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

Christy Moore: Fairytale of New York

 If you're going to cover a song, I realised years ago, you have to own the song for yourself. You have to make it your own. And the way you do that is to find a way of singing the song in a way the original artist hasn't even thought about. Find a unique way of entering the song. That's exactly what Christy Moore does with this song.

So as part of my tribute here and elsewhere to Shane McGowan, here's Christy Moore singing Fairytale of New York.

Christy Moore - Fairytale of New York

The Story Of The Pogues & Kirsty McColl Fairytale of New York The full Story

 

Kirsty MacColl, Shane MacGowan Top of the Pops January 1992

There's a great documentary about the making of Fairytale of New York but I haven't been able to post the complete documentary. However here's a link to take you to it.

Click here for the link to the full documentary, The Story Of The Pogues & Kirsty McColl Fairytale of New York The full Story.

I hope you enjoy it.

Fairytale of New York - with Shane MacGowan & Kirsty MacColl

Probably the best popular Christmas song I've ever heard. It's an absolute delight to listen to and to watch. And now with Shane Mac Gowan's death and Kirsty MacColl - 18 December 2000 - long gone. Playing the song this year has a special resonance. I hope you enjoy it.

Diana Ross - Amazing Grace

Here's Diana Ross performing Amazing Grace in 1992 at a Viennese Christmas concert.
It's absolutely stunning.

 

Legend: Episode 6: Both Sides Now

 

Click here to listen to episode 6, Both Sides Now, the last episode of the Radio 4 documentary, Legend, The Life of Joni Mitchell.

Joni Mitchell London 1970

Benjamin Zephaniah Talking Turkeys

 Benjamin Zephaniah performing at the Hay Festival in 2007 with his poem Talking Turkeys

Benjamin Zephaniah has died - Thursday 7th December 2023

We watched him perform at the Hay Festival in 2018. We managed to buy a couple of the last tickets for the gig.  We were right up in the front. When he started with the band, the place erupted. People who were politely sitting in rows behind us, suddenly got up off their seats and rushed to the stage.

It was a great gig!

 from Bloodaxe Books

Benjamin Zephaniah (1958-2023) was a writer and performer of extraordinary range: an oral poet, novelist, playwright, children’s writer, reggae artist, actor, television personality and political activist. Born in Birmingham, he grew up in Handsworth, where he was sent to an approved school for being uncontrollable, rebellious and ‘a born failure’, ending up in jail for burglary and affray.

After prison he turned from crime to music and poetry. In 1989 he was nominated for Oxford Professor of Poetry, and has since received honorary doctorates from several English universities, but famously refused to accept a nomination for an OBE in 2003. He was voted Britain's third favourite poet of all time (after T.S. Eliot and John Donne) in a BBC poll in 2009. In 2011 he was poet-in-residence at Keats House in 2011, and then made a radical career change by taking up his first ever academic position as a chair in Creative Writing at Brunel University in West London.

He appeared in a number of television programmes, including Peaky Blinders, Eastenders, The Bill, Live and Kicking, Blue Peter and Wise Up, and played Gower in a BBC Radio 3 production of Shakespeare’s Pericles in 2005.

Best known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults – and his poetry with attitude for children – he had his own rap/reggae band. He produced numerous recordings, including Dub Ranting (1982), Rasta (1983), Us and Dem (1990), Back to Roots (1995), Belly of de Beast (1996) and Naked (2004). He was the first person to record with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela, which Mandela heard while in prison on Robben Island. Their later meetings led to Zephaniah working with children in South African townships and hosting the President’s Two Nations Concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1996.

His first book of poems, Pen Rhythm, was produced in 1980 by a small East London publishing cooperative, Page One Books. His second collection, The Dread Affair, was published by Hutchinson’s short-lived Arena imprint in 1985. He published three collections with Bloodaxe, City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black, Too Strong (2001), the latter including poems written while working with Michael Mansfield QC and other Tooks barristers on the Stephen Lawrence case. His DVD-book To Do Wid Me: Benjamin Zephaniah live and direct (filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce) followed from Bloodaxe in 2013, including poems drawn from all his collections.

His other titles include his poetry books for children, Talking Turkeys (1994), Funky Chickens (1996) and Wicked World (2000), all from Puffin/Penguin; his novels for teenagers, Face (1999), Refugee Boy (2001), Gangsta Rap (2004) and Teacher’s Dead (2007), all from Bloomsbury; The Bloomsbury Book of Love Poems (1999); Schools Out: Poems Not for School (1997) and The Little Book of Vegan Poems (2001) from AK Press; and We Are Britain (Frances Lincoln, 2003). He published his autobiography, The Life and Rhymes and Benjamin Zephaniah, with Simon & Schuster in 2018.

Click here for an obituary from The Guardian

Dog Eat Dog Episode 5 from Legend The Joni Mitchell Story

 

Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen

Click here to listen to Dog Eats Dog. It's the fifth episode of the Radio 4 documentary, Legend, The Life of Joni Mitchell.

River by Joni Mitchell supported by Herbie Hancock

Legend: Episode 4 Refuge of the Roads

Click here to listen to Refuge of the Roads, the fourth episode of the Radio 4 Legend, The Life of Joni Mitchell. 

autumn leaves

autumn rain

disturbs the trees

leaves quivering 

 

Part 3 Legend The Joni Mitchell Story Blue

 

Click here for the third instalment of this extraordinary documentary about Joni Mitchell as she turns 80. This episode is called Blue.

Part 2 Legend The Joni Mitchell Story The Lady of the Canyon

 

Photo by Joel Bernstein www.joelbernstein.com

Click here for a link to part 2 of The Joni Mitchell Story, The Lady of the Canyon.

Song for Sharon London 1983

Legend: The Joni Mitchell Story

 On 7th November 1943 Joni Mitchell was born. This year on the 7th November she'll be 80 years old. To celebrate her birthday I'm going to post a link to each of the 6 episodes of a documentary about her life.
My plan is to post a photo, post a link to the documentary and post videos of performances given by her over the years that i've really enjoyed.
I hope you enjoy them too. 

Click here for  a link to the first of 6 documentaries on the life of Joni Mitchell. BBC Radio 4's programme Legend: The Joni Mitchell Story.

Here's Joni Mitchell with support from Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn at Gordon Lightfoot's home in 1975 singing Coyote

Australia Pub Choir singing Africa by Toto

I came upon this video this morning and thought it was great. It was the sheer joy and exuberance of singers, band members, soloists and conductor that made me think of you. So I thought I'd share it.

Australia Pub Choir Africa by Toto

Eclipse from James Webb Space Telescope

 I thought you'd like this photograph. I stumbled on it today going through my fb feed. Apparently it's the most detailed photograph of a solar eclipse ever taken.

A recent total Solar Eclipse from the James Web Space Telescope

Some Favourite Music Videos

While recovering from my second bout of Covid and still coming to terms with living the rest of my life from a wheelchair, I thought I'd put together some favourite music videos. 
My original intention is to put up a list of say at least 8 specifically made music videos. However, there are videos on YouTube that have been edited from much longer performances that I love watching, and will include these as well I expect.
I'm not gonna put these in any order, although I do think I know already which video I think is my number one all time favourite music video.

I suppose I ought to note down what I think makes a good music video. However I don't want to make a big fuss about this. I wanna be intuitive and even a little impulsive. But I also don't want to lead you down Cull du Sacs. I don't want to waste your time.
So I'm choosing good songs. Though not necessarily my most favourite songs.  

I'm going to be posting videos over the next few days or perhaps a couple of weeks.

Anyway, here's a first video.
I've only watched it once. And that's today, the day I first posted this post. Perhaps it was watching this that inspired me to post this challenge.

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit

The sheer power and energy of this video is completely overwhelming.  I was shocked by its chaos and implied violence.
It begins quite conventionally. The band. A stage. A seated audience. Cheer leaders.
But then completely explodes.

When I came out of hospital last year I watched something on YouTube I really never expected to watch. And that was a recording on Joni Mitchell playing at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival. The performance took place on the 24th July.

I came out of hospital in October and started catching up with stuff I'd missed. 

I saw the  Newport Festival videos soon after but didn't realise there significance.

And then the penny dropped.

Joni Mitchell, Brandi Carlile, musicians and friends at the
Newport Folk Festival July 24 2022

 I really never expected to find a current or recent recording of Joni Mitchell singing. So I was blown away when I stumbled on these videos of Joni performing. The first couple of times it came up on my YouTube feeds I didn't believe what I was watching. I dismissed the posts before even watching them. Till eventually it dawned on me what I was being invited to watch.

Now I came across this third video years ago, while I was working at Richmond upon Thames College. I'd known the song but it really wasn't a special song for me. It still isn't actually. It maybe the least interesting song for me in this challenge. But the video absolutely makes this a contender for this challenge.

REM - Everybody Hurts - Official Video

What struck me about this video is how it connects to one of my all time favourite films, Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders.
In that film we hear the unspoken thoughts of various anonymous characters as they pass through their uneventful day. Their thoughts are not necessarily linked to what is actually happening to them. However the thoughts do link directly to the broader challenges they are facing in their lives. These thoughts are often about loss and grief and are very similar to the various characters we find in this music video.

Here's the fourth music video. In fact I'm gonna post 2 videos of this song. The official video and a live performance of the song.

I love this song. It would definitely feature in any Top 10 songs I'd do of David Bowie songs. This song has its hooks deep inside me, from the first time I heard it back in 1980 when it was first released. 
I have a memory of sitting in a pub in Burnt Oak - where I went to college - with a few friends from college and at least one teacher. We were all sitting round a table having lunch and a pint or 2, when this song came over the speakers. I still have a vivid memory of that afternoon and wrote a poem at the time about that lunch.
This live video is taken from a BBC Radio 2 Radio Theatre concert. I love this whole concert. It's probably my favourite concert of Bowie's. I think for me, this is Bowie's best line up of musicians: 

David Bowie - Ashes to Ashes - Live Radio Theatre 2000

with Earl Slick – Guitar, Mark Plati – Guitar & Bass, Gail Ann Dorsey – Bass, Guitar & Vocals, Sterling Campbell – Drums, Mike Garson – Piano & Keyboards, Holly Palmer – Backing Vocals & Percussion, Emm Gryner – Backing Vocals & Keyboard.

I love Mike Garson - from Aladdin Sane days - the plucked keyboard introduction and the closing solo, Earl Slick's guitar solo, Gail Ann Dorsey's bass and of course Stirling Campbell's drums - which of course Bowie mentions at the end of this video. 

But I also have to post the original video for Ashes to Ashes. Apparently it was the most expensive music video ever made at the time. Co-directed by David Mallet - who also directed another video I'm gonna post. It depicts Bowie as a clown, an astronaut and patient in a padded cell. I think it's a completely brilliant follow up to Bowie's Major Tom - the main character in his 1969 breakthrough single Space Oddity.

David Bowie Ashes to Ashes Official Video

David Mallet also directed the next video. This video is the 2nd song of a 3 song encore from Pink Floyd's 1994 Pulse concert in London's Earls Court. This concert formed part of the band's Division Bell Tour. The first I knew about the concert, the tour or the video was watching - what I think was the encore - on YouTube. So here is the 2nd video from that 3 song encore.

Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb - Pulse concert, Earls Court 1994

Well I was completely mesmerized by the performance. I'd never seen anything like it. It seemed to me that I was watching the greatest live concert performance of any band, ever. I've watched the videos over and over again over many years, and it still knocks me out.  


Here's Madonna and Like A Prayer. It's a good song. It's a good video. It has a strong narrative, it's sexy, the choir is great. The visuals, stunning.

Madonna - Like A Prayer

Here's a video I've come to quite a few times over the years. It was recorded during the On an Island Tour in 2006 at Gdańsk Shipyard in Poland. This was the last performance Richard Wright gave before his death in 2008. I think it's a stunning live performance.

David Gilmour and Richard Wright  - Echoes - Gdansk Shipyard 2006

There is so much to enjoy here. I particularly like the closing duet between Gilmour and Wright at the end of the piece. I also really enjoy the lighting effects throughout the video. 

I still remember the first time I watched this video. It was so moving. I think I cried. Such an emotionally charged and personal video. I was sure Cash had written the song himself. He absolutely owns the song – as any good cover artist has to. It felt that it was the last song he recorded. It felt like it was the end.

Johnny Cash / Hurt

I think that all these videos are tremendous. I've come back to most of them year after year.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn Peter Sellers 1956

I've been looking for this film for years. I first watched it in 1975. It was shown before the main feature of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I went several times to see that film and got to know both films quite well.
Watching it again, right now, I realise what a bad film it is. A showcase for Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan who were in the middle of recording The Goon Show - aired on the BBC World Service and The Light Programme - between 1951 - 1960.
I also thought that the character CID's Ace Det Supt Quill played by Sellers might be a forerunner for Ch Insp Clouseau from the Pink Panther films that started in 1963 with the first film, The Pink Panther.

The Pink Panther theme music and title from the 1963 film

Fawns Alert

 

Young Fallow deer, Richmond Park, September 2023

at the end
of their first summer
fawns alert

Into My Arms Nick Cave Official Video

I've never seen the official video of this song, until today. But I thought it was worth sharing. So here it is. It's a stunning video.

September Pond

Martin's Pond Richmond Park  18 September 2023 David Loffman
shrunken pond

filled with summer sludge

and mud

Getting Closer to Solar Maximum

We are reaching the peak of the solar cycle - roughly every 11 years. Experts believe the cyclical peak is likely to take place in mid to late 2024. As we get closer to the peak of the cycle - solar maximum - the sun becomes more active. Activity such as sun spots and Coronal Mass Ejections occur much more frequently and to a greater intensity.
Oh my goodness I'm beginning to sound like one of the commentators on one of my favourite websites: APOD or Astronomy Picture of the Day.

The Northern Lights - Aurora Borealis were captured by photographer Owen Humphreys on Wednesday 13 September. This aurora display appeared as a result of a CME which was hurled into space from the Northern Hemisphere of the sun on 14 September. Click here for more information

from the Lindisfarne Causeway

taken on Wednesday 13 September 2023 at 12:45pm

by Owen Humpreys/PA

The sun released an X1 solar flare on October 2, 2022, which was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. X-class events are the most intense flares, and they can impact communications systems on Earth

from Space's Next Chapter

I've been ill

 I wrote this after I was discharged from hospital last year in 2022. But it's been in draft form ever since.

I noticed it this evening, scrolling through my blog posts and realised I had posted nothing about what's happened to us.

So it's been a year since my right knee was amputated. But this whole thing probably started at least 3 years ago now in 2020.

But my memory is shot.

I wouldn't trust it if I were you.

But this account is as close as I can come to what happened to me.

Over the next few months I'm intending to edit this post, add some photographs and write a second account following on from this one.

All I've got is a series of events but I can't be sure the the order of them.

I've got to lay them down quickly before they disappear completely.

At Home

In 2020, I was  given a new prosthetist. She made a new above knee leg for me. Despite being considered a specialist above knee prosthetist, I developed a sore and slowly it developed into an ulcer. The ulcer developed along the line where my above knee leg is sealed onto the prosthesis. Secretly, I blamed my prosthetist and the long line of prosthetists I saw during that period for the ulcer, who tried to mend it. I went back to Queen Mary's hospital regularly - at times almost every week to have the problem fixed. Every prosthetist I saw, including my own prosthetist, tried to put it right, but they all concluded that the leg fitted well, and they could see no reason why the prosthetic leg should create the ulcer.

This went on for quite a while. I cleaned and dressed the small ulcer. It wasn't growing or getting smaller. It wasn't infected. But it wasn't right. It became painful. I only walked when I had to walk.  Whenever I got home from teaching or going out I transferred into my wheelchair.

The ulcer was dressed regularly and I just carried on. As you do.

At the same time as the ulcer was developing on my left above knee amputated leg I began to feel fatigued.
Everyday it was the same. I woke feeling that lead weights were attached to me, trying to hold me down. It went on like this all day till I went to bed.
I'd wake the next day and it was the same. It didn't get any worse or any better. I carried on working. I didn't connect the ulcer to the fatigue.  

The GP Surgery, hospital appointments and work

Until February / March 2022 the G.P surgery phoned with the results of my regular 3 monthly blood tests. The GP said, my results showed high levels of inflammation. He'd contacted Doctor Kiely - the doctor who managed my recovery from Polyarteritis back in 2004.  He was based at St George's hospital. The GP wanted to inform Doctor Kiely of the situation and ask him to call me in for an appointment.

An appointment came to see Prof Kiely. In the consultation Prof Kiely said confidently that I didn't have a resurgence of Polyarteritis - an autoimmune disease I'd developed when I was 17. He was confident that something else was causing the high inflammatory markers, the anaemia and low red cell blood count. I think he put all my symptoms down to a virus.

So we went back to our local G.P surgery with one question.

"If this isn't Polyarteritis, then what is this?" The GP said she'd send me off for tests.

She was one of the surgery's GP team. I'd never seen her before. She seemed in her 20's. I was pissed off and didn't expect this consultation to lead anywhere at all.

About the same time [as we were seeing the GP] in March 2022, I experienced fatigue. I remember teaching, but feeling the whole time as if I was being weighted down by a huge stone hanging over a long drop. Other symptoms developed, these included sleeplessness, loss of appetite and  sudden short fevers. I assumed it was a virus. It would pass.

A couple of weeks passed. I continued to teach. 

But then I went off sick.

The GP we'd seen who recommended tests, referred me to have three scans under three different medical teams, these were, heart, lungs and kidneys. The appointments came fairly quickly. Scans were either CT scans or MRI scans. 

Katy went to the Bologna Book Fair on 23 March. I had been officially sick for 8 days when she left.

At home I went ON GUARD!

I started spending the night sitting up in an armchair in the sitting room. I was on guard twenty four hours a day. Seven days a week. On guard against an unseen enemy. I was a body knotted in anxiety and stress. I couldn't relax for one moment. And yet the invisible enemy was upon me. Destroying whatever it could of me. It was absolutely awful. I was defenceless! I was powerless!

I was on guard for weeks. Always watchful. Drifting into a few moments of sleep here and there. By this time I wasn't eating.

And then one morning in mid May, my left stump was covered in purple patches. We knew exactly what this was. This was vasculitis! We'd seen it before in 2004. And I'd known it from the 1970's & early 80's. It's a symptom of Polyarteritis Nodosa.

Untreated we knew these purple patches would become ulcers and attack the stump. In 2004 vasculitis resulted in the amputation of both my legs. The left leg amputated above the knee, the right, amputated below the knee.

And of course, when we saw the purple patches, we immediately tried to contact Prof Kiely. But he was away.

Meanwhile the GP's heart scan showed an enlarged aorta. But this was normal. They'd check it again in a year or two.

We can't remember anything about the lung scan. But whatever they found they considered wasn't causing me any harm.

At Kingston Hospital

We had to wait a bit for the third scan. A kidney scan. And wait a bit longer for the results. When we did see the consultant urologist at Kingston Hospital, he said that I had kidney cancer. He said he'd need to remove the whole kidney. He said once it was removed everything would be alright. I wouldn't need any further treatment.

And then we told him about the vasculitis. 

By the time we had this consultation - with the consultant urologist -  the vasculitis was all over the left leg. It was early days. There were purple patches. No signs of ulcers yet.

He had a look at the leg and said he wouldn't operate until the vasculitis was all sorted out.

We needed to consult with Prof Kiely again.

Despite Prof Kiely being on holiday, we had the first of several phone consultations. But he didn't change his mind about his idea that the something else was causing the illness. Instead he said the cause of the vasculitis was due to the cancer. He said get rid of the cancer and the vasculitis would go away. He told us to go back to the consultant urologist and tell him to remove the kidney as soon as possible!

So with the support of one of the GP team at our local surgery and a rheumatologist at St Thomas's hospital it was decided to remove the kidney. 

By this point the ulcers were getting significantly worse. Right from the start, the ulcers were not being treated at all. This was a deliberate policy set by Prof Kiely. The medication needed to treat the vasculitis would inhibit healing the cancer. As well as this, Prof Kiely was sure that - with the cancer removed -  my body would heal the vasculitis by itself. The cancerous right kidney was eventually removed at Kingston Hospital in July. 

But the vasculitis continued.

I was ready to be discharged by the urology team at Kingston hospital but the ulcers on my legs were still progressing. We've got photographs of the progress of these ulcers from early on. I'm not going to share them with you though. The ulcers were so shocking!

Just before I left Kingston hospital, we did see a rheumatologist. He recommended a biopsy of the ulcers. But the urology team at Kingston were only interested in the cancer. And they discharged me. Eventually an appointment came for a biopsy. When we went for the biopsy the doctor at Queen Mary's hospital, Roehampton. was so shocked by the ulcers he told us to go to St George's immediately. He said St George's hospital is the place where the ulcers could be treated properly. He said the best and quickest way this could be done is if we went to A&E.

At St George's Hospital

So we drove to St George's hospital A&E. 

That was one of worst experiences we had during this time.

We arrived at around 4.00 in the afternoon and joined the queue to be seen. First by a nurse and then by a doctor. I sat in the wheelchair. Katy sat in a chair. 

We waited. We waited! And we waited! And waited!

At some point in the middle of the night we were moved to another part of the A&E department. It was quieter. There were fewer people. There were curtains. There was a bed. There was a chair. We were told we were being admitted to the hospital but were waiting for a bed to be freed up. 

We realised that wasn't going to happen for hours yet. And so we waited and were admitted onto a vascular ward later that morning.

At first I was admitted into an 8 bed bay. It was noisy. It's difficult managing 8 bored and very unwell men. So I was pleased that one day I was transferred into a single bay.

And then one day one of the rheumatology team said that the ulcers were so bad on the right leg the only way forward was to amputate the knee. 

And that is exactly what they did at St George's hospital at the end of August.