Wednesday, August 07, 2019

Tuesday

Some people are organised. Even in a tent. They bought their eco friendly reusable cup on the first day, and have carried it with them for the rest of the week. I am not one of those people. Each day I go to the bar and ask for a pint of beer, and each day have to pay an extra pound for a eco friendly reusable cup. I assume this is helping the planet in some way.

Today I ventured up the Big Hill for the first time. The campsite is a way out of town at a place called Bulverton, and at the top of a big hill is the Bulverton marquee, aka The Young Peoples Tent. The Ham in Town does sit down concerts with your Julie Fowlis’s and your Martin Simpsons, The Bulverton up the hill lets you stand and bop to your Seth Lakemens and Peatbog Fairies.

Worth the climb. At 7pm Sam Sweeney was doing an informal meet the artist Q and A, mainly aimed at the young people who had been doing workshops all day. I hadn’t realized how much of Sam’s fiddle style he owes to Chris Wood (indeed I am inclined to forget that Chris plays the fiddle as well as sings miserable songs.) A young woman asked him about building a repertoire. He told her to play through the book of 1000 English folk tunes (it exists) in the bathroom, and when she finds one she likes, play it over and over. And if you find you are playing it differently to the book, he said, that’s “wicked”. It means the song is still alive.

Broom Bezums started off in the big dancing hall around 8pm. I’d forgotten how good they were. I’d forgotten that “Keep Hauling On” is originally their song, and Fishermen’s Friends were covering the Show of Hands cover. I never thought to see a grown up audience having such fun with Man Gave Names To All The Animals. Proof if proof were needed that Bob never wrote a duff song.

They were followed onto the stage by Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys who become more superlative every time I hear them. I could probably face life without the pop covers (yes, Sultans of Swing, very droll) but there is an absolute core of proper folk here. The swirling experimental weave around the House Carpenter may not be quite Trad but it is responding to the actual plot of the actual ballad. (Girl marries carpenter; girl runs away to sea with previous lover; previous lover turns out to have cloven hooves and a tail, everyone goes to hell.) But folk doesn’t get much more folky than a whole hall full of people singing Jackie boy / Master / Sing You Well / Very Well / All amongst the trees so green oh together. (Steve Knightley incorporates the same traditional song into his first world war ballad about a game keeper. It’s the folk process, innit?)

The tribute to Roy Bailey was a bit overwhelming. Received wisdom says that if the queue outside the theater has gone passed the lamppost, the people at the back won’t get a seat. The queue had reached that point an hour and a half before the doors opened. (And then, naturally, it started to rain.) Roy was not a song writer but an interpreter of songs, so a tribute show is necessarily a compilation of everyone’s favourite socially themed songs. Martin Simpson (his son in law) sang What You Do With What You’ve Got. Nancy Kerr sang Everything Possible. Robb Johnson sang We Are Rosa’s Daughter’s. John Kirkpatrick sang, er, Arthur Askey’s Busy Bee. If you have never heard the best accordion player making his box go buzz where you like but don’t sting
me, you have missed out. Sandra Kerr said it wasn’t fair to make her follow that, and Martin suggested that she sang Why Did It Have To Be Me. Martin Carthy provided guitar, but rather alarmingly, didn’t sing. Martin Simpson told the story of Roy briefly becoming lucid in the hospice and singing the final verse of “there’s always enough for a war, but there never enough for the poor”. And then everyone sang Rolling Home. Nancy and James had to sing from a sheet because, well, none knows the verses: Roy always sang them.

pass the bottle round
let the toast go free (FREE TOAST!)
health to every labourer
wherever they may be
fair wages now or never
let’s reap what we have sown
as we go rolling home, as we go rolling home.

Dry eyes were in rather short supply
dIary written in Cornish Bakery

Tuesday, August 06, 2019

Monday

So. A knight rapes a poor maiden and sensibly tells her his real name so she can name the child after him. So she tells the king and the king says he has to marry her. Just to rub it in, she goes to the wedding dressed as a lady and he has to go dressed as a page. A young man asks his sister why she looks so poorly. Because I’m pregnant with your child, she says. So he kills her. A man gets two ladies pregnant, marries one and the other hangs herself. So he runs away to sea. But her ghost comes after him in a boat and drowns him.

Ballads are great. An old guy at Woodlands did the most perfect Patrick Spens I’ve ever heard, in perfect Scots. (Man sails to Nor A Way, Man sails back from Nor A Way. Everyone drowns.)

Nick Hart also sings ballads. Nick Hart’s ballads take no prisoners. Even he admits that his version of Two Sisters goes on a bit. There is Nick Hart, there is a guitar, and in the Kellaway Cellar there is sometimes Ben Moss) as in Moore, Moss and Rutter) on a fiddle. There has been a generation of folkies adding twiddly bits and guitars and synths to folk songs; now there is Nick Hart singing them, sometimes even with that folkie nasal twang. Nick Hart is the Anti-Jim. He’s the most exciting thing in traditional folk at the moment.

The cashpoints are working again. I celebrated with a cup of coffee. (Nick Hart recommended Buzz, the coffee stand in the craft field. They are indeed excellent.)

Sam Sweeney or Robb Johnson? Robb Johnson or Sam Sweeney? Sam Sweeney made my favourite album of last year, one of the few instrumental albums I would listen to voluntarily. Robb Johnson is a marxist primary school teacher who has been called the best songwriter after Richard Thomson and ought to be twice as famous. I opted for the songs, because I felt a whole two hours of fiddle playing might be challenging on a Monday afternoon. Judging by the empty seats at the Manor Pavillon everyone else chose the fiddle tunes.

Sidmouth has a dinky little theatre, complete with comedy and tragedy masks in gold over the proscenium arch. It’s the only proper rep theatre still running in the UK. Over the summer they are doing Present Laughter and The Kings Speech and Run for Your Wife. (“And the terrible thing” said Satan “is that this could be heaven for some poor sod.”)

Robb Johnson does a one man history of the 20th century, 1918-2018, through the eyes of his father, who was shot down in WWII. He as repurposed “i’m voting Jeremy Corbyn” as “Atlee for PM for me.” Johnson is a proper socialist who believes in workers control and assumes that we do as well. His lyrics can be incredibly subtle and powerful, as in a description of his Dad from the point of view of one of the kids in his class; but he knows how to do anthems as well. His celebration of the 70 goes “all you need is love, all you need is love, all you need is love. And comprehensive schools.”

I really can’t be doing with Gaelic, so I went back to the theatre for a programme of Dartmoor Entertainment. Lots of jolly accordions. Jim Causley doing that one about the tin mines. Step dancing. And a literal jig doll. But no rape or incest.


Diary written on a bench outside Sidmouth Public Library

Monday, August 05, 2019

Sunday

There are no cash points in Sidmouth!

At any rate none of the cash points are giving out money, and none of the shops are doing cash back. And most of the pie kiosks are cash only! Fortunately the bar at the Ham is happy with plastic.


I had forgotten that the best bit of the folk week is about 1030 at night after the big gig has finished, walking around the seaside streets following the sounds of diddly diddly dee and sea shanties into pubs which haven’t quite closed. There was a yeehar band singing Old Dan Tucker in the Duke on the sea front, and some guys sitting round a table in the Black Swan singing South Australia and Rock Me Mother Like A Southbound Train while another guy accompanied them on the hurdy gurdy. I had heard a couple of hurdy gurdy players busking no on the esplanade earlier in the day. And someone singing a Rock Me Mama co e to think of it. You can go for years without hearing a busker with a hurdy gurdy and then two come at once. The word “esplanade” makes me think of Jake Thackeray. To me the road by the beach is the promenade.

Oh yes, and I also heard my favorite act in the world singing my favorite song in the world. (“Terms and conditions apply.”’)
Steve Knightly (sans Phil and Miranda) called his show 50 Shades of Sidmouth. It was meant to be a retrospective on 50 years of coming to the festival. It started out in the vein of his 2017 solo show about his career, with stories about learning to play guitar by playing Dylan records at half speed and making the audience try to guess the lyrics of his first ever song. Before long he was bringing on friends from the old days . An old club singer gamely got through Paddy’s Sicknote. He was reunited with Paul Downs who played with him in his first band, Gawain. (They were big enough to open for Steeleye: I never knew that.) I felt that the Sidmouth narrative became a bit lost as the evening went on. His teenaged daughter helped him sing Let Me Feel Your Love, Edgelarks participated in The Keeper, and Sidmouth brass band came on for the last few numbers. Any show which ends with Cousin Jack on a brass band is fine with me me. Rather a jolly brass arrangement, I would have said, but very clever the way they worked the accompaniment in with Steve’s spoken improvised sections.

Instead of an encore, the entire company sang The Larks They Sang Melodians.

Auto correct wants me to change hurdy gurdy to hurry ghastly. Just saying.

Earlier in the day I went to a stripped down acoustic version of Merry Hell. Their acoustic version worked much better for me than their louder electrical version which I’ve heard before. Think Three Daft Monkeys with a bit of Oysterband and a bit even of Show of Hands. Come on England will probably annoy the same kinds of people who were annoyed by Roots. One of the reasons I relocated to the folk world is that it gives me a space to be patriotic without being, you know, patriotic.

So stand up, come on England, live up to your history
Your heart can't be held in a flag or a crown
Raise your teacups and glasses, you bold lads and lasses
And drink to the spirit that will never lie down

I asked a few years ago who was going to speak truth to power now Chumbawamba are gone. There was a moment where I thought Merry Hell were about to answer the question.

Best song of the day was Hannah Rarity doing an almost comprehensible Scots traditional number about an ugly witch who turns a man into a worm for saying so.


Diary written in Black Horse pub.


Sunday, August 04, 2019

Saturday

NOTE:=You are almost certainly not the first person to have spotted that the word “folk” sounds a bit like the word “fuck”.

You all probably think I am mad. I passed on all the Big Venues again today (no one needs to hear the Spooky Men twice in a week) and hung mostly around the Woodlands Hotel. I have to remind myself that I bought a season ticket so I am free to choose what to go to, not to oblige me to go the most expensive ones. A blue plaque tells me that the Woodlands Hotel was a thatched medieval barn and then the home of one of Nelson’s captains. I think I listened to traditional music from 11.15 to 10.30. It’s a marathon, not a sprint and I won’t keep this up for a week, but I hate the idea of missing anything. Yesterday’s big hit Ragged Trousers we’re playing at every venue I went to. They did an astonishing things combining two versions of the Cruel Mother, but the ten minute introduction was probably as important at the song. . At the time the song was written, conceiving a child out of wedlock was a criminal offense and if a baby died there was a presumption that the mother had killed it. So a lot of women would have been burying babies near wells in forests and down by the greenwoods of ivy, oh. (I have probably heard the Flying Cloud as many times as I need to, though.)
I suppose I am search for the Great Folk Moment, that at some point in a pub someone unlikely will pick up a fiddle and sing the perfect Marty Groves and I don’t want to risk eating a pasty while it is happening.

The Woodlands hotel runs a two hour ballad session for all comers every evening, with a stern warning that only traditional songs are permitted. All the usual suspects appear — there will be a Bruton Town and a Fair Flower of Northumberland. The afternoon mini concert kicked off with a folk couple (Annie Winters and Paul Down, possibly) singing a song beginning “it is of two noble butchers” so I knew I was in the right place. I have heard stories in which a fair lady runs off with seven yellow gypsies, raggle taggle gypsies and someone called Black Jack Davey, but today the abductor was a dark eyed gypsy. The lady didn’t mind, as normal, and was quite looking forward to drinking the dew and eating the grass, which instantly set me thinking about whether gyspsys are stand ins for fairies. Almost certainly, now I think of it. Ballads are the heart of English music and these sessions are for me the heart of the festival. I wish i could hold a tune.

One of the formats for song hearing is called “an hour or so in the company of” which is pretty much what it sounds like, and informal session in which the singer can chat or play as the mood takes him. Today we had an hour or so in the company of Damien Barber and Tony Hall. Damien Barber is of course the brains behind the Demon Barbers dance group, but he’s getting back into solo performing. He said he’d asked for small venues but the Woodlands was packed. He ended the hour with Little Pot Stove. Tony Hall accompanied him on an ancient squeeze box. It just so happens that Tony Hall played that exact squeeze box with Nic Jones on Penguin Eggs.

As I say. Folk moments. You presumably think I am entirely mad.




Diary written at Wakey Wakey Eggs and Bakey.

Saturday, August 03, 2019

Friday

Oh the English, the English sunbathing and playing cricket on a pebbly shingly beach taking surfboards out into a calm sparkling blue sea that never saw the slightest bit of surf making the most of the relatively hot weather on the grounds that it will probably be snowing by the end of the week.

People behind me on the bus try too start rousing chorus of The Wild Rover, but’s dispute develops between proponents of the Irish version (wild rover! wild rover!) and the English version (no,nay, never).

The bar at the Ham (the main in town sit down concert marquee) is woefully inadequate for 10000 folkies all wanting real ale in the 15 minute interval. I was impressed with the lady trying to catch the bar staffs eye through the power of natural justice (no, i have been waiting longer,i was in the back row so i should have been served first.) Also impressed with people complaining to the stewards because they didn’t arrange different weather.

Sidmouth Toyshop may have missed an important memo.



The second Pre Festival gig features one Ralph McTell who needs no introductions but still gets one. It is apparently the 50th anniversary of That Song. Someone tells me that it was originally written to persuade a drug addict friend to turn his life around. I hope this is true because some people have taken it to mean “middle class people have no right to be depressed”. Because of That Song’s middle brow ubiquity, it is easy to forget that Ralph McTell started out as a disciple of Woody Guthrie, and when he isn’t talking about early bluesmen (“the ghost of Robert Johnson) he is lauding Bob Dylan (“the Zimmerman blues”). Rather a lot of his songs are about other singers and other artists — I am not sure that extending the “girl on the New Jersy ferry” incident to a whole song says anything which Orson Wells hasn’t already said just as well. The older he get, the more Johnny Cash I hear in his delivery. No one song will ever be as famous as Streets of London, but he can produce endless jaw dropping lyrics. “Dylan and Rotolo in a freeze farm photograph. eternally tomorrow” “she had us kind of hypnotized she made us hold our breath but if you want to love your life you have to flirt with death”,

A folk fan:



Up and coming and slightly intimidated Kitty McFarlane opened for him. She gets better every time I hear her. She has added field recordings of birdsong and nature sounds to her enigmatic mediative songs. The incredibly convoluted migratory patterns of European eels suggests migration in a wider sense, becoming a “a very, very subtle protest song.” The last known proponent of the art of weaving sea silk (silk gathered from clams) becomes a metaphor for women’s agency “until the time I am undone I’ll spin saltwater into sun”.

Lady Maisery are always wonderful. However, I have heard them quite a lot, so on a whim I let them be wonderful without me and headed for the more intimate Kellaway Cellar space. This turned out to be a Good Choice : three super traditional acts who I wouldn’t otherwise have heard.

Alice Jones comes from Halifax and does heartfelt cheeky northern songs. We had “from Hull and Hell and Halifax good lord deliver me” of course, and one I hadn’t heard before about weavers which went to Hard Times of Old England (so sing success to the weavers. the weavers forever, huzzah!) She also has a nice line in that “body percussion” thing where you accompany a song by slapping yourself round the face.

Jeff Warner has been singing traditional American songs and telling banjo jokes since forever. He oscillates between singing and speaking the words, occasionally pulls out a jews harp s raises playing the spoons almost to the level of a juggling act. Do you know, I don’t think i’d ever heard All About The Renters on Penny’s Farm before? (It was lovingly ripped off by Bob for Hard Time in New York Town.) We got a Loggers Alphabet and a deeply silly version of the Farmers Cursed wife.

Ragged Trousers do shanties. And other robust masculine songs, including a rousingly ranty Riggs of the Time; and their own version of a Chartist anthem. (“Have you noticed that chartist anthems never actually mention constitutional reform? I suppose nothing rhymes with “election”.)But the highlight was the extended ballad about the chap who is born on fair Erin’s shore , decided to make his living selling slaves, falls in with the pirates and ends up with a one way ticket to tyburn. This is what we come to folk festivals to listen to. The band were o intensely interested in the backgrounds to their songs and their harmonies were robust enough to knock the socks off any Cornish beach. I’m off to hear them again as soon as I finish breakfast.



Diary written at Fort Cafe

Friday, August 02, 2019

Thursday


Sidmouth, please.
Single or return?
Single.
£7.10, unless you would like a daily rover.
No, I’m just going to Sidmouth
It’s just that the daily rover is £6..10.
Then what was the point in...
I recently came out as an introvert. Festivals are fabulous for introverts. I talked to a lady on the bus with jewelry all over her about social dancing, ceilidhs, and whether Molly Dancing is a thing, and a man n a Blackbeard’s Tea Party Teeshirt about Blackbeard’s Tea Party, but i don’t have to talk to anyone for a whole week.

My very lightweight very easy to assemble tent is very lightweight and very easy to assemble but turns into an oven when the sun is out. The sun is out, but I am not spending any time in the tent pin the hours of daylight.

The festival happens in pubs and marquees in the town, a regency seaside town that has something to do with dinosaurs. The campsite is out of town but there is an official shuttle. The official shuttle is part of the experience, how often have you been on a double deck bus full of Morris Dancers?

The music got off to a (rousing) (raucous) (up tempo) (not entirely folky) start with a standing ovation for Lindisfarne who I admit have up to now almost entirely passed me by. I know the very famous one, of course. (Does he really sing “i can have a wee-wee?”) They came across to me as somewhere between the Oysters and the modern Fairport. Very much the right kind of thing on the first day of festival, but actually I was more enamored of Miranda Sykes, who opened for the. Miranda is of course “the one with the double bass” in Show of Hands, and I remember not specially liking her in a duo with Rex Preston, but her solo act is a chain of well judged covers. We get Little Johnny England’s lament about, er, country life, and a wonderfully specific piece by the singers mother about the way Lincolnshire has change in two generations.

I may possibly have mentioned before that it isn’t a folk festival until a song has reduce Andrew to tears, but perhaps it was a bit unfair to choose Vin Garbutt’s “what’s the use of wings” as the second song on the week.

The headline in the local paper is, I swear, “Call for tougher sanctions on mobility scooters.”







Diary written in Browns Kitchen




Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Meanwhile...

I have just written 5,000 words about the Bible without once mentioning Star Wars. So this is me, mentioning Star Wars.

About half way through Episode IV, the Millennium Falcon blasts its way out of Mos Eisley spaceport through a blockade of Imperial Stardestroyers (the big triangular ones) and dramatically makes the jump to Hyperspace. In 1977 the Hyperspace jump was reckoned to be a stunningly impressive special effect; it was said to draw applause from first night audiences. It firmly drew a line under the films first act. The heroes have escaped from their first major peril and we go off and spend some time with the villains.

When we return to the Falcon, all is calm. The robot and the hairy alien are part way through a game of chess; the hero is being given fencing lessons by his mentor. Everyone has a good-natured bicker, and they arrive at their destination. The scene takes about three minutes.

George Lucas understands, although many of his fans and his detractors do not, that there is a distinction between screen time and narrative time. Three minutes is not very long for a space ship to cross the galaxy; but it is a very long pause in an action movie. The audience feels that our heroes have had some down time between act one and act two. When the action starts up again we perceive them as a group of Six Buddies, not some strangers who were randomly thrown together just a few minutes ago. Our imagination expands and fills out the narrative space. 

Mr William Shakespeare fools around with time in very much the same way. If you pedantically read the script, you would find that Romeo and Juliet knew each other for scarcely 24 hours before their mutual suicide. But the more important truth is that they fall in love in Act I and die in Act IV -- which is about as long as a theatrical love affair can possibly be. (Entire essays, and indeed entire books, have been written about the Dual Time Scheme in Othello. You probably don't need to read them.) 

A related technique, much used in American TV shows and rom-coms, is the montage. We are shown a sequence of vignettes, lasting perhaps three seconds each, in which the The Hero and The Heroine accidentally burn their dinner; paint the living room; open their Christmas presents; and (invariably) spray each other with a garden hosepipe. This conveys to the viewer that time has passed and a new "normal" has been established -- we've jumped in a few seconds from "moving in together" to "being an established couple". The montage was so over-used that it now hardly ever occurs except as a self-aware parody. 

Anyone who has ever been to Sunday School or attended the Christian Union has a very strong mental image of "the ministry of Jesus". We have a general sense of what happened during those three years. (Everyone knows that it was three years, but no-one can say how they know.) Jesus preached -- on mountains, on the sea shore and in boats. He healed people -- the blind, the deaf, cripples and lepers. Children came running to him. He taught his twelve special friends and got to know them. He went to parties with people who were usually regarded as the dregs of society. He argued and debated with religious leaders. He went to synagogue on Saturdays. He ate a lot of fish. And after a long period of relative tranquility, he makes a decision to go to Jerusalem. 

I have an overwhelming sense of those years as being peaceful and idyllic, possibly because of that darn hymn which always accompanied Miss Beale's black and white slides. ("Oh sabbath rest by Galilee! oh calm of hills above!") 

It is often said that Mark's Gospel lacks structure: that it is a higgledy piggledy collection of traditions about Jesus that tumble out in no particular sequence. It is also said that Mark gallops over Jesus's ministry and dedicates disproportionate space to the final week in Jerusalem. This is true, in the same way that it is true that you can get from Tatooine to Alderaan in three minutes and Romeo and Juliet only knew each other for an hour and a half. You certainly can't create a coherent chronology or time frame from Mark's text. Some people have tried. Your Sunday School Bible probably included a map of Israel, with a little wiggly line showing Jesus's to-ings and fro-ings from Capernaum to Gardarenes and back again. (The one of St Paul's missionary voyages is much more useful.)

No-one enjoys this kind of game more than I do. Last year I started entering the exact dates on which particular Spider-Man adventures happened on a calendar. It would be terrific fun to give St Mark the same treatment, but unfortunately Google Calendar doesn't go back as far as AD 30. 
  • Friday 28 April 0030, morning: Jesus returns to Capernaum. A crowd assembles, and he teaches them. Incident of the cripple on the roof. 
  • Friday 28 April, afternoon: Jesus leaves Simon's house and goes for a walk on the beach. A new crowd assembles, and he teaches them.  
  • Friday 28 April, evening On his way home, Jesus invites a tax-collector to join his entourage. Returns to Simon's house with his new friend Levi and a whole bunch of people from tax offices. Argument with Scribes.
  • Saturday 29 April, morning: Jesus heads out to Synagogue. Disciples munch on some raw wheat. Argument with Scribes. At Synagogue. Heals man with poorly hand. Argument with Scribes.
  • Saturday 29 April afternoon: Jesus goes for a walk on the beach. A new crowd assembles and he teaches them. 
  • Saturday 29 April, evening: Jesus Leaves beach and heads up mountain. Appoints Apostles.
  • Sunday 30 April: Jesus returns to Peter's house. A new crowd assembles and he teaches them. Huge argument with Pharisees. His family turn up to have him sectioned, but he refuses to see them. 
And once you have done this, it is possible and very enjoyable to start seeing all kinds of stuff which just isn't there. The disciples who go off to Synagogue with Jesus on Saturday morning are obviously the very same publicans and sinners who were at the party on Friday night. So obviously they aren't worried about the finer legal details of where breakfast comes from. If the big meeting on the beach comes straight after the incident of the man with the withered hand, then it must still be Saturday: having offended the scribes by healing one man on the sabbath he goes down to the beach and heals hundreds.

But no. It's a game. Mark Chapter 1 does indeed have a strong sense of forward motion; and as we will see, Mark 4 and 5 conflate multiple Jesus-stories into a single narrative. But Mark Chapters 2 and 3 contain about a dozen incidents, only one of which (the healing of the crippled man) comes across as anything like a story. There are four or five records of the sayings of Jesus, with a tiny little narrative wrapped around them; there are three or four incidents so short that you wonder what they are doing in the text at all; and there are several general depictions of Jesus ministry. 

It is impossible to misread a literary text. If the text means something to you, then that is what the text means. "I found Moby Dick quite boring" is a rock solid piece of data: it is a much more solid starting point than "Moby Dick is about the dichotomy between theism and pantheism" or "Melville was born". If you feel baffled by a passage, then the passage is baffling. It is the critic's job to record this fact; not to cure you of your bafflement.

If Mark presents the second section of this Gospel as a series of unconnected vignettes, our job isn't to connect them; our job is to say "how does this fragmentary form make us feel while we are reading it?"

I tried to imagine the first chapter of Mark as the opening scene in a movie, with sweeping longshots of crowds in the wilderness and sudden close-ups of camel-hair loincloths. I think we will get a better sense of Mark 2 and 3 if we imagine it as montage. Here are lots of short, fragmentary glimpses of kinds of things that Jesus used to do during those first years in Capernaum. Here is a picture of him sitting in Simon's house, teaching and arguing. Here is a picture of him getting into a legal argument with some Scribes (don't worry overmuch about the content of the argument: just see him, out-Lawyering the Lawyers). Here he on the beach, with a crowd; here he is, on a beach with a bigger crowd; here he is on the beach and the crowd is so big he's had to fall back into a boat. Here he is, calling a sinner, almost at random. (He did that a lot.) 

Speaking in the house; proclaiming on the beach; teaching in the Synagogue. Beach; house; synagogue. Small crowds, big crowds, huge crowds, crowds bigger than he can cope with. This is how it was. For weeks and months and years. 

Let me tell you a Jesus story. Jesus has just finished teaching at Simon's house. Jesus has always just finished teaching at Simon's house. That's how Jesus stories start.





I'm Andrew. I write about about folk music, God, comic books, Star Wars and Jeremy Corbyn.


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Monday, July 29, 2019

Mark 3 7-35




but Jesus withdrew himself with his disciples to the sea:
and a great multitude from Galilee followed him
and from Judaea,
and from Jerusalem,
and from Idumaea,
and from beyond Jordan;
and they about Tyre and Sidon,
a great multitude, when they had heard what great things he did, came unto him.

and he spake to his disciples,
that a small ship should wait on him because of the multitude, lest they should throng him.
for he had healed many
insomuch that they pressed upon him for to touch him,
as many as had plagues
and unclean spirits when they saw him, fell down before him, 
and cried, saying,
"Thou art the Son of God."
and he straitly charged them that they should not make him known


Another vignette. Jesus goes down to the beach; crowds follow him; there are healings and exorcisms. Mark is still turning up the volume. This is biggest crowd yet. People are coming not only from Galilee in the North, but from Judea in the south; and from the other Jewish communities round about. 

Mark invariably begins a new section with a simple "and": "and he walked beside the sea..."; "and passing on he saw Levi...."; "and the Pharisees were fasting...". The Authorized Version has changed "and" into "but" in this passage; which suggests a narrative link between the Pharisees decision to seek Jesus's death and the meeting on the beach. "The Pharisees decided to kill him...But Jesus withdraw to the beach." But this link isn't in the original text. 

Jesus is still keeping his true identity under wraps, referring to himself cryptically as "the Son of Man" and "the Bridegroom". It is the supernatural forces which hover around the action that give him the bigger, more dramatic names. Godliterally Godcalled him "my beloved Son" at the outset. The first spirit he exorcised called him "the Holy One of God" and now demons in general are yelling "Thou art the Son of God" at him. 

Jesus does not reply "yes: I am the son of God, and so is every one of us". Neither does he reply "yes, I try to live a good life, and in that sense, I hope I am a son of God." In the 1960s, very many clergymen seemed to think that that is what he ought to have said. We're all sons and daughters of God. Jesus was no more the literal son of God than James and John were the literal sons of thunder." J.A.T Robinson thought that "God" meant "whatever is most fundamentally important" and to be "son of God" meant "to be completely committed to whatever you think is of most fundamental importance." 

But for Mark, "son of God" is a title of great significance; such significance that Jesus regards it is an important secret. It defines Jesus's identity: he wants the demons to keep quiet because they know who he is really is.

It almost sounds as if the true Messiah has to deny his divinity...




and he goeth up into a mountain,
and calleth unto him whom he would:

and they came unto him.
and he ordained twelve that they should be with him,
and that he might send them forth to preach,
and to have power to heal sicknesses,
and to cast out devils

and Simon he surnamed Peter;
and James the son of Zebedee,
and John the brother of James;
and he surnamed them Boanerges, which is, the sons of thunder:
and Andrew,
and Philip,
and Bartholomew,
and Matthew,
and Thomas,
and James the son of Alphaeus,
and Thaddeus,
and Simon the Canaanite
and Judas Iscariot, which also betrayed him


We have been told that Jesus and his disciples ate with the sinners; that the Pharisees asked Jesus disciples about their master's policy on fasting; and that some of the disciples annoyed the Pharisees by plucking ears of corn on the Sabbath. Most of us, out of habit, assume that these passages refer to the twelve disciples: a special inner circle. But the word "disciple" simply means "student" and Jesus seems to have had a lot of students. This passage shows Jesus choosing twelve particular followers from among those students and giving them the specific job title of Apostles. Apo-stello means "to send away" or to "send forth" so these twelve Apostles are specifically Jesus's ambassadors or envoys. 

Simon we have met: he seems to have lent Jesus his house. James and John we will see a little more of. Andrew will get a couple more mentions, because he has the best name. Judas...well I think we all know about Judas. But the other seven never become more than names on a list. The other Gospel writers will give a few of them speaking parts.

Mark says that Jesus "added the name" Peter to Simon and "added the name" Boanerges to James and John. "Nickname" would sound frivolous; but "surname" doesn't mean now what it did in seventeenth century. "Simon, who he named Peter" probably says all that needs to be said. James and John are never called Thunder Brothers again; but (with one exception) Simon is exclusively Peter from now on. In Matthew he is "Simon called Peter" from the beginning; in the letters attributed to him he calls himself Simon Peter. "Peter" doesn't seem to have existed as a name at this timeCephas or Petros were simply the Aramaic or Greek words for "stone". Probably we should think of it as a title; "Simon the Stone". Under no circumstances should we imagine that anyone ever called him "Rocky."

I don't know whether James the son of Alphaeus was related to Levi/Matthew and neither does anybody else.


and they went into an house.
and the multitude cometh together again,
so that they could not so much as eat bread.

and when his friends heard of it,
they went out to lay hold on him:
for they said, "He is beside himself."
.....
there came then his brethren and his mother,
and, standing without, sent unto him, calling him
and the multitude sat about him,
and they said unto him,
"behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee."

and he answered them, saying,
"who is my mother, or my brethren?"
and he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said,
"behold my mother and my brethren!
for whosoever shall do the will of God,
the same is my brother,
and my sister,
and mother."


Jesus's friends and the Scribes have apparently been studying C.S. Lewis. A mere human being doesn't have the authority to suspend the Sabbath and forgive sins. So either Jesus is more than merely a human being, or else he insane, or something worse.

"Friends" is a euphemism. The Greeks says "ho pe atous", those who belonged to him, which everyone not directly employed by King James agrees meant "his relatives" or "his family". And this is consistent with Jesus disowning his family, including his mother, at the end of the chapter. Jesus's family, Mary and Joseph and all, think that their son has literally gone mad. 

Why has the Jesus family picked this particular moment to challenge Jesus? Is it the "Son of Man" stuff which has made them think he is several matzos short of a Passover? ("You don't have to fast or keep the Sabbath while I am here. If I say your sins have gone away, they have gone away.") Or is it the more recent Sabbath stuff? "He's gone crazy. He's picked a fight with the most important legal experts in the country. If he isn't very careful, they will kill him." It is hard to see how the the mere fact that the house is too crowded for him to have a meal would make anyone think their brother had lost his senses. 

Jesus's family see Jesus wielding supernatural power and acting as if he had divine authority and decide that he has gone insane. It is very hard to see how this could make sense if Mark knew the stories (which we absolutely take for granted) about Jesus's wonderful, supernatural birth. For Mark, a change has come over Jesus since God spoke to him and sent his holy Dove down from heaven; and this change his mother and brothers see (not unreasonably) as an outbreak of insanity.


.....
and the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said,
"he hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils."
and he called them unto him, and said unto them in parables,

"how can Satan cast out Satan?
and if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
and if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.
and if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end. "

"no man can enter into a strong man's house and spoil his goods,
except he will first bind the strong man;
and then he will spoil his house"

"verily I say unto you,
all sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men,
and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme:
but he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness
but is in danger of eternal damnation"


because they said, "he hath an unclean spirit"




The escalation continues. The Scribes want to kill him; his relatives think he is mad; and now a delegation of legal experts sent specially from Jerusalem accuse Jesus of being demon-possessed.

The Scribes have a kind of legal logic on their side. Jesus is, in fact, exorcising unclean spirits. So they can't say that he doesn't have some kind of Authority. All they can logically do is ask where that Authority comes from. 

Why they pick on Beelzebub is not clear. He's mentioned briefly in the Old Testament as a Philistine deity: "Lord Zebub". Milton gives him a bit part in Paradise Lost and William Golding named a whole book after him. Some people think he had wings and is therefore Lord Who Can Fly; some people think he was associated with rotting corpses and was therefore the Lord of the Flies. Perhaps the Scribes don't want to oversell Jesus. They aren't going to accuse him of being in league with the Devil, merely with one of the subordinate Devilettes. Or perhaps "Beelzebub" is a euphemism, like "Old Nick" to avoid using the actual word "Satan". 

The Pharisees accusation is kind of logical; so the first thing which Jesus does is use logic back at them: demonstrating again that he can out-scribe the Scribes. They say that he is using demonic powers to cast out demons. If that were true, it would follow that Satan's power was ended, or nearly ended. But Satan's power has clearly not ended, therefore the devils cannot be fighting among themselves, therefore Jesus cannot possibly be using demonic authority.

Whatever one wishes to say about the translators of the Authorized Version, they had a wonderful turn of phrase. It is now almost impossible to think about the American civil war, the English civil war, or the British Conservative Party without the phrase "a house divided..." coming to mind. 

The second verse is best thought of as a separate "saying", not an amplification or continuation of the first. Certainly, you don't need to posit a demonic civil war to see what Jesus is saying. He is not exorcising demons because he is Satan's friend: the fact that he is an exorcist proves that he is Satan's enemy. He is here to take Satan's stuff. So of course he is going to spend some of his time de-powering demons. 

And then comes the third verse.... 

If we have learned one thing over the last two chapters, it is that Jesus is all about forgiveness. He'd rather tell a disabled man that his sins are forgiven than fix his legs. He calls Levi to join his band even though Levi is one of wicked tax collectors. He says he has come to persuade racketeers like Levi to turn their lives round, not to have dinner with religious experts. And yet suddenly, here he is, telling the Scribes from Jerusalem. "Your lot can't be forgiven. You're going to hell. You've done something unforgivable." 

I was going to type that Jesus was angry at this point. "How dare you say that God's holy dove that came down on me in the Jordan is a dirty ghost. How dare you." But I don't think the text really supports this. It's almost like, having logically and calmly said "Don't be silly. Of course you can't exorcise devils using devilish powers" he makes a general, abstract point. "Oh, and by the way. God does forgive blasphemy; but not blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Just saying." This is sufficiently cryptic that Mark's editorial voice needs to chip in with an explanation. Although the Scribes may not realize it, by saying that Jesus is possessed by a dirty ghost, they have in fact called God's spirit unclean. And that's about as bad as it gets. 

A lot of evangelical ink has been spilled over the concept of Unforgivable Sin. Some people say that the only thing which is unforgivable is to think that God is not good enough or great enough to forgive you. If you don't think he can, then he certainly can't. Other people say its about going back and denying your conversion: once you have said "God didn't save me" then you've crossed a line and you can't cross back. In the olden days, school teachers used to tell little boys that the sin against the Holy Ghost was masturbation, which seems like overkill. But the tone of this passage suggests that it is the badness of the sin we should be focused on, not a technical question about soteriology. The message is not "God forgives 99% of all known sins. But not quite all of them." The message is: "Think of the worst thing you can think of. Saying that God's Holy Dove is unclean is even worse."

Relationships between Jesus and the Scribes are about as bad as they could possibly be. They are planning to murder him; he has told them that they are going to hell. And we are only in Chapter 3.


I once saw a production of Hamlet in which the Prince was played by two different actors simultaneously; a pair of identical twins. One represented Mad Hamlet, and the other represented Sane Hamlet. Lines were shared out between them. Sometime Sane Hamlet would be saying something quite reasonable, and Mad Hamlet would push him out of the way and say something crazy. The sane Hamlet was also Laertes and the mad Hamlet was also Hamlet's father and everyone spent a lot of time with no clothes on. It was that kind of show.

I could imagine dramatizing Mark in such a way that Jesus was played by two different actors: one a wise, learned and shrewd teacher; the other the actual literal Son of God. (*) Rabbi Jesus would be learnedly disputing with the Scribes and suddenly Son of God Jesus would butt in and speak the actual Word of God. Maybe he could pronounce the word of God in red, like Jesse Custer. 

You can imagine how it might work: 

"I think you'll find that according to the first book of Samuel the twenty first chapter the sixth verse it is permissible to glean on a Saturday Morning AND THE SON OF MAN IS IN CHARGE OF THE SABBATH." 

"No, that's completely illogical; if Satan is fighting against Satan then Satan has no more power; and clearly, Satan does still have power or I wouldn't be carrying out exorcisms AND ANYONE WHO BLASPHEMES AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT WILL GO TO HELL." 

No, that wouldn't be an orthodox Christian position. No, it isn't how Matthew and Luke depict Jesus, and definitely not how John does. But it's a good description of how these passages in St Mark feel to me.




I'm Andrew. I write about about folk music, God, comic books, Star Wars and Jeremy Corbyn.


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(*) Larry Gonnick's Cartoon History of the Universe jokingly suggests that there were multiple "Yeshuas", including a mystic and a lawyer. Philip Pullman wrote a boring book called "The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ" in which all the lines which Philip Pullman agrees with are spoken by the "good Jesus" and all the lines he doesn't like are spoken by a "bad Jesus". Dave Sim theorizes that the synoptic Jesus and St John's Jesus are two entirely separate characters and that this is proven by the Beatles.

Saturday, July 27, 2019

The Halfling Laws @ The Alma Tavern, Bristol

still experimenting with workflows and being more spontaneous.

It is the autumn of 2010. New Zealand Actor's Equity has threatened to boycott Peter Jackson's Hobbit series unless Kiwi actors are paid the same minimum rate as their US and European counterparts. Warner Brothers say that if the boycott goes ahead, they will take production of the Hobbit out of N.Z altogether. The camera crews and set designers and caterers who will lose their job if the film is closed down are demonstrating against the actors' union, who even start to receive death threats. But they stand their ground and demand a living wage for their profession. In a back office of the studio where a big battle scene is being hastily rewritten, the union representatives meet Peter Jackson to try to find a solution. 

The Alma Tavern is Bristol's smallest theatrical space. One never knows quite what one is going to get there. Initial portents this evening were a little alarming: I was handed a small feedback form with my ticket ("was there any part of the show you didn't understand"); and there was a slight friends-of-the-cast vibe in the 50-seater auditorium. The action of the play starts with an ill-judged meta-textual cough in which everyone in the cast breaks character and starts to argue about whether the play can really be said to be "based on true story", points out that all but one of the characters is fictitious, that the the play is condensing weeks of industrial dispute into an hour and we could look up the facts on Wikipedia when we get home. This would have been better covered in the programme. (There was no programme.) 

False start over, "The Halfing Laws" -- rapidly retitled from "The Hobbit Laws" for obvious reasons -- quickly establishes itself as a very small but rather special piece of work: just the kind of thing which the Alma's intimate space is so well suited for. 

The actors side of the argument is represented by Hamish Lynes and Millie Walsman. Hamish, the more militant unionist, is (ironically) a Lord of the Rings enthusiast and fan of Peter Jackson; Millie is more willing to compromise but less invested in the material. The script resists any temptation to make Hamish into a stereotypical fantasy nerd. Millie isn't as anti-fantasy as she might have been, although she does describe the men of Harrad as "the evil maori elephant people"; which is fair enough. 

Jackson himself and his (fictional) assistant Charlie Dewberrie remain sympathetic throughout.  Jacskon wants to support the union case but is not willing to further endanger his already faltering production. (The news that the two film series as been expanded to a trilogy comes through during the negotiations.) As a further wrinkle, Jackson brings in Edward Hamilton who plays one of the dwarves ("the one with the beard") as a witness for the defense. Hamilton doesn't want the Union to kill the production -- after a long career it is his last chance to make it big. But he turns out to be bitter at about the endless delays and rewrites and because Jackson has cast Kiwi actors in subordinate roles while giving the big dwarf part to an American actor. 

The best moments are when the personal, the literary, and the cinematic come together. There is a very fine moment -- at least one member of the audience applauded -- when "Sir Peter" admits that the Hobbit is not going to be a very good film. ("It's turning into a Donkey Kong level"). Charlie, the P.A wonders if all the dubious changes of direction -- the extra movie, the dwarf/elf love story, the introduction of characters who aren't in the book at all -- are truly Peter Jackson's dramatic calls, or if they are being forced on him by the studio. Either way, she fears he may be losing his touch.  While everyone is despairing about the Hobbit, Jackson suddenly produces a copy of Mortal Engines and starts enthusing about it like a schoolboy. When it appears that he has stabbed them all in the back, Hamish tells Jackson just how much the Lord of the Rings means to him, and Jackson just replies "thank you".

In the end, the studio steps in and the New Zealand government redefine actors as freelance contractors with no right to unionize, so it has all been for nothing. Jackson starts to say that even this darkness must pass, and when the new days comes the sun will shine out the clearer...and Hamish roundly tells him to fuck off.  

The play doesn't really come to a point or offer any answers -- everyone just shuts the door and walks away. But in the hour we have learned a good deal about New Zealand employment law and the troubled history of the Hobbit; been made to think about idealism and pragmatics; and even seen how a decent person can start sending out death-threats Without being at all geekish, the play seems to "get" the importance that cinema and fantasy can have in all of our lives. Theater too. If we all valued tiny little productions in small rooms over pubs above billion dollar epics, it would be a merrier world.





I'm Andrew. I write about about folk music, God, comic books, Star Wars and Jeremy Corbyn.


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Thursday, July 25, 2019

The Spooky Men’s Chorale @ St . George’s Bristol

still thinking about workflows

The Spooky Men’s Chorale as they always remind us, are not a Men’s Group. They are not really a folk group either, but they have ended up in a folkie space. (As a matter of fact they are playing Sidmouth next week.) They started out as a Georgian Choir, and they still do a couple of proper Georgian dance songs and an Icelandic hymn in the Georgian style in all their shows. ("You know what it is like", says the conductor or as he prefers to style himself, the Spookmiester. "You go to the theatre or the ballet, and there is no Georgian section. Or you just go out for a meal with the in-laws and feel vaguely cheated because there was a Georgian section, but it was shit.") Georgian choral music differs from other choral music in that there is no melody line: the different sections make no musical sense until they are put together.

I think that the men are “Spooky” in an Australian, Dame Edna sense — certainly there is nothing ghostly or creepy about them, although they do dress in black. It was a weekday evening so I went in my normal work clothes. The lady sitting next to me congratulated me for taking the trouble to look spooky. This happened at the Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, as well. I went dressed in my normal clothes and was congratulated on my steampunk gear.

Apart from the aforesaid Georgian section, the Spookies mostly sing contemporary music in a choral style. This fits into three boxes. Firstly, there are sensible covers of popular songs: we had Tom Waits Picture in a Frame and a remarkable version of Joni Mitchell’s The Fiddle and the Drum. They nearly always end with the folkie version of Tennyson's Crossing the Bar, the same version which Jim Moray rocks up with False Lights. Proper not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house material. I shouldn’t like to chose between the two versions. [Mem to self: find a more obscure version that no one else will know and claim to prefer that.] They can also do extremely silly versions of pop songs. They finished their main act on a choral version of Bohemian Rhapsody which someone turned into a thigh slapping lederhosen inspired knees up. It turns out you can yodel “Galileo Figaro” quite successfully.

The most characteristically Spooky material, though, is essentially sung stand up comedy material: comic monologue set to exquisite harmony. Sort of like the Baron Knights only good. So we have the aforementioned “we all have unresolved issues with our fathers / but we are not a men's group” and “you haven’t got one/ everyone else has got one/ you think you probably need one / so you do decide to get one / but it doesn't fit” and a very clever piece about waiting for baggage reclaim in an airport which turns into a political metaphor.

Like Monty Python, this kind of material is funny only once, and also like Monty Python, the audience consists largely of people who have heard it a lot of times before. I was glad they had toned down the “blokish” element of their comedy material. I get that if you say “men and sheds” everyone laughs in the same way that if you say “women and shoes” everyone laughs but it doesn’t actually apply to nay real life man or woman I ever met.

The Spookies  mak shau better than almost anybody. Their encore was possibly a James Brown number about love raining down during which which as many of the audience as possible were pulled up on to the stage to join in and sing along. I sometimes have a problem with bands that have become brands, cults, or even franchises; but the Spooky Men’s Chorale do it so well it is impossible not to be uplifted.




I'm Andrew. I write about about folk music, God, comic books, Star Wars and Jeremy Corbyn.


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