Alan

Land of Talk - It's ok

It's OK, is my song of the week. Try to listen to it and not stop and think about someone you love. If it has no effect of you, well fuck you, you have no soul.
 

Fila Brazillia!

The Frames - In the Deep Shade

Friend City (Boxed in Remix) - Rozi Plain

This little piece of paper

Today I stuck my hand into the back pocket of my shorts and fished out this piece of paper. The way a magician fishes a colourful handkerchief out of a waistcoat pocket you were sure - as sure as you could be of anything - was empty.

Face down, the piece of paper looked like a receipt from some recent shopping expedition for asparagus or cheese or dinner.

I turned it over, impatient for it to explain itself. Why are you?

As I read, the poem unfolded itself, like an old man getting out of bed. And then the final three words. They stopped me racing through.

"You come too..."

My room creaked silent. It was a moment. I was ashamed. 

Ashamed that I had approached this little piece of paper as getting in the way, much in the same way I approach many other more important things as getting in the way of my day.

Like the audience watching the magician perform his handkerchief trick, I haven't the faintest idea how this little poem slipped its way into my life. Unlike the magician, I cannot, in the back room of some theatre with the stage lights now off, explain the magic away as illusion.

Or at least, I choose not to.

Part Christian, part pig

"I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seems real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense that I can believe matters much to Christ or anybody else. Any Christian who is not a hero, Leon Bloy wrote, is a pig, which is a harder way of saying the same thing. From time to time I find a kind of heroism momentarily possible - a seeing, doing, telling of Christian truth - but most of the time I am indistinguishable from the rest of the herd that jostles and snuffles at the great trough of life. Part-time novelist, Christian, pig.

That is who I am. Who you are I do not know, and yet perhaps I know something. I know that like me you wake up each morning to a day that you must somehow live, to a self that you must somehow be, and to a mystery that you cannot fathom if only the mystery of your own life. Thus, strangers though we are, at a certain level there is nothing about either of us that can be entirely irrelevant to the other. Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse. And there is always some comfort in knowing that Kilroy also was here."

- Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace

On Being a Comic Genius.

Last year, two great comedians published little self-promotional videos online. One was by Steve Coogan. One was by me. And I mean, I know what you're thinking: "But James! that's only one great comedian! Everyone knows that Alan Partridge sucks a big bag of awkward dicks! AH haaaa!" And I'm like, "Yeah I know!" I mean, he's only gone and bloody ripped me off hasn't he?

What's that you say?

Well, I published this in April 2015:



And here's me old mate Steve just ripping off not only my idea, but also my tone in October 2015:



I mean sure, his is... funnier, wittier, more self-deprecating, has better production values, and perhaps most depressingly, he looks less weathered at 49 than I do at 32, but still. Sometimes you just wish people had the bloody guts to at least send you an email saying, "Hey James, I am about to blatantly rip you off mate. Feeling awful. How can I make it up to you? Would you like a part in The Trip 3?"

I.D.

Clarke and Dawe - The Nativity Play

GO! Cimb into your leaky little tub of a boat, and keep going.

“I have a feeling we have talked enough — that we need silence. Not much — three minutes; to spend three minutes not saying a damn thing. Can we do that? Are we brave enough to do that?”

I seem to only publish about Buechner these days. Buechner or music. Music and Buechner. 

Why? 

To share I guess. It's as simple as that.

Perhaps not to feel alone with it all swirling inside me. 

Definitely, in the hope, however stupid it may feel sometimes, that it might latch onto something as important in you, and through that, create something undeniably important in each of us that we can yell together at the trees. Yell at the sun. Shout into the teeth of the rain. To proclaim together, "I feel... [what is it?] something like... truth!"

Whatever the reason, I guess I'm caring less and less about why I put this here. All I know is it's a conduit for hope and meaning and love in my life. A conduit because I don't think they are ends in themselves, hope, love and meaning. They are the means to an end that I can't yet name, but that I long for like I long for home. And for whatever reason, I can't help but believe that something about that end lies in the silence Buechner encourages us to be brave enough to try in the quote cited above. 

I believe it might have something to do with having the ability to sit in ourselves, and for three minutes not say a damned thing, as Buechner says, and nevertheless, despite that silence, and despite it being in many respects the most meaningless thing we could do, to sit in silence contemplating nothing in particular - in spite of all that! - to be at home within ourselves, if only for three minutes. 

So... 

I share with you this address by Buechner, given in 1997 at the 250th anniversary of Princeton University. The text is available here. I encourage you to read along, if for nothing else other than to fully understand the power of the written word when it is spoken by its author!

And just for good measure, some Phoenix:

Luke and Pip's wedding

This is the text of a speech I gave earlier this year at Luke and Pip's wedding. I'm putting here for posterity I guess, and in the belief that no one is reading this but me! So that what this blog is, in the end, is more a diary of things that have moved me, than any attempt at exposure or feedback.

So with those disclosures in place: here it is.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I was thinking about Luke and Pip, and what to say to you all here tonight about them, the idea that kept coming to mind was 'fate'.

This was a relationship that, it seems to me, was meant to be.

When I first met Luke - there was a certain amount of fate involved. Hugh andI first met Luke at a party back towards the end of school. Hugh and I happened to have turned up with a case of beers. Luke didn't. And so, we became friends. I wish I could say there was more to it than that. I wish I could say we connected on some deep level. No. It was the beers. And on such deliciously carbonated twists of fate are life long friendships made. Not just friendships as it turns out, but marriages. Because it was of course through Hugh that Luke went on to meet Pip.

Growing up, Luke and Andrew and I spent a lot of time at the Robilliard house in Haberfield. It was the stage for a lot of our adventures. We used to joke, that we were there so much we were basically part of the family.  I mean, I say 'joke'. But it's a joke that Luke has taken way too seriously. 

And then there was the competition to see which of us Helen liked the best: 

When Pip and Luke started going out, I thought, 'Well played sir. I see what you're doing. Smart move.' 

When Luke started getting invited to Robilliard family events I thought, 'OK. Not ideal for me.'

Even when Luke told me that Pip was to be pregnant with their first born child, there was part of me that thought, 'You're still in this James. Play the long game mate'.

Well guys, after today I think I'm willing to concede. Luke - you've only gone and become Helen's son-in-law! You win!

As teenager's hanging out at Stanton Rd, there was something that shone brightly about Pip and Luke when they were together. 

Pip was shy. But Luke is annoyingly charismatic. So much so, I'm pretty sure my Mum loves him more than she does me. 'It's the way that he talks to me on the phone James! "Hello Mrs Pender," he says, "And how are you?" You can tell that he was school captain.'

So obviously Pip was never going to be able to resist Luke - the laconic inner west heavy metal drummer with the school captain manners and the twinkle in his eye. As comfortable talking to the top brass of the Defence Force as he is to a 65 year old house wife with a subtle distrust of young people. 

I've watched these guys do some hard yards. From Sydney to Canberra. And Canberra to Sydney. And back again. And again. But they've made it work. When Luke was deployed to Afghanistan - there was a party at the Robilliard house in Haberfield (and I was invited - don't go on about it!). To ensure that Luke would appear in the photos taken that night, Pip provided people with a cut out of Luke's face to pose with. It was a small, some might say, silly gesture. But I remember thinking how great that was. They were always together. Sometimes, it's the little things.

Pip - since Luke has been with you. I have noticed a definite change in him. You give him a sense of direction, there's a calmness about Luke when he's with you. And inner strength. In you he's found not only a person to be with, he's found a self to be. And that is a precious gift. 

One of my favourite writers has a quote about love and it goes like this: "Love is more than a warmth to bask in. It is a grave and fierce yearning. A reaching out. A losing and finding of the self in the paradise of another. 

Luke and Pip - I've watched you yearn for each other. I've watched you reach out. And I look forward to being there as you continue to lose and find your selves in each others' paradise. 

Luke - I love you very much. And I thank God you didn't bring any beers to that party.

The dark shadow that the truth casts

The below is a passage from Frederick Buechner's Now and Then, an autobiographical memoir of his journey of vocation - as a minister, teacher and author.

The particular passage that I've selected is not about any of those things however. It is a passage, essentially, about love. It's about what love is; what it means to love; and the potential for hurt that necessarily comes with loving another human being fully - the dark shadow. Through this passage, Buechner comes to the conclusion that loving someone else can be crippling, both for ourselves, and for the ones we love, and that for that reason, "a distance must be kept". Buechner writes that, "if love is a matter of holding fast to, and identifying with, and suffering for, the ones we love, it is a matter also of standing back from, of leaving space for, of letting go of."

I don't know why it has stuck with me, this passage, this idea that we need to preserve distance from those we love. But is has stuck with me, ever since I first read it, dreary-eyed, on a flight from Sydney to Bangkok a few days ago.

Perhaps it has stuck with me because in Buechner's propensity for "helpless brooding and worrying", I recognise much of myself. As I do in his admission that such personal characteristics have been, throughout his life, "crippling both to myself and to the ones I love".

To love too much. That is the essence of it. To feel another's pain to the point where it ceases to be in any way empathic or helpful for them but simply (and selfishly?) a reflection of my own pain and worry in them. A confirmation of my suspicion that the world does have the capacity to do cruel and hurtful things to us before we are done.

Perhaps it is that.

Or perhaps it is that, although I've never thought deeply about it before, I've never thought it possible to love too much.

Or perhaps it is my stubborn, inert belief that there is nothing to be gained by holding back, by keeping distance, other than self preservation, and that it is ultimately through the sitting with, the engaging with, the working out of darkness and pain and sadness, that we ultimately learn something new about ourselves, and each other, and therefore our sense of being as humans on this earth. And although I would struggle to point to any empirical proof, I can't help but suspect that it is only by knowing ourselves, by having a self to be, that we can truly enter into relationship with all the other 'selves' out there. That we can enter into rather than simply pass beside. So to be told to 'keep distance' seems to me, in a sense, to be told to stop short, to shut the gates, to isolate ourselves from the possibility of knowing ourselves and others fully.

Or perhaps it is simply the fact that, somewhere deep down in me, I suspect that Buechner is right, and that much of the way we love others is not helpful, either to ourselves, or to the ones we love.

Although the passage is lengthy, I've felt the need to write it out in full here. Perhaps that in itself is sign enough that the words are important for me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"As a writer I have spent so much time trying to bring my dreams to life that, looking back over the years, I remember occasions when life itself seemed dreamlike by comparison. There was the departure of Katherine and Dinah for boarding school, for instance. I knew perfectly well that they were going. We had driven them around to this school and that school till finally they found the one they liked best. And for the whole summer before they left, there was all the talk about it and the getting ready for it. And when the day finally came, Judy and I drove them there ourselves and met their roommates and lugged endless bags, boxes and suitcases up endless flights of stairs for them and kissed them goodbye at last, knowing that in a few weeks we would be seeing them again because the school in Massachusetts was only a couple of hours away after all.

What I did not see was that even though they were only a couple of hours away, and even thought there would be years of weekends and vacations for us to get together whenever we felt like it, there was a sense in which, when we kissed them goodbye that September afternoon, we were kissing them goodbye for keeps. From that day forward, Vermont would never be home for them again in the way it had been. It would be a place to go for weekends and vacations. From that day forward, home, for them, was theirs to find wherever in themselves or in the world they ever happened to find it, if they were lucky enough to find it at all. Two of the four most precious people in my life had left for good, and I had been looking the other way at the time. Life went on, of course, and I managed to get around much as before, but there were times when it felt like trying to get around on broken legs, and there are times when it feels that way still.

It was not just that I greatly missed them but that I feared for them more greatly still. The world does cruel and hurtful things to us all before it's done with us, and with little more to defend themselves against it than their bags full of clothes and their boxes full of rock records, coat hangers, hockey sticks, it was out into that would that they went. The adventures that they have had since are theirs to tell, not mine, but insofar as from time to time the world has worked them over as it works us all over, I have suffered vastly more from such pain as they have known than I have ever suffered from any pain simply of my own. As Buddha well knew, that is the price that love exacts from us all, but since from childhood I have always been given to helpless brooding and worrying and darkest, most doom-ridden imagining, the price it has exacted from me has often proved crippling both to myself and to the ones I love.

Love is a key concept in Buddhism and Christianity both, needless to say. Buddhism, in the long run, seems to come out against it except in the sense of something like upekha, which is a love so vast and passionless, so disembodied and impartial, that it ceases to resemble the Christian form in any very apparent way. Buddhism, comes out against it not just for one's own sake in the sense that to love another is to open the door to a whole new realm of vulnerability and suffering for oneself, but for the sake of the other also in the sense that unless we can break all the fetters, including love, which bind us to the wheel of rebirth, we can never achieve that Nirvana-like state of selfless detachment which is the only state in which we can be of any real use toward helping others to achieve it. Bloodless, remote, and mythical as these Buddhist insights are apt to seem from a Christian perspective, they are nonetheless greatly useful, I think, in deepening our understating of love in a Christian sense.

That to love other people is to suffer when they suffer is a truth of life which Christianity recognises no less than Buddhism does. It is a truth which has much to do, of course, with what the Cross is all about. To say that Christ takes upon himself the sins of the world is to say that he takes upon himself the suffering of the world too. It is to say that in a sense his suffering on the Cross continues for as long as any of us suffers. Furthermore, in being called to take up our own crosses and follow him, we are called to participate in his suffering. But unlike Buddhism, Christianity nevertheless affirms this love that suffers and, what is more, affirms it not in spite of the fact that it suffers but because of it. It affirms it for the reason that to love others to the point of suffering with them and for them in their own suffering is the only way ultimately to heal them, redeem them, if they are to be redeemed at all. It is God's way in Christ, and as we are called to participate with Christ in his suffering, so we are called to be partners with him in his work of redemption. For our own sakes as well as for theirs, we are called to be Christs to all humankind, in other words, and that is close to the heart of our faith and of our lives together as Christians.

And yet. And yet. Having spoken this Christian truth, we must also, I think, remember the Buddhist truth which may be closer to it than at first glance it appears. If love is a matter of hold fast to, and identifying with, and suffering for, the ones we love, it is a matter also of standing back from, of leaving space for, of letting go of. To become, through loving and needing them, as involved in the lives of others as I was involved in the lives of my children is in the long run to risk being both crippled and crippling. Because we love our children as helplessly as we do, they have the power to destroy us. We must not let them, for their own sakes no less than for our own. A distance must be kept - not just from our children but from everyone we love. I think of the Buddha sitting under his Bo-tree with his eyes closed upon an inner peace which he would not permit even his great compassion to disturb. I think of the staff of the East Harlem Protestant Parish with the pale northern blue of their compassion, their sad gaiety, their utter lack of sentimentality. I think of Jesus himself, who in the profoundest sense bled for people but was never what is meant by 'a bleeding heart'; who did what he could for the sick and suffering who came his way and then moved on; who wept for Jerusalem but let Jerusalem choose its own way; who kept his own mother at arm's length and, when Mary Magdalen reached out to embrace him at the end, said, 'Do not touch me.'

We are to love one another as God has loved us. That is the truth of it. But to love one another more than God has loved us - to love one another at the expense of our own freedom to be something like whole and at peace within ourselves, and at the expense of others' freedom too - is the dark shadow that the truth casts. This is what I started to learn when Katherine and Dinah went away to school in 1975 and launched forth on lives of their own. What event could have been less earthshaking? Yet for me it shook the very foundations themselves and marked the beginning of a new leg of the journey which I am in the midst of still."

Letting it in

Buddha sits enthroned beneath the Bo-tree in the lotus position. His lips are faintly parted in the smile of one who has passed beyond every power in earth or heaven to touch him. "He who loves fifty has fifty woes, he who loves ten has ten woes, he who loves none has no woes," he has said. His eyes are closed.

Christ, on the other hand, stands in the garden of Gethsemane, angular, beleaguered. His face is lost in shadows so that you can't even see his lips, and before all the powers in earth and heaven he is powerless. "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you," he said. His eyes are also closed.

The difference seems to me this. The suffering that Buddha's eyes close out is the suffering of the world that Christ's eyes close in and hallow. It is an extraordinary difference, and even in a bare classroom in Exeter, New Hampshire, I think it was as apparent to everyone as it was to me that before you're done, you have to make a crucial and extraordinary choice.

Now and then - Buechner

In January of that first winter in Exeter, our first child was born. She was a girl, to be named Katherine after my mother, and to the last of my days I will remember that first of hers. I had been up all night. Sometime after dawn they told me I could come see her. I was shown down a long, empty corridor. A nurse held her up to the plate-glass window so that I could look at her from where I stood on the other side of it. Her face was puffy and flushed, her eyes swollen shut as though she had just come through some sort of punishing battle, which of course she had. I remember thinking that all my past and Judy's past and the past of all the people I had loved most in my life were caught up in her and that from that moment forward my life would never be the same again, as indeed it never has. She looked beat-up and exhausted. I think she was sleeping. With the glass between us, I could not touch her. She weighed less than my briefcase. She was the hope of the world. Tears leapt to my eyes as if I had been struck. 

"He who loves fifty has fifty woes. . . who loves none has no woe," said the Buddha, and it is true. To love another, as you love a child, is to become vulnerable in a whole new way. It is no longer only through what happens to yourself that the world can hurt you but through what happens to the one you love also and greatly more hurtingly. When it comes to your own hurt, there are always things you can do. You can put up a brave front, for one, and behind that front, if you are lucky, if you persist, you can become a little brave inside yourself. You can become strong in the broken places, as Hemingway said. You can become philosophical, recognizing how much of your troubles you have brought down on your own head and resolving to do better by yourself in the future. Like King Lear on the heath, you can become compassionate. Like the whiskey priest, you can become a saint. But when it comes to the hurt of a child you love, you are all but helpless. The child makes terrible mistakes, and there is very little you can do to ease his pain, especially when you are so often a part of his pain as the child is also part of yours. There is no way to make him strong with such strengths as you may have found through your own hurt, or wise through such wisdom, and even if there were, it would be the wrong way because it would be your way, not his. The child's pain becomes your pain, and as the innocent by-stander, maybe it is even a worse pain for you, and in the long run even the bravest front is not much use.

Sun Kil Moon - Gentle Moon

Woah - this is so yum.

Perfect driving song. Or fishing. Or drinking. Or walking. Or thinking. Or getting married.

Listen to that guitar.

(Can someone tell me why this isn't on spotify?)

Clarke and Dawe - Amazing

Don't Leave - Ane Brun (Live in Stockholm)

I posted this song a few years ago. Here it is again, live from a performance at the Cirkus in Stockholm.

Listen out for the the band's treatment of this stanza, the heart of the song:

I am here, here now.
I am right here, by your side.
I'll lay my hand on the couch, next to yours.
You can hold it, if you would like to.
It will do you good.

So simple.

This is for Fie.

Father John Misty - Hollywood Forever Cemetry Sings

Sylvan Esso - Coffee

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww shiiiiiitttttttttttttttttttttttt.

Get up, get down.
Feel the turn of rotation and stop
See the next one waiting
Get up, get down
Get up
Sentiment's the same but the pair of feet change.