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How Many Pinheads Can Dance On A Theologian?
A few months back, I posted a clip of the author Philip Pullman defending himself from those who would censor his work because it may undermine organised superstition.
In the clip, Pullman suggests inter alia that his critics are perfectly at liberty to write their own books.
Well, it seems one of them has. One 'Father' Gerald O'Collins, who has apparently been immured in the Gregorian University of Rome for the last thirty years, has written a response to Pullman. Well, not so much a response as O'Collins' volume is not fiction - at least not in the way the term is commonly used - more of a diatribe against the author.
I haven't read Pullman's book, and I suspect that I shall never read this priest's reply either. Especially in the light of this quote in The Guardian:
"O'Collins criticises Pullman for "picking, choosing and changing" what he wants from the gospels, altering the story "over and over again in the interests of his own 'truth' or ideology", making historical errors and conducting poor historical research."
So here we have the fine sight of a writer of fiction being excoriated for being selective with his material, altering it in line with his own ideas, and simply making things up by someone who is:
- A Catholic priest
- A Jesuit
- A theologian
I humbly present this story to you as the leading entry for the Irony Of The Year Award.
Apparently...
...ZZ Top are touring again:
A Brief Musing On Culture
Shortly after posting this late last night, I went to bed. But I found the experience to be so...well, unsettling (is there no word which is the positive equivalent of 'traumatic'?) that I found sleep hard to come by.
So I lay awake until gone three pondering on the nature of culture and its dissemination in our world today. And, although I wouldn't be so foolhardy as to chime with that notoriously self-satisfied editorial in The Times which said, "It is possible to look on the present with undisguised satisfaction" (I think it was just before the Wall Street Crash or some similar catastrophe), I really do think that we live - in terms of our access to culture - in as close to The Best Of Times as we are likely to get. And the primary reason is the World Wide Web.
I mean, consider it: for centuries, culture (as we still tend to use the term) was the preserve of the wealthy, the powerful, the favoured few. Great works of art such as paintings and frescoes were created at the behest of the contemporary princes of the world, and were intended solely for their own enjoyment (even if an adjunct of that enjoyment was simply in putting down either their rivals or their underlings).
Music (with the obvious exception of the rude chants of the serfs, or folk music as we now call it) was created at the urging, and under the patronage, of the great kings, princes, popes and merchants. The idea that the peasantry would be able to hear those works - and that it would be nourishing for them to do so - would have struck these rulers as dangerously subversive.
Literature similarly. After all, up until very recently - in historical terms - the vast majority of the population of even the most advanced societies was illiterate. Sure, the lower orders could enjoy their folk-rhymes or poems or stories transmitted imperfectly via the oral tradition, but these forms were by their nature transitory - vox audita perit, vox scripta manet - and were deemed to have no lasting merit.
Even into the age that we now seem to be emerging from, popular access to culture (however one may wish to define it) was not direct. For paintings and sculptures of merit to be seen by the public, there had to be places for them to be displayed. For books - fiction and non-fiction alike - to be available to the public, there had to be publishers and booksellers. For music to be widely heard, there had to be concert halls, theatres, publishers and, latterly, companies willing to issue recordings. And all these required money or the wherewithal to provide the infrastructure.
Thus it has been that the general public's access to culture in almost all its forms has been controlled by a few gatekeepers, who will only make available what is likely to turn to their advantage, either financially or ideologically. For this is no mere capitalist phenomenon. Whereas the great corporations - or even small publishers - of what used to be called The West would seldom issue any culture which would make them a substanstial loss or bring them discredit in the eyes of either the public or the market, so too their equivalents in the great State bureaucracies of The East would publish nothing which did not have the imprimatur of The Party, or which was likely to go against whatever minor amendment of policy was currently holding the ring (the same is equally true of far-right régimes, of course).
And so, we - hoi polloi - were circumscribed as to what we were allowed access to. More troubling was that we often had no idea that we were being limited. We just accepted that what was out there was basically all that there was. Oh, a tiny minority of hardy and foolhardy souls would trek beyond the boundaries set by the market or the prevailing ideological tendency in search of the off-beat, the off-kilter or the dangerously different, but those vistas lay unregarded by the mass, those fields lay untilled by the Common Man.
So it was that vast quantities of human artistic talent never gained exposure to a wide audience. Writers, musicians, composers, artists of all sorts found the gatekeepers uninterested in what they had to offer; either because it would not 'sell' or because if was too far away from the expected orthodoxies of their time.
And this is the great tragedy of it. How many great talents have fallen into silence or disregard, how many works which - if not in the Tolstoy/Beethoven/Rembrandt category - could bring a leap to the heart, a lift to the spirits, a tear to the eye or a shout of joy in the face of the world's aridities; how many have never reached us because of the inevitably self-serving attitude of those gatekeepers?
This is now - mercifully - changing. For the World Wide Web now does allow many (though by no means all) of those talents to put themselves out there, to make their work known, to give people all around this planet access to what they have done.
So the more forward-thinking musicians are by-passing the cold, dead hands of the record business and using the internet to distribute their wares; writers who know how deep are the slush piles and how sepulchral are the morgues of publishing companies are using online services to sell their work either in traditional paper form or electronically; artists, animators and video creators have seized an unprecedented opportunity to promote their 'product' to the widest possible audience.
As a result, those corporations and establishments whose business model depended entirely on their gatekeeper role continuing largely unassailed are in mortal difficulty, and instead of adapting to the new reality are lashing out like the stumbling dinosaurs that they are, either by spraying legal actions all over the place or by attempting (and often succeeding) to suborn governments into passing laws amenable to them, a tactic which they are pursing worldwide - check out the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) for how far they're willing to go.
This wider access by creative people to a potential audience has its downside as anyone would be able to assess. Ninety-five per cent of it, it will be said, is crap. This is correct. But ninety-five per cent of it has always been crap. Just look at where I got the link to the Man Balloon clip, for instance. B3ta is a site which - to use its own description - "...is all about celebrating the best stuff on the internet". Its Messageboard is a place where anyone with pretensions to be able to draw or design can place their work. As a result, most of what goes on there is non descript, although some of the apparently worst material on there is done ironically and with an eye to the many in-jokes which always abound in such circumstances, especially the regular abundance of the CDCs (Crudely-Drawn Cocks) - bright magenta phalluses which can be made to adorn any existing image, usually with unhilarious results.
And yet, it is on B3ta and via B3ta that I have found some of the most amusing or intriguing pictorial material I could ever hope to find. There are examples of the simply amusing (the work of Prodigy69, for example); the clever (Mofaha's conflating of Mondrian and The Beano); or just beautiful (the Man Balloon).
The crucial difference between the old way and the new is that whether something is garbage or not (or simply whether or not something is worth seeing or hearing) is no longer the privilege of the gatekeepers to determine, but is for each and every one of us to decide on the basis of what moves or excites us, not what we are told should move or excite us. Art is not a democracy and never could or should be; in terms of talent, all are not created equal. Nevertheless, the best scenario is that in which all who can contribute can contribute and all who can partake of the results can partake of them.
I have never taken it as a given that the vast majority of people in the world are innately devoid of talent, and I am convinced that there are works of substantial artistic merit being created somewhere in the world nearly every day.
How fortunate we are to live in a time when those works can be so readily available to us. Which is why it is important that we do all we can to keep control of the web out of the hands of corporations and governments and allow the freedom - however imperfect - of people to communicate their thoughts and ideas to flourish.
Oops!
Apologies to anyone viewing some of the Archive pages in Internet Explorer recently, who found everything shifted off to the right of the screen. This was due to a coding cock-up by Yer Judge, who now feels quite embarrassed at making such a basic mistake.
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The Man Who Hit The Right Notes
Morris David Brough Pert
Musician and composer
b. 9 September 1947, d. 27 April 2010
It was while I was in sixth form at the tail end of the 1970s that I first heard (and heard of) Morris Pert.
There was a rather battered old record deck in the far corner of our Common Room and while much of the stuff that was played on it was pretty standard stuff for boys in their mid/late teens who fancied themselves as the élite of their generation - heavy metal from Zeppelin to AC/DC, prog from Genesis to Hawkwind via Rush - there were some who were a little more subtle and adventurous in their tastes.
It was one such who one day spun us an album called Product by a band that I'd never heard of, called Brand X. There was some interest to be garnered from the fact that the drummer on most of the tracks was one Phil Collins, but I found the material itself to be intriguing.
It took me a few months (money was tight), but I managed to get hold of a copy for myself, and it immediately became one of my favourite albums. The combination of interesting musical concepts and the enthusiastic yet nuanced way in which they were played was a winning one.
In due course - a matter of years, for the same reason of financial distress - I was able to get hold of the band's other albums. Morris Pert hadn't featured on their first LP, having been drafted in for their second effort, 1977's Moroccan Roll, where he made an immediate impact on their sound. Literally, as the sleeve notes credit him as being on, "Percussion and a vast number of bits and things that he hit while the tape was running, including: the Q.E. 2, Idi Amin, and undiscovered parts of Scotland".
But Morris Pert was no stereotypical drummer of the 'bash bash thump' school. He had spent the previous years working with such luminaries as Stomu Yamashita and gaining a strong reputation as a composer. He had subtlety in his playing and his composition - reflections of his quiet, self-effacing personality - which can be heard on the one Brand X album where he was able fully to demonstrate both aspects, 1978's Masques.
He was also much in demand as a session player, too: he appeared on much of Kate Bush's seventies and eighties output, as well as working with Mike Oldfield and Peter Gabriel (check out the dense and intricate percussion part on No Self Control on Gabriel's third LP).
Latterly, he retreated to his own home and studio in the very far north-west of Scotland to continue to record and compose to critical acclaim, and it was there at Balchrick that he died, leaving behind him a body of work which - whilst only bringing him the admiration of those who look deeper than the current trend - will continue to be appreciated.
Morris Pert's MySpace page is still up so that you can hear some of his work.
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It may seem somewhat inappropriate to add this, but a series of thoughts came into my mind whilst researching this piece. First off, it explains why I am publishing this obit all of three months after the death of its subject.
The truth is, I didn't know. I've remarked before that there few people quite so parochial as English metropolitan critics in the fields of music and the arts in general. The same may be said for the whole of the London media, even (or, perhaps, especially) the 'serious' ones.
That it took three months for an obituary of Morris Pert to appear in any major London newspaper is indicative of those newspapers' strong tendency to look in utterly the wrong direction. It seems that if you are, say, an obscure Slovenian sociologist, a barrister with a roguish sense of propriety, or just someone who once curtseyed to the Duke of Loamshire, you have a better chance of a speedy obituary in the Guardian, the Telegraph or the Times respectively than if you were a highly-regarded performer or creator of art who happened to labour under the handicap of being born in - or of living in - Scotland, Wales or any part of rural northern England.
Not that coverage in non-metropolitan outlets is necessarily better. Pert's hometown paper, the Arbroath Herald, began its obituary with a wonderful line describing Morris Pert as, "[o]ne of the most talented musicians ever to come out of Arbroath". I chuckled at this - as I suspect its subject would have done - but at least one can say that it showed a sense of engagement. The London Meejatypes can have no such defence.
A (Fish) Broth Of A Girl She Was
One from JudgeCo™'s Department Of Minor Serendipity:
No sooner do I mention the veteran Irish broadcaster Arthur Murphy here, than a news story comes through that one of Ireland's (and, most particularly, Dublin's) iconic figures may not have been what she has been portrayed as being.
For Sweet Molly Malone may not have simply traded in the shallow waters of the fishmongery trade, and that the appellation "Tart With A Cart" applied to her by the coarse wits of Dublin's fair city may have been rather nearer to the truth.
An earlier version of the famous song has been found, dating from the late eighteenth century, and contains such lines as:
"Och! I'll roar and I'll groan, My sweet Molly Malone,
Till I'm bone of your bone, And asleep in your bed."
This would suggest that the ould girl sold more than just the tails of cod and skate, and that any cockles and mussels (conspicuous by their total absence from the newly-rediscovered version) may well have been, shall we say, figurative.
In this reporting of the latest developments, I particularly enjoyed the deeply ironic comment of the Chief Executive of Dublin Tourism, one Frank Magee:
"Everyone knows that it is hard to believe that such activities, if they took place in Dublin in the late 17th century, were of a mercenary nature. The author admits to having imbibed drink, which is another unusual characteristic for a Dubliner, and so I believe his recollection of his night with Molly may have been clouded by alcohol. I believe that there is no evidence to suggest that Molly was anything other than a lady of virtue, who was smitten by the writer and may have shared her bed with him."
But what has this to do with Arthur Murphy? Well, back in 1959 he recorded a sort-of rock'n'roll take on the version of the song which has become most familiar to us today. It was released in Ireland and subsequently on Parlophone in the UK (R4523 was the catalogue number, it was the 'B'-side to Murphy's recording of Sixteen Candles, and mint-condition copies of the 45rpm and 78rpm versions are judged to be worth about £10 a throw). Moreover, when Murphy was doing his weekend stints on Radio City's Downtown show in the mid 1970s, he did spin that particular track once or twice. Which is how I came to know about it in the first place.
Which gives me an excuse to feed you a short extract of this forgotten gem. To hear it, click on the picture of Arthur below (courtesy of Brian Jones' Radio City tribute site) showing him with an alarm clock, as he was the first DJ to be heard on the station just after 06:00 on 21st October 1974.
Irony Aloud
The phone just rang. I knew it would be a sales call. It almost always is. I'm registered with the Telephone Preference Service, but their writ obviously doesn't run everywhere. Like India, for example.
On this occasion, the conversation (if such it could be called) went something like this:
Voice: HELLO! AM I SPEAKING TO MR STAPLEY?
Me: Speaking
Voice: OH HELLO! I'M CALLING FROM (Name of company withheld. Not out of a sense of decorum, but simply because I couldn't make it out. She was very, very loud).
Voice: OUR RECORDS TELL ME THAT SOMEONE AT THAT ADDRESS MAY HAVE ADSDSA FASSDEWREW WQEWQTDSLQKWEQ?
Me: Pardon? (It wasn't that I couldn't hear her, it's that I was holding the receiver a good five or six inches from my left ear by this point)
Voice: I SAID, OUR RECORDS TELL ME THAT SOMEONE AT THAT ADDRESS MAY HAVE ONCE WORKED IN A NOISY ENVIRONMENT? LIKE A FACTORY?
Me (resisting the natural temptation to shout): No, darling, I've only ever worked in an office.
Voice: OH, I'M SORRY. I'LL TAKE YOUR DETAILS OFF OUR SYSTEM. GOODBYE!
Click.
I couldn't find it in myself to be cross with her. She had a pleasing accent with a hint of the West Indies to it, and her cheerfulness seemed to be of the kind which has always appeared to me to be second nature to those of Caribbean origin rather than the usual version which is like fake tan applied over the essentially lily-skinned Eeyoreness of its wearer.
I found the irony of the nature and volume of her enquiry to be pleasing, so I thought I'd share it with you.
Gallery Update
After a slight delay, there are new pictures in The Gallery. I'm also considering consolidating it into fewer pages, but that will have to wait a bit.
Click on the link in the left-hand sidebar.
