.
Wednesday April 1st and Thursday April 2nd
I saw an enormous curved ramp from the elevated motorway in the night sky, wending its way around a block of flats, several stories above my head, and I finally had to admit this wasn’t a dream or a nightmare - I was lost. Either the ramp shouldn’t be where it was, or I shouldn’t be where I was, and frankly I had no idea where I was.
It seemed sensible to assume that the ramp had every right to be where it was, whereas I had no business at all being somewhere I shouldn’t be, wherever it was. Being under that ramp was no part of my plans, back at the point of leaving Mukogawa station, looking to stroll the mile or so back to my apartment. Memorising the route and the general directions I’d need to take had seemed easy - or so I’d thought.
Still - there was no need to worry. I still had the map in my rucksack. I took it out and consulted it under a nearby streetlight. On this particular street there were no people. Back in London in the dead of night on an unknown street with no-one around I’d have been starting to feel slightly worried. No need for that here, though - surely Japan has no petty crime and no crazy street gangs, armed to the teeth and looking for easy pickings?
The map had seemed easy to read yesterday, at the point of knowing exactly where I was on it, and where I needed to get to. Now that I’d somehow departed from the straight and narrow, and no longer had a clue where I was, the map was useless, on account of the fact that it was entirely in Japanese, and so were the actual street signs -assuming I could eventually find one or two of them. Trying to memorise the look of the characters on the road signs and then scour the map for the exact same Japanese characters would be a nightmare, standing there in the chill wind of the Spring darkness.
After a couple of minutes pondering how on earth I’d gone away from the proper route, I noticed an old guy coming slowly along the street, for all I knew having had a few drinks at a nearby bar. Not feeling at all optimistic I held out the map and said in English, “Excuse me, I need to get back to this place and I don’t know where I am.”
He looked down at the map and muttered something in Japanese, and immediately shuffled off in the direction he’d been heading. I didn’t feel I could blame him - there was no way we were going to communicate, and I doubted that he could read or understand the cluttered little photocopy of a map that had on it only the names of the main roads, and in very small characters.
And then he was suddenly back again, standing next to me, holding a pair of reading glasses, having gone somewhere to collect them. So much for my intuition and my faith in humanity. Of course - he couldn’t read the map because he couldn’t focus on it properly! After a couple of moments he looked up and pointed in the general direction I’d need to go in.
And then he pulled on my arm, clearly saying, look - come here - I’ll show you. He not only walked with me to the next intersection where I’d need to turn left - he came with me for several blocks till we reached a main road, from where it was obvious where I should go to complete the journey. Then he shook my hand, bowed, and went off home.
--------------------------------------
The Temples
It had been a fitting and affirmative ending to what had been an excellent day. Yoko had phoned early and asked whether we could meet at 9.00 instead of 10.00, as it was a beautiful, bright day and we should make the most of it. We agreed it should be possible for me to catch the two trains I’d need to take to get to central Osaka station, assuming I had my wits about me, and in the event I caught one that went all the way through.
Kayo was waiting for us when we arrived at Kyoto, two more trains later. And then it was down into the underground for a train that took us from north to south, and out into a windy street to wait for the ‘community bus’ that was in effect a shuttle bus to the Daigo temple complex we intended to explore - a bus that was about the size of an average American taxi but able to contain about forty tightly-packed humans, obviously with most of them standing and strap-hanging..
Yoko said she could tell from the accents that a great many of the people who were flocking to the temples this cherry-blossom time were from the Tokyo area. It was interesting that there were virtually no Euros or North Americans.
And finally we had confirmation that this was the very peak of the 2009 cherry blossom season - the vast majority of the blossom on the trees in the temple gardens was in full bloom, and there was absolutely none of it down on the ground. Neither had the new green leaves burst from their buds.
There’s no point trying to describe the cumulative effect of the blossoms in the gardens and the temple walkways - it was just sensational. The atmosphere was festival-like, but quiet and respectful, and suitably in awe of nature’s amazing display. New wonders came into sight with every turn and with each fresh vantage point. Thousands of photos were being snapped, and hopefully some of them will do justice to the spectacle, and bring back some of the feeling of the day.
We went from one meditation hall to the next, higher and higher up the mountain, past streams and ponds, over bridges that looked down on slow-swimming Koi carp, past raked pebble gardens and waterfalls and a huge pagoda, past pine trees and leafless Japanese maples.
Truly a memorable and incredible experience, never again to be repeated. I can’t imagine ever again being able to coincide a trip to Japan with the very peak of the cherry blossom season.
Next week I’ll go back and take photos of the blossom scattered like a carpet of snow on the ground, and floating in the ponds and streams, having drifted down like snowflakes.
--------------------------------------------
Flashbacks
I keep getting flashbacks of the journey to Japan. I guess I’m still recovering from it.
Last night I had a very sharp memory of the shiver of dread that ran through me at Heathrow when I suddenly had a thought- is Emirates a DRY airline? Holy fuck! Was that the reason it was the only airline that still had seats available to Japan in the cherry-blossom season? How bad would that be! More than 16 hours flying time via Dubai - without any free booze! Aaaarrrggghhhh!
Calm. Calm. Worst case scenario. The best case scenario was that there was unlimited quantities of top-class beer, wine, spirits and liqueurs to help pass the hours in a haze of well-being and olfactory delights.
When I asked the steward for a second can of Heineken he said, “I’ll give you two more.” Now that’s what I CALL an airline.
So - three cans before dinner, wine with it, and a generous glass of Hennessey to follow.
The spicy chicken and basmati rice, salad, bread, cheesecake and coffee weren’t bad either.
The double-decker Airbus 380 - 800, the biggest damn passenger plane in the world, and in the entire history of the world, sailed smoothly on at over 1,000kph, and every single man, woman and child in its massive cabins, and no doubt in its similar cabins upstairs, was sitting in front of an individual flat screen on which was playing a UNIQUE image.
No two images or programmes the same. It was unbelievable. The plane had more channels and films on tap than my home cable TV service. Plus a constantly updated map of where we were on our journey, and exactly which bit of which country we were flying over. Plus a constantly updated notification of airspeed, groundspeed, outside temperature, time at destination, time at point of departure, etc. Incredible.
Plus - the ability to touch the screen to change from a video image of what’s directly ahead of the plane to what’s immediately beneath it, to what the entire plane looks like from a video camera mounted at the top of the tailplane.
------------------------------------
Academia
Yesterday I went to look around the university and to attend a seminar that involved a colleague of Yoko plus three of Yoko’s post-grad students - Kayo, Tomoko and Megumi. The subject was the history of education and the progressive movement in Europe the late 19th and early 20th Century. These guys know a damn sight more about it than I do - Dewey, Montessori, etc.
At the end of the session I asked if I could do a video interview with them as a group. I had four questions. Why are there so many women-only universities in Japan and what do they feel are the advantages? What did they think were the main benefits of the Montessori approach to early years learning? What could they tell me about wabi sabi? Why do most Japanese people seem to know very little about (and care even less about) Zen?
When I find the time I’ll try to transcribe the discussion from the tape. Interesting.
In the afternoon I managed to set up my laptop for Internet access in Yoko’s office via the uni’s network, with the help of one of Yoko’s very pleasant colleagues. No sign of anyone having a guitar to lend me as yet!
We then went back to her new house, which I was visiting for the first time, and made dinner whilst trying to get the gist of what was at that very moment happening live in London - the G20 demonstrations. Felt very annoyed to be missing such events in my adopted city. Oh well . . .
-------------------------------------------------------
I have to write a speech for the start of year faculty meeting at the university tomorrow, so here goes.
Good morning everyone. Ohayo Gozaimas. I’m sorry I don’t speak any more Japanese, but I’m going to try hard to learn some in the next three weeks. Professor Yamasaki has very kindly bought me this Instant Japanese book - so I hope it will be instant!
I’ve only been back in Japan for a few days, but I’ve already decided I don’t want to go home to London. Being in Japan at cherry blossom time is very exciting and a huge thrill for me. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. Yesterday in Kyoto was wonderful beyond description. I wish I could show you the two thousand photos and one hour of video I took! I guess you have lots of photos of your own at home!
I’m missing the G20 meetings and demonstrations in London this week. My generation of students grew up in the 1960’s, so I have a fondness for political demonstrations. I haven’t lost my belief that by working together, people like us can help to make a better planet.
My home is in east London, which is where the next Olympics will take place in 2012. The main stadium’s construction is now reaching its full height. You can see it on internet webcams. Or feel free to come and see the games in 2012. I’m not sure I’ll be there myself though. I may have to escape to Japan for a more peaceful life.
I was a Primary teacher in London, and was then a headteacher of a Primary school for 20 years. My school was well known as a place where progressive child-centred education was pioneered in a State Primary school in the 1960’s, and onward.
I have now been happily retired from headship for two years, and these days I’m running my own educational consultancy, working with associates who are able to offer to schools, universities and local authorities advice and support on children’s wellbeing, personal, social and emotional intelligence, creativity, and pedagogy for child-centred education. I can give you a web site reference if you’re interested in knowing more.
I look forward to meeting some more of you and getting to know you better in these next three weeks. I’d like to thank those of you who have already been so welcoming and helpful. And I’d especially like to thank Professor Yamasaki, who wrote an academic paper with me and published it in Japan a few years ago.
With her help and support I’ve been able to develop my 3 Dimensional model of human intelligences, and it’s thanks to her generosity and continuing friendship that I’ve been able to return this year to Japan, a country I really love, yet again.
I wish you all a very happy and productive new academic year. Take care of one another, and enjoy life together.
Thank you all. Arigato gozaimas.
.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Layer 142 Cherry Blossoms, The Iron & Steel Coast, the Concrete Coast, the G20 and the Soul of a Nation.
Oxzen - The Movie. The Video Diaries. The Cherry Blossom Journal.
Monday 30th March and Tuesday March 31st., etc.
This is the soundtrack for Act One. The commentary. Cue speech track, immediately after music track fades to low volume, having faded in and up initially while the point of view of the camera was still a mile up in the sky.
And . . . Action!
“I’m back in time-warp and jet-lag territory - mentally, physically and spiritually.
On Tuesday I awoke at 3.30am local time, feeling part-refreshed and semi-human again, after a blissful 3 hours sleep in a proper bed, in a proper flat. This is consciousness turned upside down; consciousness bent and reconfigured, fast-forwarded and truncated through the planet’s darkness zone, having reduced the zone’s dark duration by several hours of jet-streamed travel.
With darkness still outside the curtains and blinds, I set about settling into this most excellent apartment, allocated to me by the owner of the property, the university. The only thing it lacks is a really decent bed and a decent duvet. I unpack.
I ask myself, when was the last time I slept under blankets? No doubt the first of many odd experiences I’ll have this cherry-blossom season.
I reviewed the video I shot yesterday from the window seats in the aeroplane and in the airport coach, and I like it. I think Ike’s going to be pleased with it when we get down to reviewing and editing. He’d mentioned specifically he wanted footage of the plane landing in Japan, when he handed over the camcorder. Well he’s certainly getting plenty of it.
I felt even better when I discovered a Jean-Michel Jarre CD on the Zen music player, one from Brother B’s collection that I’ve never got round to listening to, and one that’s going to make an excellent soundtrack for the edited film. I’ll post the name of it in due course.
I need to get serious now with Yoko and Kayo about making a film about them, as well as a film about the broader picture of Japan in the cherry blossom time.”
Cut!
-------------------------------------------------------------
The name I propose to give to this part of central Honshu, one that no doubt others have already given it, doesn’t exactly sound wealthy or exclusive like the Ivory Coast or the Gold Coast, let alone evocative of warmth and beauty like the Costa Tropicale, or the Costa del Sol.
But Iron and Steel is the reality of the part of the coastal strip of modern Honshu that lies between Kansai airport and Osaka City, which constitutes Japan’s second metropolis, second only to imperial Tokyo/Yokahama - Honshu’s mega-metropolis that sprawls in full view of Mount Fuji . . . the mighty Fuji-san, which looks down on it, and gazes upon it Zen-like - inscrutably and without comment.
No comment necessary. This is the final outcome of Big Business and Big Finance, the final tangible and physical outcome, that is, because banks and hedge funds and tax havens don’t really need a physical existence. They are as much virtual as they are real nowadays, and they reside mainly in the circuits of computers - zillions of dollars, euros and yen no longer need to physically exist or to physically change hands.
This coastline is an unbroken stretch of heavy metal and heavy industry for mile after mile - factories, refineries, warehouses, docks, ships, cranes and chimneys. It’s the mighty workshop of the nation, and these days, along with similar and even grimmer and dirtier places in China, it’s also the workshop of the planet.
This is the birthplace of modern digital industry, and it’s to the planet’s 20th Century what the coalfields and steel mills of Britain were to the 18th and 19th Centuries. In its turn the 20th Century provided the seed corn money for, and gave birth to, the fledgling organisation, or conspiracy, that became the busted casino of the 21st Century. The G20. The capitalist club. The conspiracy against human kind.
Here in Honshu, where the iron and the steel and the industry peters out, and the urban sprawl takes over, then you can also call it the Concrete Coast, which, let’s face it, is little, if any, improvement on Iron and Steel, depending on your taste and point of view.
Gliding past it and through it in the near-silence of the airport-to-city coach, the ‘Limousine’ - on the way to Nishinomiya, the view through the front and side windows looked incredible against a backdrop of a sky changing from blue to orange and purple in the dying embers of a late evening of a sunny and warm day in the cherry blossom season of these powerful and strangely spiritual islands, these birthplaces of Zen.
Electric lights gradually and imperceptibly came on everywhere to give added interest - studding the stark steel shapes of this technological and industrial hell-hole with pinpoints and glares of bright light. Steam and smoke completed a picture of what is by any standards an overkill of industrial crassness.
You have no real sense of all this industrial sprawl from a vantage point in an aircraft descending in the light of a red setting sun towards the Land of the Rising Sun, down through blueness towards Japan’s second international airport, Kansai, laid out on its own artificial island in a deep blue sea, created by intrepid engineers, architects, and an army of construction workers, in the beautiful and so-called Inland Sea.
As it happens the airport terminal’s architects were British, but they’re not really nation-specific people any more . . . . any more than money and glitz and technology and heavy metals are nation-specific any more . . .
It’s time for some more of Jarre’s glorious techno-reggae . . .
--------------------------------------------
I’m desperate for some news of the G20 - this week’s meeting of the leaders of, quote, “The Group of the world’s most powerful industrial nations”. It used to be the G7 or G8. Changing times. Along came Russia, and then China . . .
Ah, yes, indeed . . . . China. The crouching tiger. The hidden dragon. The incubator and mother of Buddhism, whose father was India, which begat Zen in Japan, etc.
So who else is in this exclusive, though somewhat enlarged, club? (Insert here. DIY. By the end of this week we should all have the names of all 20 of this Rich List on the tips of our tongues.)
Why care so much about these bastards? On one level, we shouldn’t. At the personal level, they ARE an irrelevance. Life’s too short, and we have much more important, much more fundamental things to do with out time.
We have our individual well-being and enlightenment to take care of. We have the needs of our families and our friends to take care of. And so little time every day. So little time. With each new time-saving electronic device, each new time-compressing technological miracle, we have less time. We’re time-poor, we all say. It’s ALL about time . . .
And it’s about time . . . for a change.
Today’s the day for people to get together and not so much “protest” . . . as “demonstrate” what we feel, and to say what we want from our governments, and the “G20”. And if you don’t yet know what you want, then PLEASE find out! If WE don’t know what it is we want to change then how the hell can we let our governments know? The past 30 years should have taught is that we can’t rely on our governments to do the right thing.
I say “today” is the day because I’ve just remembered to go into “Control Panel” and change my computer’s time to “Osaka and Tokyo” time, which means that for me it’s suddenly Wednesday April 1st! April Fools. The day of demonstrations.
That’s how controlled we are by computers and abstract ideas. Back ‘home’ it’s still Tuesday 31st March, but where I sit it’s 2.30am on the morning of Wednesday April 1st. Mad. So little time. So much to think about. Time to think about time, and time to act.
It’s 2.30 in the morning and I’m drinking red wine, brought to Japan by unknown persons, all the way from the Herault. I’m drinking wine because I need some more sleep so that I can function when Kayo comes to collect me at 8.30, to take me to the university and to her seminar on the history of education.
The wine’s not bad, and the music’s good. Set to random play, it’s the unsurpassable blues of JJ Cale, and his self-written “The Sensitive Kind”.
-----------------------------------------
As I was saying - why care so much about these bastards?
Because that’s part of our Social Intelligence. Because as a species, at best, we’re the sensitive kind.
Because Zen recognises that there’s no such thing as purely individual well-being, and the more connected we become as a planet and as a species, the more we need a highly-developed and evolved Social Intelligence. We need to become empathetic. We need to know that we are our brother’s keeper. And our sister’s. And everybody’s brother and sister. Everybody’s wellbeing and happiness depends on everybody else’s.
Which is a philosophy that stands in some contrast to the bankers’ ethos of individual enrichment and gated ‘communities’ - i.e. fragmentation, and envy, and conflict, and dog eat dog mentality. Which is not what I call enlightenment.
Enlightenment? Don’t know what it is!
It keeps changing. Rearranging. (Thank you Van)
But we know it’s not THAT!
This is not a hippie or even ex-hippie point of view. This is not even a utilitarian point of view. Nor a Utopian point of view. It’s an enlightened point of view.
Maybe if a few of the bankers were now made to seriously suffer - thrown into prison for their greed and their crimes against humanity, for example, MAYBE they might start to consider such things as brotherhood, social intelligence and spiritual intelligence. DUH! they might say to themselves.
So were they criminals, or sociopaths, or both? Did they know what they were doing - i.e. fucking up the planet - but went ahead and did it anyway? Psychopaths - indifferent to the suffering of others. Responsible, indeed, for the suffering of others. Those whom they’d call the sub-primes. The plebs. The masses. The morons. Deserving of ripping-off and exploitation. Within the rules of the game, of course. The rules of the casino.
Rules that were a little lax, maybe, but still - those bankers weren’t responsible for the rules, the poor loves. They just played by the completely inadequate rules, and worked damned hard to make sure they weren’t altered in ways they didn’t like. In my book that makes them culpable. To not speak out about the uselessness of the rules as inhibitors of exploitation made them culpable, to my way of thinking.
And all the while they were making damn sure they stuffed their ill-gotten gains into offshore accounts in tax havens before the music finally stopped, and everything went shit-shaped. Of course they did. Of course they were culpable.
Clever people, in their own nasty, disgusting, stupid way.
.
Monday 30th March and Tuesday March 31st., etc.
This is the soundtrack for Act One. The commentary. Cue speech track, immediately after music track fades to low volume, having faded in and up initially while the point of view of the camera was still a mile up in the sky.
And . . . Action!
“I’m back in time-warp and jet-lag territory - mentally, physically and spiritually.
On Tuesday I awoke at 3.30am local time, feeling part-refreshed and semi-human again, after a blissful 3 hours sleep in a proper bed, in a proper flat. This is consciousness turned upside down; consciousness bent and reconfigured, fast-forwarded and truncated through the planet’s darkness zone, having reduced the zone’s dark duration by several hours of jet-streamed travel.
With darkness still outside the curtains and blinds, I set about settling into this most excellent apartment, allocated to me by the owner of the property, the university. The only thing it lacks is a really decent bed and a decent duvet. I unpack.
I ask myself, when was the last time I slept under blankets? No doubt the first of many odd experiences I’ll have this cherry-blossom season.
I reviewed the video I shot yesterday from the window seats in the aeroplane and in the airport coach, and I like it. I think Ike’s going to be pleased with it when we get down to reviewing and editing. He’d mentioned specifically he wanted footage of the plane landing in Japan, when he handed over the camcorder. Well he’s certainly getting plenty of it.
I felt even better when I discovered a Jean-Michel Jarre CD on the Zen music player, one from Brother B’s collection that I’ve never got round to listening to, and one that’s going to make an excellent soundtrack for the edited film. I’ll post the name of it in due course.
I need to get serious now with Yoko and Kayo about making a film about them, as well as a film about the broader picture of Japan in the cherry blossom time.”
Cut!
-------------------------------------------------------------
The name I propose to give to this part of central Honshu, one that no doubt others have already given it, doesn’t exactly sound wealthy or exclusive like the Ivory Coast or the Gold Coast, let alone evocative of warmth and beauty like the Costa Tropicale, or the Costa del Sol.
But Iron and Steel is the reality of the part of the coastal strip of modern Honshu that lies between Kansai airport and Osaka City, which constitutes Japan’s second metropolis, second only to imperial Tokyo/Yokahama - Honshu’s mega-metropolis that sprawls in full view of Mount Fuji . . . the mighty Fuji-san, which looks down on it, and gazes upon it Zen-like - inscrutably and without comment.
No comment necessary. This is the final outcome of Big Business and Big Finance, the final tangible and physical outcome, that is, because banks and hedge funds and tax havens don’t really need a physical existence. They are as much virtual as they are real nowadays, and they reside mainly in the circuits of computers - zillions of dollars, euros and yen no longer need to physically exist or to physically change hands.
This coastline is an unbroken stretch of heavy metal and heavy industry for mile after mile - factories, refineries, warehouses, docks, ships, cranes and chimneys. It’s the mighty workshop of the nation, and these days, along with similar and even grimmer and dirtier places in China, it’s also the workshop of the planet.
This is the birthplace of modern digital industry, and it’s to the planet’s 20th Century what the coalfields and steel mills of Britain were to the 18th and 19th Centuries. In its turn the 20th Century provided the seed corn money for, and gave birth to, the fledgling organisation, or conspiracy, that became the busted casino of the 21st Century. The G20. The capitalist club. The conspiracy against human kind.
Here in Honshu, where the iron and the steel and the industry peters out, and the urban sprawl takes over, then you can also call it the Concrete Coast, which, let’s face it, is little, if any, improvement on Iron and Steel, depending on your taste and point of view.
Gliding past it and through it in the near-silence of the airport-to-city coach, the ‘Limousine’ - on the way to Nishinomiya, the view through the front and side windows looked incredible against a backdrop of a sky changing from blue to orange and purple in the dying embers of a late evening of a sunny and warm day in the cherry blossom season of these powerful and strangely spiritual islands, these birthplaces of Zen.
Electric lights gradually and imperceptibly came on everywhere to give added interest - studding the stark steel shapes of this technological and industrial hell-hole with pinpoints and glares of bright light. Steam and smoke completed a picture of what is by any standards an overkill of industrial crassness.
You have no real sense of all this industrial sprawl from a vantage point in an aircraft descending in the light of a red setting sun towards the Land of the Rising Sun, down through blueness towards Japan’s second international airport, Kansai, laid out on its own artificial island in a deep blue sea, created by intrepid engineers, architects, and an army of construction workers, in the beautiful and so-called Inland Sea.
As it happens the airport terminal’s architects were British, but they’re not really nation-specific people any more . . . . any more than money and glitz and technology and heavy metals are nation-specific any more . . .
It’s time for some more of Jarre’s glorious techno-reggae . . .
--------------------------------------------
I’m desperate for some news of the G20 - this week’s meeting of the leaders of, quote, “The Group of the world’s most powerful industrial nations”. It used to be the G7 or G8. Changing times. Along came Russia, and then China . . .
Ah, yes, indeed . . . . China. The crouching tiger. The hidden dragon. The incubator and mother of Buddhism, whose father was India, which begat Zen in Japan, etc.
So who else is in this exclusive, though somewhat enlarged, club? (Insert here. DIY. By the end of this week we should all have the names of all 20 of this Rich List on the tips of our tongues.)
Why care so much about these bastards? On one level, we shouldn’t. At the personal level, they ARE an irrelevance. Life’s too short, and we have much more important, much more fundamental things to do with out time.
We have our individual well-being and enlightenment to take care of. We have the needs of our families and our friends to take care of. And so little time every day. So little time. With each new time-saving electronic device, each new time-compressing technological miracle, we have less time. We’re time-poor, we all say. It’s ALL about time . . .
And it’s about time . . . for a change.
Today’s the day for people to get together and not so much “protest” . . . as “demonstrate” what we feel, and to say what we want from our governments, and the “G20”. And if you don’t yet know what you want, then PLEASE find out! If WE don’t know what it is we want to change then how the hell can we let our governments know? The past 30 years should have taught is that we can’t rely on our governments to do the right thing.
I say “today” is the day because I’ve just remembered to go into “Control Panel” and change my computer’s time to “Osaka and Tokyo” time, which means that for me it’s suddenly Wednesday April 1st! April Fools. The day of demonstrations.
That’s how controlled we are by computers and abstract ideas. Back ‘home’ it’s still Tuesday 31st March, but where I sit it’s 2.30am on the morning of Wednesday April 1st. Mad. So little time. So much to think about. Time to think about time, and time to act.
It’s 2.30 in the morning and I’m drinking red wine, brought to Japan by unknown persons, all the way from the Herault. I’m drinking wine because I need some more sleep so that I can function when Kayo comes to collect me at 8.30, to take me to the university and to her seminar on the history of education.
The wine’s not bad, and the music’s good. Set to random play, it’s the unsurpassable blues of JJ Cale, and his self-written “The Sensitive Kind”.
-----------------------------------------
As I was saying - why care so much about these bastards?
Because that’s part of our Social Intelligence. Because as a species, at best, we’re the sensitive kind.
Because Zen recognises that there’s no such thing as purely individual well-being, and the more connected we become as a planet and as a species, the more we need a highly-developed and evolved Social Intelligence. We need to become empathetic. We need to know that we are our brother’s keeper. And our sister’s. And everybody’s brother and sister. Everybody’s wellbeing and happiness depends on everybody else’s.
Which is a philosophy that stands in some contrast to the bankers’ ethos of individual enrichment and gated ‘communities’ - i.e. fragmentation, and envy, and conflict, and dog eat dog mentality. Which is not what I call enlightenment.
Enlightenment? Don’t know what it is!
It keeps changing. Rearranging. (Thank you Van)
But we know it’s not THAT!
This is not a hippie or even ex-hippie point of view. This is not even a utilitarian point of view. Nor a Utopian point of view. It’s an enlightened point of view.
Maybe if a few of the bankers were now made to seriously suffer - thrown into prison for their greed and their crimes against humanity, for example, MAYBE they might start to consider such things as brotherhood, social intelligence and spiritual intelligence. DUH! they might say to themselves.
So were they criminals, or sociopaths, or both? Did they know what they were doing - i.e. fucking up the planet - but went ahead and did it anyway? Psychopaths - indifferent to the suffering of others. Responsible, indeed, for the suffering of others. Those whom they’d call the sub-primes. The plebs. The masses. The morons. Deserving of ripping-off and exploitation. Within the rules of the game, of course. The rules of the casino.
Rules that were a little lax, maybe, but still - those bankers weren’t responsible for the rules, the poor loves. They just played by the completely inadequate rules, and worked damned hard to make sure they weren’t altered in ways they didn’t like. In my book that makes them culpable. To not speak out about the uselessness of the rules as inhibitors of exploitation made them culpable, to my way of thinking.
And all the while they were making damn sure they stuffed their ill-gotten gains into offshore accounts in tax havens before the music finally stopped, and everything went shit-shaped. Of course they did. Of course they were culpable.
Clever people, in their own nasty, disgusting, stupid way.
.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Layer 141 Springwatch, Zen lessons, Seismic Shifts, the Year of the Ox, the G20 and the Art of Living.
.
This should have been posted yesterday.
Springwatch 7
Devon
Devon is glorious in the Spring. Two months ago the first camellias made an appearance, and some of them are still only now coming into full bloom, with their blazing scarlets and deep reds. I even spotted one with yellow flowers.
Thousands of trees are in blossom, with the first slight appearance of the brilliant white blossoms of flowering cherries this week. Can’t wait to see the cherry blossoms in the gardens of Japan next week.
Meanwhile, in Devon, daffodils and narcissi are everywhere in full bloom, plus the first tulips, and the hyacinths, with their incredible fragrance. There’s also the brilliant yellow of the forsythia and the yellow pom-poms on the shrub whose name I’ve never known.
There’s masses of wallflowers, primroses, and humble white daisies. The first delicate green and red leaves of Japanese maple have started to unfurl. Strange that these fragile-looking acers come into leaf before our more robust native trees, most of which still have their winter bareness. It must be the longer daylight hours that trigger their buds.
There are tiny blue flowers on the rosemary shrubs, and small purple ones on the heather. The gorse is studded with bright yellow. The periwinkle is a mass of purple and dark blue. There are some magnificent magnolias full of creamily exotic flowers, which have always struck me as almost unreal.
By next week there will be the first clematis and a lot more tulips. Still to come are the magnificent blues of the cyanothus trees and the wonderful reds and scarlets of the rhododendrons and azaleas.
Arguably the Spring is even more glorious in this country than the summer, especially if you happen to appreciate blossom on the trees more than green leaves, and if you prefer the varieties of Spring flowers to those of the summer.
This particular Spring has been more glorious than any I can remember. Parts of England have had thirteen consecutive days of bright sunshine and blue skies, as the high pressure system continued to hang around and shield us from the usual cloudy and wet westerly anti-cyclones and the northerly gales.
Zen tells us to pay attention to nature and to learn from nature. Nature, the natural world, has the power to inspire awe and wonder, and through this power to lead us along the Way towards better living, to character development and enlightenment. The mere observation of incredible beauty in both form and colour refreshes and recharges our jaded spirits.
Thanks to the weather and the wonders of Spring it seems to me there’s a change in most people out in the streets, which seem weirdly calm and quiet. And not just in Devon. Last week in Broadway Market in the East End there were masses of people out enjoying the sun, even people picnicking on the grass in London Fields. In March!
Last winter was the best in living memory as well - the coldest overall for a century, but many more bright and sunny days than normal, and the best and deepest snowfalls for decades.
I think it’s more than coincidence that my journeys along 700 miles of motorways and city streets this week, travelling between Devon, London and Hastings, have been as pleasant and hassle-free as I’ve ever known. Well done the drivers of England! Long may it continue!
Year of the Ox
So far the Year of the Ox is living up to expectations.
Last year’s Rat year began a new cycle, and was seismic in many, many ways. The sense of breaking with the past was immense. The near-collapse of capitalism, which has been shaken to its very foundations, echoed the collapse of communism in 1989/90. Huge sums of public money have been poured into repairing and propping up what's left of the old financial system.
The Year of the Rat brought about the beginning of vast numbers of people starting to question old assumptions about values, money, economics, the way they live, and their quality of life.
There was the rise of Obama and the demise of Bush and Cheney. A truly seismic event if ever there was one. The felling of those two arseholes, those twin towers of evil. The World Enslaved Centre, or the World Corrupt and Depraved Centre. The Project for the New American Century! Ha! What a project it turned out to be. The ‘Washington Consensus’ is well and truly a pile of rubble.
Clearly the Ox year is about building on last year’s beginnings, and recreating our world, re-imagining our lives, taking a fresh look at politics, economics, finance, business, social policy, equality, climate change, sustainability, education, etc. Those that don’t participate don’t deserve a say. No play, no say.
G20
Next week, dammit, Oxzen is going to be away on the other side of the planet just as huge events unfold in London - the meeting of the G20 and massive demonstrations in the City and elsewhere, when people will at last take to the streets in an organised way and make clear their demands to what is the nearest we currently have to a World Government. It’s going to be very interesting.
My advice is to book a day’s holiday, wherever possible, and either join in the various demonstrations, or stay at home and watch what happens live on News 24. Or possibly do both. Hopefully the BBC’s coverage of events will be re-run throughout the evening on News 24. There’s bound to be plenty to watch and to think about. There’s a hell of a lot of anger waiting to be expressed, and a hell of a lot of demands to be voiced. This is the Big One.
There were two very good pieces in the Guardian on Monday on pages 24 and 25 under the headline, Grave new world: hard choices leaders face to solve the crisis. It behoves everyone to read carefully and to form their own opinion.
Larry Elliot, the economics editor, “suggests five areas for leaders at next week’s G20 summit to focus on”, in which he describes the need for a new economics, reform of the IMF, tougher global regulation, etc.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/22/larry-elliott-proposals-for-g20
Aditya Chakraborty, under the heading ‘The pursuit of happiness’, says: “Forget growth: let’s focus on wellbeing”. Some interesting thoughts there on The Art of Living, which is probably worth a google as well. We’re talking here about rethinking our entire attitude to who we are and why we do what we do, as well as re-making the entire global web of economic and cultural relationships.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/22/gdp-economic-growth-happiness-wellbeing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/blog/2009/mar/23/globalrecession-financial-crisis
Katharine Ainger wrote a good opinion piece in the Guardian this week - on the G20 and 'global social movements'.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/26/anticapitalism-protest-recession-g20
Dr Jonathan Sachs
His Thought for Today focused on the transformations that are due to global communication technologies. Are we equal to the challenge of thinking in global terms, realising that we share a common fate? Only by turning outward can we create a movement for change. Moving from national pride to a new age of global responsibility.
Education
More headlines this week about the Primary Curriculum Review and its implications for schools - more right-wing commentators getting hot under the collar about the possibility of teaching kids to use Facebook and Twitter, and dropping the teaching of history. Hilarious. Those bastards sense the beginnings of a fightback against all they’ve done to diminish the rights of children and to destroy the work that had gone on over two or three progressive decades to make education and learning in this country fit for the needs of children in the 21st, and not the 19th, Century.
Not that it was ever fit for purpose, even in Dickens’ lifetime, when the first national network of state-run schools was constructed. Children should NEVER have been so inhumanly treated. They should never have been made to sit passively and silently focused on a teacher who saw his/her role as doling out imperial gallons of facts, and been punished if they failed to do so.
This morning we hear that the NUT and the NAHT have got together to formulate motions which they’ll put to their respective annual conferences this Spring demanding that this year’s KS2 SATs will be the last of them. Leaving aside the fact that these two large and potentially powerful organisations should have done this a decade ago, in fact prior to the imposition of this evil idea, this is incredibly positive news. My flabber is ghasted. This is seismic. I really didn’t imagine, after all this time, that they were up to such sensible collaboration.
Having given the government notice that they’ll no longer collaborate with such anti-child, anti-teacher evil fucking nonsense, it will only remain for their members to have absolutely no further truck with either coaching kids for the tests or indeed implementing them. What’s the government going to do? Sack them all?
Gandhi said this about chasing targets and results:
"He who is ever brooding over the result, often loses nerve in the performance of duty. He becomes impatient and then gives vent to anger and begins to do unworthy things; he jumps from action to action, never remaining faithful to any. He who broods over results is like a man given to the object of senses; he is ever distracted, he says goodbye to all scruples, everything is right in his estimation and he therefore resorts to means fair and foul to attain his end".
If that sounds like New Labour and the majority of Westminster’s political establishment, and their obsessive whipping of public servants towards often unattainable targets and results, then so be it. Ed Balls’ instant repost to the unions’ statement was to the effect that headteachers had better not get involved in any test boycotts because they’ll be breaking the law. Tough talk, Mr Ed.
I wonder what’s better, and which is right - breaking an immoral politician-made law, or doing what’s right for children and teachers? Gandhi would have known. Gandhi took on the whole of the British state and its empire, without resort to arms or violence, and won. He was thrown into prison for his beliefs, and still stuck to doing what he knew was right. Is it too much to expect for headteachers to do the same? Especially if they have the vast majority of the public and parents backing them and urging them to do what is right.
Never mind a ballot of their members for a SATs boycott. The NUT and NAHT need to launch a major campaign against the vile SATs and league tables’ terror and then ballot the English public. No need to bother with Scotland and Wales - they have no truck with SATs anyhow.
http://www.youmeworks.com/clingfree.html
Public Sector Workers Unite Against Blunkett!
The Blunk lumbered into action this week with a Guardian column expressing astonishment that the bloody ungrateful public sector workers are telling pollsters that they’re not going to vote New Labour next time. His point is that under a Tory government many of them will lose their jobs through budget cuts, and the bastards should recognise how much the public sector has been expanded under Blair & Brown.
The world’s most hideous politician, (after Hazel Blears - what is it with these Northern twat politicos?), ought to take a moment to reflect on the fact that the public sector workers care more about the people they serve and being true to their own professionalism than they do about looking after their own job security. For that they deserve applause.
Cameron has said that the NuLabour targets regime is vile and must be scrapped, and professionalism and local autonomy must be restored to the public services. So why not vote for him? What’s not to vote for? Blunkett, of course, as a dinosaur trade unionist thinks only in terms of how many jobs he can create or preserve for ‘the workers’ - what he sees as operatives in miserable results factories.
He can’t understand either that many of us have very long memories and we still hate his guts (and Blair’s, and NuLabour’s) for what he did to education post-1997 - not only retaining Woodhead as his stick to beat the teaching profession, but going even further than the Tories would have done in micromanaging education through central diktat, publishing league tables, making Ofsted even more nasty and vindictive, payment and promotion by results, focusing exclusively on test and exam data, etc, etc.
We remember well his words to those who work in the most challenging schools - “No excuses for failure.” We’ll never excuse his failures, or those of NuLabour, through over 10 years of nasty neo-conservative dictatorship.
The only way we’d vote for his party next time would be if they came out and recanted, admitted that they’ve done all the wrong things, and declared their intention to reverse all their policies on running the public services, including privatisation and marketisation.
But that won’t happen. As the Blunk says in his column, “The government has to avoid blinking”. So carry on Blunking. Blinking is something the Blunk will never do. Never has, never will. His belief in his own infallibility is absolute. And he pays no attention whatever to what every sane, intelligent person had been saying for years.
His, and NuLabour’s, approach to improving public services has been entirely on the Soviet model. Invest in setting up more and more collective farms and tractor factories. Install compliant managers who agree to chase output targets. Give them precise directions as to how to achieve their targets. Punish them ruthlessly if they fail to reach their targets (No excuses for failure), and then wonder why the bloody ingrates hate them and rebel against them, plus the tractors are rubbish and crop production generally diminishes. Animal Farm indeed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/26/labour-conservatives-local-government-nhs
Whitechapel
This week sees the reopening of the newly refurbished and extended Whitechapel gallery. A full-sized tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica, which normally hangs in the United Nations building in New York, is the centrepiece of the first exhibition of the gallery. This is clearly a must-see show, and it’s brilliant that the gallery has had these improvements.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/26/pablo-picasso-guernica-spain-war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/mar/17/whitechapel-gallery
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2009/mar/17/architecture-tour-whitechapel-art-gallery
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This should have been posted yesterday.
Springwatch 7
Devon
Devon is glorious in the Spring. Two months ago the first camellias made an appearance, and some of them are still only now coming into full bloom, with their blazing scarlets and deep reds. I even spotted one with yellow flowers.
Thousands of trees are in blossom, with the first slight appearance of the brilliant white blossoms of flowering cherries this week. Can’t wait to see the cherry blossoms in the gardens of Japan next week.
Meanwhile, in Devon, daffodils and narcissi are everywhere in full bloom, plus the first tulips, and the hyacinths, with their incredible fragrance. There’s also the brilliant yellow of the forsythia and the yellow pom-poms on the shrub whose name I’ve never known.
There’s masses of wallflowers, primroses, and humble white daisies. The first delicate green and red leaves of Japanese maple have started to unfurl. Strange that these fragile-looking acers come into leaf before our more robust native trees, most of which still have their winter bareness. It must be the longer daylight hours that trigger their buds.
There are tiny blue flowers on the rosemary shrubs, and small purple ones on the heather. The gorse is studded with bright yellow. The periwinkle is a mass of purple and dark blue. There are some magnificent magnolias full of creamily exotic flowers, which have always struck me as almost unreal.
By next week there will be the first clematis and a lot more tulips. Still to come are the magnificent blues of the cyanothus trees and the wonderful reds and scarlets of the rhododendrons and azaleas.
Arguably the Spring is even more glorious in this country than the summer, especially if you happen to appreciate blossom on the trees more than green leaves, and if you prefer the varieties of Spring flowers to those of the summer.
This particular Spring has been more glorious than any I can remember. Parts of England have had thirteen consecutive days of bright sunshine and blue skies, as the high pressure system continued to hang around and shield us from the usual cloudy and wet westerly anti-cyclones and the northerly gales.
Zen tells us to pay attention to nature and to learn from nature. Nature, the natural world, has the power to inspire awe and wonder, and through this power to lead us along the Way towards better living, to character development and enlightenment. The mere observation of incredible beauty in both form and colour refreshes and recharges our jaded spirits.
Thanks to the weather and the wonders of Spring it seems to me there’s a change in most people out in the streets, which seem weirdly calm and quiet. And not just in Devon. Last week in Broadway Market in the East End there were masses of people out enjoying the sun, even people picnicking on the grass in London Fields. In March!
Last winter was the best in living memory as well - the coldest overall for a century, but many more bright and sunny days than normal, and the best and deepest snowfalls for decades.
I think it’s more than coincidence that my journeys along 700 miles of motorways and city streets this week, travelling between Devon, London and Hastings, have been as pleasant and hassle-free as I’ve ever known. Well done the drivers of England! Long may it continue!
Year of the Ox
So far the Year of the Ox is living up to expectations.
Last year’s Rat year began a new cycle, and was seismic in many, many ways. The sense of breaking with the past was immense. The near-collapse of capitalism, which has been shaken to its very foundations, echoed the collapse of communism in 1989/90. Huge sums of public money have been poured into repairing and propping up what's left of the old financial system.
The Year of the Rat brought about the beginning of vast numbers of people starting to question old assumptions about values, money, economics, the way they live, and their quality of life.
There was the rise of Obama and the demise of Bush and Cheney. A truly seismic event if ever there was one. The felling of those two arseholes, those twin towers of evil. The World Enslaved Centre, or the World Corrupt and Depraved Centre. The Project for the New American Century! Ha! What a project it turned out to be. The ‘Washington Consensus’ is well and truly a pile of rubble.
Clearly the Ox year is about building on last year’s beginnings, and recreating our world, re-imagining our lives, taking a fresh look at politics, economics, finance, business, social policy, equality, climate change, sustainability, education, etc. Those that don’t participate don’t deserve a say. No play, no say.
G20
Next week, dammit, Oxzen is going to be away on the other side of the planet just as huge events unfold in London - the meeting of the G20 and massive demonstrations in the City and elsewhere, when people will at last take to the streets in an organised way and make clear their demands to what is the nearest we currently have to a World Government. It’s going to be very interesting.
My advice is to book a day’s holiday, wherever possible, and either join in the various demonstrations, or stay at home and watch what happens live on News 24. Or possibly do both. Hopefully the BBC’s coverage of events will be re-run throughout the evening on News 24. There’s bound to be plenty to watch and to think about. There’s a hell of a lot of anger waiting to be expressed, and a hell of a lot of demands to be voiced. This is the Big One.
There were two very good pieces in the Guardian on Monday on pages 24 and 25 under the headline, Grave new world: hard choices leaders face to solve the crisis. It behoves everyone to read carefully and to form their own opinion.
Larry Elliot, the economics editor, “suggests five areas for leaders at next week’s G20 summit to focus on”, in which he describes the need for a new economics, reform of the IMF, tougher global regulation, etc.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/22/larry-elliott-proposals-for-g20
Aditya Chakraborty, under the heading ‘The pursuit of happiness’, says: “Forget growth: let’s focus on wellbeing”. Some interesting thoughts there on The Art of Living, which is probably worth a google as well. We’re talking here about rethinking our entire attitude to who we are and why we do what we do, as well as re-making the entire global web of economic and cultural relationships.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/22/gdp-economic-growth-happiness-wellbeing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/blog/2009/mar/23/globalrecession-financial-crisis
Katharine Ainger wrote a good opinion piece in the Guardian this week - on the G20 and 'global social movements'.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/26/anticapitalism-protest-recession-g20
Dr Jonathan Sachs
His Thought for Today focused on the transformations that are due to global communication technologies. Are we equal to the challenge of thinking in global terms, realising that we share a common fate? Only by turning outward can we create a movement for change. Moving from national pride to a new age of global responsibility.
Education
More headlines this week about the Primary Curriculum Review and its implications for schools - more right-wing commentators getting hot under the collar about the possibility of teaching kids to use Facebook and Twitter, and dropping the teaching of history. Hilarious. Those bastards sense the beginnings of a fightback against all they’ve done to diminish the rights of children and to destroy the work that had gone on over two or three progressive decades to make education and learning in this country fit for the needs of children in the 21st, and not the 19th, Century.
Not that it was ever fit for purpose, even in Dickens’ lifetime, when the first national network of state-run schools was constructed. Children should NEVER have been so inhumanly treated. They should never have been made to sit passively and silently focused on a teacher who saw his/her role as doling out imperial gallons of facts, and been punished if they failed to do so.
This morning we hear that the NUT and the NAHT have got together to formulate motions which they’ll put to their respective annual conferences this Spring demanding that this year’s KS2 SATs will be the last of them. Leaving aside the fact that these two large and potentially powerful organisations should have done this a decade ago, in fact prior to the imposition of this evil idea, this is incredibly positive news. My flabber is ghasted. This is seismic. I really didn’t imagine, after all this time, that they were up to such sensible collaboration.
Having given the government notice that they’ll no longer collaborate with such anti-child, anti-teacher evil fucking nonsense, it will only remain for their members to have absolutely no further truck with either coaching kids for the tests or indeed implementing them. What’s the government going to do? Sack them all?
Gandhi said this about chasing targets and results:
"He who is ever brooding over the result, often loses nerve in the performance of duty. He becomes impatient and then gives vent to anger and begins to do unworthy things; he jumps from action to action, never remaining faithful to any. He who broods over results is like a man given to the object of senses; he is ever distracted, he says goodbye to all scruples, everything is right in his estimation and he therefore resorts to means fair and foul to attain his end".
If that sounds like New Labour and the majority of Westminster’s political establishment, and their obsessive whipping of public servants towards often unattainable targets and results, then so be it. Ed Balls’ instant repost to the unions’ statement was to the effect that headteachers had better not get involved in any test boycotts because they’ll be breaking the law. Tough talk, Mr Ed.
I wonder what’s better, and which is right - breaking an immoral politician-made law, or doing what’s right for children and teachers? Gandhi would have known. Gandhi took on the whole of the British state and its empire, without resort to arms or violence, and won. He was thrown into prison for his beliefs, and still stuck to doing what he knew was right. Is it too much to expect for headteachers to do the same? Especially if they have the vast majority of the public and parents backing them and urging them to do what is right.
Never mind a ballot of their members for a SATs boycott. The NUT and NAHT need to launch a major campaign against the vile SATs and league tables’ terror and then ballot the English public. No need to bother with Scotland and Wales - they have no truck with SATs anyhow.
http://www.youmeworks.com/clingfree.html
Public Sector Workers Unite Against Blunkett!
The Blunk lumbered into action this week with a Guardian column expressing astonishment that the bloody ungrateful public sector workers are telling pollsters that they’re not going to vote New Labour next time. His point is that under a Tory government many of them will lose their jobs through budget cuts, and the bastards should recognise how much the public sector has been expanded under Blair & Brown.
The world’s most hideous politician, (after Hazel Blears - what is it with these Northern twat politicos?), ought to take a moment to reflect on the fact that the public sector workers care more about the people they serve and being true to their own professionalism than they do about looking after their own job security. For that they deserve applause.
Cameron has said that the NuLabour targets regime is vile and must be scrapped, and professionalism and local autonomy must be restored to the public services. So why not vote for him? What’s not to vote for? Blunkett, of course, as a dinosaur trade unionist thinks only in terms of how many jobs he can create or preserve for ‘the workers’ - what he sees as operatives in miserable results factories.
He can’t understand either that many of us have very long memories and we still hate his guts (and Blair’s, and NuLabour’s) for what he did to education post-1997 - not only retaining Woodhead as his stick to beat the teaching profession, but going even further than the Tories would have done in micromanaging education through central diktat, publishing league tables, making Ofsted even more nasty and vindictive, payment and promotion by results, focusing exclusively on test and exam data, etc, etc.
We remember well his words to those who work in the most challenging schools - “No excuses for failure.” We’ll never excuse his failures, or those of NuLabour, through over 10 years of nasty neo-conservative dictatorship.
The only way we’d vote for his party next time would be if they came out and recanted, admitted that they’ve done all the wrong things, and declared their intention to reverse all their policies on running the public services, including privatisation and marketisation.
But that won’t happen. As the Blunk says in his column, “The government has to avoid blinking”. So carry on Blunking. Blinking is something the Blunk will never do. Never has, never will. His belief in his own infallibility is absolute. And he pays no attention whatever to what every sane, intelligent person had been saying for years.
His, and NuLabour’s, approach to improving public services has been entirely on the Soviet model. Invest in setting up more and more collective farms and tractor factories. Install compliant managers who agree to chase output targets. Give them precise directions as to how to achieve their targets. Punish them ruthlessly if they fail to reach their targets (No excuses for failure), and then wonder why the bloody ingrates hate them and rebel against them, plus the tractors are rubbish and crop production generally diminishes. Animal Farm indeed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/26/labour-conservatives-local-government-nhs
Whitechapel
This week sees the reopening of the newly refurbished and extended Whitechapel gallery. A full-sized tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica, which normally hangs in the United Nations building in New York, is the centrepiece of the first exhibition of the gallery. This is clearly a must-see show, and it’s brilliant that the gallery has had these improvements.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/26/pablo-picasso-guernica-spain-war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/mar/17/whitechapel-gallery
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2009/mar/17/architecture-tour-whitechapel-art-gallery
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