Painting Fakes

I've been playing guitar long enough to know I'll never be much good at at. I always enjoy listening to a really good guitarist, and some of my all time favourite artists are people who can play guitar parts I can hardly dream of playing. Lately I've been enjoying Jeff Lang's new CD, "Chimeradour", as I always enjoy pretty much everything he does. First and foremost Lang is a guitarists' guitarist. He has a devoted following which I suspect includes way more than the average proportion of wannabe guitar players like me. He's essentially a blues player, but if that label conjures up stereotype pictures of guys playing 12-bar and singing about their dead dog, think again. Lang skips easily between lap steel, acoustic, electric and resophonic guitars, with intricate parts played in all variety of weird tunings. But I'm not here to write about the technicalities of guitar playing - as if I could! Instead, I want tell you about the stories he tells. Un...

At church recently we've been reading the Book of Ruth, and it's got me thinking about a few things. For those who don't know the story, here's a summary. An Israelite man called Elimelech goes off with his wife Naomi and two sons to live in Moab to escape a famine. While there, the two sons marry Moabite women, then all three men die. Because men owned all the property in their society widows had few means of support,  Naomi decides to return to Israel, where her kinship networks are, and suggests to her daughters-in-law that they should likewise return to their families. One of them agrees, but the other, Ruth, vows to stick with her mother-in-law and go to Israel with her. "Your people shall be my people, your god shall be my god," she says. She claims the protection of the law and kinship networks of Israel. This is a brave and perhaps foolish decision. The Moabites and Israelites were often at war, and various Israelite laws discriminated against fo...

I've just finished reading Richard Holloway's Between the Monster and the Saint . Holloway is pretty much the only religious person mentioned positively by Richard Dawkins in "The God Delusion", mainly because of his self-description as a "recovering Christian". However, while Dawkins has little feeling for religion, and refutes his own caricature of it, Holloway has lived a life immersed in it. As a lifelong Anglican priest, former Bishop of Edinburgh and author of over 20 books on religious subjects he has spent decades wrestling with the Christian faith, so while he no longer seems to believe it in an orthodox way he understands it intimately, is sympathetic to it and has been deeply influenced by it. In this book Holloway is searching for an answer to those perennial questions - why are humans so cruel? Why do they suffer, and make each other and other creatures suffer? Is there an ultimate purpose to life? "The human herd," he says, "wh...

A little bit of extra holiday reading - Behind the Exclusive Brethren by Michael Bachelard. Bachelard is an investigative reporter with the Melbourne Age who first came in contact with the Exclusive Brethren when they were exposed in some rather dodgy behind the scenes support for the Howard Government's re-election in 2004. Subsequent investigations took him as deep into the life of this exclusive sect as it's possible for an outsider to get. This book is the result, and a sorry tale it is too. There are currently about 40,000 Exclusive Brethren in the world, including about 15,000 in Australia. Their collective life is largely shaped by an extreme interpretation of the passage in 2 Corinthians 6 which begins "Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common....'Therefore come out from among them and be seperate' says the Lord." This is a controversial passage and has been applied to many things by different...

Happy Christmas Everyone! Since it's Christmas and I've been reading a book on religious philosophy, here's a Christmas thought. We're told that Jesus was born to Mary even though she was a virgin. That is to say, she had never had sex, and so no sperm had ever entered her uteris to fertilise the egg. Yet the teaching of the church (both Protestant and Catholic) is that Jesus was fully human - hence that he grew from an embryo into a human baby like the rest of us. Now we know that in normal circumstances an unfertilised egg is barren - it doesn't divide and grow, it just decomposes. We also know that even if it did begin to grow of its own accord, unfertilised, the outcome would be a girl, since it is the man who provides the Y chromosome. So, in the absence of male sperm, how did her egg get fertilised, and the required male DNA enter the ovum? This problem leads sceptics, particularly those of a scientific persuasion, to dismiss this story as a "mere myt...

Each semester in High School English we would study one main novel, and in Grade 11 we "did" John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. I loved it (as I loved most of what we did in English) despite the curriculum. I was moved by the way the Joad family maintained their dignity in the face of the crushing poverty of the Great Depression and the absurdity and cruelty of their society. As a result I read quite a few other Steinbeck books in my youth, and they were just the thing for a sensitive young man. Coming back to some of these stories as a supposedly mature person provides some interesting food for thought. Take, for example, The Pearl. This little novella, a kind of meditation on Jesus' parable of the pearl of great value, features Kino, his wife Juana, and their infant son Coyotito, a poor Indigenous Mexican fishing family. One day Kino goes pearling and discovers an amazingly beautiful, enormous pearl, a find that should enable him to live out his dreams. Modes...

Since last Sunday’s sermon I’ve been thinking about the letter to the Laodiceans. My wife grew up among the Brethren and we spent six years when we were first married going to a Brethren assembly. Most of them read the seven letters of Revelation as seven eras of the church, with Laodicea as our present era, the final one before Christ’s return. I don’t go for this entire prophetic system – it’s way too forced – but it’s an interesting insight into our current age. We are lukewarm, neither one thing nor another. I think the current debate about climate change is a great example of how this happens. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change represents the majority opinion amongst climate scientists, that global warming is happening and is caused by human-generated pollution. Governments try to act on this understanding, but there are plenty of dissenting voices, saying there is no global warming, or it's caused by something else, or it's way worse than the scientist...

In the 2002 movie adaptation of HG Wells’ The Time Machine (which bears only passing resemblance to the book), its chief character is driven to complete the invention of his time machine by the murder of his fiancé. Traveling back in time, he repeatedly attempts to prevent the murder, only for her to die in some other way. In despair, he travels far into the future and meets someone of highly advanced intellect who explains that since the murder triggered the invention of the time machine, it can only exist in a time stream where the woman dies. Ever since Wells’ novella, time travel has been a staple of science fiction. Usually, as with Wells, the ability to travel through time represents a technological triumph, although ultimately a mixed blessing as various versions of the paradox perplex or endanger the participants. The Time Traveler’s Wife , both the novel by Audrey Niffenegger and the recent film adaptation starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, makes it a disability. ...

Apropos of pretty much nothing, I'm sitting here listening to Tom Waits CD "Alice". It has this great song called Poor Edward , the lyrics of which go like this. Did you hear the news about Edward? On the back of his head He had another Face Was it a woman's face Or a young girl They said to remove it would kill him So poor Edward was doomed The Face could laugh and cry It was his Devil twin And at night she spoke to him Of things heard only in Hell They were impossible to separate Chained together for life Finally the bell tolled his doom He took a suite of rooms And hung himself and her From the balcony irons Some still believe he was freed from her But I knew her too well I say she drove him to suicide And took Poor Edward to Hell. Very spooky! And fascinating. The two sided personality, good and evil co-existing in the one person. More fascinating - Mr Waits (or the song's narrator) sets you up to think that the sonmg is about Edward, but then at the end he...

I’ve recently heard a couple of sermons based on passages in the New Testament talking about persecution. The most recent was just this Sunday, based on Revelation 2:8-11 – the letter to “the angel of the church in Smyrna”. The Lord, speaking through John, says, “Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the Devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.” Unlike most of the book of Revelation, the meaning here is unambiguous. They will suffer a severe official persecution, and they should stand firm (ie not renounce their faith) even on pain of death. The same message is repeated in other New Testament passages. Preachers these days struggle to make these passages relevant to their hearers, and with good reason. In Western societies Christians haven’t experienced this kind of persecution for a long time (although they do in other so...

On the Hill of Tara all four points Stretch to far horizons. The sheep are lords of all they survey, And the mounds and gullies sing of former glories. The tourists dance around the phallus Singing of glories to come. At Newgrange the inscrutible dead Sleep the sleep of millennia, Protecting the secrets of their strange carvings. After so much labour, Carting stones so many miles, Rolled on makeshift logs Lifted labouriously into place So the sleepers within can catch the fleeting sun To light their eternal darkness. In every town there is a reminder Of the days long gone And of the days hardly gone - The fight with the English, The bombings, the murders, The Protestant churches firmly locked. Things grow and change, The golden arches beside the Boyne, The half built houses on every street The "yes" and "no" to Europe at every junction, The English papers, the European soccer, The Chinese students walking the streets. Time marches, the ...

I thought you might enjoy some extracts from the journal I've been keeping on my travels. The monks chant, their drone puctuated by cymbals, quickened by the building, fading pounding of the drum. Behind their striking purple, their gaudy green and yellow, worshippers bow in street clothes, shoes in plastic shopping bags, some kneeling, telling over beads, holding out bags and packages for the mysterious blessing of the fire. Above, the fierce god in his blue war paint scowls at his worshippers, his blue attendants matching his ferocity, brandishing sword and chain, fiery halo and pointed fangs. Yet around the walls his worshippers remain calm, unafraid, seated in their socks slippers stowed carefully beneath the sepia sky. Outside, the fierce sun shocks us out of winter. The carp beg beneath the bridge. The blossoms defy stereotype. The old man smiles a greeting, or a comment, or perhaps asks a question I can never answer. Later, on the bus, the yo...