The Flaming Lips

Ah yes, the show at Central Park SummerStage on Monday. Musically I quite like the Flaming Lips: did you hear their remake of Dark Side of the Moon? Love it.

My problem was with the needy, out-sized ego of the singer: between every song he'd do a pumping motion with his arms if he felt the applause wasn't sustained enough. He also had some childish political "thoughts" which he felt compelled to share: you know what, if every audience member did a peace sign all together it really, really won't change anything. Hippy-ist thought for the consumer generation. Likewise some of the lyrics feel self-consciously quirky and twee, and probably deliberately not taken to the extremes that might make them really interesting: check out Gong / Here & Now if you feel the need for unadulterated hippy quirkiness.

I'm always looking for that wall of sound at a concert that you can slam into. Flaming Lips delivered the wall, but sometimes also they provided a sparer sound with lots of spaces where interesting things could happen between the notes. Maybe they should record more sessions on the radio so the listener can cut through the visual excess to the musical core.

The (deliberately?) retro staging allowed me to have fun with my camera, but the blow-up ball and the roadies and groupies all dressed in orange just felt cultish. Everyone on stage (and many in the audience) were just ecstatic: you know what, it was a good show, but it wasn't really great sex. And that's despite the band members coming on stage through an on-screen projected vagina and the two phallo-horns ejaculating orange confetti and white smoke over the audience.

The whole event just felt over-indulgent, and made me long for a band like the Antlers who just get on the stage and play. A colleague recently criticized my over-detailed emails by observing "you've got cum on your hands". Yes, the Flaming Lips too had cum on their hands.

Happy Birthday Dad!

There are many noble and illuminating skill-sets that my Father continues to develop over his long, long, yes long life. There is of course his brilliance in the field of civil engineering, manifested in his ability to sketch a curve and then supply the mathematical formula that describes that curve. Then there are his people management skills, which he parlayed into the creation of the largest civil engineering consultancy in the world. Or perhaps his ability to transform Terminator-style into a walking compendium of botanical Latin names, complemented by his deftness with trowel and dibber. His design of hi-fidelity audio systems involving valves and ferro-concrete are rightly legendary. We should not forget his Fastnet boat racing skills with his professional crew: my mother. On a smaller note, I particularly remember the decorative back-lit panels that he created one Christmas in Pakistan, with wize men on camels overlooking the little town of Bethlehem.

These are amongst the many skill-sets for which Dad is widely admired. Impressive though these undoubtedly are, they pale into insignificance when set against his one vast, overarching accomplishment. I speak, of course, of his ability to fall asleep at a moment’s notice. Perhaps gaining inspiration from a toggle-switch mounted on his self-built amplifier in Pakistan, he flips the switch and is out for the count.

This skill has earned him fame, nay notoriety, at dinner parties. His timing is always perfect. He avoids falling asleep during the process of eating, as pitching head-first into the soufflé would be a trifle indelicate. He instead awaits until coffee is served, perhaps in the living room. He stakes his claim on the comfiest chair, or better yet an overstuffed sofa seated next to one of the insufferable bores he calls his friends (you know who you are!). He waits until the aforesaid insufferable one strikes up a conversation with him, perhaps on a riveting topic such as the beauty of sewage system design in Uzbekistan. Then, with the precision and –yes- grace of a leopard grabbing its prey, he flips the switch and falls asleep.

At first this practice caused some consternation amongst his circle of friends, acquaintances and entourage. They mistakenly applied inappropriate adjectives in their inadequate quest for the right terms to describe what they had just witnessed. Words such as “rude”, “unforgivable” and even “bugger” were deployed, often with a slight shortness in breath which denoted indignation. But Dad knew, as with much else in his life, that he was just ahead of the curve, and that unlike mere mortals he knew the equation for that curve. Playing the long game, he pressed ahead with developing his skills: wine and cheese parties, pot-luck suppers and haute-cuisine sit-downs were all grist to his mill. Over time, indignation gave way to acceptance, acceptance to a grudging admiration, until his coterie began to view a sleeping Roy as a seal of approval for the food just served. A worried host or hostess would whisper to his or her significant other, with a slight shortness of breath now denoting panic: “Roy’s not sleeping yet! Could it be the vol-au-vents?”

Like all skills, such as playing the banjo, continual practice is required to achieve perfection. Dad’s family was privileged to repeatedly view his devotion to his overarching skill. Now skills often require tools to deploy in their pursuance of perfection: in Dad’s case, his tools were “Classic Bike” and “Motorcycle News”. “Classic Bike” was deployed if he had had a so-so day: falling asleep in a chair with “Classic Bike” open at the ads page for spare parts for a BSA Rocket Gold Star, it was easy to maintain the pretence that he was reading: the small page magazine format, the quality stock glossy paper, the stiffening reinforcing of staples at the spine, all made it relatively easy to ensure that the monthly periodical remained open and vertical while he pursued his craft.

If he has had a good day, he felt up to tackling “Motorcycle News”. The large format, the floppy newsprint pages, the absence of stapling all conspired to present formidable challenges, which my father met head-on. There is nothing as awe-inspiring as seeing my Dad asleep, with “Motorcycle News” open and erect in front of his face, with Barry Sheene shaking on the front page with each intake of breath. I know that my Mother felt her bosom swell with pride when she came in from the kitchen, hands red from the washing-up, only to see such artistry in full display. Her words may not have reflected her unbound admiration, but we knew it was there: deep inside. Very deep inside.

As the offspring of a giant, my father is an enormous inspiration to me. Living with him when I was growing up, it became apparent to me that his cornucopia of skills and talents was over-abundant. Most sons wish to emulate their fathers in some way, and after carefully evaluating the many fruits he had in his basket, I settled on the skill I most admired: his ability to fall asleep at the drop of the proverbial hat. Some said I should have adopted his engineering, business or even his gardening skills. But Dad and I both know these to be ephemera, passing shadows in the confusing thicket of life, and that in life you should focus on the important things.

At seventeen, I managed to fall asleep on the ridged metal floor of a 4 ton army truck, as it bumped and grinded its way across the Welsh Black Mountains. This was a defining moment of my adolescence, the transition from childhood to adulthood. I make it a duty to fall asleep at the opera, the theatre or movie house, and strive to ignore Robin’s sharp elbows. The mosh pit at a rock concert is a little more difficult: I find an unfrequented corner, sit down cross-legged and swiftly am rocked into the arms of Morpheus.

I have even adopted Dad’s famous phrase as my own: “I must have dropped off, for five minutes”. For him and for me, it is never, ever five minutes.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Cartoons and Intolerance: a mid-flow discussion

The following is an email I sent a collegue on the intolerance debate surrounding the Danish cartoons

In our multi-layered argument and going back to an earlier thread, my point was that Muslims feel that they were attacked by the West purely because they are Muslims. If you take the point that we didn’t carpet-bomb the Falls Road to wipe out the IRA, but did so at Falluja in an attempt to wipe out the insurgency, then, quod erat demonstrandum, we attacked them because they were Muslims, and they are right to so think.

I disagree with your last conclusion too. With the possible discounting of self-professed believers who belong to no organization apart from the Church of Dr. Feelgood, I have not found any serious church-goers who do not exhibit intolerance in some fairly fundamental ways. The whole act of belonging to a Church or religion inevitably predicates that one believes that that Church or religion is the “correct” path, and that therefore people who are not part of the club are necessarily following an “incorrect” path. To be sure, I have met devout persons who I have found to be warm and admirable people (I’m thinking right now of a born-again woman from Oklahoma City I sat next to on a plane), but that alone does not discount my premise.

Of course I find it absurd that people, many who do not have a pot to piss in, are demonstrating against some cartoons, but it fits my premise about the distorting emphases of faith. I would much rather they turn their ire against a target that has more real impact on their lives: the corrupt, brutal and inefficient regimes that are in charge of their countries would be a good start. But I would also prefer that our home-grown hero, Rudolph Guiliani, had not vented his ire against the Brooklyn Museum for exhibiting Chris Ofili’s portrait of the Madonna (because it was made in part out of elephant dung and pornographic pictures from magazines). He tried to shut the exhibition down, and threatened to withdraw city funding from the Museum.

Jim Callaghan

Jim Callaghan

Jum Callaghan's death at 92 has brought out all the usual hyperbolic praises that such milestone events engender, and perhaps in recognition of his limetime of political service, this is no more than his due. After all, it is a social convention (that we fearfully continue with certain knowledge of our own swiftly-approaching demise) that funerals are a time for warm-hearted eulogy, not cool-headed analysis.

Since others have polished the plaudits with greater skill than I can aspire to muster, it remains for me to rewind the videotape of history. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, he refused to devalue the pound, to the economy's cost. As Home Secretary, he sent the British army into Northern Ireland, with repercussions that the nations on both sides of the Irish Sea are still trying to detangle. As Prime Minister, he presided over a country in chaos, and by refusing to call an early (winnable) election he ushered in "The Winter of Discontent" and the Tories under Margaret Thatcher. This is the man who publicly and vociferously withheld his support from Barbara Castle's reformist "In Place of Strife", and suffered from the Union militancy that that program was supposed to replace.

Sunny Jim's lasting legacy to the nation was to hasten the demise of "Old" Labour, by blithely ignoring the irreconcible internal conflicts choking Party and Nation, thereby offering the Nation to Margaret and the Party (eventually) to Tony.

Much has been made of Jim being an honourable man. Honour in politics is a rare commodity, and we should applaud him for it; incompetance in politics is alas far more common, and for this our hands should remain apart.

The Gates

The Gates

On February 18, it was my pleasure to accompany a bunch of eigth-graders from my son's School Poly Prep through the Central Park to view "The Gates" -Christo and Jean-Claude's latest large-scale installation. The majority of the kids appeared to be remarkably unimpressed (unlike myself), but had a good time climbing over the Alice statue.

Return of the Caliphate

If white is the colour
of mourning in Andalusia,
it is a proper custom.

Look at me, I dress myself in the white
of white hair in mourning for youth.

Abu l-Hasan al-Husri

An abiding dream for many Muslims is the return of the Caliphate, a united Islam as a world center of power and culture. Setting aside the fevered fundamentalist fantasies of the deranged and dispossessed, it certainly appears that a united Middle East is the only way that Moslems can stand up to the powerful West. A fragmented and backwards Middle East, trust fund oil states of money but no influence, do not represent or value their subject peoples and as a result those peoples are held in little worth by the rest of the world.

Models for the twenty-first century Caliphate are not hard to find, such as the neighbouring European Union, with its loose federalist structure and its freedom or thought and association. Or perhaps the tighter political structure of the Great Satan itself. Or a look back to the enlightened poet-princes of Al Andalus, whose benign Islamic rule in Spain served as a lonely beacon of light in the Europe of the Dark Ages.

Fallujah in Pictures

For those in the red states that think democracy is obtainable at the end of a gun, check out the powerful Fallujah in Pictures blog at:
http://fallujapictures.blogspot.com/

A different country

Precious Cargo, Memphis

Due to the vagaries of construction site schedules and the demands of a client, I was in the red (Memphis, Tennessee) on Black Wednesday, the day John Kerry conceded.

Since then I have been reading analysis after analyses, in an attempt to understand how or why America went for the little guy. The analyses contradict each other with aplomb; in fact it's a safe bet that Americans had many reasons for casting their votes, not all of them synchronous, many of them contradictory. It will take a four-year unfolding / unravelling of events for these same Americans to judge whether they made a wize choice.

As I have quieted my voice in shock and awe for two weeks, avoiding the siren charms of the dimensionless space that is this great blogosphere, I feel that it's time to add my own contribution to the cacaphony of commentary. I'm reaching for, but failing to grasp, the great unifying theme that can tie up the straying red, white and blue threads into some neat package of punditry that explains all to everyone, or at the very least to me, myself, I.

But this I can say. You Americans who voted for George Bush as your President sent a message to us non-Americans who cohabit with you in our shared home, the planet earth. The message is simple and clear: we don't need you, we don't want you.

We have heard and understood you.

So back to Memphis and the "Precious Cargo" restaurant at 381 North Main Street, pictured above. Having half an hour to eat before my meeting, I selected a black-owned establishment, to fill my belly with catfish and fries, and more importantly to avoid the need to pass pleasantries back and forth with the victorious good ol' boys. Fortunately, I got a lot more than that. The politically-active proprietress (alas I've forgotten her name) filled me in on the Memphis scene, talked eloquently of ongoing racial polarization, failed attempts at urban regeneration, a sapping of the African-American political will in the city since it hosted the assassination of Dr. King. This woman's will however was magnificently unsapped: the restaurant hosts acid-jazz, hip-hop and reggae concerts, poetry readings, and the night before was the venue for a victory party for a candidate for the Memphis school board: a little victory snatched from the mighty jaws of our collective defeat.

Do ye ken John Peel?

An elegy for the late, great English DJ, penned by David Stoner, our senior correspondent in Barcelona.

A few days ago, while ambling up the Rambla, I was whisked away back in time to a moment in the late seventies - I presume it was then. I was boarding-school schoolboy as we all were in those days. On one particular cold evening in November - rather like today, I suppose - I was sitting at a large solid wooden table in a Tudor-style house in a quintessential village a stone's throw from the town of Cambridge. It was half-term, you see, and this Laurie Lee-like world is where I would go on leave. It seemed to be colder in those days. That was probably because this was East Anglia and the North Sea freezing fog would wash in over the estuaries and endlessly flat sugerbeet-smelling farmland chilling you to the bones. Neither the cold nor the smell would ever leave you in peace. Unless, however, you were in that cottage home which did indeed provide a cosy retreat form the autumnal elements and boarding school.

More often than not, especially between the hours of ten and twelve, evenings were spent around that wooden table reading and listening to a large radio; the type made of metal and wood displaying an exotic array of large cities among the numbers on the dial: London, Bombay, Moscow, Buenos Aires, New York ... One particular evening while dreaming about such cosmopolitan destinations, a voice came over the airwaves interrupting my train of thought. To this day I have never forgotten what it said and have always had difficulty communicating how much it meant to me, and probably to countless others of my generation. It said ten magical words, and I am sure that when you read them you will know what I am talking about. It went like this: "And for no particular reason, 'Tommy Gun' by The Clash ..."