winter wonderland

Living amongst the chaos of unpacked boxes and no place for anything I wondered whether the trusty selection of Christmas music would find its way out from the shadows into the open this year. And yes... much digging later the familiar battered cd and tape cases appear mysteriously next to our make-shift music system. Evie sings again, proclaiming the same old message of her title track Christmas: A Happy Time. Other less hopeful artists... Monkaton for example, have their own slightly more cynical takes on this happy Christmas concept. And while fixing our eyes on the manger scene can fill us with peace and joy if we let it, there often seem to be far too many difficult distractions that demand the gaze of our eyes long before we make it to Bethlehem. Our consumerist society demands that we demand to find happiness at Christmas, but most of us struggle greatly to do so of our own accord and it’s not long before you here anxious whispered hopes that this yearly burden will all soon be behind us again... Escape back to struggling only with mundane day to day realities. Escape!

This Christmas day all pre-prescribed Christmas stress was strangely bi-passed. At least for a brief and wondrous glimpse, as I jumped through an unclosed loop hole into a peaceful winter wonderland. Gently snow clad forest paths glowing in the slowly setting sun, leading to a still, still lake, semi-frozen and framed with icy mist. Yet family frictions follow closely... A porky chap with reddening nose leans against the entrance gate mumbling angrily, ‘you see my **** family, to tell them to ********* well hurry back’ he demands. But even he fades gently away into the background leaving us to tramp along in slowly expanding mangeresque peace and joy...except for the ducks... the wildly ravenous hoard of hooting ducks that follow us around our picture book circuit remind us gently that the Christmas peace and joy comes also through reaching out and meeting needs and selflessly seeking not for happy consumption but for a peace beyond our everyday understanding, that can lead us through all the storms along the way.

BCN metro musings

I wonder why traveling on Barcelona metro doesnt freak or stress me out nearly as much as the London Underground. Perhaps it is because it isn't so far below the ground and is somehow more airy and less chlostraphobic. I`m imagining that we are not so far down beacuse mobile phones seem to work....so youre now just cut off from civilization`...stuck panic-room stlye in a dark black sewer tube.

But then again...if the whole tube network is that much closer to the surface...doesnt that make it all quite architectually unstable... will the city some day soon collapse into lines 3 5 and 6? Hmmm.

Maybe it's because Barcelona city council provide free music for traverlers waiting on platforms. And how can you be intimidated by a system that plays- unconsciusly one imagines -Christmas music in July and a mixture of the Beatles and Oasis in December.

Maybe the security announments also help... smoking is not allowed but jumping down onto the metro tracks is strictly not and never allowed... one feels they have a sensible health and safety prioritisation going n here. Our best interests at heart. Though fines seem to be in opperation for smoking but not for rail jumping. 30 euros and 5 cents. Why the 5 cents? Why?

O...and there is also music provided both on the metro journey and in the metro entrances. The journey music varies substantially but has one thing always in common – there is a soloist of some sort accompanied kareoke style by an onwheels kareoke machine. Solists include acordianists, guitarists, clarinetists and in more traditional mode ...singers. This is more financially complicated than the town hall station music...which is included in the price of your ticket. The quesiton is ...how much do you pay...its a voluntary contribution sometimes encouraged by soloist's accomplice who does a run of the carriage with a plastic cup. I look eagerily to see whether people set a lead worth following and see that it tends to be people with greying hair and wrinked knowledge reaching deep for purses and small change. How many times a day should you reach deep for if you make numerous metro journeys I wonder...and should payment be based on merit , or pity or both or neither. It's hard to say.

The most difficult soloist to listen to is the wailer... she screachs dramatically and operates without a backing tape of any description...'ooooo wooooooooooooo is me....have mercy....millk for my poooor children......' the strangest part of this performance is the sudden visible cut from on-scene to backstage as she preparess to disembark and begin the play again.

Most solisits in metro entrances do have backing music of some description – not normally any wailers there....though there are the beggars-opera style setups which can be inevitably more disturbing than wailing, as malformations are competitively displayed to best advantage... with the weather turning cold there is something infinitely unsettling in seeing 4 splitting red stumps cruelly exposed to the inclemment wind... and bringing out deeper levels of cynicism I wonder how poor 4-stump got to target place a and who the money in the collction pot would be going to.

In contrast to this some of the soloists do raise a smile. One panpiper in metro entrance c was playing a tune called flower song.... strange. I played that on the piano many years ago except my brother told me that I was missing the light fluffy character of the whole thing...and that it sounded like the poor flowers were stuck in the mud...or was it that it sounded like people were wading through mud, one or the other at any rate. Panpipe man was doing a much better job than me, though amazingly it must have been the current backing tune on the block because at the following station there was soloist number two also having a good bash at it, but this time playing the recorder and sounding not so much like a mud discourse but more like a stormy sea discourse...this poor soloist hadnt even made it to kareoke machine level and was still stuck with backing music coming from a portable cd player...and it sounded like he could be stuck with it for some long time to come...unless there are mechanisms of purchase in that world that I know nothing about. Hmmm. The flower song, I think I'll get that out and have another go at it when I get home.

Full Moon Forest

image adapted from: http://thecorner.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/full-moon-oak.jpg


Poetry has been described as a means of making simple topics complicated but as the historian Frederick Lewis Allen noted “Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people.” The following is an attempt to describe a late evening wander in the Forest of Dean last week. Stunningly beautiful!


Full Moon Forest

Glistening pathways
Snake inwards,
Lost islands
Clutter together
Whispering stories
Reflected in the full moon shadow;
Our giant blundering boot-steps
Crush them one by one.

A sudden flash. Not the wind
But a grunting deer outline
And another,
Eagerly pursued by
Out of work sheep dog
White tail framing
Beatific chase.

Then with quiet calm
And eerie restraint
Leafless branches hush.
The moon’s muse
Engraved in black ink
Across narrowing trail.
We sense the command and
Poised spellbound
Watch
As we too
Are painted into crescent portrait.

Blood and Rain

These days I am feeling the affects of the mysterious percentage of gypsy blood flowing through my veins, as I rarely spend more than two nights in the same location at a time. Constant movement, minimum possessions (somewhere there are a whole load of boxes containing all my stuff but I haven't needed any of it in the last few months since its storage, and so I guess it's not all that important), and long train travel engender random ponderings: life, origins, identity, identity. I should note that British National Rail services, alongside London Underground Services, very much help to cultivate this line of thought as long delays and cancellations become part of the daily process. Another instigator has been the typical set of circumstances that are created through meeting a whole lot of new people who ask the same old question: 'where are you from?' which is a sort of synonym of 'who are you?' ...or is it...

I don't really know where I'm from but does that lead to me specifically questioning who I am? Perhaps. I guess it led me last week to the Odeon, Covent Garden to the opening of the DLAFF (discovering latin america film festival). The film was Jorge Navas' controversial 'la sangre y la lluvia'. (blood and rain). Set in Bogota, my birthplace, the film relies on stark realism to present the darker side of the city. Years of working for tv advertising set Navas off on a rebellious trail, in a refusal to play the commercial, capitalist fool. As Navas himself asserts, just as we are about to begin viewing, it's not meant to be light entertainment. I rediscover the streets of early childhood, mediated through the harsh night life of the city. It's not just drugs, sex, violence and death however...the filmatography is stunning, at times quite beautiful...leaving a radiant, though brooding, landscape imprinted ...to be taken away and contemplated. The message is also more than 'don't get in a taxi at night in bogota...or indeed...don't ever leave your house if you can help it' There is also love...and the potential for human connection and hope that this connection might one day be more durable.

The shocking discovery came at the end of the showing, in the director's question and answer session. There were numerous angry Colombians there who seemed to question how Navas could dare to show such a portrayal of their beautiful country to the wider world (the film has made quite a hit in numerous important festivals). 'Why didn't you think it would be better to show something more lovely...more... ?' they challenge him. 'We go to the cinema to escape' another protests. Navas is unfazed by these questions, though a little saddened, and he answers calmly. 'You can't escape the reality of your own day-today existence' he states. 'It must be faced...and if it can be changed in some way it must first be challenged in some way'. 'This is a part of our identity'.

Time worth pondering over this is not lost time then... perhaps I should be more grateful for the train delays that enable such a luxury.











ps - I guess I should acknowledge stealing a google picture which I played arounda little bit with to create the above - original accessable at: http://www.worldsbestlanguageschools.com/Bogota_Colombia2.jpg

maybe the language school is actually in one of these buildings...