Sam Norton, who blogs at Elizaphanian, has published Let Us Be Human, a book which brings together his thinking on many of the topics on which he has blogged and taught extensively over the past few years:
"We live in a time of escalating crises and environmental disasters – how should the church understand them, and how should the church respond to them? In this short, readable and punchy book, Sam Charles Norton argues that the fundamental problem of our time is a spiritual one – that we have forgotten what it means to be wise – and that the path for the faithful through this time of crisis is to re-establish the priority of worship. Only by becoming more distinctively Christian can we engage constructively with the collapse of our culture."
I've appreciated Sam's take on these issues greatly in recent years, including taking a group from St John's Seven Kings to Mersea Island to hear from him, and am looking forward to reading Let Us Be Human as a result.
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Thea Gilmore - Bad Moon Rising.
Thursday, 2 February 2012
Leonard Cohen: self-deprecating and humorous
One of the things I love most about the work of Leonard Cohen is his self-deprecating humour. Lines, which sound like personal credos although sung by the characters he creates, like, "I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that Time cannot decay/I'm junk, but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet" from 'Democracy', every line in 'Tower of Song' where Hank Williams coughs a hundred floors above him, or this, from 'Going Home':
"I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit ...
He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the brief elaboration of a tune."
There is real self awareness and humility here combined with the distance and irony of setting these lines ostensibly about himself in the third person. Victoria Segal notes Cohen's self-deprecation in an excellent review for Mojo of Cohen's new album Old Ideas.
Also included in Mojo's Cohen feature is a personal piece by Will Oldman describing Cohen's influence on his inspiration and work. In this piece he writes about being introduced to Cohen's music via The Best Of ... and Death Of A Ladies Man, the controversial 1977 Phil Spector-produced album. Oldham writes that he feels privileged to have been introduced to Cohen through the latter album "because to love something through its flaws provides a richer love."
Death Of A Ladies Man breaks the mould of the Cohen stereotype as sombre, introspective folk-poet by taking the vibe of Dylan's 'Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35' and giving free rein to the carnal, humorous aspects of Cohen's work. If you haven't heard it or have filed it away on a shelf somewhere, then get it out and allow your expectations of Cohen's sound to be shattered.
Oldman perceptively writes that there is something about Cohen's lyrics "that pullls you in without revealing itself entirely but it holds you there on each listen":
"It's a combination of of humour, modesty, nihilism, despair, joy and appreciation done by someone who has the ability to put language first as a poet.
Somehow he has the ability to shine a light on our finer qualities as people in a way that you feel that you have an ally: even if you're looking at the beautiful and the ugly in the world, you can value it. I can look around at the good and the bad and say, Well, this is humanity and I'm going to keep on dealing with it because I have this man who is doing that too."
For more perceptive words on Cohen listen to Malcolm Guite's On The Edge talk by clicking here.
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Leonard Cohen - Iodine.
"I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit ...
He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the brief elaboration of a tune."
There is real self awareness and humility here combined with the distance and irony of setting these lines ostensibly about himself in the third person. Victoria Segal notes Cohen's self-deprecation in an excellent review for Mojo of Cohen's new album Old Ideas.
Also included in Mojo's Cohen feature is a personal piece by Will Oldman describing Cohen's influence on his inspiration and work. In this piece he writes about being introduced to Cohen's music via The Best Of ... and Death Of A Ladies Man, the controversial 1977 Phil Spector-produced album. Oldham writes that he feels privileged to have been introduced to Cohen through the latter album "because to love something through its flaws provides a richer love."
Death Of A Ladies Man breaks the mould of the Cohen stereotype as sombre, introspective folk-poet by taking the vibe of Dylan's 'Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35' and giving free rein to the carnal, humorous aspects of Cohen's work. If you haven't heard it or have filed it away on a shelf somewhere, then get it out and allow your expectations of Cohen's sound to be shattered.
Oldman perceptively writes that there is something about Cohen's lyrics "that pullls you in without revealing itself entirely but it holds you there on each listen":
"It's a combination of of humour, modesty, nihilism, despair, joy and appreciation done by someone who has the ability to put language first as a poet.
Somehow he has the ability to shine a light on our finer qualities as people in a way that you feel that you have an ally: even if you're looking at the beautiful and the ugly in the world, you can value it. I can look around at the good and the bad and say, Well, this is humanity and I'm going to keep on dealing with it because I have this man who is doing that too."
For more perceptive words on Cohen listen to Malcolm Guite's On The Edge talk by clicking here.
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Leonard Cohen - Iodine.
Monday, 30 January 2012
Windows on the world (181)
Bermondsey, 2012
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The Alarm - The Stand.
Sunday, 29 January 2012
St John's Seven Kings: Our Weekend
This weekend at St John's Seven Kings has been full of the usual variety. There have been first aid demonstrations with our youth group, a naming ceremony for a new baby, a wedding, a medieval Murder Mystery evening as a fundraiser, a presentation from the Redbridge foodbank in our main morning service, and a discussion of justice based on the parable of the Good Samaritan during our Going Deeper Evening Service. All part of the rich tapestry of life and experience that is parish ministry in East London!
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Saturday, 28 January 2012
Airbrushed from Art History (12b)
Here's a little addendum to my 'Airbrushed from Art History' series of posts because the current edition of the Church Times has an interesting feature in which Stephen Laird uncovers the artist’s little-known fascination with the writings of Jacques Maritain.
Laird says that Sutherland had a well-thumbed copy of Maritain's Art and Scholasticism which influenced his 1936 essay 'A Trend in English Draughtsmanship' and Sutherland's Welsh landscapes of the 1930s, well before Sutherland's later 'religious' work for St Matthews Northampton and Coventry Cathedral:
"Visually, Sutherland's Welsh landscapes from the '30s are most reminiscent of some of William Blake's more haunting imaginative illustrations. Intellectually, they are a fully fledged expression of Maritain's theological programme ...
Sutherland borrows Maritain's words to describe how the artist's part is to create something truly inspired and "poetic", and how this cannot be achieved "ex nihilo", as it must be "gathered from the world of created things" ...
discovering one thing with the help of another, and by their resemblance making the unknown known."
This is of interest as it indicates a degree of influence by Maritain on a generation of British painters and sculptors in the immediate post-war years who were known collectively as ‘the neo-romantics’ (Paul Nash, Henry Moore sometimes, Sutherland, John Piper, John Minton, Keith Vaughan, Ceri Richards and others). This movement, as Christopher Frayling has noted, "sometimes chimed with the aspirations of the post-war Church of England" as they "searched for a lost Eden amid the ruins of the contemporary landscape: who wanted to depict its desolation while striving to reach beyond it; who felt it might soon be closing time in the gardens of the West, and who thought of the pastoral as one of the few remaining symbolic ideas in the culture from which to draw hope."
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Jonathan Harvey - Speakings.
Laird says that Sutherland had a well-thumbed copy of Maritain's Art and Scholasticism which influenced his 1936 essay 'A Trend in English Draughtsmanship' and Sutherland's Welsh landscapes of the 1930s, well before Sutherland's later 'religious' work for St Matthews Northampton and Coventry Cathedral:
"Visually, Sutherland's Welsh landscapes from the '30s are most reminiscent of some of William Blake's more haunting imaginative illustrations. Intellectually, they are a fully fledged expression of Maritain's theological programme ...
Sutherland borrows Maritain's words to describe how the artist's part is to create something truly inspired and "poetic", and how this cannot be achieved "ex nihilo", as it must be "gathered from the world of created things" ...
discovering one thing with the help of another, and by their resemblance making the unknown known."
This is of interest as it indicates a degree of influence by Maritain on a generation of British painters and sculptors in the immediate post-war years who were known collectively as ‘the neo-romantics’ (Paul Nash, Henry Moore sometimes, Sutherland, John Piper, John Minton, Keith Vaughan, Ceri Richards and others). This movement, as Christopher Frayling has noted, "sometimes chimed with the aspirations of the post-war Church of England" as they "searched for a lost Eden amid the ruins of the contemporary landscape: who wanted to depict its desolation while striving to reach beyond it; who felt it might soon be closing time in the gardens of the West, and who thought of the pastoral as one of the few remaining symbolic ideas in the culture from which to draw hope."
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Jonathan Harvey - Speakings.
Friday, 27 January 2012
Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali (2)
For a man who creates massive, magnificently moody meditations on mortality, Anselm Kiefer is remarkably chipper and chirpy when interviewed. Tim Marlow, his interviewer in oe of a selection of Kiefer films able to be viewed at White Cube Bermondsey throughout Il Mistero delle Cattedrali, clearly enjoyed the encounter while professing himself slightly mystified by some of Kiefer's more mystical responses.
Kiefer was very clear about his creative processes, beginning with a clear concept which inspires him to create but which then undergoes significant change in the process of creation with the resulting work often not relating to the original concept at all. Concepts are clearly of significance for Kiefer with this exhibition deriving from his interest in alchemical ideas and processes but his works are so layered with significance that they are much more than and are about much more than the animating concept.
Ronald Goetz has claimed Kiefer as 'a deliberately, if idiosyncratically, religious painter.' He argues that allusions to Kiefer's 'own strangely skewed versions of Christianity, Judaism, gnosticism and alchemy abound, and he has acknowledged that he thinks a great deal about religion ‘‘because science provides no answers."' 'Somber, guilt-ridden, accusing, mocking, enigmatic -- Kiefer’s vision of life, religion, ideology, national identity and history has been charred by the flames of the Holocaust ... The ‘‘God is dead’’ theologians and our current theological deconstructionists can claim a profound ally in Kiefer.'
This is to overlook however the extent to which Kiefer's is a transformative art; one that deals out distressed, decaying or dying imagery and objects in ways that create awe-ful, powerful works which overwhelm with their size, physicality, emotions and ideas. He scores and scars his images into thick paint which dries and cracks to form expansive wastelands in front of which symbolic found objects are hung. His oxidisation technique, another alchemical aspect, seems to mean that these works are never resolved but are always changing, always in flux.
'You have to find a golden path between controlling and not controlling, between order and chaos' Kiefer has observed. 'If there is too much order, it is dead; if there is too much chaos, it doesn't cohere. I'm continually negotiating a path between these two extremes.' This is the creative process which, as he notes, accelerates 'the transformation that is already present in things' and which brings his dead objects and images back to significant, signifying life.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - People Ain't No Good.
Kiefer was very clear about his creative processes, beginning with a clear concept which inspires him to create but which then undergoes significant change in the process of creation with the resulting work often not relating to the original concept at all. Concepts are clearly of significance for Kiefer with this exhibition deriving from his interest in alchemical ideas and processes but his works are so layered with significance that they are much more than and are about much more than the animating concept.
Ronald Goetz has claimed Kiefer as 'a deliberately, if idiosyncratically, religious painter.' He argues that allusions to Kiefer's 'own strangely skewed versions of Christianity, Judaism, gnosticism and alchemy abound, and he has acknowledged that he thinks a great deal about religion ‘‘because science provides no answers."' 'Somber, guilt-ridden, accusing, mocking, enigmatic -- Kiefer’s vision of life, religion, ideology, national identity and history has been charred by the flames of the Holocaust ... The ‘‘God is dead’’ theologians and our current theological deconstructionists can claim a profound ally in Kiefer.'
This is to overlook however the extent to which Kiefer's is a transformative art; one that deals out distressed, decaying or dying imagery and objects in ways that create awe-ful, powerful works which overwhelm with their size, physicality, emotions and ideas. He scores and scars his images into thick paint which dries and cracks to form expansive wastelands in front of which symbolic found objects are hung. His oxidisation technique, another alchemical aspect, seems to mean that these works are never resolved but are always changing, always in flux.
'You have to find a golden path between controlling and not controlling, between order and chaos' Kiefer has observed. 'If there is too much order, it is dead; if there is too much chaos, it doesn't cohere. I'm continually negotiating a path between these two extremes.' This is the creative process which, as he notes, accelerates 'the transformation that is already present in things' and which brings his dead objects and images back to significant, signifying life.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - People Ain't No Good.
Thursday, 26 January 2012
Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali
I'm looking forward to seeing tomorrow Anselm Kiefer's exhibition Il Mistero delle Cattedrali at White Cube Bermondsey. The first work by Kiefer that I saw was his Palmsonntag or Palm Sunday Artist Room at Tate Modern. I was so moved by this piece that I wrote a meditation based on notes and impressions that I jotted down while in the room itself.
Staged across 11,000 sq ft of gallery space, 'Il Mistero delle Cattedrali' is the largest presentation of Kiefer's work ever made in London:
"All of the large-scale canvases on show use landscape as its starting point. Thereafter, Kiefer works on each of them rigorously and with intense physicality and some of the canvases are exposed to the elements. In addition, for this exhibition, many of the large-scale works have undergone an accelerated process of oxidisation. Consequently, images that may be seen to evoke the sublime are themselves subjected to the subtle but immense power of natural forces. 'You have to find a golden path between controlling and not controlling, between order and chaos' Kiefer has observed. 'If there is too much order, it is dead; if there is too much chaos, it doesn't cohere. I'm continually negotiating a path between these two extremes.'"
Ronald Goetz has described Kiefer as a deliberately, if idiosyncratically, religious painter: 'Allusions to his own strangely skewed versions of Christianity, Judaism, gnosticism and alchemy abound, and he has acknowledged that he thinks a great deal about religion ‘‘because science provides no answers." Somber, guilt-ridden, accusing, mocking, enigmatic -- Kiefer’s vision of life, religion, ideology, national identity and history has been charred by the flames of the Holocaust.'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Low - Don't Understand.
Staged across 11,000 sq ft of gallery space, 'Il Mistero delle Cattedrali' is the largest presentation of Kiefer's work ever made in London:
"All of the large-scale canvases on show use landscape as its starting point. Thereafter, Kiefer works on each of them rigorously and with intense physicality and some of the canvases are exposed to the elements. In addition, for this exhibition, many of the large-scale works have undergone an accelerated process of oxidisation. Consequently, images that may be seen to evoke the sublime are themselves subjected to the subtle but immense power of natural forces. 'You have to find a golden path between controlling and not controlling, between order and chaos' Kiefer has observed. 'If there is too much order, it is dead; if there is too much chaos, it doesn't cohere. I'm continually negotiating a path between these two extremes.'"
Ronald Goetz has described Kiefer as a deliberately, if idiosyncratically, religious painter: 'Allusions to his own strangely skewed versions of Christianity, Judaism, gnosticism and alchemy abound, and he has acknowledged that he thinks a great deal about religion ‘‘because science provides no answers." Somber, guilt-ridden, accusing, mocking, enigmatic -- Kiefer’s vision of life, religion, ideology, national identity and history has been charred by the flames of the Holocaust.'
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Low - Don't Understand.
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