Painting Fakes

So, to continue my Pink Floyd odyssey. One of the most intriguing things about Pink Floyd is the fact that although  Syd Barrett was only part of the band for such a short time his influence and, in a sense, his presence lingered long after he left. In the early years after his departure it's not necessarily so obvious.  Their songs didn't openly reference him and they seemed to be carrying on smoothly with David Gilmour in his place.  However, although their music gradually became more structured and sophisticated, it still had Syd's fingerprints on it.  For instance, even though Syd was the only member whose use of hallucinogens went beyond the odd experiment, they continued to write "psychedelic" songs after his departure.  You would swear Roger Waters' 'Cirrus Minor'   and 'Julia Dream' or Rick Wright's 'Remember a Day' and 'Paintbox' were inspired by LSD, but neither Waters nor Wright used the stuff.  They were copy...

At the end of the 1870s Count Leo Tolstoy seemed to have everything.  He was in the prime of his life and in excellent health.  He was the owner of a hereditary title and a large, profitable estate. He was happily married with a growing brood of children.   War and Peace and Anna Karenina  had made him one of the most celebrated novelists in Europe. Yet he was profoundly unhappy.  He detested his great novels almost as soon as he had finished them.  He felt uneasy about his title and his wealth.  He felt that his life had no value and no meaning and if this was the case, what was the point of bringing children into the world? The result of all this dissatisfaction was three years of intense, harrowing soul-searching which he describes in A Confession .   He scoured the works of contemporary philosophers, scientists and religious thinkers trying to understand the meaning and purpose of life.  Nothing helped him.  The only conclusion h...

This evening I get to preach on what for me is one of the most intriguing passages in the Bible, the first two chapters of Paul's letter to the Galatians.  Here's roughly what I'm going to say. Galatians is a passionate letter written by Paul to a group of churches in Galatia, shown on the map.  It's not entirely clear who he's writing to but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that the recipients were the churches in the south of the province - at Iconium, Lystra, Derbe and Pisidian Antioch - which he and Barnabas founded on the first journey they took after being commissioned by the church in Syrian Antioch.  He certainly seems to have known his correspondents personally and talks to them as a spiritual father.  These cities were multicultural communities, Greek colonies in a region inhabited by Celts, ruled by Roman overlords, and the churches there would almost certainly have been multiracial. The letter addresses one of the most cruc...

I'm in the middle of reading some of the religious works Leo Tolstoy wrote at the end of his life.  I'll tell you all about it some other time.  In the meantime, here's something he says in The Kingdom of God is Within You, published in 1894 . The basis of authority is bodily violence.  The possibility of applying bodily violence to people is provided above all by by an organisation of armed men, trained to act in unison in submission to one will.  These bands of armed men, submissive to a single will, are what constitute the army.  The army has always been and still is the basis of power.  Power is always in the hands of those who control the army, and all men in power - from the Roman Caesars to the Russian and German Emperors - take more interest in their army than in anything, and court popularity in the army, knowing that if that is on their side their power is secure. In Australia over the century or so since federation we have been extremely fort...

Speaking of Syd Barrett , as I was, here's what I think is probably Syd's cleverest and most revealing song, and certainly one of his most popular - Bike .  It's the last song on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and it appears on virtually every Pink Floyd compilation you could lay your hands on.  Written at the latest in early 1967, it also sheds some very disturbing light on Barrett's state of mind well before any obvious symptoms of mental illness started to appear. Perhaps the closest comparison to this song among Pink Floyd's contemporaries is The Beatles' Can't Buy Me Love , written mostly by Paul McCartney and recorded in 1964. Pink Floyd and The Beatles weren't exactly friends but there was a lot more contact between them than you might imagine.  Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney attended early Floyd performances.  Yoko Ono was a regular at the UFO Club where Floyd cut their teeth, staging semi-improvised pieces of performance art i...

This week the Australian public has had to swallow the news that a violent protest at the Manus Island detention centre resulted in the death of one detainee and serious injury to a number of others.  Depending on who you believe, the death and injuries were the fault of the asylum seekers themselves (who were rioting in frustration over their conditions), of heavy handed response by security guards at the centre, or of local police or residents breaking into the camp and assaulting the protesting detainees.  The various accounts of the event are irreconcilable.  At this point, given that neither staff of the centre nor detainees are allowed to talk to the media and we can't trust anything the government says on the subject, we have no way of knowing what happened. One thing is agreed by all those telling the story.  The detainees were protesting, with some violence, about conditions in the camp.  They had, in fact, been protesting for weeks before their pr...

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...