Psybertron Asks

The Muscle Shoals Music Foundation has involved the actual participants and interests from all sides of the Muscle Shoals story. Their achievement in making Muscle Shoals The Movie, makes it clear that the common success under the drive of Rick “it was war at the time” Hall far outweigh any differences.

In fact seeing the movie on DVD, the differences already presumed to involve some hitch over the Aretha Franklin sessions, turn out to be non-existent musically, and on the scale of what actually did get created, a trivial misunderstanding or lovers’ tiff. Real life stories are made of such stuff.

The movie itself is excellent by any standard.

The musical content should come as no surprise given the name-droppers heavenly list of voices and musicians involved, but the story told in the mix of a surprising amount of old footage, many old stills (uncredited Cher, Paul Simon), and the ubiquitous talking-head rock-doc interview clichés amidst the retrospective on-location monologues, tells the whole story very effectively at length. The real surprise is the cinematic production values are first-class. You get a tremendous sense of the Tennessee River location amid the north Alabama swamps and cotton-fields – even The Walls of Jericho? – enough to make me sweet-home-sick.

I loved the irony, given that The Swampers feature throughout, that you don’t get even a hint of the Sweet Home Alabama riff until the closing credits, and quite rightly since it really did happen pretty late in the story. With so much excellent material to work with, everything can be given proper balance.

Apart from learning the real Aretha Franklin story, and getting a dose of the wonderful Keith Richards “The Beatles beat us to Muscle Shoals by about 4 days!”, there are so many untold surprises that needed a documentary to tell. The Jerry Wexler / Atlantic Records / Rick Hall tie-up was central to the whole story – success that drew in the Stax and Sun artists and more from East and West for a little of that swamp magic. A bunch of nerdier-looking-white-guys-working-the-local-supermarket you could hardly expect to be doing the business, colour-blind in 60’s/70’s Alabama. You couldn’t make it up.

Worth it for the Wilson Pickett interview alone, that and Spooner Oldham’s “unblocking” keyboard riff , but packed with good stuff throughout, all orchestrated by Rick Hall – one of a kind.

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[Post Note: An apology. When I first posted my summary of the “Muscle Shoals” music connection back here, I kinda damned with faint praise the FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) connection, just mentioned Rick Hall as a name, and overplayed the split between FAME and MSSS (Muscle Shoals Sound Studios) from the MSSS side, set up by The Swampers after they decided to go it alone. My one-sided perceptions maybe arose from arriving at the connections via Noel Webster then the current owner of the 3614 Jackson Highway (MSSS) Studio and a fellow Huntsville resident. (I acknowledged the developing situation several times since.)]

Not been tempted to interject yet in the PM “Christian Country” vs the BHA Open Letter response, but there is one point I need to make.

Fact: we are a Christian country in the sense that not only cultural but also deep and long-standing institutional “traditions” have arisen from Christian values.

That says nothing exclusive about whether equivalent values could not have arisen from any other religious or secular traditions, nor whether the values inherited from Christian tradition were themselves inherited from earlier mythologies and practices, nor continuously evolving with parallel traditions.

It also says nothing about God or belief in any god, or modern religious and secular practices of any current population. Christ was a human prophet, or at least the imperfectly-attributed preachings of a collection of human prophets, together with a whole lot of baggage concerning mythical and metaphorical explanations and exhortations.

Humanist values may not need a Christian tradition, but they don’t need amnesia either. It is (probably) possible to build a fairly comprehensive set of rules of thumb regarding human behaviour starting with the golden rule, though it is equally improbable that the golden rule could itself be derived from first principles in any absolute sense. The point is we’d need “our values”  enshrined in some “tradition” – we can’t afford every human to learn every value by individual empirical experience, nor by popular vote in each generation.

Life is not a repeatable experiment.

On the big questions, of time and causation, the origins and composition of the universe, even science long since left empirical falsifiability far behind, so let’s not tie-up real-life politics with the scientistic neurosis of exclusive logical objectivity.

[Post Notes]

[Previously here. And update here, Miliband “Jewish but not religious.”]

[Plus 8 arguments.]

[Post-Archbishop. Finally, as usual, the (now ex-)Archbishop agrees with me. “Cultural memory is strongly Christian”, unless of course you are a wilful amnesiac, as I said. He uses the expression “post-Christian” in the sense of post-Modern, as in not excluding Christian, but taking it further. I’ve always seen him as “extra-Christian” much to the annoyance of practising Christians in his time. Too clever for the Archbishop’s good, but the lord-spiritual spot-on as usual. He and Wilby make a great double-act as the post-Archbishop said to the Archbishop.]

 

As 300 more go to a watery grave, can I just point out the the biggest problem facing us is not terrorism or evil conspiracies, rather the globally endemic cock-up of systematically lousy decision-making. My agenda to understand why and how to fix. (Some of the terrorism and reactionary evil is no doubt a symptom of dissatisfaction with dominant prevailing decision-making memeplex / paradigm / genre.)

My thought seeing the first photos the other day was, how come only two of the many dozens of inflatable life-rafts seemed to have been deployed. State of the art ship – yet the crew paralysed between standby and prepare to abandon ship, and …. appropriate action.

Talking of enjoying success, here’s hoping the Geneva Ukraine / Russian talks prove fruitful.

If the Ukrainian “Ambassador at Large” Olexander Scherva is anything to go by, interviewed on Newsnight last night and the Today programme this morning, there is good reason for hope. A very impressive and credible representative putting things into both immediate and historical perspective.

Even when expressing hope, Putin still can’t resist the rhetoric of power and “rights” though. As I said before, turn down the rhetoric, please. If you have the rights (and the power) and hope not to use them, why say it?

[And that’s a two-way street of course Stop Poking the Bear – Engage with Putin, don’t castigate.]

Apropos nothing in particular,
great to see Gareth Bale enjoying success in the Champions League semi-final.

Pic courtesy the BBC (oh, and Getty Images of course). And an excuse to try out the new WordPress 3.9 image drag / drop / resize features in the post editor. Simples.

Despite the obvious direction of motion frozen in the sporting context, hard not to see him being drawn up to the heavenly light 😉 In fact, what with his foreground scale against the crowd, and the tiers in the stadium, not so much spot-the-ball as stairway-to-heaven.

[And success at the other end of the scale, well done to John Still and Luton Town for regaining their football league status.]

[Finally – you couldn’t write this stuff – Gareth’s season did have the fairy tale ending he deserved.]

I’m reading Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia, picked-up along with his much acclaimed new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. More on the latter later.

The title resonated with a recent quote from Eagleton in Culture and the Death of God:

Like most avant-gardists,
[… when it comes to Christian culture …]
Nietzsche is a devout amnesiac.

Tend to forget, brought up on James’s quick fire TV and Magazine pieces, that he’s a seriously polyglot, well-read poet and cultural historian, pulling in references he’s clearly read in the original French, German, Russian and Italian, not to mention Spanish / Portuguese and classical Greek and Latin. You can hear his voice in the rhythmic prose delivery, but the content is both wide and deep.

I’m only up to the C’s but already loving it. It’s a series of essays, loosely-based on named individuals, triggered by contemporary marginal notes from his 20th century readings, then arranged (arbitrarily) in alphabetical order. Many recurring themes; popular culture naturally, the Jews, world-wars I & II, American cultural dominance from his antipodean perspective – but the common thread is the poetry, with Dante leading the field. The expression of culture in well crafted phrasing of the day, often borrowed, evolved by judicious selection (or typesetter’s error) and re-purposed from another day.

So many people and references new to me, but so far all excellent, absolutely wonderful. Exemplary piece on Gianfranco Contini analysing poetic criticism on “rules” of rhyme and rhythm, and the concept of “learning  by heart”. The latter we may pejoratively translate as almost robotic or mechanical – uh oh – don’t forget the heart. It’s a kind of imperfect recall compression skill that comes from real learning and near-perfect appreciation. Fascinating.

Another from Contini: You heard the idea of no such thing as problems, only opportunities ? Well try this

The departure point for inspiration is the obstacle.
[Varianti – essays 1938-68]

A cheaper, less inspiring idea for a book it’s hard to imagine, which means James’ imaginative content stands by itself. An immense and unexpected pleasure, and being in essay form, an easy piecemeal read, no rush.

Piece in The Spectator to read later. Tweeted by Andrew Neil.

Dreadful piece it turns out, too exclusively Christian, but the main point is true enough.

The new atheists may not like it,
but they’ve had their say.
It’s time for a serious discussion.

It’s a plug for a book that’s clearly been a long time in the writing, the Terry Eagleton reference is from 2009, as opposed to his 2014 book. (Which, ironically, I criticised for being written a decade too late. Better late than never I guess.)

Came across this Kent University page on presentation skills, which as well as including many common sense, tried an tested rules, also included some useful original key quotes and examples.

One for later.

In addition to the 2006 references below, there are more later even better observations.

For example, “Does the motion of the solar system affect the microwave sky?”

Rick Ryals adds on Facebook:

There have been a number of scientific papers written that derive the same results…
… yet look at them now, they act like they never saw any of it before…

Also, “Is the low-l microwave background cosmic?”

And, “Large-angle anomalies in the CMB”

And, “Why is the solar system cosmically aligned?“