So What?

Improvisation and Spirituality 1: Caligula

Caligula was not his real name of course.  He was Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus and Caligula was his nickname.  In view of his popular reputation for cruelty, extravagance, and sexual perversity, in other words as an insane tyrant, one has to ask why Victoria Hesketh has named herself after him.  Little Boots (Caligula in Latin) is a talented musician rather than a tyrant; I'm no longer young and so can't be expected to understand these things.

Anyway, she is an interesting musician and this is one of her best videos:

The interesting thing is you can view alternative recordings on YouTube.  This is one of the same song without the backing group.  You also get a better idea of the use of the ternorion.

Now those of you with a courageous turn of mind might try to listen to this.  I suggest you listen with fingers in your ears; I usually manage 30 seconds max before I switch off.  It is of course the commercial version.

If you're wondering what this has to do with improvisation and spirituality, it's a slow build - there will be more posts on this theme.

We'll All Bake Together When We Bake

So what is this new blog for?   After several months of worthy blogging about ecumenism, I am finding the constraints do not allow me to write on certain topics.  So here is a new blog which will:

Ask questions.  So What? is one of them.  We live in a world where public statements seem increasingly bizarre.  If they’re not wrapped up in jargon they are redolent with unspoken assumptions.  Politicians, church leaders, the media - they all do it.  So what are they actually saying?  Who benefits?  Who loses out?

Local and global perspectives.  The world of a half-employed, aging radical:

• My place is perhaps called Pitsmoor, a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan, highly contentious inner city area of Sheffield, England ...
• My faith is Methodism - a branch of Christianity specially set aside for genteel eccentrics.
• My politics are Green with a reddish tinge perhaps – sadly red is the new blue these days ...
• My profession is development work in community, in and between churches, anywhere that will put up with me ...
• A one-time scientist - doctoral thesis about activated sludge since you ask - and I'm not going to blog about it ... this background does inform my views on the great atheist / theist debate - there's something to look forward to ...
• My music is classical opera, jazz and anything that appeals to me ...  there will be videos!
• My prejudices include (in no particular order) trainers, political extremists of all hues, fundamentalists, people who don’t look where they’re going – are these really prejudices? – I’ve been around long enough to know what they’re like.

We’re all in denial.  The world we have lived in for the last 20-30 years, maybe my whole life (so make that 55 years), is coming to an end.  (I'm not talking about the end of time but of our modern oil dependent civilisation.)  Are we all suffering cognitive dissonance?   Still, it goes against my instincts to be censorious.  We’re all in this together and even Methodists are playing their small part to screw up the planet.  Essentially we are living through absurd times and it falls to me and others to point out we're all rowing the same boat to oblivion, whatever direction we're rowing in.

So, I will point out the absurd.  I don’t want to laugh at people so much as point out the sense we have all been caught with our hand in the cookie jar (or biscuit barrel in English English). 

Some will think all this has been said before.  They would be right, here is one example, (I love the rhyme for ICBM):