For many parts of the UK, it’s been the coldest week for 30 years. In Birmingham temperatures got down to minus 9. The canals are still frozen and the geese and ducks in Cannon Hill Park are struggling to find a patch of water to swim in.
I wish I could have been in Oxford this week – Port Meadow froze and people were skating on it! Percy at Oxford Daily Photo has posted some photos and some nice images have been uploaded to Flickr by Isisbridge and robbie_shade.
In the news this week: The Morris Ring (England’s national association of morris dancers) is worried that Morris Dancing will die out. Apparently there aren’t enough young people wanting to join Morris sides around England, and in 20 years time “there will be no Morrismen left.” The dancers think that youngsters are embarrassed to be seen walking around with bells on their ankles, leaping about with handkerchiefs and hanging out with 50 year-olds. Well… yeah, OK.
I have one suggestion for saving morris dancing: make morris dancing a competitive inter-school event. You can laugh if you want, but it might just work. I think of an example from New Zealand. Every year, the Auckland Secondary Schools Polyfest brings together students from across Auckland to perform Maori and Pacific Island dance and music. It’s held in a stadium over three days, and thousands of people turn out. There’s food and market stalls. Schools enter performance groups in competition, the contest is fierce, and resultant quality of performance is often amazing.
I’m sure that people will complain about full curriculums, a lack of teacher time, and the plethora of other school activities that fill up pupils’ days. But there are numerous benefits:
The Morris Ring needs to stop moaning and get a little creative. It’s just a matter of packaging the concept in the right way. Some gutsy morris side should get a sound system and dance at the Notting Hill Carnival.
The competition element is key, it seems to me. If getting kids interested in Morris traditions seems a challenge, why not look at combining traditional elements of Morris with breakdancing, or rap? Or martial arts? If people are worried that about diluting or destroying traditional practice, then create ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ disciplines.
But if a school competition doesn’t work, it’s worth trying the other ultimate motivator: beer. Morris dancing is often preceded or followed by a trip to the pub (or the dancing happens at the pub). This makes it a pastime that is eminently suited to the English temperament – and pubs aren’t going out of fashion with the young, at least last time I looked.
The fact that morris dancing has even survived in such health into the 21st Century is a small miracle. It’s one of the few traditions in the UK that is identifiably English (ie. it’s not Scottish, Welsh or Irish). Living in Oxford for several years, one got use to seeing morris sides from all over the country dancing in the streets for the Folk Festival or on May Morning. It’s worth finding a way of keeping morris alive and relevant.
And if anyone thinks morris dancing ain’t funky, check this out:
This is cool news: ECM Records has partnered with HDTracks. It seems to be a partnership that makes sense – ECM’s particular production values (reconstituted echo, Nordic precision and ice-clear mixes) kinda get lost in low bitrate mp3 format. Hi-res digital is definitely a good move for ECM.
Currently the ECM selection in the HDTracks store is relatively limited, mainly focusing on a few of the grandes classiques from the back catalogue: the usual Keith Jarrett albums, Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Fall, Chick Corea’s Return to Forever and some of Jan Garbarek’s stuff. Hopefully we’ll see a lot more of the catalogue available soon. Some older ECM titles (like Steve Reich’s work) are a bitch to get hold of these days, either on vinyl or CD. An easy download option for these hard-to-find albums would rock.
HDTracks offer offers music both as AIFF and FLAC lossless files, as well as 320kbps mp3 files. However I’m not sure how long this distinctiveness is going to last. Storage and bandwidth keeps getting cheaper and larger, so I’m guessing that more digital download stores are going to be offering lossless and much higher bitrates. Just this week Apple announced it was starting to dropp DRM from iTunes and moving to higher bitrates…
Meanwhile, the 45 rpm vinyl disc is still going strong. Please somebody tell me, why do I still have 400 CDs sitting in boxes?
Earlier last year we talked about Oxford hip hop crew GTA. We quite liked their unashamed Thames Valley accents and Stax-sampling beats. The good news is that their début album The Way is now available everywhere.
Here’s the video for their new single Breakthrough:
As you might expect from an album recorded in Oxford, there aren’t too many stories of ghetto life to be heard here. MCs Chima Anya and Ineff are mostly interested in addressing their experience as young men growing up, finding their way in life (Chima is a junior doctor, Ineff is an accountant), running round town and chasing women.
And GTA are keen to point out, The Way is about life, it’s not about the town they’re from. Even if Ineff claims that “We’re the biggest thing outta Kidlington man” there’s little name-checking of suburbs or housing estates. As Ineff continues, there’s no point in giving shout-outs to a town that’s already world famous:
There’s a list of places that are simply blazin’
But I’m not gonna list the places
If you wanna know ask Tourist Information
The attitude is 100% positive, they both seem to know they’re lucky to be making beats and rhymes. And best of all it sounds like the guys had a lot of fun recording the album.
The Way can be picked up as an mp3 download Amazon or iTunes, or you can buy a CD for 10 squids via their Myspace page.
Clive James is one of my favourite writers. When I was 13 years old I wanted to write like him. I still do. Deeply funny and very, very well-read. Cambridge educated, he wears his omniverous intellect lightly, rather like David Mitchell.
He’s Australian, but like fellow brainy Aussie Germaine Greer, he left his native land early to forge a formidable reputation in the UK. Occasionally Clive James does a series of talks for Point of View on Radio 4. (A 10-minute podcast each week – well worth subscribing to!)
He nails his topic just about every time: last week he delivered one of the best atheist-agnostic descriptions of the continuing importance of Jesus I’ve ever heard.
This week, he takes on the credit crisis, and makes one very serious point – why the heck do we need all this money anyway? What WAS Bernard Madoff (already a wealthy man) actually going to DO with 50 billion dollars?
James makes one prediction for 2009 – having lots and lots of money is going to look very silly.
“We’ve reached a turning point. A madness has gone out of fashion: the madness of behaving as if only too much can be enough. There will always be another madness, but not that one. From now on a man will have to be as dumb as an petrodollar potentate to think that anyone will respect him for sitting on a gold toilet in a private jumbo jet.”
“England to me is my mother tongue / And what I did when I was young.“
W.H. Auden
“…J’ai souvent eu l’occasion de répondre, à ceux qui me posaient des questions sur mon origine, que mon pays c’est d’abord et avant tout l’enfance, puis, en second lieu, ma langue.“
Daniel Ducharme
Birmingham, 3rd January 2009
Dear Everyone I’ve Ever Met,
On New Year’s Eve, I was back in Oxford. Stepping off the train into the cold grey afternoon was like breathing a sigh of relief. Everything was once again familiar. The Business School’s copper ziggurat , the low forest of bicycles arrayed outside the station (none of which seem to have moved since I left), the signs on the front of the buses lead towards familiar places… Abingdon, Wheatley, Temple Cowley.
Avoiding the streaming traffic and noise of Frideswide Square, I slipped through the churchyard of St Thomas the Martyr, with its gravestones and 12th century priest’s door, and turned into my old street. Nothing’s changed much in three months, of course.
That night we played old-time jazz in the village pub in Cassington, and saw in 2009 with a New Orleans-style rendition of Auld Lang Syne. The pub had good ales on tap, the village was built of Cotswold stone. The local accents burred westwards as the night went on. Strangely, it felt like I was home.
Although, at the same time, I am not “home” at all. I’m a New Zealander. The place where I put my feet is an obscure south-east corner of the Hauraki Gulf, with its particular configuration of water, tides, rocks and islands. NZ writer Emma Hart, blogging this weekend at Public Address, talked about her own turanga waewae – the highway south of Christchurch that is the “back-bone of my childhood” :
…it’s how a landscape should be. That’s where I feel I stand strong, with the sun on my face, the sea on my right hand, and the mountains on my left.
Our emotions and memories are so often bound up in landscape: places where significant things happened, places linked to people we love, or places where we return to gain strength. But our memories of those places are twisted.
As we remould our memories, adding new layers of meaning, it seems we quickly reach a point at which our image of a place no longer resembles its reality. What we are left with is language: words that attempt to evoke the importance of certain times and places.
Last year in May, I returned to wander around my old school, a place where so much growing up took place. Suddenly, it seemed the school was strangely small, that it couldn’t live up to the significance I’d given it through repeated exercise of memory.
There’s a sense now of being burdened by the clutter of places that make up a personal history. Like a refrigerator covered with so many postcards that you can’t tell its a fridge any more. There’s pictures of dining tables in Basel, a view of Lake Taupo from my grandfather’s house, a snapshot of desert in Arizona, a place near Queenstown called Paradise, snow-covered ridges in the Vosges, cloisters in Oxford.
Is there a point at which our spiritual scrapbook gets too full? Is it possible to cherish all these places and yet still keep adding more pivot points to your life? Can we stretch our roots too far?
In just over two weeks, I leave the UK to live in France. Once again uprooted, pushing onwards into a new place. It’s exciting. But at the same time, there is a little voice asking if it is time to settle down. I’ve still got a whole bunch of old postcards to sort out. At the same time, I’m still writing new ones.
Hope everything is going well in your parts of the world!
Lots of love from,
Richard xoxo
(Sorry, if this post comes across as self-regarding waffle, that’s because it probably is.)
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