Relief

The backyard of the cathedral was a garden as well as a graveyard.
Nobody was there, except for me. Suddenly I found myself in a private space. The garden walls prevented me from being seen from the street.
Well, alone… I was surrounded by a wild abundance of trees and plants and flowers. In between were grass pathways and some gray headstones.
The place welcomed me, like a mother, or maybe like a masseur whose gonna relief your back ache. Except it wasn’t my back that needed relief, it was my heart.
All these hours among strange, foreign and very high-brow people – I needed a moment of relaxation.
When I had walked around for maybe fifteen minutes, I saw a young girl entering the place. She didn’t notice me, because of the plants between us. Her face was weary, but when she sat down on a bench, I saw it relaxing. She seemed relieved, just like I had been fifteen minutes ago.
I watched her for a minute and then quietly left the garden, leaving it all to her.

Floating around in Music Movie Heaven

Ok, fasten your seatbelts, this will be the first list on this blog.
And I tell you what: it offers a complete musical education.

• Seven ages of rock (BBC 2007)
• No direction home: Bob Dylan (Martin Scorcese 2005)
• Beethoven, with Charles Hazlewood (BBC, 2005)
• Jazz, by Ken Burns (2001)

To be honest i didn't like all of Seven Ages. The Punk and Britpop episodes were ruined by dreadful ‘looking back’ interviews. Johnny of the Sex Pistols kept on saying that it was ‘just fun’ to… Yeah, to what really? He didn’t manage to put into words how he had actually experienced things, he just repeated the same old ‘do it yourself’ and ‘fuck it all’ ideology that happened to be fashionable in 1976. The so-called experts in additional interviews turned out to be no more than fans, just offering their admiration.

Still, it was chilling to see how their American tour ended: Johnny on his knees, performing just one song (‘no fun’ by The Stooges), ending it with a repetitive ‘no fun, no fun’, exhausted, yet half ashamed towards the audience (‘I’m a lazy bastard’). So, in spite of his lame interview, Johnny was kinda touching. This can't be said of Noel Callagher, who, bragging about charts and money, was really only annoying and boring. Yet his episode (Britpop) did contain some nice footage of The Smiths.

The episodes I liked best were Early Rock and Alternative. Early Rock links up the stories of Jimi Hendrix, king of psychedelic rock, and the british ‘white blues’ invasion of Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. Also, we see Jimi performing songs of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, turning them into something really Jimi-like. The Alternative episode first follows R.E.M. touring for years, right alongside their hardcore counterparts Black Flag. Eventually famous REM and upcoming Nirvana get to befriend eachother, with Michael Stipe fruitlessly trying to lift up suicidal Kurt Cobain. Not a cheerful story, but well-told, insightfull and moving.

The other three episodes covered Art Rock, Metal and Stadium Rock, all really enjoyable.

What to say about No Direction Home: it’s famous. The part I like best is where the folkies condemn Bob for turning ‘rock’, one of them actually swinging an axe at his electrical gear. Unbelievable.

The Beethoven documentary (also known as The genius of Beethoven) is partly dramatised, partly narrated by Charles Hazlewood. The fake interviews with Beethoven’s contemporaries (his brother, his mentor Haydn etc etc) are historicly quite convincing, yet accessible. This dark Beethoven story is much, much better then Hazlewood’s cheerful yet shallow film on Mozart, however more popular the latter seems to have been (according to some IMDB comments).

Then, the Ken Burns’ Jazz story, a monster-size documentary. Right from the beginning I was struck by its power to evoke historical sensations. It weaves together old footage, pictures, recordings and citations, along with expert interviews, some interviews with personally involved people who are now very old, and a narrating voice tying it all up. It made me understand much better not only jazz muzic but also, well, ‘black experience’ in America.

Pfew, now I have to rest, these strenuous memorising efforts have exhausted me. If you go see these docs, don’t forget to come back and tell me what you thought of them.

Barack exploring people's sacred stories

Recently I finished Barack Obama’s memoire, first published in 1995, called Dreams from my Father. I like the way he analyses his own and other people’s identities. For himself as a highschool kid on Hawaii two things were important: being black in a white country and having, in spite of being black, a white mother. This tended to be a little confusing. As he grows up, gets educated and immerses himself in social work, he gradually shifts his attention to the way other people see themselves:

“beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried within them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.” (p 190)

Working in a torn apart black Chicago neighbourhood, he tries to connect people’s individual stories with their collective problems: how come so many black people fail to get ahead? Thinking about this question he manages to avoid the easy, big picture, large scale generalisations. ‘Contradictory experiences’ and ‘the messy reality of history’ are among his favorite expressions.

Eventually his own identity knocks on the door again. He never knew his father, who was a black man from Kenya. Now seems the time to visit his family over there. The Kenyan trip will indeed proof a spiritual revelation to him, a confirmation of his suspicion that blacks in America should turn to their African roots for inspiration and cultural pride.

In this third, African part of the book Barack ‘lost’ me a few times: his enthousiasm sometimes seemed to overshadow his subtility. Towards the end one passage really annoyed me. Barack meets his half-brother Mark. Unlike Barack, Mark doesn’t need his African roots. He likes Shakespeare and Beethoven, in other words: hard-core white culture. Of course Barack remains polite, but it’s clear from the narrative that he disaproves of Mark, feels alienated and disappointed towards him.

I don’t understand that. Surely a black American is not obliged to seek salvation in Africa, is he? Mark can be touched and uplifted by whatever culture he wants. It’s a free country, Barack.

Oh why not admit it...

A quiz about religion, yum. My results:

"You scored as Scientific Atheist. These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future."

Scientific Atheist		92%
Apathetic Atheist		50%
Spiritual Atheist		50%
Angry Atheist		33%
Agnostic		25%
Theist		17%
Militant Atheist		8%

What kind of atheist are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

His mumbling highness

I think it’s just that I trust R.E.M.
They’re allowed to mess with my feelings, to wander about my nervous system, while I, irresponsibly and defenselessly, sit and watch their resonance and suggestion sink into me.

But why? Maybe George Starostin, describing Stipe on Murmur, is right:

“The important thing is the intonation. This guy was in his early twenties or something when they did the album, I guess, yet he already sounds like that wise bearded guru that prefers putting his friendly hand on your shoulder instead of speaking to you from a distant dais. The song may be slower, it may be faster, or merrier, or sadder, it's all the same - Stipe always sounds like he's your long lost friend who's here to tell you all the bad news and all the good news in one go.” (source: Only Solitaire)

By the way, i'm especially knocked about and messed around with by their first ep and their first three full length albums: Chronic Town, Murmur, Reckoning and Fables of the Reconstruction.
But Out of Time, Automatic, Monster, New Adventures and Reveal are almost as good.

Imagining some other life

Such a pretty picture.
Maybe the reading woman imagines herself embracing the delightfull ass of the woman standing.
Perhaps both the reading man and woman are really unaware of what’s going on right beside them, just like in society where different subcultures hardly know eachother.
Or maybe the sensuous women are real, projecting to themselves a picture of sweet and cosy dullness, the life they could never have.
Then again, the kneeling woman and the reading man could be siblings, tolerantly sharing the same apartment.

Any other suggestions?

By the way, this picture was painted by Guy Johnson in 1983 and is called The Reading Room.

Now how do you feel about new agers claiming the environment issue?

One of the pages I visit regularly is nrc.nl.
NRC is a liberal dutch newspaper, one of Holland's three "intellectual" newspapers, the other two being socialist Volkskrant and leftwing protestant Trouw.

Last weekend NRC published an opinion article about the environment problem. That's not so unusual: the environment is fashionable this year and NRC, although objective & impartial, does have a sense of responsibility. Still the article was unusual for NRC's pages because the author stressed the need for spirituality in tackling environmental issues. Spirituality is not really an NRC thing.

The article rubbed me the wrong way. The author talks about the "dominant world view" of our "age", starting with Newton, as something strictly rational and materialistic. She feels a new age is coming up, in which "searching for your inner God" will be a more common thing. This should also raise environmental awareness.

Because i love the internet and its nice & easy ways to communicate, i couldn't keep myself from typing a comment. It went like this (but in dutch):

"yeah right, newton and his fellow celebrities could think of nothing else but reason and fysical existence. Come on, things like religion and emotion and idealism have always existed, right next to the urge for science and prosperity. You sound like Hegel all over again, this big massive Zeitgeist thinking certainly won't help us."

Then i continued my day, took a shower, had a cup of coffee. Still the subject clung to my mind. I wrote another comment, noticing that 50 other people had done the same thing. My second comment went like this:

"the environment shouldn’t be the exclusive property of a certain world view or belief system. Saving our planet is something we should do together: leftwing and rightwing, sceptics along with new-agers. It doesn’t take meditation to do biological shopping, to drive an efficient car, to sign up for green energy."

And still I hadn’t enough so I wrote a third (and last) one:

"It’s a very good thing this 'momentum' for the environment cause. But Annick de Witt (the article’s author) is trying to jump on the bandwagon to promote her other beloved issue, spirituality. This is no good: those of us that are not into new age will only be alienated from the environmental issues."

But maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe Annick de Witt will just raise awareness among new agers, and other more sceptical people will raise awareness elsewhere. Is it intolerant of me to criticise her point of view like this? Was i short-sighted?