Unconsidered Trifles

Think. Imagine. Know. 



November 23, 2009

It's Time.

Shakespeare is superb on time - and I don't have the time to find the right quotes. But in a day when I got to see an early version of the utterly awesome - you heard it here first - Retroscope, and I got this strong sense of multiple strands entwining happily, at the right time and the right place - that serendipity thing, I felt I had to just put a marker in the flow of time to flag that we are lucky to be living in extraordinary [swearword of choice] times.

How lucky are we?

Really?

Humankind has been asking for this stuff for millennia, and many of the poorest of the poor are now better served with possibilities than, say, fat Henry VIII. Surely a good ting? I mean, would you rather listen to Hey Nonny Nonny for the rest of your life - i.e. ever -  or,say, Staff Benda Bilili?

I say again, how lucky are we?

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Posted by John Pollock 

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November 22, 2009

uk@earth.people

[Scroll down for the pretty pictures]

Digging though the archive to find an e-copy of something to make a point, I stumbled upon uk@earth.people, now well north of a hundred moons, done for DFID.

Illustrated by the magnificent Andy Martin, I'm still fond of it. I learnt a great deal about design from the presiding genius of Richard Wise (often, with my neurotic attention to detail, in the early hours) as well as about print from the old-school Aldgate Press.

I learnt, in short, that if you really care about something, you have to be on it like necrotizing fasciitis.

Clare Short launched is as "probably the funkiest Government publication ever produced" (it would still be in the running).

It was part of a suite of publications for DFID that won the occasional PR Week Award for Copy (not too bad given we were up against Abbey and Boots).

Yes, it's a kind of propaganda - but a subversive one, with the intent of creating something people would actually read. And they did. The best feedback came from people working for DFID who said things like "my family all read it and at last they understand what I do" and "for 25 years my mother-in-law has despised my work, which she didn't understand. After uk@earth she just said 'Well, maybe you're not that bad after all'". (I'll blog some other time about some work whose rave reviewer was... 2 years old).

First tip: given that this was, although it shouldn't have been, somewhat radical for a UK Government Department, I got the top of the office to bring their most junior staff to a pre-publication presentation about it. The juniors got that 'Crowded House' (for a section on population) was a band too. One, bless him, even asked if there would be T-shirts made of the club cover. The oldsters grumbled, but were long enough in the tooth to recognise genuine enthusiasm among those several 'grades' below them.

Second tip: it's dangerous to stand out sometimes. Clare, then Secretary of State, asked 'why can't all my publications be like this?' 'Well, Minister, he's expensive' (As is good illustration, design, print, copy, etc). The point being, people enjoyed reading it, unliked most government publications.

There's a full PDF here, from my River Path incarnation, or ask and I can email or even possibly send a hard copy. This last is worth it for the flick book we tucked in to relieve the deadline-tension at three in the morning (the earth by the page numbering rotates).

 

           
Click here to download:
ukearth.people.zip (392 KB)

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Posted by John Pollock 

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November 18, 2009

Shadows on the wall

Just been speaking with the ever fascinating Gary Woods, a couple of whose highly collectable Shadow series very suitably dominate the walls on the 27th floor aerie I'm in now.

Shadows have long exerted a fascination, and the way they stalk through our consciousness - from Upper Paleolithic hand paintings which have been described thus: ‘the potency-filled paint created some sort of bond between the person, the rock veil, and the spirit world that seethed beneath it... shamanic ‘touchings of the other world’ to Plato's shadows in the cave allegory to mark our nature in its education and want of education.

I just scored a useful 12 on Jon Silk's ad hoc test to see whether one should sync or not. Briefly, that score resided in a liminal, shadowed otherworld - the results applied only to those scoring less than 12 or more than 13. A simple mistake, but actually a pleasurable one.

For as the magnificent Leonard Cohen sings in his great Anthem: 'There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in".

And it's in those mysterious antumbral, umbral and penumbral interstices, surely, where some of the best and most interesting things reside.


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Posted by John Pollock 

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November 16, 2009

As the actor said to the bishop

Some gnashing & wailing of teeth about "traditionalists" "keeping their traditions" about women bishops in the Anglican church.

These 'traditions' emerged when "the Literalists" (those fundamentalists who, sadly, persist in believing that the latest version of some translated and long-censored words they read in the Bible are the 'literal' truth i.e. not a palimpsest accumulated over time and circumstance as demonstrated by even the most cursory effort at study).

The skinny comes from The Jesus Mysteries, reviewed by Roger Boulton of Radio 4's The Sunday Programme, thus:

'Rarely have the roots of Christianity been disentangled to such disturbing effect. I shall never be able to read the gospels in the same way again.'  

The relevant section, summarised here: 

The Pagan Mysteries were open to all, regardless of gender. Literalist Christianity used the idea of original sin to keep women in the dark, as it were. The Pagans had women priestesses who were held in high esteem; Literalist Christianity frowned upon women as priests or bishops.

Like the Pagans, Gnostics also held women as equals. In Gnostic gospels, women play central roles, as opposed to men in the Christian gospels. Mary Magdalene is portrayed in conflict with the foolish Peter, who complains that she is dominating the discussion. He urges Jesus to silence her. Instead, Jesus rebukes him. Christians such as Tertullian complained bitterly of women who hold positions of authority.

The long and tedious history of a kind of moronic sexism rooted in the 'traditionalist' world-view dominated by a few very disturbed religious beardies over a thousand years ago is hardly worth going into, especially with glazed-eyes true believers who get utterly threatened by anything resembling the real truth.

More sad, in my opinion, is that the church keeps its story as a kind of Disney version, rather than the much more interesting stuff they all know about. So, for all you traditionalists, without further ado, the sine qua non on the subject:


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Posted by John Pollock 

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November 15, 2009

Passionate intensity

Just been hanging out with someone who remembers hanging out in Jack Yeats' studio. Which reminded me of this:

 William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

               THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand; 
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out 
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; 
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
    The darkness drops again but now I know 
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep 
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


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November 13, 2009

My tie

Almost drinkable, isn't it? One of only two ties I've ever really cared for. Bought at New & Lingwood and Joseph Gane in Eton.

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November 13, 2009

Oh the water. Hope it don't rain all day

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November 13, 2009

Rain

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November 13, 2009

God is in the details

I spend a lot of time near the top of Erno Goldfinger's brutalist masterpiece, Trellick Tower, and understandably rather like Mies van der Rohe's work too. As well as 'God is in the details', he is also famous for his remark that 'less is more'.

However, with the new Quiet Riots homepage, more is more. We've pulled the feed to the front, made feedback a lot easier, and are also flagging the top Open Letters. It's still not perfect, and will keep iterating, but anyone spending a little time here now should be able to get an inkling that Quiet Riots is, potentially, a seriously big idea.

It's meant to help people find each other, cluster up around issues, and reduce the friction on doing something. It will succeed or not. But in the absence of compelling alternatives, it might be worth giving this one a go: because it's our world, and with the new toys we have to play with on the interwibweb, it is, as they say, 'time for change'.

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November 13, 2009

Exuberance

 

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great
Stephen Spender 

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

With this lovely poem by Stephen Spender, the great Dr Kay Redfield Jamison introduces her excellent book, Touched with Fire: Manic-depressive illness and the Artistic Temperament, studded with wonderful remarks like ""We of the craft are all crazy," remarked Lord Byron about himself and his fellow poets ..." 

In her own, utterly remarkable, memoir, An Unquiet Mind, she writes:

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one's life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one's loves and friendships.

I too, "being, as I am, litter'd under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsider'd trifles", and so am often without a watch.

Quoting a prayer to "shield your joyous ones" in this lengthy and absorbing video, she remarks "The joyous tend to be left to their own devices, the exuberant even more so... After the victory, the harvest, the discovery of a new idea... delight is its own reward". She goes on, "joy is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek and to love again."  I've just nominated her for a TED Prize. She's closes by citing a 19th century hymn: 

An exultant song rings triumphant over despair
My life flows on in endless song
Above Earth's lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn that hails a new creation
Through all the tumult and the strife I hear the music ringing
It finds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing? 


(The boys in the photo, incidentally, are showing their exuberance in one of the poorest villages in the poorest region - Casamance - of one of the poorest sub-Saharan African countries, Senegal. Exuberance will out!)

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