Glasto 09 - the sweetest one ever!

Playing at Glastonbury 09, we pass Stonehenge and spot a *t*o*r*n*a*d*o* on the way in. This photo was taken from the 'Solstice Roadside Services'.....

Left, found somewhere to sleep after a night of non-stop music. Thank god for the green fields....

A Mention on BBC Radio 4

After our jubilant joy at being mentioned in The Daily Mail - the only paper that doesn't turn your fingers black, but turns them white instead (sic Shappi Khorsandi) - Radio 4 dramatised sections of radio Head, which devotes a section to my show, on Book of the Week.

Six Pillars to Persia was name checked, and I was quoted and the producers picked a track we'd played to give their listeners a rare snippet of radio 4 endorsed music.

Here is our bit, about half way through. Click Granny Earmore for the audio. \

NB Writer makes a mistake about the radio coverage, you can hear it up to zone 6.

In the Daily Mail May 8th

My radio show got a mention in the Daily Mail, the article is still online, and will be in a book about radio in the UK later.

Kathak to Come

Free workshops for Southwark residents at Cool Tan Arts!

Here's a post on the podcasting I'm running. Look also for Machine Sewing (on big industrial machines), life drawing and poetry.

Summer is coming, and yesterday I got to meet the Kathak dancer I'll be working with on a creative sound project for Asian Arts Week, July 17th. She lives on a boat!

Meanwhile the show Six Pillars to Persia on Resonance 104.4fm is covering the Kiarostami production of Cosi Fanni Tutte, the comic opera by Mozart, listen out on June 1st 13.30, repeated the following Sunday 20.30.

Kiarostami is also showing an exhibition of photos at Purdy Hicks Gallery during the production of the opera, which is taking place at London Coliseum.

Paranoia Pandemic

They do it, these media outlets. They chip away at your peace of mind until each week there is at least one headline you are concerned about, even at a subliminal level. If you ignore the radio, and leave the TV off for a week, you will almost certainly have one of your friends deliver the facts to you without being prompted, or yourself sit in front of one of the tabloids with a searing headline spread across it crying "PANIC ENSUES!"

Ignorance allows me to feel impermeable to the swine flu scare, with my admirably super strong immune system and my proudly existent appendix (new searches show it may release valuable bacteria during illness) not to mention my remarkable good luck and fiercely independent travel on "the chariot" as pictured above. Ok maybe not, but I wasn't worried.

In fact weeks of impermeability went by, with that deep sense of well being becoming a constant source of comfort to several hyped up friends.
That was until I took a short tube journey.

There in the sooty, cavernous tunnels of the Northern Line (one of the deepest and oldest lines), sitting in a state of mild relaxation I had my toe abruptly trodden on by a large woman; a woman who was clearly oblivious to everything except her determined last puff of energy to get her immense frame into a seat. Admittedly my shoes were rather long at the toe, but still a mere look of mild concern would have sufficed to put me at ease.

Instead she began a loud conversation with her four friends who were spread around on the seats around me. I didn't notice they were talking in Spanish for at least 3 minutes and it struck me then that they were tourists.

My reason, now assaulted by a back-story of news headlines and badly researched Yahoo facts, churned up the logic that even if they weren't Mexican tourists they had recently been on plane!

This tension was worsened by the reaching of one of their chubby arms as it pointed directly at the headline of the free newspaper in front of us, delcaring panic about swine flu. I felt there was recognition in the women's reactions, as they nodded and I heard them utter the word 'swine' amongst the garble - they knew the story of the swine flu intimately! They recognised it as their own.

The quickly thought came: I could sit here, stubbornly telling myself 'Nothing's going to happen, not to me. It always happens to other people'. This is what all victims tell the press they felt until it happened to them. My whole life for a quick decision. If I stood up as the doors opened they might think I was getting off and I could sit farther along without causing offence. Part of us is so English isn't it, that painfully self-aware part that doesn't want to cause offence to total strangers, strangers who probably don't even notice us.

So I got up and sat father down, and called myself a victim of the paranoia pandemic. The rest of the journey was however totally peaceful, until I discovered from flashes of someone else's newspaper that the SIV virus has struck before.....

A Shoe of Note

We all remember hearing about the shoe that nearly took out president Bush on his farcical tour of Iraq.

Artist Laith al-Amiri and a group of children at an orphanage in Iraq built a large bronze-coloured sculpture of the shoe. Later it was erected in Tikrit, Iraq, but sadly ordered removed the next day. Apprently it took the artist and her elves 15 days of hard slog to make the sculpture and cost around $5000 to build. It had been on display in the orphanage and was made in of honour Muntazer al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist currently in prison for throwing the historic shoe at Bush during a press conference in December.

The brave artist we hope will continue with similar work, and the children will no doubt never forget this cutting edge project. There is no news as to whether the journalist has heard about the honour bestowed on him by the children from his prison cell. We on the other hand, are mostly helpless, despite perhaps feeling the injustice from oh-so-far away. It is a surprise that the Iraqi officials do not feel some sense of the right thinking in the work, as they view the destruction of the war on their own towns and people, let alone the satirical humour in the work, an honour often allowed art that is not so easily permitted elsewhere.

Video footage of the sculpture and some very adorable and the children themselves is available here.

Abbas Kiarostami directs Cosi Fanni Tutte at the English National Opera

Coming soon on Six Pillars to Persia is look at the imaginative collaboration between the ENO and Iranian Realist film-maker Abbas Kiarostami.

Since we first broadcast his talk from the V & A museum in 2005, interest in Kiarostami's work has increased tenfold. Appearing with Mike Leigh for a series of talks helped to put Kiarostami in a category the majority of people can grasp: as a realist he is, like Leigh, a man of the people.

We attended his Trees in Snow exhibition at Zelda Cheattle's gallery, a distinctly stylish et low-key affair (one of the works pictured above) and elicited a few words from the digital film-maker in Farsi via an on hand dignitary who acted as spontaneous translator. This new ENO project however has less of a fanfare attached, despite the accompanying talks and events it has spawned. It's still early days, hopefully we can expect a few episodes of Six Pillars on the opera itself and an accompanying talk.

Read more here about the production. Meanwhile if you haven't been to Shah Abbas yet at the British Museum, time is running out. We recommend taking in an event along with the exhibit the most interesting of which is a 1000km walk undertaken by Birkbeck staff in order to retrace Shah's own pedestrian pilgrimage. A man of somewhat dubious morals, the Shah was a tenacious muslim.

What is about dying?

Resurrection is the natural non-sequitur to death we all hear about but rarely dwell on. Recently in Tunisia I was faced with the Muslim take on resurrection, which I normally associate with mass-marked graves of the well-off, waiting for the day they will rise up and live again, as so generously promised in the bible.

In Islam it's not enough to be buried on hallowed ground and not be a suicide (or any of the other unforgivable things). You must also be buried with your head facing Mecca (see the other pics of the mass graves).

It's also written in the Koran "On the day of resurrection your hands will speak". Given the absolute love of religions to interpret their texts in anything but the most literal ways, I'm bemused to imagine what they make of that.


The best explanation I've heard about death and resurrection was given by a friend to my mother around the time of my graduation. We were in a cafe and he was explaining what it meant to be a Baha'i to my mother, who was related to some Baha'is once in Iran (I'm not a Baha'i by the way). He told her they believed Bahu'alla was the promised Imam, the 12th Imam they are waiting for in Islam called the 'Maha'di'. "But for the Maha'di to have come" my mother pointed out, "We would all have to be dead and it to be the time of the resurrection according to the Koran". "Most people are dead," said my friend "spiritually. We understand death and resurrection to be one of the spirit, not of the body. Most people live their entire lives without being spiritually alive for even a moment".

I can relate to that explanation. It still doesn't explain the hands, or graves, but I think where I was in Tunisia (Mahdia, named after the 12th Imam, no less), brought me a step closer to thinking about it in the right light. I wonder if Tom Hanks will have anything to say about the misconceptions we have 'inherited' today about life and death in his new film, the strapline for which is "Tell the world the truth".