If I'm not mistaken, Minnie Marks hadn't yet cleared 20 years on the planet when she travelled from her native Oz to Ireland to be introduced and interviewed by this cringey Balcony presenter... But the meat in the sandwich is worth waiting for. Funny how the blues can cause a smile to sneak out. A song of faithfulness and unfaithfulness.
Here's another vid when she was back on home turf, playing the title track of her 2012 album.
The girl has attitude.
...If I could walk away from me?"
I'm just back from a weekend spent with a community that I'm part of. It's really an extended family, where you don't yet know all your relatives really well. Our political views vary, our religious views vary, and our ages vary considerably, but we're committed to getting on as a community. After a weekend drinking more coffee than I probably should (including with a world-renowned astrophysicist), doing a bit more walking than I'm used to (with a guy who's been to the top of Everest), and sitting down to eat some modest but adequate food with them, I know a few folk a bit better. One part of the weekend which helped was the Angels' Share session, tho sadly this was more metaphorical than actual. (If, as was the case with me, you don't know what the Angels' Share is, you need to a trip to a good Distillery). My respect for some of these people has grown, and I've benefited from spending a bit of time thinking about how I should spend some of my time, money and energies. I've heard some great music - not the throwaway kind, but the stuff that moves you deep down; and challenges you to think, maybe even behave, a little differently.
The weekend unsettled me. I blame Doug. (Or I might blame Steve cos Steve brought Doug). Doug's a big Scotsman - a Scottish Nationalist, actually, but we'll forgive him that. He used to front a band called Candy Says. Now, I like to know where bands get their names from and, when I don't know, I can't resist speculating. I did ask Doug so that I wouldn't have to speculate, but he claimed it's too long ago to remember. Maybe he just wanted me to use my imagination. Candy Says is an old song by the Velvet Underground. It's pretty meditative, melancholic in fact. Stripped back, with exposed, quivering vocals. Vulnerable. Candy Says is kinda the less well known sibling of Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side. However, its vocals aren't provided by Reed but by another Doug, Doug Yule. Candy came from out on the island. And started off life as Jimmy. She was part of the Warhol Factory scene - one of those Andy Warhol made "famous for 15 minutes." Something tells me Holly wasn't the only one who plucked her eyebrows on the way.
Candy was one of the Warhol "Superstars." Of course they were superstars simply because he filmed them and declared them to be. So what was a Scottish Presbyterian minister doing naming his band after a '60s/'70s transgender actress, and whatever she said? I haven't found out (yet). But the song lyrics did provide me with a couple of interesting couplets, which coincidently tied in with some of what Doug had to say.
"Candy says I hate the big decisions
that cause endless revisions in my mind...
...What do you think I'd see
If I could walk away from me?"
What would it look like if we began to step away from our own comfortable same old same old? What would we see when the focus is less on us or our own needs? What if the music in church more accurately reflected how people are feeling when life has ripped out the bottom of their soul? What if it met people in their grief, distress and doubt, rather than trying to brush over that distress with the warm fuzzies? Since we claim to believe in a God who not only understands our distress but volunteered to identify with us by experiencing it, I'd argue that it's vital that we don't try to bluff or kid ourselves, or portray to others, that a life of faith isn't full of gritty reality, pain, doubt, injustice, and, for some, misery. Perhaps that's why Les Miserables has a strong appeal to the spirit. It's certainly why the Blues and Spirituals intersect. They reflect the messiness of real life.
I also blame Philip, who is quite an authority on Irish history. He presented important factual information, illustrated by powerful anecdotes. He covered the Somme, and the Easter Rising and challenged those of us who are middle class to recognise how working class loyalists have been marginalised and left feeling forgotten, robbed of identity. Perhaps we need to walk away from our own comfort zones in order to see the distress felt by others. In my own church we've done that with those of a nationalist aspiration much more than we have with loyalists.
Like many Old Testament books, the book of Jeremiah has plenty of blues within it. Spanning a period in which the Israelites were taken captive into an foreign country, and involving much brutality and loss of life, is it any wonder that many African Americans identify with the notion of Babylon? Doug spent some time demonstrating from that book that we shouldn't rush straight from suffering to hope. First we need to acknowledge the suffering, and feelings of helplessness. We're also supposed to engage with it - one of the reasons faith can't be a private exercise, as some either assume it is or would like to make it. Jeremiah contains some strong stuff - which is often not touched on in church sermons. Difficult passages, which Doug didn't duck [What alliteration :-)], including the role of God when evil pays a visit. The text is designed to be wrestled with, not to be cherry-picked from - whether by evangelical atheists to present God as a monster, or by misguided Christians who wish to skip the tricky stuff and rush to put on the rose-tinted specs. Hope is real but there can be generations of slaughter, genocide even, before it's realised. There are multiple voices in the text of Jeremiah (and elsewhere in the Old Testament). If it was an easy text, it would come with a ladybird symbol on the cover. It's designed for more longevity than that. Noddy's Guide is for Toyland. This ain't Toyland.
Doug pointed us to St James' church in Piccadilly, London, which, until 2nd February, has an art installation entitled "Flight" by Arabella Dorman. This is what the congregation gathered under to sing their traditional carols over the romantic festive period.
What has an upturned inflatable boat with dangling life jackets got to do with the Christmas narrative? If you need me to answer that, you need to go read it again. It's much easier to cosy up in front of the fire and sing "See amid the winter snow" with its dubious, if familiar, imagery, or restrict the force of Christmas to a couple of days in the year (it's over now isn't it?), or absorb distortions of the account popularised up and down the country in school nativity plays, if we're permitted to have them.
Of course, it's not just school nativity plays or some carols which may be dodgy advertisements for Christianity. People are too, all year 'round. We're all work in progress, and we need to be open to (in Candy's terminology) revisions of the mind. As regards how Christians have failed to live up to how we should be, apologies. Be patient with us. One of the songs I was introduced to at the weekend is this haunting number by American alternative rock band the innocence mission.
"Hang my head low, so low.
Don't see me only as I am but
see me how I long to be.
So here's to better living - less me-orientated, more for the common good; less 'our nation'-orientated and more toward global good. This takes courage. How about nationhood, national identity and economic growth as means to an end rather than the ends themselves? Here's to better listening and, when we speak, let's not finish each other's sentences. Sometimes maybe we shouldn't rush to finish our own. And here's to better music, and art generally, in church - joy and pain acknowledged side by side. As one of the teenagers launched into a song yesterday that had pretty much the same guitar intro as Wild Thing by the Troggs, I thought we were beginning to get a little balance restored, and then I remembered the tag-line "you make everything groovy." Maybe eventually, but definitely not right now. In the meantime maybe we do need to take a walk on the wild side... and stay there a while. Much of the weekend was more about asking questions than providing prescribed answers; about starting sentences and lines of enquiry and letting them sit for a while rather than rushing to finish them. However, thanks to Patricia, I also was given some useful answers in pure maths - specifically on why some infinities are different than others, countably different in fact. Go figure.
22 year old Ivy Ford has caught my notice, and many people are sitting up and paying attention in the Chicago blues scene. Why is she grabbing hold of a guitar to play blues? In her own words
"The Blues and I just have a certain understanding, it’s the roots; heart and soul of life. Blues music is a social and historical commentary, which is why it’s never-ending."
Now this particular song doesn't offer much lyrical commentary, and it's never really made explicit what is actually meant by "Rock me, baby" but with the blues sometimes you've gotta read between the lines. Leaves room for the imagination, and getting creative. It also leaves room for some slick licks, and warm tones, as it did for BB, who's clearly a strong influence. Apparently her instrument is actually the piano. Makes you sick, eh? But maybe all you need is a red guitar, 3 chords and the Truth.
Here's an accessible TED talk on the Higgs and other fields, string theory, multiverse, and the possibility that we might be reaching an end to further knowledge of physics. (Let's hope not, but still... to hear a particle physicist say it...).
In the meantime we are hanging in the balance, waiting, under the mask of a sulphur sky, and asking the legitimate question, "why is there something rather than nothing?"
String theory's all very well, but here's a guy who takes strings past theory.
"Underneath the mask of the sulphur sky
A bunch of us were busy waiting,
Watching the people looking ill-at-ease,
Watching the fraying rope get closer to breaking
Women and men moved back and forth
In between effect and cause
And just beyond the range of normal sight
This glittering joker was dancing in the dragon's jaws
Let me be a little of your breath
Moving over the face of the deep --
I want to be a particle of your light
Flowing over the hills of morning"
Or as Bruce put it in another song
"Stand on a bridge before the cavern of night
Darkness alive with possibility
Nose to this wind full of twinkling lights
Trying to catch the scent of what's coming to be (in this...)
World of wonders...
Moment of peace like brief arctic bloom
Red/gold ripple of the sun going down
Line of black hills makes my bed
Sky full of love pulled over my head
World of wonders..."
Are we done learning?..... Nah, I reckon we've just begun to scratch through the surface. C'mon, dig in. Get a sense of wonder, and of a sky full of love.
I'm sure you've heard of Mississippi Mud Pie. Even a sliver is pretty indulgent. Well here's a different kind of Mississippi mud, straight from the delta. If you're looking for some dirty blues guitar, and/or a 21st Century update on Dylan's Masters of War, or commentary on Western business dealings with Saudi Arabia, Big Pharma's (or the coffee industry's!) exploitation of those in developing nations, nutritionist quacks or unrighteous doctors selling things that'll never cure your ills (a different kind of selling your soul to the legend of Robert Johnson at the crossroads, in fact one much closer to reality than that legend), or if you just feel some righteous indignation at folk who benefit on a smaller scale from the harm done to others, have some 20-something Joanne Shaw Taylor. Something deep within us cries out for justice and retribution - that people should reap what they sow (or Karma, as in the song). I aspire to an even higher form of justice - redemptive justice - where what has been done wrong is put right, clearing the path for mercy.
An end to bloodshed, war, arms dealing, exploitation, oppression; and people whose names are mud. Bring it on.... em.... Honey.
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