Painting Fakes

After reading lots of stuff about Pink Floyd over the holidays, I've spent the last couple of weeks reading about their founder and muse Syd Barrett.  His death in 2006 released a new wave of writing and re-evaluation of his life and legacy.  I've just read two quite detailed and thoroughly researched examples - Julian Palacios' Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe and Rob Chapman's A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett.   Pink Floyd had a rapid rise to fame.  In early 1966 they were playing R&B covers at university socials.  By the end of 1967 they had a top 10 hit and successful first album, were playing concerts in USA and Europe and were at the forefront of the new wave of psychedelic music that was sweeping the Western world.  Most of this success was down to Barrett.  He played lead guitar, operated as the main singer and wrote most of the songs.  The creative vision that made them so successful was almost totally his...

I often ride my bike past the Seventh Day Adventist church on O'Keefe St in Buranda.  This week the sign in front of the church read "Love People. Use Things."  I'd like Scott Morrison and co (including their Labor colleagues who are just as bad) to read this sign. I haven't posted on refugee issues for a while.  I've been too depressed about it to write anything.  Our current government has ratcheted up the deterrent to a point where it has become absurd - a military style intervention whose sole purpose is to repel boatloads of asylum seekers and return them to Indonesia from where they have generally departed or, failing that, send them offshore to detention facilities on Manus Island or Nauru where they can expect to stay indefinitely no matter what their refugee status.  The result has been a growing number of horror stories and embarrassments - pregnant women and newborn children interred in terrible camp conditions or returned there ...

Graham Nash has just released a memoir, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life.   I'm quite a fan of Crosby, Stills and Nash (and sometimes Young).  Their heyday was a bit before my time but Neil Young was the first musician to make me think that perhaps I could do that, as opposed to just think it sounded great.  (As it turned out I couldn't, but I'm still trying.) Of course once I cottoned onto Young it was only a matter of time until I followed the trail that led to his most famous collaborators. I've seen CSN live twice in recent years - a good but not great show at Brisbane's River Stage in late 2007, and an electrifying set at the Byron Bay Bluesfest in 2012.  Sadly, one of the reasons the Brisbane show was a bit flatter was that they attempted to play some newer material.  Fair to say the audience didn't enjoy it much.  The Bluesfest set didn't include anything recorded after 1978.  Still, it's pretty impressive that they can still hit thos...

Last night Tony Abbott treated the world to the unedifying spectacle of his use of a global forum (the World Economic Forum in Davos) to criticise his Labor opponents .  There's a lot else to dislike about his speech.  It was a classic of simplistic dry economics - low taxes, deregulation.  He also made the breathtaking claim that "stronger economic growth is the key to addressing almost every global problem", conveniently ignoring the fact that decades of growth have done no such thing.  If you keep doing the same thing, you will get the same results. However, I was most interested in the way he used the speech to criticise the Labor Government's economic stimulus program, suggesting that this program was unnecessary and caused the economic problems we are facing now by pushing the government into debt.  Doubly interesting when in the same speech he urged the US to exercise caution in winding back its much more ambitious stimulus program.  You cou...

So everyone, here's the gist of tomorrow's sermon. Readings are 1 Corinthians 1:1-9 and Romans 12:1-13. But first, a story about Mohandas Gandhi.  In the 1930s and 1940s if you wanted to do anything in the Indian independence movement it was important to have Gandhi's blessing. So when Shriman Narayan returned to India from England in the early 1930s with a PhD in Economics and a head full of schemes for economic reform, he went to visit Gandhi in his ashram.  He explained his ideas and plans and asked Gandhi for his blessing.  Gandhi, however, said that first he wanted Narayan to clean the ashram toilets. This was not a pleasant job. The toilets were not water closets they were latrines, and cleaning them involved a shovel and bucket. Narayan had probably never done it before. Traditional Hindu society has a strict caste system. Higher caste people, like Gandhi and Narayan, do important things like running the government and trading. Lower cast...

More Pink Floyd ruminations for you... You could divide Pink Floyd's work into four periods. The first, spanning 1967 to 1969 and including their first album Piper at the Gates of Dawn and some of the second, A Saucerful of Secrets , was dominated by guitarist, singer and chief songwriter Syd Barrett and involved experimental, off-the-wall songs and musical pieces with strange sounds and bizarre lyrics. The second began when Barrett's mental illness made his ongoing participation impossible. It involved the remaining members - bass player Roger Waters, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Rick Wright along with replacement guitarist Dave Gilmour - trying to work out what they should do next. The result is a number of interesting musical experiments - quirky extended songs and musical pieces which tested the limits of late 1960s and early 1970s recording studios but which these days are more curious than compelling. In the third period they finally found the answer. B...

Many people can tell you exactly where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot.  For myself, I'm not quite sure but most likely I was safely tucked up in my cot on the other side of the world, totally unaware that there even was such a person. I do remember clearly the moment I first heard of John Lennon's murder.  I was working in the dingy upstairs office of the Maryborough Housing Action Group, and the guy whose business rented the next office popped his head in to tell me about it.  I was sad, of course, but not deeply affected. A much more significant moment for me is the time I first heard Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.   I must have been about 14 years old, riding my bike along Breton Street in Sunnybank.  It was evening.  On one side of the street was the railway, on the other a row of houses.  The chorus of 'Brain Damage' rolled across the street from one of these houses.  And if the d...

In Luke's version of the Christmas story an angel announces Jesus' birth to a group of shepherds.  This is how we always heard the story in my youth, taken from the King James Bible. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." In about 1980 I was a young Beach Mission leader and spent part of my Christmas holidays running evangelistic kids' activities at a big caravan park on the Gold Coast.  In the bus on the way to somewhere one of my fellow leaders, an earnest young Calvinist a couple of years older than me, was pontif...

Today is William Butler Yeats Day.  Not everywhere.  Just on this blog. I blame The Waterboys, but more of that later.  First to WB himself.  He was an Irishman, born in 1865 and living until 1939.  He is, perhaps, the greatest literary figure in Ireland's history, leading (after a fashion) a revival in Irish culture which went along with the revival of Irish nationalism and the independence which he lived to see.  He even served as a senator in the first independent Irish parliament. When I was a young man dabbling in literary studies we were taught that there were two pillars of twentieth century English poetry, Yeats and TS Eliot.  I have to confess that at the time I preferred the austere Eliot.  I loved to immerse myself in the beautiful cadence of his verse. What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands What water lapping the bow And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog What images return O my daughte...

Of all the farewell messages written on this blog, this one is probably the saddest. Not that it was a shock or even a surprise.  Nelson Mandela's death has probably been the most anticipated of the year.  He was 95, his health has been declining for some time.  His regular visits to hospital have been headline news all year.  His time had come.  May he rest in peace. You can read and hear endless words about Mandela and I can't really say anything that others won't say better and with more knowledge.  As President of the African National Congress (ANC) he was South Africa's most prominent post-war anti-apartheid activist.  Then in 1962 he was imprisoned by the Nationalist regime and spent the next 27 years in isolation, out of sight but never out of mind.  In 1990 he was finally released as South Africa belatedly began the transition to multi-racial democracy, and served as his country's first ethnically African President from 1994 to 1999....