Painting Fakes

It's been said that to us an alien of sufficient power and complexity would be indistinguishable from a god.  It's also been said that if we had enough knowledge we would be able to prove, one way or another, the truth of religion.  However, if we could do that its character would change completely.  It would no longer involve faith and belief, it would simply be another branch of science, the gods other beings who could be studied and communicated with, heaven and hell realms of exploration and even conquest.   I'm not sure what Iain Banks' religious views are.  From his novels I would be surprised if he was not an atheist, or at least an agnostic.  Yet he has arguably the most fertile imagination of any living speculative fiction writer and he is certainly more than capable of imagining heaven, hell and all manner of gods or demons to inhabit them.   Many of his science fiction novels are set in a Galactic-scale civilisation known as the Culture, a kind of extr

Apropos of Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp , here's another little song for you.  It's an old English folk song that goes by the name Polly Vaughan, Polly Von, Molly Bond  or other variations thereof.  Here's a version by Anne Briggs. Come all you young fellows that handle a gun Beware how you shoot when the night's coming on For young Jimmy met his true love, he mistook her for a swan And he shot her and killed her by the setting of the sun As Polly was walking all in a shower of rain She sheltered in a green bush, her beauty to save With her apron throwed over her he mistook her for a swan And he shot her and killed her by the setting of the sun Then home ran young Jimmy with his dog and his gun Crying Uncle dear Uncle have you heard what I done? I met my own true love, I mistook her for a swan And I shot her and killed her by the setting of the sun Then out rushed his uncle with his locks hanging grey Crying Jimmy oh dear Jimmy don't y

Here's a little song for you.  It's called What Are Their Names?.  It was written by David Crosby and first recorded on his 1971 solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name.   He has been singing it ever since with Crosby Stills and Nash, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, in duet with Graham Nash or as here with many other musicians who admire him and this song.  Who are the men who really run this land And why do they run it with such a careless hand? What are their names and on what streets do they live? I'd like to ride right over this afternoon and give Them a piece of my mind about peace for mankind Peace is not an awful lot to ask. Crosby and co are well known peacenicks.  They sang at Woodstock, protested the Vietnam war, sided with the anti-war protestors killed at Ohio State University, and wrote a large number of anti-war and anti-nuclear anthems.  They're still at it.  In 2006 Neil Young got the band back together to do a tour singing nothing but a

In the years after the Second World War, science fiction was essentially a pulp genre.  Magazines and niche publishers put out small print runs of short stories and slim novels.  Most of the writing was clunky, the stories strong on technological marvels and weak on plot and characterisation.  This all started to change in the 1960s.  Not all at once and not everywhere - there is still plenty of pulp science fiction written even now - but a new breed of writers started to focus more on the fiction and less on the science.  Philip K Dick's best novels are masterpieces of imagination, beautifully characterised and exploring issues of drug use, mental health, religion and the meaning of being human.  His school-mate Ursula Le Guin wrote stories of lyrical beauty and moral depth. Some legacies of the pulp era remained.  Circulations were still small, and if they wanted to make a living from their writing they had to keep churning it out.  Novels were short, and frequent.  Expandi

It's hard to avoid Dan Sultan these days.  Ever since he appeared in the ridiculously funny Bran Nue Dae he's been constantly in the media, recieving music awards, playing at celebrity concerts, promoting worthy causes.  He seems a level headed young man, comfortable with his Aboriginal heritage and not afraid to speak up for himself.  He's also no mean singer, belting out an infectious brand of soul-inflected pop music. However, I have to admit I find myself a lot more fascinated by his long-time collaborator Scott Wilson.  When I first saw Sultan live on stage - a vibrant set at Byron Bay Bluesfest - it was obvious Wilson was the key to the band, playing lead guitar, counting everyone in,  holding the whole thing together while Sultan did his charismatic performing thing. So I've been digging.  On Sultan's most recent album, Get Out While You Can,   released in late 2009, Wilson plays a large number of different guitars and is credited as co-producer.  H

Over the past few days I've found myself wondering what the socialist German playwright and poet Berthold Brecht would have made of my short post on Plutarch and his biography of Mark Antony.    The trouble with using someone like Plutarch as your source of historical information is that as a biographer, he is only interested in the individual.  You learn plenty about Mark Antony but not much about those around him, and virtually nothing about those under his command or under his rule.  This can make him seem like a romantic figure, an actor in a glorious tragedy. You do learn enough, though, to know that things were not so glorious for others.  When he stuffed up the campaign in Parthia thousands of his soldiers died, and the others had to resort to eating bark and leather to survive on their long retreat through the desert.  Thousands more died in his ill-fated naval battle against Octavius, while he and Cleopatra high-tailed it back to Egypt with their gold on board.  No w

Reading ancient authors can be disconcerting.  It's hard to be certain if you're inhabiting the same mental universe as they are.  How similar are we to our forebears of two millennia ago, and how much have shifts in time and culture made fundamental changes to our outlook?  For instance, my recent reading of some of Plutarch's Lives . Plutarch was a Greek author and philosopher who wrote at the end of the first and beginning of the second century CE.  He was a philosopher, trained at the Academy in Athens, and also a priest of Delphi, the famous shrine of Apollo from which Greek and Roman leaders sought oracles before they set out on important ventures.  However, he is best known for his "Lives", a series of short biographies of prominent Greek and Roman leaders from various eras.  He produced these in pairs - one Greek, one Roman - intended to illustrate different moral and political lessons and to compare and contrast Greek and Roman civilisation.  The Peng

So after a weekend of wild weather across southern Queensland it seems that Brisbane is about to be flooded again .  Fortunately for us the event is being described as a "minor flood" with levels 2 metres below what they reached in 2011, so we should be high and dry, unless further rain intervenes.  Not so our friends in Maryborough and Bundaberg, a bit further up the coast, who are facing a lot more water than they did in 2011.  Thinking of you all up there. Ironically, although so far we have suffered no damage worth talking about in the storms that arrived this week, we did suffer a number of technological failures including of all things a blocked water main which meant our running water was reduced to a trickle.  I didn't mention the irony to the poor Queensland Urban Utilities guy who had to come out and fix it in the pouring rain on Sunday afternoon.  That would just have been annoying.  I'm hoping he got double time plus an extra wet weather allowance.

So, I get to preach again after a long break, and my subject this Sunday is Psalm 116.  Here's what I think I'm going to say, or something like it. The Book of Psalms is a song book, an anthology of works by different authors written at different times in Israel's history.  It probably came together in its current form in the post-exilic period, but many of the songs it contains are pre-exilic, with a lot attributed to King David.  No musical notation has survived (it's possible that none ever existed) and we have no way of knowing how the songs were sung, but what appear to be musical instructions appear in some of the psalms and the title of the book itself comes from the Greek word for songs accompanied by stringed instruments. In principle, this collection is similar to the collections we use today for church worship - The Australian Hymn Book, say, or the various collections of Scripture in Song or The Source.   Like these contemporary collections, it conta

Reading and thinking about Tom Waits and the art of being someone else made me think of Helen Demidenko. Demidenko burst onto the Australian literary scene at the age of 22 in 1994 with her novel The Hand That Signed The Paper.  Prior to its publication the novel won the Australian/Vogel award for a manuscript by a young author.  After publication in 1995 it won the Miles Franklin, Australia's most prestigious literary gong. The novel, purporting to be drawn from stories told to the author by her Ukrainian refugee family, dealt with the cycle of violence between Ukrainians and Jews  It blamed Jews for the Ukrainian famine of the late 1930s (for which, incidentally, the Russian Communist Party was actually responsible) and subsequent Ukrainian involvement in the holocaust was portrayed as a consequence of this prior crime. The book's reception at the hands of Australia's literary establishment can't have been hindered by its charismatic author.  A ta

I've been a fan of Tom Waits for a long time.  His music is so distinctive, his clever jazz-influenced sound cutting across the blues and folk of his contemporaries, his worn voice telling stories of bad luck, bad whisky and life on the edge of society.  The apparent shambles of his music and his person hides a rare sophistication and attention to detail which has produced a unique body of work over almost 40 creative years. So one of my holiday reads this year was Barney Hoskyns' Low Side of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits.   I wanted to know, what makes Waits tick?  How does he come by the slanted, left-field view of the world which makes his songs so distinctive? Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately, as we will see -  this is just what Waits himself does not want me or anyone else, especially a journalist like Barney Hoskyns, to know.    Waits not only refused to speak to Hoskyns, he also discouraged his friends from doing so.  This left the author relying on ex-friends

We often hear talk about "the magic of Christmas".  Usually it has something to do with elves and flying reindeer and Santa Claus breaking into your house through the ceiling vent.  However, we shouldn't forget that the original Christmas story (you know, the one with Jesus in it) also features magicians.  Here they are, in the NIV translation of Matthew 2. After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” Herod consults with his scholars and suggests they try Bethlehem, then asks them to report back to him after they have found the child. After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they sa