Spandex Jerrytastic leaves

Tiny orange dungarees;

Many men were on their knees:

"Jolly Bolly Knockers!"

Holy Holly Helly Hoo.

Many Mandy's Mary Moo.

Writing, writing, but who to?

"Kaery Nary Squeezer!"

Bless'd be you and bless'd be me

Cocking up the cocking tree,

Mouse ran down, cat did pee

"On the trolley pisser."

Whiner Diner Polly Pocket

Stuck it like a fucking rocket.

Wally Dolly she did sock it,

"Rarely in the shitter!"

Labels: poetry

Anyone with views on the new series of Green Wing might like to pop over to the discussion over on the GW Series 2 Blog... I enjoyed it lots, but am waiting to see what happens in the rest of the series before I decide whether it's up to the standard of the first series!

Update

Woo! I have the GW1 DVDs before YOU can get them in the shops!

Tagged: greenwing, channelfour, tv, blog, seriestwo, television.

The problems with today:

• Our washing machine broke down
• In the process, it stained many of my clothes with weird rusty-coloured dirty water stains
• I transferred a small fortune to my current account to cover bills and tuition fees
• I had really bad dreams last night and woke up crying. (I don't know what they were about.)
• Stuart left to go to Germany for two weeks :(
• I couldn't eat until this evening.

The good things about today:

• I spent this evening eating pizza, tiramisu, Tuc biscuits, and drinking a bottle and a half of Chianti.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.

—Antoine de Saint-Exuper

Tonight was the first night since October that I drove up the M61 to Bolton in the light. The sun was setting beautifully, refracting through the dispersing clouds and shining as if it was the first time it had shone. The music in my car and the rolling Lancashire hills combined with it to hint at the best of all possible worlds, an illusion which we all must escape to from time to time, indulging a primal urge to reduce the world to narrative, to reduce the world to good, to reduce the world, and to reduce ourselves to ascetics. But the world is full and irreducible: we have an inexhaustibly plenitudinous encounter with it, because the world is none of these things: it is anti-narrative, it is good and bad and neither, and we are agents in spite of the sun and rain and grass and desert which surrounds us.

Faire is the heaven where happy soules have place

In full enjoyment of felicitie;

Whence they do still behold the glorious face

Of the Divine, Eternall Majestie;

Yet farre more faire be those bright Cherubins

Which all with golden wings are overdight.

And those eternall burning Seraphins

Which from their faces dart out fiery light;

Yet fairer than they both and much more bright

Be the Angels and Archangels

Which attend on God's owne person without rest or end.

These then in faire each other farre excelling

As to the Highest they approach more neare,

Yet is that Highest farre beyond all telling

Fairer than all the rest which there appeare

Though all their beauties joynd together were;

How then can mortal tongue hope to expresse

The image of such endlesse perfectnesse?

—Edmund Spenser

By embracing the world, I say, and embracing humanity, in all its fallenness and indignity. An embrace is heaven; a loving encounter is heaven, and it is world; a transaction in which we are reconciled with God. Faire is the heaven, and faire is the world.

DarrenS has the following over on Flickr:

Menghy Dagrow

Menghy Dagrow in the hearse.

Another world. Another verse.

The people all said, "Undertaker,

Where are Samueletta's shoes?

Her foots are morely in the nudes."

Under Samueletta's toes,

Alas, dear Menghy picks his knows.

"Gnostic anacrostic toxic!"

Samueletta's mother cried,

Because her toes had nearly died.

Menghy Dagrow nose no bounds;

Now he's dead, he can't be found

Save in moustaches, under glasses,

Cooking cordon bleu cuisine

In St. Theo's trampoline.

Generally, generations

Generate genitalations

In the bedroom, cold and raw,

On the kitchen table, floor,

In the pantry, by the door,

With the ventilation shaft,

In the garden, up the path,

Tickle Posh and Becks, although

Neither of them demonstrate

Menghy Dagrow's perfect weight.

"Gentlefolk, please calm yourselves,"

Menghy Dagrow wisely tells

A rabid crowd of rabit wolves

Under Mary's bathroom scales

(Sourced from Sweden, via Wales).

Witness to a brief encounter

Mary had with Jerry Mounther

Which he did most skilfully,

With little mess or complication

Since there was zero penetration,

Much to Mary's disappointment,

But Menghy Dagrow gave some ointment;

From then on, the men stayed hard,

Mary rode them through the night

And gave the scales quite a fright.

Lies! Deception! Subterfuge!

Menghy's telephone was huge,

Early days of telecom, then

Many years of internauting

Samueletta's astronauting.

Menghy got his breath again,

But died just after half past ten.

Tagged: poetry, original, nonsense, poem.

Labels: poetry

• ORGAN HAZARD SHOCKER!!! A belated link: EU directive threatens pipe organs due to lead-content specification on new work. Probably a storm in a teacup, but worth the tabloid headline nonetheless. We're talking organs here, people. (Thanks, Nick.) Tagged: pipeorgan, organ, lead, eu, europe, directive.

• Will my Intel-based Mac melt if I run Windows XP on it? Guardian column on some successful attempts and possible risks. Tagged: intel, mac, windows.

What have you that you did not receive?

—I Corinthians 4:7

Went for a nice walk around Fletcher Moss and Stenner Woods in Didsbury this afternoon; the sun was shining, and it felt like Spring might at last be breaking through the frozen ground of wintry inertia which leaves everything looking and feeling desolate and dead. We maintain hope and expectation that spring will come, and that life is there all along, even when all we experience is death. And we have not been let down yet; the providence of nature uninterrupted, life ever à venir, ever to-come, ever in the inexhaustible future of imagination, creation, which calls the earth into being and into life with a single word.

Tagged: corinthians, bible, newtestament, fletchermoss, stennerwoods, didsbury, manchester, nature, creation, imagination, providence, theology, death, life.

• Perhaps I should buy a shredder: torn-up then sellotaped-back-together credit card application is successful! via Suburbanbliss. Tagged: consumer, credit, fraud, privacy.

Regrettably, the Daily Distress have reduced the size of their thumbnail, but the resolution still just about allows us to enjoy this classic.

Tagged: express, nhs, surgeon.

• The Guardian's new "Comment is Free" section contains this nice heated tag cloud. Is this a better representation scheme than del.icio.us? My initial feeling is that it contains more information and is much easier to use and link with. (via Ben Hammersley, who coded it) Tagged: ben hammersley, hammersley, tagging, guardian.

On the other hand, some days go well and I get to the end feeling positive and full of the force which yesterday I lacked. As on every Tuesday during Lent, tonight we had Stations of the Cross, which I mention only because our priest is away and one of the servers led the service instead. He was very nervous but did it excellently and I felt happy for him because I remember what it feels like to overcome massive jitters and still to be able to give a good performance. That is substantially what makes performance exciting and fulfilling; the same applies to life, I suppose, the performance just being somewhat more protracted. It's days like this that I'm glad the church is there because, for all its failings, this particular person has been transformed into an outgoing, talkative and sociable guy, having been completely timid before coming to church. I only justify this, as always, on sociological grounds; there are fewer and fewer other arenas of social transaction configured in the same way as a (good) church; where there is a regular audience/congregation over a period of decades rather than just months or years; where meetings are so frequent; where people understand they are there to support each other and help each other grow.

This isn't going to, and shouldn't, lead to higher churchgoing in the future. The established church is in terminal decline. As a result of technology, our social ties are structured differently today, which has many positive aspects. The internet enables positive discussion, political exchange, political mobilisation, international communication, and has broken down many barriers which we are better off without. But this doesn't benefit everyone, and the minority of people which new social networks leave behind are at risk of being forgotten. The elderly, the poor, children, the timid server who comes to church, are groups of people who are prone to marginalisation in every generation, but who have been supported in the past by the strong ties of churches, community organisations, physical neighbours, nuclear family; but the demands of postmodern economy for full employment, and the technological propensity for privileging the global over the local, mean that these strong ties are no longer as easily sustained. Hence, greater state involvement (which would initially seems paradoxical) in the provision of child care and elder care.

The fact that the old social institutions like churches are passing is not necessarily negative. What is negative is the loss along with these insititutions of the potential for social capital and civil society that they represented. The question facing us as individuals and communities, but not as a society, nation, or government, is: how do we renew these healthy local networks of relationships? I don't ask this question because I'm being romantic, but because the consequences of a breakdown of actual, physical, real-world relationships for the most marginalised in society are staring us in the face every day.

Tagged: church, state, society, britain, child, children, government, postmodernism, postindustrial, social capital, civil society, relationship, technology, establishment, performance, lent, stations, elderly, elder, poverty, abuse, marginalisation, marginalization, politics, political, sociology.

I am languishing in a void, moving at random in the cosmic petri dish of ambivalence. I lack force, cannot write, cannot read, cannot think, cannot work, cannot talk, cannot engage except with those very close to me. I have no ambitions any more, nothing to drive me forward, no end to give purpose to the means. Man does not have a trade these days; better not to have a trade; better to sit at home and buy tracks off of iTunes. This keeps the economy going. If we ever decided to stop buying shit, the engines of unlimited capital growth would stall terminally, and the neo-lib dream would be over. But we never will stop buying shit. Without a true trade the individual collapses into a completely arbitrary preferentialism, and the individual identity dissolves in the same turn.

The artist lacked a trade from time immemorial. Hence the artist lacked an identity. Hence the artist is non-human in the eyes of others. All the works of canonised artists are a compulsive outpouring of non-identity, romantic ejaculations of the non-existent, kenotic cries for nutrition which are only redeemed by the movement of the work of art into the church. Thus is the arbitrary anchored to the absolute, the non-existent resolved by the creator, kenosis reversed by the plenitude of God.

The more we use iTunes, the more we long for God, and the sooner I can leave my petri dish for the greener grass.

Under three weeks to go until the wonderful Green Wing returns to Channel 4 for a second series (Friday, March 31st). Last Wednesday the first episode was screened to the press. Here are a few links (calm yourselves):

• GW's production designer blogs about series two, containing some screenshots from the first episode :ooo [updated now: sorry, I put in the wrong link before]
• British Sitcom Guide's Green Wing page
• James Henry, one of the writers, blogs about the new series and the BAFTA screening. He also has news that Peep Show has been recommisioned for a fourth series in spite of the third series being a bit weak.
• Channel 4's Green Wing site has nothing on at the moment, but hopefully it will soon.

Tagged: Green Wing, Comedy, Channel 4, Channel Four.

• The Observer has quite a nice interview with John Hurt today. Tagged: John Hurt, Observer, Actor.

Dear loyal reader, Today I went to my first civil partnership ceremony. The event itself was a shambles; the registrar was incompetent and managed to get both parties' names either completely or partially wrong. But that is another story. As we said later, all registrars are corrupt and perverted, but the ones we know are alright, and after all, some of our best friends are registrars. More to the point, however, there was much drinking; I have now been drunk for the best part of twenty-four hours; and I met lots of nice new people and the film Caché was strongly recommended by one of them. I really must be drunk more often. Last night, I had an intimate experience with a glamorous Italian academic, and today I also chatted at length to some medieval historians. All in all my social skills have had a good workout this weekend. I hope you've been having as much fun as me. Yours, Newfred. x

I knew it would be like this, and I didn't. Does anyone else feel like they're living in the future? I suspect it's because I'm really living in the past.

This post originally appeared on the unsuccessful Supplementary blog. It's now been integrated into the main site.

Languages are made to be spoken, writing serves only as a supplement to speech... Speech represents thought by conventional signs, and writing represents the same with regard to speech. Thus the art of writing is nothing but a mediated representation of thought. —Jacques Derrida

I am fascinated by Derrida's thinking of 'the supplement,' but make absolutely no claim to understand it. The above quotation is issued only thanks to Nicholas Royle's superb book on Derrida. Nevertheless, in this, a supplement to Newfred Rebooted, I vow to post miscellaneous musings on all things supplementary, and indeed to proffer supplements to the main website.

Everything around us is in a constant process of supplementation, of being-added-to, and therefore eternally incomplete and in-need-of-something. In my extremely limited meditations on the subject, I have already considered a range of possible interpretations. Take this web page: there is text, but this is supplemented by a box, and then a border, and there are other boxes, a title page, the window... or is it the other way round? Does writing supplement its own context? Or, take a television programme: it is immediately supplemented by breaks, by subtitles, by trailers, by recaps of the previous episode and previews of the next, by interactive functions, by The DVD, by repeats, by review programmes; it goes on, necessarily, ad infinitum, in an endless process of supplementation.

'The supplement' sums up Derrida: on the one hand it is simply stating-the-obvious, but on the other hand it is also something far more ghostly which cuts to the very essence of how we structure meaning.

Last night we began working on Arvo Pärt's Berliner Messe. If you're not familiar with the music of Pärt, a good place to start is with his Fratres or Tabula Rasa. His music is extremely simple in the sense that it is minimalist; the Gloria of the Berliner Messe is based almost exclusively around a G minor chord, but then complicated by the incessant crossing of parts and the obscurity of any possible melody. As in anything perceived as 'minimalist,' it can be argued that the most important aspect of the music is what happens between the notes in both a vertical and a horizontal sense. The effect of most of Pärt's later music is extremely haunting and otherworldly, in much the same way as John Tavener's music is. Unsurprisingly, Pärt reached his current music standpoint by a recourse ad fontes, a return to the sources of Western music, through plainsong and renaissance polyphony. Once again we see how in this most current, postmodern, music, how there is a return to and an echo of the premodern, and it is this literal ghost of history (barbarism, as the enlightenment would have it) which creates such an ethereal atmosphere, I believe. The word 'postmodern' is a hindrance in understanding what is really going on here, though; prefer perhaps Derrida's phrase, 'the enlightened enlightenment,' which I was reminded of whiel reading some posts over at The Blind Beggar the other day. Furthermore, as Andreas Andreopoulos has argued, the music of Gorécki, Pärt and Tavener represents the "(re)turn of art towards religion as part of a larger spiritual phenomenon rather than as an exclusively artistic trend." ('The Return of Religion in Contemporary Music' in Literature and Theology 14.1, March 2000)

In some ways I agree with Andreopoulos' position, but at this stage it risks hyperbole a little. On a sociological level it is essential to see how such work is received as well as how it is composed. While these composers, belonging to a school of 'New Simplicity' or 'Sacred Minimalism,' may compose by uncomplicating the musical enterprise, by filtering out the arbitrariness of structures imposed by romanticism, the reception of these works seems to follow a completely different set of rules. We are still obsessed with complicating the artistic character — the Wiki on Pärt is an excellent example — and, further, stressing the personality and history of the composer in assessing the work. This is, I believe, a profoundly romantic gesture, and one which is anachronistic to the spirit of the music. There persists a structuralist belief that researching the composer will reveal something about the music.

The response of the 'enlightened enlightenment' to personality might be to recount an anecdote someone recently told me about when they were going to a concert which Pärt would be attending. Shortly before, my friend was wandering around Woolworth's and remembered noticing a vagrant browsing the pick-and-mix. Later, after the concert, Pärt was summoned to the stage: alas, it was the vagrant. How would this tale fit into a romantic account? Of course, it would not. But who's to say it's any more or less relevant to the music than any other consideration?

Tagged: Part, Arvo, Berliner Messe, Berlin Mass, Tavener, Andreopoulos, Postmodernism, Music, Secular, Sacred, Gorecki, Blind Beggar, Arvo Part.

So here's the thing. I told Stuart and he thinks I'm mad. While watching 'Friends' on E4 earlier, I noticed during a blackscreen moment some faint text panning across the screen in a box which read, 'Stop Bullying.' I have noticed faint lines & symbols before, but assumed them to be interference. I am still open to such explanations, but this is the first time I have actually managed to read any text!

I maintain that I am not mad. Has anyone else noticed this? Is there an explanation? Should I see a doctor? Will the government take me away for writing this? Nevertheless, even if it is real subliminal messaging, I'm quite impressed at how quaint the message is.

Tagged: E4, Bullying, Messaging, Subliminal.

• Robin Greenwood of Christian Aid argues neo-liberalism does not offer the answer to Asian poverty.

Tagged: Asia, Poverty, Christian-Aid, Greenwood.

• Ten Distinctives of Postmodern Churches is a summary of emergent-church and incarnational church approaches to ministry in a postmodern environment. Depending on your interpretation, this configuration will either be evidence of how exploitative the churches can be, or this could represent a positive step forward for the churches in meeting the challenge of the world in saecula saeculorum. It is perhaps a little of both, but as I perhaps come closer to personal 'faith' than I have for seven or eight years, I feel more and more frustrated with the church in general and my church in particular. The thing I respect about incarnational ministry is that it does what it says on the tin: yes, it does use strong and absolutist language about God and Jesus etc., but it is grounded in this-worldly action; people know what they're getting, and if they don't like it, they don't have to support it. Traditional churches, it seems to me, are more in the business of getting people through the door on false premises.

Tagged: Church, Evangelical, Incarnation, Incarnational, Postmodernism, Faith, Secularism, Secular, Ministry.

Just in case any church musicians ever stumble upon this website, I thought I'd make a couple of my arrangements of seasonal music available. There is some dodgy notation in some of them, because I am poor and therefore use Finale Notepad, which is a tool I shan't criticise, because it is free and has enabled me to present music in a way I wouldn't have done otherwise. Anyway, the Tallis O Nata Lux arrangement should be in 3/2, 6/4 or no time signature, depending on how you look at it (but it certainly shouldn't be in 12/8: this is the only way Notepad would allow me six crotchets in a bar). The arrangement of Were you there has some lower-voice splits, but these could well be omitted. I'll post a bit more stuff when I have time.

As ever, feel free to use and distribute these arrangements, but please do so without removing credits.

• Download O Nata Lux de Lumine by T. Tallis, arr. for SATB (from SATTB) [PDF 68kb]
• Download Were you there, traditional spiritual, arr. for SATB (with splits)

Tagged: Church, Music, Tallis, SATB, Arrangement, O Nata Lux, Were you there, Choir, Choral, Printed Music, Spiritual.

Now the crazy Minifig from over at Pootling kindly invited me to join his In The Fridge group on Flickr which takes photos from the inside of fridges while their doors are closed. As a result:

Tagged: Fridge, Photos, Inside.

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter slumbering the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

—S. T. Coleridge

In case you're wondering, yes, I have posted this before, but it is one of my favourite poems and so I thought I'd post it again. :)

The Shostakovich concert last weekend was an education. I think I might have heard the fifteenth symphony on the radio before, but I certainly hadn't heard the Mahler orchestral song-cycle Das Lied von der Erde, a work of symphonic proportions stretching over an hour. Mahler was apparently the composer Shostakovich most admired musically, and the ending of Das Lied was overwhelming:

The dear earth everywhere

Blossoms in spring, and grows green anew.

Everywhere and forever, forever

Blue lights the horizon.

Forever... forever...

These words were added by Mahler, the core text of all the songs coming from Chinese poetry. There is a very thorough Wikipedia article for anyone interested in finding out more about the work. The end of the final movement was overwhelming, the instrumental harmony gradually fading away and pushing towards a cadence but never quite reaching it, cycling through the same sequence of chords (in a way that struck me as Wagnerian) until the music finds its final resting place. Above all, this setting of the words by Mahler brims over with a transcendental optimism which issues from the resources of the earth and of nature itself; it is a profoundly human work issuing from a composer whose changing religiosity was never far from mysticism.

Shostakovich's Fifteenth was powerful in a different way, although the preview before the concert alerted us to certain compositional similarities between the works. Both works certainly seek to integrate jovial light-heartedness with spine-tingling accounts of the ambiguities and tragedies of human life. If you're feeling down today, you could do worse than listen to these two works; they overflow with hope.

Technorati tags: Shostakovich, Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde, Symphony, Manchester, Bridgewater, Hall, BridgewaterHall, Philharmonic, BBC, BBCPhilarmonic, Sinaisky.

Things have been very crazy over the last week. My brother and I went to he Bridgewater Hall last Friday for the last concert in the Shostakovich series. The balance wasn't great in the Mahler song-symphony but it might have been because we were sat at the front of the stalls; we might have been better off further back. Our friend Alex came to stay from Germany, so we had a raclette party last Saturday (1 bottle of wine); I worked on my historiography essay on Sunday (half a bottle of wine); finished my historiography essay on Monday; finished my research methods exercises, did choir and then went to jazz club on Tuesday (1.5 bottles of wine); met some friends for drinks on Wednesday while Stuart and Alex went to London (2 pints); and had a friend over for dinner last night (1 bottle of wine). Will do a proper update soon! And sorry for redesigning again. I have too much time on my hands.

Snow is so romantic, but I want it to be summer again, because summer is romantic too, and has the advantage of being sunny, and everything's better when it's sunny. I finished all my work, handed it in, so now I am officially on sabbatical (apart from the book reviews I'm going to write), and celebrating by getting fairly drunk on consecutive nights. Last night five of us went to a jazz club in Manchester and drank six bottles of wine between us. I like those odds, as Homer Simpson might say. I like life too, even though it makes me very sad.

Edith Piaf sings about mon légionnaire, the snow continues to fall, and tomorrow beckons, like it always does, with its unfailing regularity.