – that way I still have my proper skill to fall back on, something I’ve spent decades honing, rather than a half-arsed haphazard approach to comedy, which just sort of happened and is really helpful for getting reviews on the Edinburgh Fringe, but isn’t really what I do for a living…

Anyway, the headliners were, as expected, fantastic. Very very funny. I’ve seen Milton Jones live loads of times – at Greenbelt, and a few other comedy gigs around, but he never fails to make me fall about laughing. An exceedingly skillful comedian. Gina is someone that TSP and I have enjoyed on TV for years, and is equally if not more funny on stage. Great observational stuff, very endearing personality and some top absurd stories.

All in all a great night out, despite having spent £12 to stand up. Next Time we’ll get there earlier.

Soundtrack – Erin McKeown, ‘Grand’.

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Gay Marriage in the news again

The gay marriage debate has come up again in the US, this time with California’s rubbish governor vetoing a bill allowing same sex marriage.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating – there’s nothing ‘moral’ or religious about the need to allowing the registering of same sex relationships. Whether you call it marriage or not is moot – it certainly doesn’t have any effect on ‘straight’ marriages to call a permanent stable faithful committed same-sex relationship a marriage, but if they want a new name, that’s cool. The issue is one of supporting people’s right to self-determination under the law in terms of their lives, the power of attorney, legacies and decisions relating to property, illness and death. Beyond all the emotional nonsense talked about protecting the sanctity of marriage, here we have a very simple choice to do with protecting the equal right of a gay person to decide who is their life partner, and who they want to be linked to, legally.

As Peter Tatchell pointed out when he spoke at Greenbelt a couple of years ago, it’s an issue that goes deeper than just gay relationships – there should be a way for people who have spent their lives together in non-sexual relationships to have that recognised under law.

And Arnie’s dropped the ball. He says that it being a constitutional issue means that legislating on it now just makes it less clear, but I reckon it would have given a great push to the equal rights side of the argument for California to have brought it into law.

Meanwhile, the worldwide Anglican communion is still threatening to split over the same issue – the Nigerian church are threatening again to cut themselves off from Anglicans in the UK “if it followed the lead of the U.S. Episcopal Church by accepting a gay bishop or otherwise condoning homosexuality.”

While this is clearly more of a theological issue than the legal decisions being made in the US courts, it’s still pretty tragic that an entire country is going to cut itself off from another one within the Anglican church over the issue of ‘condoning homosexuality’. Especially given that for for the most part within the African church, there’s been very little theological discussion simply because a very simplistic reading of the Bible supports their ‘ewww that’s disgusting’ view of gay sex. It’s driven by the yuck factor rather than any serious theological searching.

I know some very intelligent, committed, wise and scholarly people on both sides of this discussion in England. At the moment none are threatening to leave the church. There are a few slightly mad right wing groups in the UK threatening to quit, but perhaps not surprisingly, I don’t know them personally.

I’m personally in favour of ordaining people who are called to the priesthood whatever their sexual orientation – the prurience of inquiring into the specifics of what people do with their chosen life partners seems absurd to me – it’s not as if straight married clergy get given a list of sexual sins laid out in Leviticus to tick off which ones they’ve done. I wonder how many vicars have ever been asked about bestiality, incest or whether they’ve ever had sex during their wife’s period in their time at vicar-hogwarts? So even if gay sex is viewed as a sin, there’s still a crap double-standard at work that says straight people can self-regulate and act according to conscience, but gay clergy have to be subject to moral policing. That’s clearly rubbish.

However, I also recognise that as a club with it’s own set of rules, the Anglican church does need to establish what those rules are, and allow people who don’t agree to them to either leave in good grace, or agree to abide by them for the good of the whole. I just hope that the church manages to find a way to accommodate the different ways of seeing things, and that everyone concerned learns something through it – that those on the more liberal wing see that the conservatives are (nutters notwithstanding) just doing what they see as right in the sight of God, and that the more conservative members realise that their more liberal brethren (nutters notwithstanding) aren’t on a quest to undermine the moral fabric of the church and society, but are genuinely seeking to apply their understanding of Biblical principles in the modern world.

FWIW, I’ve met some fantastic gay ministers, and some really shit straight ones – in neither case did their sexual orientation seem to play any part in their shitness as clergy-peoples.

Soundtrack, Duke Ellington, ‘The Classic Tracks of The 1940s’ (I’ve just written a last.fm journal entry about this stuff here.)

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A picture speaks a thousand words…

Picture nabbed from Jyoti’s blog.

Yup, that’s an old bloke – Walter Wolfgang, 82 years old, who came to England as a Jew persecuted under the Nazis. At the Labour Party conference, he was bodily thrown out for shouting ‘nonsense’ during Jack Straw’s (Jack Boot?) speech on Iraq.

So not only are the Govt still trying to defend the disaster in Iraq, they are throwing out old men for disagreeing – he wasn’t being threatening or rowdy, or winding up ready throw a fresh dog turd at Straw (oh, that he had!), he just disagreed. But no, under New Labour such things are not allowed. And what’s more, he was prevented from re-entering the hall under the new Anti-Terror Laws!! WTF?? Since when was ‘nonsense’ hate-speech, or incitement to blow shit up, or whatever?

Blair’s half-arsed apology this morning was an embarrassment – a pathetic attempt to shrug off common assault taking place in the name of his party stifling dissent.

This quote from the Guardian sums up the government’s response

Returning to the scene today, Mr Wolfgang received a round of applause from both the conference floor and from party members standing outside. However, the two cabinet ministers on stage at the time, Lord Falconer and David Miliband, refused to join in.

Of course they refused – how could they applaud the exposing of a deeply flawed spin-machine-decision? They’d probably get thrown out of the cabinet.

in contrast, “Later, in his closing speech to conference, the defence secretary, John Reid, apologised to Mr Wolfgang with the prime minister applauding from the stage.” – that’s right, applaud the controlled written apology, worded to try and make light of the whole thing. But don’t join in with the rank and file plebs as they show support for an old man assaulted by hired goons.

How long are the labour party members going to put up with this?? The general public in Britain are on the whole way too apathetic to do anything about it on a national level, but those inside the Labour party who’ve seen their beloved institution stolen out from under them and replaced with some kind off hybrid ‘psuedo-compassionate Thatcherism’. It’s hideous, it’s tragic and it’s wrong.

The berk who man-handled Walter should be tried for assault, as should whoever decided on that as a policy. Wouldn’t it be great to have seen a mass walkout in protest? You bet your arse if it had happened in France that’s what they’d have done.

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since when was constructive criticism a 'bias'

For the last few days, the news of Tony Blair’s whinging about the BBC’s coverage of the Katrina Disaster has been in the news – he claims it was ‘full of hate for America’, largely due to its overt critique of the Bush government’s response to it.

Since when was pointing out the abject failure of a government to do its job ‘Anti-Americanism’ – surely an anti-american stance would have been saying that the country deserved it, or would have been gloating over the scenes of the disaster. There was nothing of the sort of course, and the reporters seemed genuinely moved by the plight of the people they were reporting on. Indeed, it seemed more like their closeness to those who lost the most was the thing that was driving them to look for answers and that search lead them to the top of the pile. Bush even admitted he was at fault (when he realised it was one PR war he was losing tragically).

The history of Tony Blair’s relationship with the Bush administration is so sickening sycophantic that he doesn’t even seem able to admit when he’s beloved George has been so obviously shown up as not caring about the poor within his own borders. Katrina has revealed such a gaping sore at the heart of the American project, one that the vast majority of americans are sickened by and want to see changed. It’s by no means anti-american to point out that the one person with the authority to have done something about it chose to a) not do the preparation years ago (neither did Clinton), and b) delay the rescue attempts when the whole thing kicked off, despite them having a few days notice that it was going to happen!

to be labeled as ‘un-American’ or ‘anti-american’ has for a long time been the worst thing you can accuse someone of in certain sections of US life – they are words that have been employed to keep people in line to prevent questioning of the government, to stop people asking questions about the constitution, and to draw a thick line between those for us and those against us. Thank God there are now millions of Americans who are dissenting because they see it as their right and duty as Americans (OK, so all the nationalism leaves me cold, but for now, I’m seeing it as a big step forward from the blind support for all things Governmental…) – it’s great to hear Americans being openly critical of some elements of the ‘American Dream’ and the effects it’s had in creating a massive poverty problem within the US. In the same way that poverty in Britain has to be a concern for anyone who likes living here or claims to ‘love’ their country, those who claim patriotic allegiance in the States need to acknowledge that a country born out of the genocide of one nation and the enslavement of a continent to build its infrastructure is never going to just fall into being one with ‘freedom and equality for all’ (or whatever it says in the declaration thingie – i think I’ve got the ‘all men are created equal’ bit and the ‘justice and liberty’ bit mixed up).

It’s so sad to see the destruction of so much of the American south – New Orleans, Louisiana, the Texas coast… I’ve got friends who’ve lost their houses, some whose houses are still standing but in the middle of a sea of toxic mud, and I can’t even imagine what I’d do in such a situation. But I do know that I’d be expecting the people i’d been paying taxes to for so many years to do something to help put it right, and if they didn’t I’d be kicking up one hell of a stink, and anyone from the overseas media who helped to highlight the cause of those who’d been left stranded would be considered a friend and ally, not accused of anti-British sentiment.

Soundtrack – King Crimson, ‘Three Of A Perfect Pair’.

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how does this happen?

“After a three-year investigation, a grand jury in Philadelphia reported yesterday that two leading figures in the U.S. Roman Catholic hierarchy, Cardinals John Krol and Anthony Bevilacqua, deliberately concealed the sexual abuse of hundreds of children by at least 63 priests in that city from 1967 to 2002.”

Have a read of the rest of the article. How can anyone, of any faith or no faith, feel that there is anything worth protecting over and above the kids that were being abused? Was it just an old boys network of fellow abusers? A misplaced faith in the church to sort out its own problems? Pressure from church heirarchy to not blacken the name of the church? All of those are so insignificantly tiny when compared with the irrepairable damage that the abuse these 63 (63??????) priests inflicted on so many children.

It is so far beyond me that anyone would ever go out of their way to protect a paedophile that part of me believes there must be more to the story – were the Cardinals being threatened? Did they really not know? Surely no-one is that rancid, least of all those who preach in the name of the ‘prince of peace’.

I guess the ones I feel most sorry for (after the abused kids, of course) are ordinary Catholics, who must be torn between turning their back on a church institution that has allowed this to go on, and sticking with the church that has nurtured their faith thus far. thinking about it, there are certainly things that go on in the Anglican church that sicken me (the rabid homophobia of some of the bishops in the international synod – and I don’t just mean the opposition of the ordination of Gay clergy, I mean the vile hatred that is preached by some of the more extreme characters), and other things that I just disagree with. Maybe it’s just that as a late joinee of the C of E, I don’t feel that much of a bond with the worldwide Anglican communion. I certainly don’t feel any affinity with those who preach homophobia, mysoginy and racism in the name of God!

It’s an eternal struggle for people of any faith, I guess – do you stick with the institution with all its faults, aware that you may be tarnished by your association with those unsavoury types, or do you form your own little cuddly club of likeminded people… Having spent many many years in a cuddly club of likeminded people, I’ll give that one a miss. Surrounding yourself with people who all believe the same thing is really really hazardous to one’s critical faculties. I know too many fundementalists of all stripes – be they religious fundies, athiestic fundies, football fundies or musical zealots – who constantly seek the company of those who serve to uncritically affirm their beliefs, which just leads to ever more entrenched levels of unchallengeable belief. I once spent almost two years surrounded by people who thought roughly the same things as me – towards the end it started to feel like some sort of benign cult.

Since then I’ve tried to vary my circles of influence, to bring my beliefs under question when possible, and to work on the assumption in what I believe that ‘I might be wrong’ – seems really obvious when you say it, but I went for a very long time being closed to the idea that someone might prove me wrong about any of my deeply held convictions about the life the universe and bass playing.

I still have a support network – when you’re feeling down, the last thing you want is some muppet tearing at the things you hold dear – but I try to broaden things out where I can.

Soundtrack – Trip Wamsley, ‘It’s Better This Way’.

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Cliff gives up recording… hmmm

So Sir Cliff has given up recording because radio won’t play his tracks – what a damn stupid reason not to record music! It says a lot about Cliff’s motivation and his relationship with his fan-base, who would buy whatever he put out regardless of the perceived radio-snub.

In general, I have a bit of a soft-spot for Cliff. He’s faintly ludicrous, but whenever he actually speaks or is interviewed, he aquits himself superbly, and is pretty hard to fault.

However, refusing to make records because a handful of style-crippled stations won’t play music by a man pushing 70 is pretty foolish. If he wants to retire from recording, good luck to him, but don’t try and lay the blame at the feet of radio. If that happened to me (like I’ll ever have enough radio play to notice if anyone stopped playing it!) I’d see it as a challenge to make better music, unless it was just that the demographic my music was aiming towards was different from that the radio station was targeting (as is clearly the case with Radio 1 and Cliff).

He’ll keep touring, which I guess is good news for his fans, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the occasional live album came out. I guess that would even give him a way to sneak the occasional new song on there. Although, maybe that’s what this is about – he just can’t be bothered to learn any news songs!

Anyway, it’s a shit reason for not recording, and Cliff should really know better.

Soundtrack – The The, ‘the Singles’.

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