(sorry, can't find it on You Tube and I'm not going to be the one to upload it... but here's the Spotify link)
I heard this on a Sky Arts promo - nicely picked, originally a bonus track on the "Sewn" single, also on the double CD version of the "Join With Us" album.
The Feeling reminded me of how excited I could be about songs. When I first heard them, they seemed like a familiar band that fell into a time machine and ended up out of sync with the universe of musical fashion, but somehow connected with what makes a song feel timelessly worth something. "Twelve Stops And Home" was full of the best kind of pop songs - hummable, stick-in-your-brain-but-you-don't-know-why tunes which didn't sound like anything else out at the time. There's a classical quality and inventiveness in their best stuff which makes me go "you can't do that in a pop song... can you?", which then reminds me that you can, and they did.
I believe I was the first radio programmer to playlist The Feeling - months before they had a release date set for a single. I did a proper raving campaign for them to other stations before they had their year of being the most played band on the radio. I love the guys. It's hard to describe how bad I feel that, apart from "Join With Us", the second album didn't really do it for me, and worse, the label butchered and botched that song in the radio edit.
But as they get their summer festivals done and finish album three, this rediscovered song reminds me of how good their fragile, vulnerable songs can be. It's not flashy, nor marketed, perhaps not "single" material, but nice to stumble over. I didn't think about this consciously, but I just realised I'm also hoping the chorus lyrics will apply - "When I return, I will be better than before."
Amazon MP3 link (rubbish choice of 30 second clip misses the hook - hear it in full on Spotify if you can)
Rumours of the death of the music industry may be greatly exaggerated, but we've all got to go some time. How about making a lasting impression with your remains? Death metal fans - it's not just for you.
www.andvinyly.com (see what they did there!) will press up 30 discs with your name, audio you supply (up to 12 minutes per side) and something you don't find enough in music - you can genuinely pour yourself into it. Well, someone else can pour your ashes into it, after you are dead. Could be a little soulless (I believe that bit's going elsewhere...) but you can always opt to record a speech, or simply have silence which will only be interrupted by your pops and crackles.
The basics cost £2000, extras range from "bespook music" at £500 a track, and distribution "to reputable vinyl stores worldwide" for £1000, to artwork from renowned portrait painter James Hague for £3500.
With the British music industry desperate to extend copyright terms from 50 years to life + 70 years, it could be said that there is an increading demand to reap shareholder value from the grave. But at least these guys are upfront about it.
For the record, my choice of funeral anthem is "God Gave Rock And Roll To You". I'm not yet sure if I want to be part of the recording.
Suggested playlist choices for your AndVinyly compilation: 1. "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)" - Dead Or Alive 2. ... errr... 3. ... that's it. (feel free to comment with more)
I'm not sure whether I miss pencils. I was a big fan of sketching (ideas, words, pictures) but found it so easy to lose bits of paper that I went all-digital as soon as the Palm Pilot came out.
But I keep reading and finding that there is something special about getting something down on paper. Ideas can flow in a way that computers and phones don't allow, even with touch screens.
So it turns out that the pencil business isn't just surviving, it's booming, and if you want one web site that can tell you EVERYTHING about it, you'd be hard pushed to beat www.penciltalk.org. It triggers memories of the smell of wood shavings and the strange thrill of supply hunting. For me, stationery shops feel full of potential, as if the right pen contains all the best words it could ever write - it's just a case of finding that pen and shaking the words out.
However, I doubt there are many back-to-schoolers packing a new Porsche P3120, machined from a single block of aluminium (like a Macbook Pro, in pencil form) with a street price of around £90.
At the (slightly) more affordable end of the market, debate is raging on Boing Boing about the merits of a new line of "Blackwing" pencils. Apparently the discontinued Blackwing 602 has a cult following, with the original 50 cent cedar and soft waxy lead pencils now selling for up to $39 each. Music writer Stephen Sondheim, animator Chuck Jones and novelist Joseph Finder are among this pencil's fans of legend.
I think many creative people who crave breakthroughs so much, they would love to believe that the right tool makes the difference. I'd love to find some research to see if it does. Marketing hype aside, if you write with Blackwing pencil into a Moleskine journal, and it makes you feel like a better writer, are you any closer to unlocking your inner genius? Or if you invest in a Porsche, can it bring out the Jeremy Clarkson in you?
"I have just paid £90 for a pencil which is much like other pencils, and now I am angry, bitter and in need of a rant."
Yes, I believe it can.
Tune of the Day: Cee-Lo - Forget You (New 2010) Radio Edit
Hello and welcome to my new "Tune of the Day" slot. Every day I'm going to try and post a new tune I love, or an oldie I've recently discovered, thanks to YouTube, Spotify, etc. Chances are I'll be looking to play it on the radio too, so I can plug my stations at you. Woo ha!
Here's one we've just rushed onto the soon-to-be-relaunched Star FM. Cee-Lo Green is the voice of Gnarls Barkley ("Crazy" etc) and the album version of this is really quite rude. So much so, the record company haven't dared risk including it on the radio promo CD, although they have entitled the song "F U", so you'll get the idea.
Ahh, one day, if this becomes a classic, a hapless radio bod may accidentally load the wrong version to their playout system which - being in the future - will hold so many petabytes of laser-accessed holodata that an errant song will go unnoticed, until Robbie the Robojock plays it at breakfast to mums on the school run in their hover cars (that's enough tenuous "futuristic" images - ed.)
And how we will laugh.
Meanwhile, enjoy it for what it is - bright sunshine through dark clouds.
Research suggests that, however much money you win on the lottery, you're almost equally likely to go bankrupt within five years. Even if you win a fortune.
What does that say about us and money? It reminds me of John D. Rockefeller's answer to the question "How much is enough money?" - "A little bit more."
I really wouldn't mind winning, or being given, a fortune. Actually I'm unlikely to win one, as we don't tend to play the lottery. Maybe we'll go on "Millionaire" one day, and we'll face the question of whether we'll play for a "life changing" amount of money. If we won £100,000, I'm pretty sure that one of the things which would change would be the amount of stuff we could afford. One of the things which wouldn't change would be the desire to have a bit more than that.
Holy Kaw links this story to a useful looking budget planner from Mint.com, which can help manage money practically. Dealing with the desires and understanding how money means so much to us is something else.
I'm involved with some tremendous work at www.CrownUK.org which addresses that, using the Bible, some inspiring ideas and really practical help too.
I've been asked to share with some people how to do good Powerpoints. That could have been a lot of work. Thankfully, Jesse Desjardins made this AND told people to steal it. So I did. Please read, enjoy, and stop killing us with your bullet points.
How easy is it become a cynic? It's so much easier to protect ourselves from disappointment than to hope for great dreams to come true, and deal with the pain when they don't. I've been in radio nearly 20 years, and it's rare to meet people who aren't somehow hardened up and at least a little bitter about things that didn't work out, and who mistrust new leaders and new hopes.
On Monday I went to Global Radio's presentation of a new vision for company culture and values. I thought Ashley Tabor’s presentation was personal, warm, vulnerable and challenging. The same presentation viewed through the eyes of a cynic was calculated, manipulative, repellent and challenging - in a "how can I avoid this/get out" kind of way instead of a "how well can I do this" kind of way.
What makes us cynical? I think it's all down to unprocessed kairos moments. A kairos is a significant moment in time that grabs our attention and changes the way we feel, like hitting a big bump in the road. Choosing to learn from kairos moments changes who we are, for the better if we can do this well with other people. But if we cut short the learning process, try to go our own way, or just get away from the challenge of a kairos, we end up adding insulation around ourselves to protect from future bumps. That protective layer hardens into cynicism. (Find lots more on kairoses and the Jesus-inspired learning process in my Living A Chilled Life podcasts...)
So what can penetrate cynicism? I believe only love and growing trust in relationships can do this. Ideas bounce off cynical people. Loving, non self-centred people might be pushed away too, but they carry the only hope.
Do you want to grow into a cynic and maker of cynics, or a hope carrier? If it's the latter, get ready for plenty of kairos moments!
These are thinking aloud notes about making sense of Bible stories, following up on this note about how I'm working out how to read the Bible.
Trying to match up the story of Noah with physical evidence about the world we live in is hard. It makes me go back to the basics of how and why to take the Bible seriously at all. My aim is not to sit in judgement over God and His words, but allow myself to be shaped by them. This doesn't mean switching off my brain, though. One of God's promises in the Bible, which must be self-consistent if we have to take it seriously, is that we will grow to worship God "in Spirit and in truth." In other words, spiritual ideas don't replace honest, truthful analysis of the world. There is a place where they meet and support each other. God doesn't want us to live in a fantasy world when we think about Him.
Being moved by art
I was once blown away by a sculpture called "Spiky Thing" by Tim Noble and Sue Webster. On entering the display room at Sydney's MCA, it looked like a pile of scrap, dense and meaningless. The viewer has to walk around it to make any more sense of it. Only two things can make it look better than random. A light source in the right place will shine through the sculpture and make a recognisable shadow on the wall. The viewer can see this image in the sculpture itself, but only if they move themselves, so that they see in the direction that the light is pointing.
Paul's letter to the Romans has pretty much everything you need to know about who God is, who we are, and what we need to do about it. The form is sometimes difficult and abstract, there isn't much story and the illustration looks unusual to us, but the structure of Paul's case is so strong that this letter is used by at least one major legal training university today as an example of how to put a great case together.
The case is that God made us, loves us, wants us to know and live with Him, and has made it possible to do so through Jesus.
I am struck by the idea that all the clues are there in creation already. We could, if we were smart enough, work out that there is a God and understand what He is about. Paul suggests that anyone could do this - so it's not dependent on the ideas we were brought up with. In fact, changing our ideas about faith when we increase our understanding is something Paul did himself - his life turned around pretty dramatically after meeting Jesus.
So why do so many people resist the idea of change and growth in faith? Why does it seem so respectable to some to reject the idea of God - as if we have outgrown such a thing - or to make a commitment to agnosticism, perhaps believing we can never know about the reality of God?
Big picture stuff today. Genesis is one of the world's best known and controversial books. How do we make sense of the creation of the world and our role in it? Are there any bigger questions?
The "was the world made in seven days or not?" debate always strikes me as tedious and pointless, distracting from the point of the passage. When we look at what Genesis meant to its original readers, we have to remember that they were not stupid. Just because it was a long time ago, they had lives and families, and the idea of someone living to the age of 900 would have sounded just as odd to them as it does to us.
The point isn't to fuss over those details, but appreciate that God did something remarkable, amazing, in making the world and our role in it. There isn't just diversity in God's creation, there is personality, and we can learn about God from it. Most remarkable, God made it good. When God made us and looked at all of the world with us in it, "it was very good."
I'm using this space as a personal journal while I go through a plan to read the Bible in a year. I'm sharing the notes online because I'd like to be open about what comes up as I do this, and if there is anything which catches your interest, it would be great to hear from you. I'm not trying to write a decent Bible commentary, however - writing short thoughts every day on big topics will be much too patchy for that.
If you're looking for good study aids for Bible reading, the ones I use most often are the NIV Study Bible (good for general background on the meaning of Bible texts), the Life Application Bible (does what it says on the cover - it's good for thoughts on how to apply the Bible to real life), the Classic Bible Commentary (for perspectives from different times in history) and the IVP New Testament Commentary series (the "big guns" for when you really need something in depth - I've heard decent preachers lift entire passages from these books for their talks. I'd try not to do that myself, but there's always something worth thinking about and sharing in there...)
By the way, in case you think I have the world's biggest bookshelf for these, I don't - they all fit neatly onto my iPhone using Pocket Bible from Laridian. I've not used paper for regular study for nearly ten years.
I've set up a new site for sharing things about social networking and media production - things I have been doing as a freelancer (and would like to do more of).
There is a new blog there too, with stories about this kind of stuff.
So if you need some help to spread stories and grow relationships online, or you know people who could use this, you can find my work bits at www.bernleckie.com/freelance
It is probably down to watching too much Sky News - they have these weird promos for The Recession (heard of it?). Some have a Village People-like cross section of the working community filming an unexpectedly depressing video. They sit in the world's worst amusement arcade, shoving their last pennies into slot machines, to the sound of scary, abstract, claustrophic, dissonant droning - the music you would have in a film if someone fell down a mineshaft, and was still falling after 30 seconds. The other promos feature Jeff Randall, financial editor from the Telegraph, and Sky's answer to the BBC business sexer-upper Robert Peston. He warns us sternly that we're all living in la-la land if we think there is a quick way out of this mess, and we'd better take his advice and be good. And by the way, just to make us feel a bit worse, he could have told us this was going to happen in advance so WHY DIDN'T ANY OF US LISTEN TO HIM???!! Grrrr!!! Arrrgghhhh!!!!
Yesterday I met with a group who organise an annual celebration of the best of Bristol's industry. The unusual, fascinating thing about them is that they commit to do this in a church. They have an historic connection with the place, and they want people to come, so they put on a show and send out the invites.
They were disappointed with the turnout. From 1000 invitations, 50 came, and they are wondering how to do better this year. Should they spend more on the invites? More on the event? Do different publicity?
The Chill station website has non-stop music for chilling with, and links to communities of people who are getting together to help each other chill. Join in
Pip n Jay church
Pip n Jay is a friendly group of people in Bristol who are following Jesus. You can read more at our website, and get in touch if you want to know more. Join in
Work stress
Life is fun but stressful as a freelancer. Variety, choice, uncertainty, potential, a great chance to build faith. I'm writing some notes... Read more
I've set up a new site for sharing things about social networking and media production - things I have been doing as a freelancer (and would like to do more of).
I'm getting fed up of doom and gloom. 