Once again the old steam driven tower pc I persist in using won't let me cut and paste into a Facebook note so I am replying to one I was tagged in here.
It is the "Favourite Music for Worship" meme, following hot on the heels of a previous one about your least favourite chorus, which I declined to do (as it would have taken all day to decide which one of many cringeworthy things I have sung over the years would get that title).
So here are the questions
1.What is your favourite piece of music for congregational singing? Why?
2.What is your favourite piece of music for performance by a group of specialist musicians within a liturgical context? This might be a worship band or a cathedral choir or just a very snazzy organist or something else entirely, but the point is that it is not congregational singing and it is live music in liturgy.
3.What is your favourite piece of music which makes you think about God to listen to outside of your place of worship? Why? This could be secular music.
4.What is one thing you like about the music at your usual place of worship? Have you told the musicians about this lately?
And these are my answers. Reading this? You're tagged!
1. My favourite piece of music for congregational singing would have to be Keith & Melody Green's "There is a Redeemer". It was a close run thing between this and "Thine be the Glory", but I went for it in the end because it was sung at my ordination, and also because it was one o f the first songs I learnt following my conversion in the mid 80's. The slight downside is that I usually end up thinking about Rory McGrath while singing it because he kind of looks like Keith Green...
2. I don't like the idea of performance in worship (justabout getting used to the concept of worship musicians having a "set list") but I am always very blessed by the worship team at St Mary's Church, Stebbing, when they play during the distribution at communion services. It doesn't really matter what they play!
3. The title of this post gives this one away. "Nothing Compares 2U by Prince (or more usually Sinead O'Connor). It's like a Psalm for me, a lament, though I know not all the lyrics really work. I'd love to do just the chorus in a Taize service one day.
4. See 2, and also, the organists in Lindsell and the Salings (who are both reading this via Facebook) never cease to bless me with their dedication and talent and desire to diversify.
Who's this then?
- Tim Goodbody
- Chelmsford, Essex, United Kingdom
- The occasional blog of an Anglican priest in rural Essex
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
'A life on every face
Ekklesia, The Church Mouse, Michael Wenham and Cranmer's Curate are among many people blogging away at the moment around the subject of the Pete Broadbent Facebook debacle and the Bishop of London's subsequent [overre-]action in withdrawing Bishop Pete from public office.
I have emitted many deep sighs about this sorry affair over the last few days, and probably need to write this post just to get stuff out of my system (but I shall be careful not to rant (too much)).
I like Bishop Pete. We met at NEAC, and we were Facebook friends until I recently culled him along with a number of other "famous" people clogging up my wall (mostly because he goes on about Spurs all the time).
He has been good for the church and good for Spring Harvest for many years. He is an Open Evangelical like me, and so there have been very few things he has ever said in public that I have disagreed with. Until now.
If you read the church press or read Anglican blogs or news feeds you will be fully aware of the kind of mudslinging that goes on between conservatives and, well, everybody else really, around the topics of Women Bishops, homosexuality, Flying Bishops, and so on and so on. On the Internet in particular feathers can fly. Very rarely does anyone get disciplined for (say) slagging off the Bishop of Chelmsford or Rowan Williams on the Ugley Vicar or slagging off Reform on Fulcrum. People lick their wounds and retreat out of range until things flare up again, or they (like me) get sick of the circular arguments and stop posting.
But Bishop Pete's Facebook discussion has elicited a big can of worms being opened. The comments, which weren't even as public as some stuff one reads,( e.g. the comments on the Guardian's Comment is free every time Christianity gets a word in edgeways, which can make your blood boil) have been splashed around the world, and the chap has been withdrawn from public office - I guess that means he's just doing a desk job.
One one level I'm thinking "you wally, Pete" - I don't think he should have posted what he did. But on another level, I'm bearing in mind cases such as that of the Priest who blessed a homosexual couple - and who received (from the Bishop of London no less) a letter slapping him on the wrist and telling him not to do it again. And that was for doing something that we have all been specifically told no to do; like, not ever. To my mind that applies, under church discipline, even if you disagree with it. Why wasn't he asked to "withdraw from public office"? After all, the daily mail (and yes those lower case letters are deliberate) hardly approved!
OK, breathe now .....
The wider issue I suppose is, do we take seriously what we have to do and say to be a minister in the CofE? All those ordained have to swear an oath of allegiance to their Bishop and to the Queen. Bishop Pete must have done that - most recently at his consecration as a Bishop. Clearly he didn't mean it, as he is a declared Republican, but what is also clear is that being a Republican is not a bar to ministry in the Anglican church. Do the oaths mean anything then? Or are they just anotherr anachronism clogging up Ministry.
Don't get me wrong, I disagree with Bishop Pete about the Wedding and about the Royal family per se. I am just increasingly frustrated that both liberal and conservative words and actions go unpunished while leaving the church rather bruised and battered, and thus (actually, albeit indirectly) the Monarch under attack.
I can't see a way back for Bishop Pete under the current bishop of London. He was supposed to also be looking after the Stepney episcopal area during the vacancy there so that can't be much fun for them either.
I was going to call this post "Just remember there are two side to every story" from Billy Bragg's "It says here" but in the end went for an intriguingly relevant line from Talk Talk's "Such a shame"
I have emitted many deep sighs about this sorry affair over the last few days, and probably need to write this post just to get stuff out of my system (but I shall be careful not to rant (too much)).
I like Bishop Pete. We met at NEAC, and we were Facebook friends until I recently culled him along with a number of other "famous" people clogging up my wall (mostly because he goes on about Spurs all the time).
He has been good for the church and good for Spring Harvest for many years. He is an Open Evangelical like me, and so there have been very few things he has ever said in public that I have disagreed with. Until now.
If you read the church press or read Anglican blogs or news feeds you will be fully aware of the kind of mudslinging that goes on between conservatives and, well, everybody else really, around the topics of Women Bishops, homosexuality, Flying Bishops, and so on and so on. On the Internet in particular feathers can fly. Very rarely does anyone get disciplined for (say) slagging off the Bishop of Chelmsford or Rowan Williams on the Ugley Vicar or slagging off Reform on Fulcrum. People lick their wounds and retreat out of range until things flare up again, or they (like me) get sick of the circular arguments and stop posting.
But Bishop Pete's Facebook discussion has elicited a big can of worms being opened. The comments, which weren't even as public as some stuff one reads,( e.g. the comments on the Guardian's Comment is free every time Christianity gets a word in edgeways, which can make your blood boil) have been splashed around the world, and the chap has been withdrawn from public office - I guess that means he's just doing a desk job.
One one level I'm thinking "you wally, Pete" - I don't think he should have posted what he did. But on another level, I'm bearing in mind cases such as that of the Priest who blessed a homosexual couple - and who received (from the Bishop of London no less) a letter slapping him on the wrist and telling him not to do it again. And that was for doing something that we have all been specifically told no to do; like, not ever. To my mind that applies, under church discipline, even if you disagree with it. Why wasn't he asked to "withdraw from public office"? After all, the daily mail (and yes those lower case letters are deliberate) hardly approved!
OK, breathe now .....
The wider issue I suppose is, do we take seriously what we have to do and say to be a minister in the CofE? All those ordained have to swear an oath of allegiance to their Bishop and to the Queen. Bishop Pete must have done that - most recently at his consecration as a Bishop. Clearly he didn't mean it, as he is a declared Republican, but what is also clear is that being a Republican is not a bar to ministry in the Anglican church. Do the oaths mean anything then? Or are they just anotherr anachronism clogging up Ministry.
Don't get me wrong, I disagree with Bishop Pete about the Wedding and about the Royal family per se. I am just increasingly frustrated that both liberal and conservative words and actions go unpunished while leaving the church rather bruised and battered, and thus (actually, albeit indirectly) the Monarch under attack.
I can't see a way back for Bishop Pete under the current bishop of London. He was supposed to also be looking after the Stepney episcopal area during the vacancy there so that can't be much fun for them either.
I was going to call this post "Just remember there are two side to every story" from Billy Bragg's "It says here" but in the end went for an intriguingly relevant line from Talk Talk's "Such a shame"
Monday, 22 November 2010
Facebook books meme technical fail
I was tagged in a note on Facebook, but owing to my rubbish computer, I was unable to comply there so am doing it here.
Instructions: Copy this into your Facebook NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt and underline the ones you’ve seen the movies of. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graham
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernier
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
My only comment would be that 100% of the classic literature titles here that I have marked as read I read before the age of 18 and probabaly haven't picked up since then - that's English and French S level in the 80's for you! So there should be a way of marking "read for pleasure" over against "read at school/college".
anyway, consider yourelf tagged if you are reading this
Instructions: Copy this into your Facebook NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt and underline the ones you’ve seen the movies of. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graham
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernier
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
My only comment would be that 100% of the classic literature titles here that I have marked as read I read before the age of 18 and probabaly haven't picked up since then - that's English and French S level in the 80's for you! So there should be a way of marking "read for pleasure" over against "read at school/college".
anyway, consider yourelf tagged if you are reading this
Monday, 1 November 2010
happiness more or less
Recently, in a discussion on the Psalms, a friend used the expression "all human life is here". I had usually associated that with the News of the World, but it does work for the variety of emotions you find there - cries of joy, of anguish, of depair, of praise, of love and of revenge adorn the hebrew Bible's hymnbook. We concluded by saying it would be good if our worship gave enough space for such a breadth of emotion. It doesn't really though, does it?
I also concluded that it was about time I stopped suppressing my emotions when I am deployed pastorally. You know like when you are at a funeral you probabaly don't expect the minister to be overly emotional because (and cringe, I have used this phrase of myself0 they are paid to keep a straight face. It is quite hard to shock me, but now I am unafraid to weep at a funeral I am taking, if only because (like the psalmists, I feel) I would want everyone there to feel comfortable expressing emotion.
Then again, I watched Marley and Me tonight and blubbed like a girl ...
What do you think?
(btw since I am fasting from Fb this week please reply here)
I also concluded that it was about time I stopped suppressing my emotions when I am deployed pastorally. You know like when you are at a funeral you probabaly don't expect the minister to be overly emotional because (and cringe, I have used this phrase of myself0 they are paid to keep a straight face. It is quite hard to shock me, but now I am unafraid to weep at a funeral I am taking, if only because (like the psalmists, I feel) I would want everyone there to feel comfortable expressing emotion.
Then again, I watched Marley and Me tonight and blubbed like a girl ...
What do you think?
(btw since I am fasting from Fb this week please reply here)
Monday, 24 May 2010
facebook tag: 20 most influential albums
this'll be interesting.
I was tagged over on Facebook (like you need me to do a link) to list 20 albums (with reference to vinyl which shows my age) which have had a big influence on me. This post is the response but I'm afraid if you've never heard these you're going to have to google or spotify them yourself.
1. Pete Seeger's Greatest Hits. My dad bought this in the late 50's/early 60's when he hitchiked across the USA. He used to play it to us kids when we were tiny, and I can probably sing most of the songs on it now.
2. Electric Light Orchestra "Out of the Blue" I never owned this on vinyl, but probably taped it off a mate (Charlie, was it you?) Got the CD off eBay last year, and hey presto, all the lyrics came flooding back.
3. AC/DC "Back in Black" Got into this on a French exchange to Grenoble in 1981. Still some of the greatest riffs ever, but the lyrics make me wince in some cases. It is a kind of ambition to use the title track as the recessional music for a licensing in the future!
4. "Heaven and Hell" by Black Sabbath. Bought this off Martin Finey when I was 15. I was never an Ozzy fan really. Again, great riffs and many lyrics that make me shudder now.
5. Michael Jackson "Thriller". Just when it looked as if I was descending into permanent denim/leather/spots/long hair territory, along came MJ with this. I can still remember hearing the guitar solo in "Beat it" (played by Eddie Van Halen) and thinking, maybe there is more to music than rock and roll!
6. Dire Straits "Making Movies". Soundtrack to an anguished adolescence!
7. Telephone "Un autre Monde" Why should the Anglophones have all the good music? It helps that this was the only cassette I carried with me through my year off living in France.
8. Billy Bragg "Life's a riot with Spy vs Spy". Genius.
9. The Wedding Present "George Best" Best live band ever.
10. Half man half Biscuit "Back in the DHSS" Funniest ...
11. The Housemartins "London 0 Hull 4" - all these three mark a new departure in guitar based but "alternative" (whatever that meant) music.
12 REM "No. 5 Document" suede coatrs and sailors caps everyone!
13. U2 "The Joshua Tree" I could pick any of their albums up to the present but this one (and maybe Achtung baby) came out at times when what I really needed to hear was a soaring anthem mixing bitterness and joy, which is what they give you.
14 Guns and Roses "Appetite for Destruction" full circle ...
15. The Rolling Stones "Exile on Main Street" Pure and dirty at the same time. I bought this to prepare for their 1990 tour - still the only time I've ever been to Wembley Stadium.
16. The Indigo Girls debut. Postmodern Angst at its finest
17. Neil Young "Weld" Noise and politics can mix, especially on his version of "the times they are a changing" and "Keep on rocking in the free world".
18.Enya "Watermark" Honeynoon. 'nuff said
19. Dido "No Angel"
20 Crowded House "Recurring Dream" These are both influential because they are music i enjoy with my wife
Pretty sure that shows that not much music has touched me for about 15 or 20 years; hmmm
I was tagged over on Facebook (like you need me to do a link) to list 20 albums (with reference to vinyl which shows my age) which have had a big influence on me. This post is the response but I'm afraid if you've never heard these you're going to have to google or spotify them yourself.
1. Pete Seeger's Greatest Hits. My dad bought this in the late 50's/early 60's when he hitchiked across the USA. He used to play it to us kids when we were tiny, and I can probably sing most of the songs on it now.
2. Electric Light Orchestra "Out of the Blue" I never owned this on vinyl, but probably taped it off a mate (Charlie, was it you?) Got the CD off eBay last year, and hey presto, all the lyrics came flooding back.
3. AC/DC "Back in Black" Got into this on a French exchange to Grenoble in 1981. Still some of the greatest riffs ever, but the lyrics make me wince in some cases. It is a kind of ambition to use the title track as the recessional music for a licensing in the future!
4. "Heaven and Hell" by Black Sabbath. Bought this off Martin Finey when I was 15. I was never an Ozzy fan really. Again, great riffs and many lyrics that make me shudder now.
5. Michael Jackson "Thriller". Just when it looked as if I was descending into permanent denim/leather/spots/long hair territory, along came MJ with this. I can still remember hearing the guitar solo in "Beat it" (played by Eddie Van Halen) and thinking, maybe there is more to music than rock and roll!
6. Dire Straits "Making Movies". Soundtrack to an anguished adolescence!
7. Telephone "Un autre Monde" Why should the Anglophones have all the good music? It helps that this was the only cassette I carried with me through my year off living in France.
8. Billy Bragg "Life's a riot with Spy vs Spy". Genius.
9. The Wedding Present "George Best" Best live band ever.
10. Half man half Biscuit "Back in the DHSS" Funniest ...
11. The Housemartins "London 0 Hull 4" - all these three mark a new departure in guitar based but "alternative" (whatever that meant) music.
12 REM "No. 5 Document" suede coatrs and sailors caps everyone!
13. U2 "The Joshua Tree" I could pick any of their albums up to the present but this one (and maybe Achtung baby) came out at times when what I really needed to hear was a soaring anthem mixing bitterness and joy, which is what they give you.
14 Guns and Roses "Appetite for Destruction" full circle ...
15. The Rolling Stones "Exile on Main Street" Pure and dirty at the same time. I bought this to prepare for their 1990 tour - still the only time I've ever been to Wembley Stadium.
16. The Indigo Girls debut. Postmodern Angst at its finest
17. Neil Young "Weld" Noise and politics can mix, especially on his version of "the times they are a changing" and "Keep on rocking in the free world".
18.Enya "Watermark" Honeynoon. 'nuff said
19. Dido "No Angel"
20 Crowded House "Recurring Dream" These are both influential because they are music i enjoy with my wife
Pretty sure that shows that not much music has touched me for about 15 or 20 years; hmmm
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
“You Twit Face”
Not an insult, but actually the name of a seminar at last summer’s New Wine conference, examining the impact of social networking Internet websites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
Whether we like it or not, the Internet and mobile phones are increasingly playing a role in how people build communities. I am on Facebook, (are you?) Along with a billion people a day, I use YouTube a fair amount (you can use if for useful things like instructions on how to service an Aga, as well as trivial stuff like how to make a rocket with Coca-cola and mints), but I draw the line at Twitter. I suppose we all have our limits!
As I write, staff at the Royal Mail have voted to strike. One of the aspects of the dispute between postal workers and management seems to me to be that the former still have a understanding of the important role they play in communities, in bringing personal communication and information to the sizeable proportion of the population who don’t use the internet, while the latter build their statistics imagining that everyone in Britain is texting and emailing all day every day.
But we are not. Even though there are all sorts of useful things to be found on the Internet (even churches), and even though I enjoy catching up with people I don’t see very often as well as those I do, through Facebook, none of these things are a sufficient substitute for real face-to-face community.
Would Jesus be on Facebook? Perhaps he would, but he’d be one of those people who don’t write much, because his message is simple, “God wants you in his community”. That’s why God didn’t show his love for us by being remote and distant, but by coming to live on earth as a man, and experiencing the joys sorrows pain and celebration of human communities.
Through the advent of Jesus into the world, the whole world was redeemed. Or to put it in the words of Gregory of Nazanius, a fourth century Christian teacher, “That which God did not assume, he did not redeem”. At the end of this month we begin our journey to Christmas in the season of Advent. Countless generations of villagers here have taken that journey; it is part of the heritage of our community. It might be happening all over the world via the Internet, but we can do it together, face-to-face, here. Do join us for our special Advent Sunday benefice service at Stebbing on November the 29th at 11am, when our preacher will be Canon Andrew Knowles, Canon theologian of Chelmsford Cathedral.
And if I do put this letter on Facebook, it won’t be until after the magazine is published!
With blessings and prayers for Remembrancetide and Advent
Wednesday, 21 October 2009
A Face in the crowd
So you may have noticed that I am on Facebook now. I really must insist that I did it for work, to help with the communications for my Course in Christian Studies class. I know you won't believe me but there you go.
Of course there have been some good outcomes, not least getting back in touch with my godson Cameron, and improving communications with people I ought to be better at staying in touch with.
I also use it to stay in touch with people from Church and their far-flung relatives. We have a group for St Mary's Stebbing, so to a certain extent we are developing into an online community, especially for those peopel who for whatever reason are not actually living in the village at the moment.
It's not a substitute for real life human contact of course, but I have begun to notice that in a way Facebook is better than real life because you really have to watch what you say and do. In real life people can have a good old gossip, or a bit of a slagging off session; if you are daft enough to do that on Facebook, everyone can see it. It's a reminder that everything we do is observed by someone.
On the subject of online community, the online sermons thing is nearly there!
Of course there have been some good outcomes, not least getting back in touch with my godson Cameron, and improving communications with people I ought to be better at staying in touch with.
I also use it to stay in touch with people from Church and their far-flung relatives. We have a group for St Mary's Stebbing, so to a certain extent we are developing into an online community, especially for those peopel who for whatever reason are not actually living in the village at the moment.
It's not a substitute for real life human contact of course, but I have begun to notice that in a way Facebook is better than real life because you really have to watch what you say and do. In real life people can have a good old gossip, or a bit of a slagging off session; if you are daft enough to do that on Facebook, everyone can see it. It's a reminder that everything we do is observed by someone.
On the subject of online community, the online sermons thing is nearly there!
Monday, 26 January 2009
Would you still remember me?
Well, that didn't last too long.
Following Obamageddon last week everyone was talking about Twitter.
I thought I'd have a little go, so I signed up and sent a message to an old friend, then started following Stephen Fry after reading about him on the BBC website.
Some of you may have noticed I even put a widget in the sidebar here (reminds me of a Chas'n'Dave lyric but that'll have to wait for another post), but that was a pain as it asked you to sign in every time you looked at this blog. Sorry about that.
So after about 4 hours and at least one stranger started following me, clicked the wondrous "delete my account" button and that was it. I was as free as a bird.
I suspect I was suffering from Facebook envy, as my wife has 87 friends, and I wanted to see if I could catch up by twittering but it wasn't to be. In the end I've got more and better things to do than spend ages clicking on "find a friend" - what i really want to be doing is getting up off my backside and finding some real ones!
As I thjought about my expoerience, I was reminded of the comedown from an inital encounter with Friends Reunited (you don't want to go there so I won't do a link) when we all suddenly thought, "what's the point of this? I already know where the people I want to stay in touch with are!"
We had an interesting discussion at an Arrow residential (a course that my wife is on and I get to go as spouse) about the definiton of the word Friend on Facebook, because its not the same as the meaning of the word in the real world.
Following Obamageddon last week everyone was talking about Twitter.
I thought I'd have a little go, so I signed up and sent a message to an old friend, then started following Stephen Fry after reading about him on the BBC website.
Some of you may have noticed I even put a widget in the sidebar here (reminds me of a Chas'n'Dave lyric but that'll have to wait for another post), but that was a pain as it asked you to sign in every time you looked at this blog. Sorry about that.
So after about 4 hours and at least one stranger started following me, clicked the wondrous "delete my account" button and that was it. I was as free as a bird.
I suspect I was suffering from Facebook envy, as my wife has 87 friends, and I wanted to see if I could catch up by twittering but it wasn't to be. In the end I've got more and better things to do than spend ages clicking on "find a friend" - what i really want to be doing is getting up off my backside and finding some real ones!
As I thjought about my expoerience, I was reminded of the comedown from an inital encounter with Friends Reunited (you don't want to go there so I won't do a link) when we all suddenly thought, "what's the point of this? I already know where the people I want to stay in touch with are!"
We had an interesting discussion at an Arrow residential (a course that my wife is on and I get to go as spouse) about the definiton of the word Friend on Facebook, because its not the same as the meaning of the word in the real world.
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