image of rosie, denison and sufjan by liz wong via her artghost blog
on thursday night i ventured out into the sultry heat of kings cross all on my own to catch a gig. i’d not been to a gig on my own before, it was a strangely liberating experience. no worry about the person you’ve invited not enjoing it as much as you’d hyped it, the ability to squeeze into a small space for a better view and cheaper rounds at the bar. plus i sort of felt like a proper music journalist (not much fear of that usually).
the gig was a bit of a double header by two friends, who are also friends of friends.
confused? get some clarity after the jump. Read more »
Some friends of ours have just come back from a trip to Liberia and the Central African Republic. Simon and Laura are involved in setting up the London branch of hl’s favourite charity charity:water so they took the opportunity to get a firsthand feel for the situation themselves and to bring back a record of what they had seen.
One of the great things about charity:water and specifically it’s founder scott is the way it manages to make incredible cultural leaps seem natural and easy. That a former nyc party promoter has gone and set up a really practical way to help thousands of people somehow makes it possible to be involved in engaging with people in a completely alien environment without your cultural identity being a massive obstacle-it just seems like a natural, obvious response.
Anyway Laura tells a great story and there is an unpretentious honesty that comes through in her blogging that makes you think, firstly ‘damn that sounds crazy’ and then ‘maybe that’s the kind of crazy I could do with a bit more of’.
Check out the first 8 parts of her blog on the links below.
I couldn’t find any Liberian music to post . (I’m sure that’s more a reflection on my lack of knowledge more than anything else) But here is an incredible track from another West African nation (Mali), which I absolutely love. (and am tempted to get my re-edit on with)
i grew up as far from the sea as it’s possible to get on these british isles… give or take a mile or two.the largest expanses of flat water for quite some way were mill ponds and reservoirs.
however the canals, which had once pulsed so vitally through villages like mine during the nineteenth century, spreading the veins of industry out from mills and workhouses played watery host to my halcyon childhood summer holidays. their sleepy, brambled banks fat with rosehips and sweet nettles were perennial forts and dens for our stick wiedling batallions. a place where twilight sent us cycling home in weary, weaving convoys with scraped knees, the stucatto graze of briars across our shins and lips stained with blackberry juice.
since i’ve just moved closer to the water, to a charter’d street near where the charter’d Thames does flow, its made me think about how i find the nearness of water an eternally calming, contemplation inspiring notion. stories of sailors and pirates, whales and silkies, harbourmasters and fisherwives have always stung my imagination like briny flecks of seafoam and the slippery brush of rockpool seaweed.
songs about the water get their own playlist on my ipod.
the ebb and flow of arterial streams and waterways, the rain fall, the ice thaw, dried river beds, the floods and droughts, the eternal centrality of water to the human story, a force for geographic, social and personal change - something so vital and nourishing that its easy to forget quite how important it, at once is, and always has been. routes for communication and trade; the basis of settlements; a force for life and death, peril and cleansing, trial and inspiration all mute without water.
so i guess now’s a good time to remind you that 1.1 billion people in the world don’t have access to a clean, safe source of water, and to encourage you once more to take a few minutes out of your day to check out the amazing work that scott harrison and others are doing with charity: water.
trusting the flow of water to deliver is a tradition which is older than the hills carved by those self same insistant rivers. from hiding moses in the reed beds to a game of pooh sticks from a stone bridge; messages in bottles and the hopeful trickle of a spring. dana falconberry writes love notes on paper sailboats and sends them to a lost lover.
My mind has been flitting between ma-ho-sively different things. On Tuesday I (quite willingly) got caught up in the maelstrom of hype that surrounded the iphone launch. It was almost funny seeing the photos of people trampling over each other desperate to get seat for Steve Job’s presentation and pumping their hands in the air and screaming at every announcement. It’s not as if I can claim to be any kind of bemused, detached observer either. I had engadget and macrumours frantically auto-refreshing every ten seconds in a state of minor rapture as tiny pieces of the future leaked out line by line.
It was like the geek world cup final-I felt like everyone in the office should be allowed to take the afternoon off. We could all crowd around a plasma, drinking beer and high fiving each other when one of our favourite rumours was finally revealed.
Funny thing is, it doesn’t even make me feel good. It’s not a positive thing, it’s like a mania, like there is this disease that I’ve picked up somewhere and I see people around who have it worse than me and it’s not attractive. But I do it anyway.
So I had to leave my auto-refresh-athon early cause I had to go see this guy, Scott Harrison, at (of all places) the Apple Store on Regent st. I arrived, half expecting to see hordes of rabid fans descending on the place to bow down in worship, and sat down to listen to his talk. It was quite a harrowing hour really, the photos he shows are hard to look at, just the most horrendous things that poverty can do to people. All the time, just behind me, a hundred imacs are glowing with the freshly updated apple website and yet the more I listened the less it mattered. All this other stuff, reality, pain and suffering, the amazing work of people like Scott, it’s an antidote to all the junk we fill our lives with. It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with apple or cool new stuff or brands in general, it’s just how hard it can be trying to keep things in their place, trying to maintain a balance. Everything in moderation (except moderation itself) as my mother used to tell me.
As for the iphone-I love it, but I think it seems a bit rushed somehow, like they weren’t quite where they wanted to be but have announced it anyway. It’s something beautiful, but it’s not for me right now-in a couple of revisions they will have made it something ubiquitous and perfect and I, like everyone else, will need and treasure them. But more importantly it’s just an object I can use to communicate with people I love (and I can do that, imperfectly, already)
image of rosie, denison and sufjan by liz wong via her artghost blog
