Tag: iona

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Italy post no. 5

(written 23/7/05 14.37)

So I’m now in Bollate, near Milan – today is the clinic day of the Noi Bassisti bass event, with me, Michael Manring, Lorenzo Feliciati …. and others doing clinics. What I always forget is that doing a clinic with a translator means you can only say half as much. The hour flew by, but people seemed to be into it. We’ll see if I get any more feedback as the weekend goes on.

It’s great to see Michael again – after touring with someone as much as Michael and I have, it’s very tempting and easy to slip into your own homegrown language, particularly in a foreign country… …so we’ve succumbed, but are trying to explain the things we’re laughing at to the people around; an occasionally fruitless task given that no-one seems to laugh at the same stuff as us.

The journey from Brescia to Bollate was made very easy by Andrea and Marco from the film gig last night offering to drive me here, and drop me off. The Italians are such lovely people! I’ve not met one I don’t like. Italian audiences have all been very up for new music, and effusive in their feedback, and the promoters have – contrary to the reputation – been fantastic. I like it here!

Still haven’t had a chance to log on for long enough to see what’s going on in the world – given the amount of time I normally spend reading online news and blogs, it feels very odd to be cut off from the net here. I had a chance to log on briefly this morning, which is when I uploaded the other blog posts, but for the most part, I’ve been netless.

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Italy post no. 4 – first gig of the trip

(written 23/7/05 1.10)

Well, tonight was probably the hardest solo gig I’ve ever done, but was pretty rewarding for it.

The gig was providing an improvised soundtrack to a silent film from the 20’s called L’Inhumaine, directed by M. L’Herbier – a part surreal/part narrative film that was OVER TWO HOURS LONG!! This last bit I wasn’t told til about an hour before the gig.

The venue was beautiful – a cloistered court yard, with an art exhibition hanging in the cloisters, and chairs laid out in the courtyard facing a huge screen that was projected onto, with me sat in front of it, slightly off to the left, watching the film and reacting to what went on on screen.

There were two major problems that I hadn’t really forseen – the first was not having a light – the organisers had offered me one, but I thought there’d be enough ambient light to see what I was doing. i was wrong. And number two, the bits on the film where words come up on screen to help you follow the story, Harold Lloyd stylee, were in Italian. The film was French, and if the bits between had been french I’d have been fine, as I’d have been able to follow the story a lot more clearly. As it was, it took me quite a while to work out who was who in the story, and who was a good guy and who was a bad guy, and who was just some weirdness thrown in for Avant Garde effect.

As it is, it was a qualified success – the second half was a lot better than the first, as I had worked out what I was doing by then, and started to use the loops in much more sophisticated ways, keeping some loops and fading them in and out as leitmotifs for different bits of the story, I also had stopped trying to add to many literal ideas and near-sound-effects – I tried this a few times, and it was largely a bad idea (worked for a couple of driving scenes, but not so well for crowd noise etc.)

Thankfully, the audience loved it – it got loads of applause, for a v. long time, and lots of lovely compliments afterwards.

The other fun angle on the gig was that about a third of the way through, we started to see lightning in the sky, obviously from a fair way away, but there was always the possibility that it was heading our way. As the film went on, we had the occasional moment of gusty wind, which made the screen flap about, but cooled me down a little.

The actual rain held off until less than a minute after I’d finished – people were still clapping when the first drop of rain hit me, and within another minute from then, the rain was torrential – fortunately, we got my gear under cover before that bit happened. The rain then turned to hail – huge great mint imperial-sized hail stones, accompanied by lightning that lit up the sky like an apocalyptic hollywood special effects team who’d be asked to go really OTT on the lightning.

So all in, a fun, worthwhile evening that was very well appreciated by the lovely Italian crowd (are Italian crowds ever anything less than lovely? I think not.), and a great learning experience for me.

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Italy post no. 1

(written on the plane, 21/7/05 18.02)

What a day!

Given the travel fuck-ups in London of late, I decided to leave plenty of time to get to Gatwick for the flight to Italy… Little did I know I’d need every second of the FIVE HOURS that it took to get from Southgate to the airport!

The Picadilly Line is already suspended up where I am, so I had to get the ‘rail replacement bus service’ from Arnos Grove to Seven Sisters (oh yes, I’m going into all the really dull details, just for you lovely bloglings… and cos I’m on a flight with not much else to do!) but when I got to Seven Sisters tube, a little man in an orange jacket (perhaps fresh from Guantanamo) said that the whole Victoria Line was suspended…

At this point, the serendipity of my having just got a new phone (Sony K750i) kicked in, as it has an FM Radio built in. I’d been listening to the mighty Robert Elms on BBC Radio London, and he’d done a quick announcement that something had happened just before I got to the tube, but as I crossed the road to try and get on a bus towards Victoria, the situation started to unfold in a fledgling way. The report came through that three ‘incidents’ had taken place, at Oval, Warren Street and Shepherd’s Bush tube stations, and soon after a fourth incident came through on a bus in Shepherd’s Bush. Radio London switched to rolling news, and kept updating with all the facts and no speculation, and did a remarkable job, which greatly helped with the next installment of my journey, definitely the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me on a bus…

…the radio broadcast is interrupted by my phone ringing, and it’s Muriel Anderson on the other end of the line – it’s always a delight to hear from Muriel and my immediate assumption was that she was coming to England to look for gigs. ‘I’m in Indianapolis, doing a live radio spot, and was wondering if you wanted to talk on air about the bomb situation’…!! I checked to see whether they meant the one from two weeks ago, or todays – not knowing whether news would have filtered as far as Indianapolis – and they confirmed it was today. Fortunately having been listening to the radio I was able to fill them in on all the latest official details, and quash a few rumours about huge explosions and the like… My first ever live international radio interview whilst on public transport, that’s for sure!

The bus proved to be a pretty unreliable way of getting across London – it stopped for over an hour on High Holborn, and then turfed us all out – but with the tube network being pretty much closed, I didn’t have any choice but to sit it out, and watch the three hour margin I’d left myself gradually ebb away. The second bus moved much quicker once we got past Oxford Street, and eventually we got to Victoria, and I made it straight onto the Gatwick Express.

At this point, I want to praise British Airways. my initial idea for this trip was to take my rack on the plane as handluggage, and put my bass in the hold in a foam-flight-case. But I weighed my rack-case this morning and it was 50lbs! Not the kind of thing you can get away with as hand luggage. So the plan switched to taking the bass in a soft case again, and checking the rack, hoping it’ll get through OK (it is packed with all my clothes too, so should be padded OK).

I’m used to having to sweet-talk my bass onto a planes by all means neccesary – starting with chat about favourite shades of nail varnish, moving up to compliments on people’s hairstyles, and culminating in blind panic if it looks like I’m going to have to put a soft case in the hold… At the BA check in desk, not a question was asked. The lovely lady who took the rack from me was fine with me taking the laptop and the bass onto the plane, and was very helpful with labeling up the rack as fragile and getting it hand carried down to the plane. None of the other BA staff questioned me taking the bass on board, and it’s now nestling in the overhead compartment above my head!

So as you can now tell, I made it onto the plane, from whence I write (to be uploaded when I find some delicious Italian WiFi at the other end). I’m sat here, listening to Gillian Welch, sipping tomato juice (why do I only ever drink tomato juice on planes? I really like it!) having just eaten a lovely veggie meal, along with everyone else: BA are smart enough to just serve veggie food to everyone, so there’s no questions about who gets what food! smart as plums.

Anyway, the situation with the ‘incidents’ as I left it in London was that there had been four explosions, all much much smaller than the ones two weeks ago, and that no-one had been killed, and there were very few casualties at all – the only confirmed one being the owner of on of the rucksacks that exploded.

Whoever it was who did it did a rather good job of ballsing up London’s transport for another day, and have probably scared quite a few commuters. I’m just glad that the bombs either malfuctioned or were only detonators with no payload. Enough already with the bombing, please!

…and in that serendipitous way that chance can provide a day’s soundtrack, the track that’s just come on iTunes is John Martyn’s ‘I don’t want to know about evil’ – I don’t want to know about evil, I only want to know about love… I’ll find the lyrics and post them when I find the delicious italian wifi.

Soundtrack – John Martyn, ‘Solid Air’.

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'democracy' brings a shift to the right in Iraq.

Well, lots of people said it would happen. Apparently, the new Iraqi constitution “could sharply curb women’s rights, particularly in personal matters like divorce and family inheritance.”

So what happened to this new found freedom that The US promised following blowing up Iraqi cities? We’ve already got a situation where ‘immodestly dressed’ iraqi women are having acid thrown at them.

All it shows is that the invaders have really not thought through the ramifications of attempts to democratise in the middle east. Obviously bombing for democracy is a shitty idea anyway, but what happens if the democratically elected government don’t meet with your approval? Are we going to be heading for a situation in the middle east like we had in Central America in the 70s and 80s where the CIA were training and funding right wing militia groups to try and oust democratically elected left wing governements? Only this time it’ll be islamic governments that get elected, and bringing elements of sharia law. At the moment, there are very few countries that use sharia law, but it may become more popular as ‘open’ elections allow militants to run alongside moderates, and challenge people to vote for a ‘proper’ islamic party.

It will, ironically, probably mirror the insane scare tactics used by Bush in the last election in the US, where the religious vote is galvanised around a couple of issues that are deemed to be the most important for people of faith, thus allowing a hideous government to get elected despite them having the worst interests of most of the people at heart. In the US, it was abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research. I’m not even going to speculate how things would go in the middle east.

Either way, this new Iraqi constitution could lead to yet more suffering and bloodshed in the quest for ‘democracy’.

Soundtrack – Jughead, ‘Jughead’.

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What women still have to put up with.

Until reading This story about the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, I had no idea that there had never been a woman conductor resident with any of the ‘major’ orchestras.

And now Baltimore are faffing over whether to employ Marin Alsop – currently chief conductor at the Bournemouth Symphony (one of the best orchestras in the UK). And it’s the musicians that are stifling the process…

Now, it’s altogether possible that Marin just isn’t up to the job – as with any discrimination situation, you have to weigh up whether the gender/race/sexuality/disability of the applicant is the problem, or if they just aren’t up to much – but Marin has an impeccable track record, has guest conducted most of the major orchestras in the US, has recorded a lot of stuff, and given that the orchestra is $10 million in debt, they could surely do with something a little different to start bringing the punters in.

Instead of looking like a bunch of reactionary old duffers, on par with the dissenters in the General Synod, complaining about the C of E’s recent fab decision to finally allow women bishops, they could have welcomed Marin with open arms, announced it as a new dawn for orchestras, and sought some much needed positive publicity from it.

It’s almost inconceiveable that women are still facing this crap across most areas of life – work, faith, music… it’s such bollocks, and hopefully will be looked back on in 10/20/30 years as an anachronism on a par with segregation.

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The G8 deal falls apart before it begins…

The oh-so-clued-up Sarda just emailed me a link to a BBC news story saying that The G8 deal on debt relief is already under threat.

Here’s a chunk of the article –

“The Belgians have apparently proposed changing the terms of the deal to give lenders more leverage over poor countries than they would have if they simply wrote off 100% of their debt.

In a document that has been leaked to the activist group Jubilee Debt Campaign, Belgian official Willy Kierkens is quoted as telling the IMF executive board that “rather than giving full, irrevocable and unconditional debt relief… countries would receive grants”.

The IMF would then be able to withdraw the grants if countries failed to meet IMF conditions such as implementing the Poverty Growth Reduction Strategy which is a pre-requisite for receiving debt relief.”

Now, Belgium has a particularly hideous record in Africa, given the actions of King Leopold in The Congo.

Let’s also remember how far short of what was being asked for the debt relief on the table at the G8 fell. It already left the countries concerned mired in a web of trade reform obligations put in place by the IMF. But apparently, even those crippling undemocratic ruinous measures weren’t enough. No, they have to not only put the measures in place, but threaten to cut the debt cancellation if those measures in any way fall behind the IMF timetable.

Is is possible to be born without a heart and live? Is there some sort of selection process for heartless, emotionless amoral bastards who see it as their droid like duty to ruin the lives of the world’s poorest people? I was already depressed about the post-G8 findings. These are acts of great evil people, no ‘great justice’ has been done, it’s no victory for Africa, it’s just a smokescreen to hide the ongoing rape of an entire continent from the eyes of a worldwide audience made aware of the cause then lead to believe the G8 are the good guys by two well-meaning but misguided Irish rock stars.

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More on the G8 aftermath

Gig report from last night, and a couple of online reviews to come, but first, some politics! (yay! i hear you cry)

Today’s Guardian reports that Blair is a bit hacked off the aid agencies are down on the G8’s ‘acheivements’, but also suggests that he has some fairly ambitious plans during Britains tenure as president, to push for more movement on getting rid of farming subsidies, and for a new treaty on climate change.

Now, the problem here is, Tony now has a foil in both camps – he knows that Bush is not going to give in on capping emissions, and he knows the French aren’t going to go quietly on the CAP, so he can happily talk in non-definite terms about wanting things to ‘move forward’, ‘develop’ etc. without much fear that he’s actually going to have to do anything.

Of course, there’s the off-chance that he means it, which would be good. But there’s no real way of knowing. I don’t really trust him on anything these days. I can’t really see why anyone would after the outright lies he and his government told over Iraq. Why should he change now? He hasn’t even come clean over that disaster.

But I live in hope. We still have the problem of the G8/WTO/IMF/World Bank actually existing in the first place, but I’m a pragmatist and I really hope things move forward in a direction that is favourable for the world’s poor. We just need to remember that we’re still operating within a fundementally inequitous framework, and at some point, the world’s poor and working classes need to realise that the billionaires don’t really have our interests at heart. The globalised neo-feudalism of G8 style political dialogue is all about seeing what concessions they can make without spoiling things for share-holders. And therein lies the fundemental problem.

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One Day On…

So, it started with up to about 9 bombs going off in London, which thankfully (though inexplicably) became four bombs. Lots of people tragically killed, but could have been lots more – times like this we all get thankful for lil’ things.

Anyway, a few stream of conciousness thoughts that have been circulating my head over the last 24 hours…

Predictably, the cliched rhetoric has started to pile up like media manure pile all that ‘it’s not an attack on London, it’s an attack on Freedom and Democracy … they want to destroy our freedoms … they won’t beat us …’

OK, #1, we don’t know who ‘they’ are, for certain. It has all the hallmarks of an Islamist extremist group, and some previously unheard-of group linked to Al Quaeda have claimed it, thus far unsubstantiated.

#2, it’s not an attack on democracy – while the killing was indiscriminate, if it was Al Quaeda, or any other islamist extremist group (which we’ll assume for the sake of argument, though wait for clarification in the long run), the targeting and motivation weren’t indiscriminate at all. This was in direct response to the bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq. A situation where the people of Afghanistan and Iraq had no democratic say in what went on, and thousands upon thousands of innocent people were killed. More than were killed in London yesterday were killed in single attacks.

Falluja was flattened, large parts of Baghdad was flattened, 10 thousand years of history obliterated. From where they were sat, that didn’t look like democracy in action. I’m not defending the bombing of London – it’s hideous and evil. But I’m equally not defending the bombing of Iraq or Afghanistan. If yesterday was an attack on Freedom, it’s the assumed freedom to bomb nations into the stone age to get rid of their leaders (albeit, seriously fucked up leaders). That’s not democratic, especially when the nearest to a democratic body voting on the legality of the war said ‘no’.

It’s also about the ongoing Iraeli military action in the middle east. From house clearances to kids with sticks being shot with helicopter gunships. The support given to the Israeli armed forces from the British and American governments is perceived as an attack on Islam. Talk of ‘attacks on freedom and democracy’ sound pretty hollow if you fail to deal with the senseless killing happening on both sides in Palestine.

#3, there’s nothing to ‘beat’ – this isn’t a war, it’s a terrorist attack. The form is, they blow shit up, we tidy up and try to stop it happening again. Each time, everyone changes their tactics and carries on. They aren’t going to ‘beat’ us, no-one’s going to ‘win’ – they’ve made the point that they are unhappy with something, by murdering lots of people. That’s a pretty screwed up way of proving a point.

the US and the UK both have a pretty poor record in protecting democracy – we’ve done precious little about the regime in Burma, about the Chinese occupation and genocide in Tibet, and we prop up dictators around the world, particularly the Reagan-era interventions in Cental and South America, aimed at keeping back the communist onslaught, by funding and arming right wing militia groups to oust democratically elected left-wing governments. So much for freedom and democracy.

World politics is far more messy than talk about ‘them’ attacking ‘us’ and ‘our freedoms and democracy’. These were seriously fucked up people, but also seriously desperate people with a point to make. They made it in a hideous murderous way and I hope they are caught and locked up for a long time. But I don’t want to hear anymore jingoistic shite about Dunkirk spirit or attacks on liberty.

These things HAVE to inspire introspection. There’s a reason, whether the motives are screwed up or not. If you want to prevent it from happening again, you have to try and understand the motivation. Hitting a wasps’ nest with a stick won’t make it go away. There is no ‘war on terror’ any more than there’s a war on poverty or a war on bad stuff. Terrorism is a method not an ideology. It’s what happens when very desperate people are dispairing enough to see their cause as worth both killing and dying for. Ironically, it’s almost always through a lack of any possible democratic international discourse.

The tragedy of all this is that the way to stop terrorism is dialogue. It’s happened with the IRA, it needs to happen here. A war on terror just shows their supporters how ‘right’ they were in the first place, and that those who were previously sympathisers become militants. It’s like Jason and The Argonauts – you chop one in half, two jump up to fight. The invasion of iraq has turned it into a military play ground. Apparently, militant organisations are practicing terror attacks there. The rhetoric is still confusing. Insurgents, Militant Islamists, Jihadis, Terrorists, Freedom Fighters? Who knows. Someone somewhere needs to do more talking and less shooting. And it doesn’t look like they are in a position to start the talks. Who’s got the balls to look at ways of making sure it doesn’t happen again, rather than ‘getting even’?

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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….

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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.

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