Haiku

 

grey sky
a raven perches
silently

Professor of Rock on Like a Rolling Stone

 

Like a Rolling Stone

 

Rick Beato's Interview With David Gilmour. November 2024

 Here's a recent interview with David Gilmour. It's the first interview Rick Beato had with Gilmour. 

I hope you enjoy it.

Rick Beato interview with Rick Wakeman. November 2024

Rick Beato sits back and lets Rick Wakeman talk. And for an hour and a half that's what Rick Wakeman does. It's an absolutely mesmerizing interview. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Here's the interview.

One Hundred Words

 

I’ve decided to reintroduce the 100-word project.

My life has become quite flat and empty since the kidney cancer and the medical complications associated with it happened in 2022. They were life changing complications that we continue to face every day. They resulted in the amputation of my one surviving knee.  And that changed everything. I no longer walk. I am a permanent wheelchair user. It’s a difficult truth to come to terms with. I struggle with it daily. One consequence of the amputation is my inability to read or write anything. That’s why I’ve restarted this project.

Wild God by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

It's clear I'm struggling.

I've been reading Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan and visiting Nick Cave's website The Red Hand Files as a way of trying to address what's going on with me. And also try and distract myself from our situation.

Reeling from the trauma of Kidney Cancer and the complications of the cancer that led to the amputation of my one remaining knee. I'm now a full time and permanent wheelchair user. And I think, reeling from the knowledge that I'm never gonna walk again. I'm trying to rebuild my life. But it's slow and feels like I get stuck.

This morning I applied for some help from Kingston Council. They have a few online mental health courses to apply to. The mental health nurse I've met a few times suggested I apply. So I filled out a long online form and sent it off this morning. Who knows. Well actually Kingston Mental Health have got in touch with me. |I have an appointment in October.

I've also been considering writing a letter to The Red Hand Files asking Nick a question or send him my condolences about his own tragic, heart breaking losses. But my ego has held me back. I couldn't bare sending a letter and it not being replied to. Pathetic! But that's how I am. 

But over the weekend I suddenly knew what I could do. 
I could send him poems. My own poems about loss. After all I've got plenty of them. They slip in and out of the 2 collections of poetry I've written and had printed since 2004. They are Slaying a Dragon and Patches of Light. And there are others.

He'll read the poems.
He might reply privately through email or not. It's his call. But I think my ego would be satisfied with that.
I might send him a poem every so often. 

But I don't want them to be a burden on him. He's got a lot to bare himself.

I’m a devout agnostic. But, like Nick Cave, I hunger for meaning in our chaotic world

by John Harris

Click here to read this article at The Guardian website

John Harris

The spiritual aridity of modern life can be tough to handle. Maybe that’s why the singer, and his new album Wild God, have struck a chord

Nick Cave

There is a tension in 21st-century life that may come close to defining how millions of us now live. Whenever we want to commune with other people, we need only reach for an object the size of a Twix and there they all are: scores of acquaintances and a veritable galaxy of complete strangers, offering insights and opinions on a huge range of subjects. But our online lives too often revolve around a mixture of anger, silliness and superficiality.

Where do we go and who can we find to meaningfully share our thoughts about life’s inescapable fundamentals: love, loss, death, fear, bereavement, regret? To properly do so might require real-world company, which can be an equally big ask. Think about all this, and you will sooner or later collide with something that predates the internet: the long and steady secularisation of life in the west and the vast social holes it has left. Once, for all their in-built hypocrisies – and worse – churches at least offered somewhere to ritualistically consider all of life’s most elemental aspects. Now, beyond communities with high levels of Christian observance, they are largely either empty or woefully underattended.

Which brings me to the singer-songwriter Nick Cave, who has just released a new album, Wild God. In November, he will be playing to huge audiences in a run of British arenas: a relatively new experience for him and his collaborators, which reflects deep changes in his life and his music. In 2015, he suffered the loss of his 15-year-old son Arthur; seven years later, another son, Jethro, died. And in the midst of an unimaginable level of grief, Cave has not only poured his thoughts and feelings into his art, but repeatedly spoken about the profound personal changes caused by outwardly senseless bereavement, as well as reflecting deeply on other people’s experiences. As a result, his audience has ballooned: as he turns 67, he is probably at the all-time pinnacle of his success.

Wild God is a fantastically moving, life-affirming record. But there is even more to Cave’s bond with his public than music and lyrics. Since 2018, he has overseen the Red Hand Files website, where he answers inquiries on a huge range of subjects. As he puts it, the original idea has grown into “a strange exercise in communal vulnerability and transparency”, which entails reading “100 letters a day”. Because he is a kaleidoscopic, complex figure, some of his replies highlight views that are not to some people’s tastes, as evidenced by his hostility to cultural boycotts of Israel, or his antipathy to so-called cancel culture. Last year, he explained why he attended the coronation of King Charles (“I’m just drawn to that kind of thing – the bizarre, the uncanny, the stupefyingly spectacular, the awe-inspiring”). Most of what he posts combines his curious, questioning instincts with a deep humanity: recent editions have covered loneliness, parenthood and suicide. When he plays live, all of this is in the air: it seems to give everything even more meaning.

The same is true of Faith, Hope and Carnage, the bestseller published in 2022 and made up of dialogues with the Observer writer Sean O’Hagan. It looks ahead to Cave’s tentative return to the Anglicanism he was brought up with, and – among many other subjects – is full of insights about what happens when life fills up with grief and hurt. One of his key beliefs is that when we experience loss, we become more human: these things are universal, and therein lies the key to surviving them. “This will happen to everybody at some point – a deconstruction of the known self,” he says. “It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation.”

He goes on: “But in time they put themselves together piece by piece … and the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realised, more clearly drawn person.” The book is full of passages like that. I don’t think I have ever read anything like it, which is a tribute to Cave and O’Hagan’s achievement – but also an illustration of what is missing from most of our culture.

Some of us seem to be belatedly trying to fill the gap. I see that impulse in people’s renewed yearning for nature, the ritualistic pleasures of summer festivals, and the popularity of meditation and mindfulness. It is telling that the militant atheism that peaked 20 years ago with the publication of such books as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great now seems passé.

No one should ignore darker developments that run alongside all this – not least the culture warriors whose interest in a Christian revival is part of their loathing of Islam. But there is a very different story about other people’s quiet quests for meaning and transcendence, and the enduring presence in our culture of essentially Christian thinking. The historian Tom Holland – who, like Cave, has returned to the Christianity he was brought up with – says that in the way millions of us interpret world events there is something unspoken: the fact that “at the heart of western culture is the image of someone being tortured to death by the greatest empire on the face of the Earth”. Many modern rituals and gatherings, he says, look like a “tepid echo” of old church festivities. And he likes Cave’s characterisation of God as wild: “Unless you feel a sense of awe and incomprehension, what’s the point? It can’t be a God who’s just nice.”

I am a devout agnostic. But as I get older, there are experiences and aspects of living that often open the way to a sense of the ineffable and mystical, and the need for something that may help me make sense of an increasingly chaotic world, and life’s ruptures and crises that seem to arrive with alarming regularity.

Most Sundays, I go walking with my two kids, which is a reliable emotional pick-me-up. More often than not, we stray into one of the village churches that tend to pepper our routes. It happened again last week, when we spent 15 silent minutes in a disused chapel near the Somerset village of Holcombe, and I thought about an entry in the Red Hand Files that Cave posted in response to a fan’s bafflement that he has found at least some solace in Christianity.

“To my considerable surprise, I have found some of my truths in that wholly fallible, often disappointing, deeply weird and thoroughly human institution of the Church,” he wrote. “At times, this is as bewildering to me as it may be to you.” Here, I think, lies the faint outline of a journey that more people may sooner or later take, and something I can just about imagine: slowly increasing numbers of people being pulled away from their screens, towards something much more human and nourishing. Those pews, in other words, may not stay vacant for ever.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

"To be or not to be that is the question."

This came up in my fb feed this morning. So funny. Just had to share it with you. 

 

A Personal Response to: Faith Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan

It's a long time since I've written a book review. My short term memory has been shot since I was ill, I think 2 years ago, although I'm not entirely sure. Since being ill - Kidney Cancer and the return of the Polyarteritis Nodosa, - I've stopped writing almost completely. I've also almost completely stopped reading. Anything and everything. But recently - perhaps the last few months I've begun to try and pick up my reading and writing again. It was a terrible time. I've written something about it here. Anyway, briefly, Faith, Hope and Carnage, proclaims to be a conversation between Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan. But in reality it is a series of conversations that took place over an extended period of time during the lockdowns from Covid 19 between 2000 and 2001, in the UK. I've not bought any of Nick Cave's recent albums, barely even heard them, since Push the Sky Away. But when I heard about the book, my interest in him re-emerged. Iona bought the book for me at Christmas and it lay patiently for me till I decided to make another effort to actually complete a book. That was quite some time ago. At least 2 months anyway. So I've completed it! Today! At last! I think the reason why I've not been able to read or write anything since this latest bout of illness is because we are still in a state of trauma. And with the amputation of my right knee - and the realisation that I'm never gonna walk again. I am now a permanent and full time wheelchair user. We are still reeling from what happened. And I think what drew me to the book is Nick Cave's own loss - the accidental death of Arthur - his 15 year old son - in Brighton. He writes about it quite openly. He has said somewhere, 'If we love, we grieve.' And in the Afterword, written by Sean O'Hagan I read that Nick had lost his oldest son Jethro - who died in Australia. Such loss. Too much to bare. So something about his words resonated with me. I wanted to know more. Actually I want to know how to grieve. I think I've been holding on to what I've lost for so long I don't know. I don't have the words, I don't have anything. I'm just holding on to something - the bit of me that's left - knowing and also not knowing what I / we have lost. As I was reading the book I thought about sending a letter with a question to the Red Right Hand Files. That seemed like a place to start to put the broken pieces of my life back together. And although many of the letters written to Nick are genuine and sincere, and Nick's replies are often thoughtful and empathic. Sometimes insightful and wise, I just didn't feel comfortable writing about what we have lost, what I have lost. Such a huge public display of grief and the distict possibility of being completely ignored, would have been just to hard to bare. Click here to buy Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan Click here to visit the Red Hand Files

Rick Beato on Gordon Lightfoot

This is a half hour video made by Rick Beato. I've been following Beato for a couple of years. He's a muscian and records vlogs on music. His videos are all on YouTube. I think he's great. Here's a video I've seen before. I think it's great. And I realise I want to share it with you. I'm probably going to post a few related videos to this one over the next few weeks. I hope you enjoy this one and those that follow.

Drew Binsky: Travelling to the 14 Most Isolated Countries on Earth

Here's a Drew Binski video I really like. In it he travels to 14 isolated countries. They are all in the southen Pasific Ocean - north and to the east of Australia.
It's a really facinating watch. I hope you like it.

Toumani Diabate

I first heard Toumani Diabate lying in a hospital bed. Two friends came to visit and handed over Kaira. Released in 1988 this was Toumani's first album. It's a solo album. Just Toumani and a Cora. It completely blew me away. I loved it. I still do. And much more of the work he has done. Click here for a link to the Guardian's obituary of Toumani Diabate.

Archive on Four: Dirty Old Town at 75

I recently heard this programme on Archive on Four on Radio 4.

I thought it was the most amazing programme. I was completely spell bound from beginning to end. Here's a link to the programme. Honestly! Unforgettable! Click here to hear the programme

Drew Binsky 'This is my favourite Country'

Here is the second Drew Binsky video I want to share. It's a 2 hour epic but it is extraordinary. It's about The Philippines, his favourite country. It's the country his wife comes from and she is a co film maker for this Drew Binsky video.
It begins with a tour of various regions and cities. Food seems to me to be the unifying feature or theme of this video. Wherever Drew goes, no matter who he meets, food is there.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Drew Binsky

This is Drew Binsky. He made the video featured in the last post I made about the Pygmy in the Central African Republic. Katy wanted me to see the video because we're going to a concert in September by Baka Beyond. They are an Afro-Celtic danceband. I came across the band years ago when I was finding out about the music of West Africa.
Anyway she found a video she wanted me to see. That's the video I posted just before this post. I became really interested in the guy that made the video Drew Binsky. He's made a lot of video documentaries about his travels. I thought, given my situation - of recently becoming a permanant wheelchair user - that he would become my eyes and ears of the world. I intend to post from time to time Binsky's videos that I've watched and enjoyed. I hope you like his work as I do.

Meeting the Pygmy tribe in the Central African Republic

Here is a link to an extraordinary video. I hope you enjoy it.

From The Guardian Saturday 2 March 2024: From Dylan to Ishiguro: can song lyrics ever be literature?

 From the Guardian Saturday 2 March 2024

Click here to read this article at the Guardian website

A new book of lyrics by Kazuo Ishiguro joins collections by Kate Bush and Jarvis Cocker. But can songwriting ever work on the page?

Dorian Lynskey

Sat 2 Mar 2024

Jarvis Cocker performing with Pulp at the Castlefield Bowl in Manchester. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

Long before he wrote Booker-winning novels and Oscar-nominated screenplays, the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro wrote bad songs. In his own words, these unheard lyrics were “mostly ghastly” but they enabled him to find his voice. He worked through the gauche and the pretentious before alighting on the simpler first-person style that would define his fiction: “understated, almost mundane lyrics, with emotions placed between the lines, only occasionally pushing to the surface”.

In 2002, Ishiguro chose a track by the American jazz singer Stacey Kent on Desert Island Discs and a friendship developed. Kent’s husband and collaborator Jim Tomlinson suggested to Ishiguro that he try writing her some lyrics – his first in 30 years. These were much better. Now, Faber has collected 16 of them (five as yet unrecorded) in The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent, with elegant illustrations by Bianca Bagnarelli.

Ishiguro’s lane-changing is not unique. There are songwriters who write novels (Nick Cave, John Darnielle), novelists who have written lyrics for musicians (Michael Chabon, Polly Samson), songwriters who publish poetry (PJ Harvey), and poets who release albums (Kae Tempest). But whether lyrics are themselves a form of literature is still an open question. While they can certainly be literary, a lyric is just one channel for conveying meaning in a song. The vocal delivery, melody, rhythm, arrangement and production are all used to enhance, or sometimes subvert, what the words are saying.

Take the two available versions of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. In the 1982 acoustic demo, the Vietnam veteran’s complaint is a bitter howl of rage. In the 1984 studio version, it sounds perversely anthemic, with the result that some patriotic listeners missed the message altogether. Or consider Nick Cave’s 1988 song The Mercy Seat, a more effective bit of storytelling than either of his novels. To Cave, the indignant death row convict was clearly guilty but Johnny Cash later covered it on the assumption that he was in fact innocent. Same words, different impact.

Performance, then, is one obvious distinction between lyrics and literature. The sensory experience of hip-hop narratives such as Ghostface Killah’s gangland nail-biter Maxine or Eminem’s parasocial tragedy Stan is so fundamental that they call to mind not literature but cinema. Yet there is no argument about considering plays as literature to be read, even though they are designed to be brought to life with actors and stagecraft.

"Lines that seem crass, pretentious or entirely incomprehensible written down can thrill a stadium."

Perhaps the real difference is that a song lyric has neither the narrative responsibilities of drama or prose, nor poetry’s duty to precision. Lines that seem crass, pretentious or entirely incomprehensible written down can thrill a stadium. Even songs with more literary flair can comfortably withhold meaning, merely gesturing at a larger story that the writer may or may not have thought through. After Bobbie Gentry’s tantalisingly enigmatic 1967 hit Ode to Billie Joe sparked a frenzy of speculation about what Billie Joe McAllister threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge, Gentry admitted that she did not know herself. Ishiguro argues that this “unresolved, incomplete quality” is what makes a song haunt the mind.

As well as being Ishiguro’s publisher, Faber has a track record of publishing handsome little volumes of lyrics by Kate Bush, Jarvis Cocker, Lou Reed, and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. Traditionally confined to record sleeves, songbooks, websites and old issues of Smash Hits, lyrics acquire a patina of prestige between hard covers. Bush wrote that all the lyrics had “been reviewed as works of verse without their music”.

Still, imagine reading one of Faber’s collections without ever having heard the songs. You would not be able to conjure Cocker’s sly, fruity delivery of the words, “I said, well, I’ll see what I can do” in Pulp’s Common People, nor the leaping desperation with which Bush sings, “Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Cathy, I’ve come home” on Wuthering Heights. On the page, without that context, such lines would hardly stop the reader in their tracks. Read Tennant’s lyrics to West End Girls and you can see how he was emulating the collage of urban voices in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land but not how he and Chris Lowe refracted it through a homage to New York hip-hop.

The strongest case for lyrics as literature was made by the Nobel committee when it awarded the 2016 prize for literature to Bob Dylan – the first songwriter to receive that honour. But the committee skated over the reasoning for the decision and its implications, saying only that the award was for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. True enough, but does that make it literature or just very good songwriting?

Dylan himself seemed fantastically uncomfortable with the whole affair. When he was asked in 1965 whether he saw himself as a poet, he famously responded, “Oh I think of myself more as a song and dance man.” Very few songwriters explicitly aspire to the status of literature, because they know that songwriting can be fast and instinctive and even gobbledegook can delight as long as it sounds good. It is hard to square the meticulous exegesis of some Dylan lyrics with the knowledge that he did not sweat over every syllable. As Neil Tennant writes in One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem, “Every lyric-writer also has a guilty secret: the sound of the words is sometimes more important than the sense of them.”

Leonard Cohen, who began his career as a poet and novelist before deciding that music was a better way to make a living – a kind of Ishiguro in reverse – is one notable exception. His lyrics have a rare solidity, meticulously crafted to stand alone. But even a lyric as perfect as Hallelujah, which took him five years to finish, tells you that it wants to be sung: “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth / The minor fall, the major lift.” And that immense voice, pitted and weathered like a monument, tells you that these words have been not just written but lived.

‘A a song lyric works quite differently from a poem’ … Kazuo Ishiguro. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

‘A a song lyric works quite differently from a poem’ … Kazuo Ishiguro. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Pressed to clarify the logic behind Dylan’s literature prize, the Nobel’s permanent secretary Sara Danius pointed out that Homer and Sappho wrote poetic texts to be performed aloud with music but they can now be read with pleasure, so why not Dylan? But of course, we don’t have countless hours of recordings of Homer and Sappho to tell us how they wanted those words to sound. While songs can be covered, rearranged and even melodically transformed, the original recordings still have an authorial weight that is hard to shake, especially for fans who are in the market for books of lyrics.

The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain is a fascinating test case. Although Stacey Kent is a Grammy-nominated artist with 2m albums sold, her work is not so famous that her phrasing will be stamped into the brain of every curious Ishiguro fan. These lyrics can still be read as extremely short stories. He took the image of the tram ride in Breakfast on the Morning Tram from 1995’s The Unconsoled, the novel of his that most resembles music because it prioritises mood over meaning – or rather, the mood is the meaning. It is no coincidence that the protagonist who wanders through a dream-like central European city, is a pianist. When Ishiguro writes that songs allow for “narrative vacuum and gaps; an oblique approach to the releasing of information”, he could also be describing his fiction.

These lyrics also dwell on travel and the slipperiness of human connection but they contain more hope and romance than Ishiguro’s novels. They occupy the timeless realm of jazz standards: trains and rain, old movies and exotic locales, myriad variations on the theme of love. The journey in Bullet Train becomes a metaphor for the way time slips away: “It feels like we’re not moving / Though I know we must be moving … Way too fast.” The second verse of Craigie Burn, with its deft sketch of a life derailed, performs the classic songwriting trick of leaving the listener/reader to imagine the full story.

Does that make it literature? Tellingly, the introduction to almost every book of lyrics contains a semi-apology. It is a “strange beast”, admits the novelist David Mitchell in his introduction to Kate Bush’s How to Be Invisible. The page is “not the natural habit of a song lyric”, writes Neil Tennant. For Jarvis Cocker, “seeing a lyric in print is like watching the TV with the sound turned down: you’re only getting half the story.”

Ishiguro likewise maintains, “it remains my belief that a song lyric is not, and works quite differently from, a poem,” encouraging readers to listen to Kent’s recordings. That is, after all, what these words are for.

 To buy The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent by Kazuo Ishiguro go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Sermon: Spring Cleaning our Lives From Anger

 
Click here for a link to the sermon

Marina Ambrovic at the Royal Academy

 

Marina Abramovic Rhythm 0 Naples Italy1974

On a Saturday morning - just before Christmas - she came up in conversation around the breakfast table. A friend was staying with us. She's an artist and was going back home - to Toulouse France - the following  afternoon. She mentioned she wanted to see an exhibition in London of the conceptual artist Marina Abramovic. 
I'd heard the name for the first time on the Friday before. She was on Desert Island Discs on Radio 4. So when Pam - our friend - mentioned her name, my ears pricked up. When we realised there was a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Royal Academy we knew that we just had to go.
We also realised that we had a gap of 6 hours the following day where we could get to the exhibition.

It was the first time I had gone to see an exhibition by a conceptual artist. I didn't really know what conceptual art actually was.

It was also the first time I'd come across nudity at an art exhibition. Where we were expected to engage with it. That was quite uncomfortable. I've come across nudity in the theatre in recent years and have found that straightforward and acceptable. But being invited - several times - to squeeze myself, in a wheelchair - between 2 naked bodies, and forced to be in physical contact with them - no matter how brief and fleeting - was a thing I really didn't want to interact with. it's probably an English thing. Hopeless! But there it is.

Abromovic's work “Imponderabilia” - first performed in 1977 - was recreated at the Royal Academy. Credit David Parry/Royal Academy of Arts

I didn't really know how to approach the exhibition. This is conceptual art, where the physical components of the exhibits are not as important as the ideas that informed them. For example, the first gallery was filled with more than 100 screens on opposite walls. On one side are video screens of members of the public staring intently out. And on the wall opposite are screens of Abromovic also starring - seemingly - intently out at the screens on the wall opposite. It was a restaging of probably Abromovic's most famous work, The Artist is Present, where 2 chairs are placed facing each other and visitors are invited to sit opposite the artist for as long as they like, staring at Abromovic, while Abromovic stares back at them.

The Artist is Present Abromovic

I really was perplexed. In every other art exhibition I've ever been to, the artwork  is the central object. But this was different. Was I to join in and stare at each screen individually? Was I to stare at one screen and then find the corresponding screen on the wall opposite. Was this gallery filled with over 100 pieces of art. Or was this a gallery where I hold a collective sense of all the screens. It was unnerving.

And then confronted with Imponderabilia, I wondered whether all the 100's of visitors that visit the exhibition were expected to squeeze between the narrow doorframe of flesh made up of 2 naked bodies. I decided that I wasn't going to do that.
Apparently there was a another hidden door frame where one can pass through into the next gallery without having to confront naked flesh.

As we moved through the exhibition I began to feel like I just wanted to leave. I felt removed and quite emotionally detached from the whole exhibition. There were exhibits of Ambrovic combing her hair, ones of her and her lover slapping each other on the face, another one of them fully naked, holding hands and walking away from each other.

We came across another door frame in a later gallery that consisted of very bright lights shone through selenite crystals.

It was quite painful and uncomfortably hot walking through this threshold. There was a sense of passing through one state of being into another state of being. It felt like something spiritual was taking place.

There was a strong sense of discomfort throughout the whole collection. I never felt at ease or at peace throughout any of it. Especially when we are confronted by mortality. One exhibit that expressed this is a photograph or was it a video, of Abromovic lying down naked with a skeleton placed on top of her. This image is placed at floor level. On top of this image, a naked performance artist lies down and a skeleton place on top of her.  At various times in the day artist and skeleton process out of the gallery and process back again later.

For me perhaps the most disturbing image is the exhibit that refers back to Abromovic's 1974 work, Rhythm -Zero. It's the photograph that begins this post. I don't know what you think, but I've been watching it every day I've been trying to write this piece. There's shock and contempt - at those who have abused her - and also defiance against her audience. Hearing about Rhythm - zero completely caught my attention.
And looking at it again now, I think of Jesus giving himself over to the Jewish authorities to eventually be killed. It is a kind of sacrifice.

Click here for a link to the RA listing of the exhibition.

Photograph by Jonathan Muzikar The Artist is Present Marina Abromovic at the MoMA 

Click here for a link to Marina Abromovic's Desert Island Discs episode