Layer 525 . . . Great Artists, Enlightenment, Zen, Dawkins and Obscurity

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In the previous blog I wrote about some of America's greatest living artists, and it seems to me I need to say a little more on this subject. The job of an artist is ultimately to raise awareness, to express, celebrate and comment on the human condition, and to bring a little (or a lot) more enlightenment into the world.

There should be no doubt that artists such as Dylan, Cohen, Springsteen and Young fulfill all of these criteria. Anyone who doubts Dylan's credentials as an artist and a poet should read Christopher Ricks' wonderful "Dylan's Visions of Sin" and Michael Gray's "Song and Dance Man - the Art of Bob Dylan", and also pay careful attention to Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man".

Anyone who questions Leonard Cohen's right to be called a great artist also ought to pay attention to his words, his poetry and his music, and then allow themselves to go "a thousand kisses deep", or simply take a walk down "boogie street".

Bruce Springsteen's art, on the other hand, is based on a very different sort of poetics, and a determination to speak to his audiences clearly and directly, without obscurity, but without being in any way patronising or underestimating their intelligence. Of course there will still be idiots like Reagan who completely fail to understand the irony in a song like "Born In The USA", but Bruce has learnt to live with this as a fact of life.

Neil Young also comments on his country and his fellow humans through songs like Ohio, Let's Impeach The President and Restless Consumer.

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2008/11/layer-84-music-politics-neil-young-and.html

http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwvideos/therestlessconsumer_wm.html

Neil's all-time masterpiece may well be the Sleeps With Angels album, and in particular the track "Change Your Mind", which not only has brilliant lyrics but also features scintillating, extended guitar solos which tear at the senses and wrench emotions from stony souls. Try listening to this track on decent headphones with the volume turned up in a darkened room, with or without the video on the screen -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGZWPgScALU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWXy-8vNxrs&feature=fvsr

You'll need to be in it for the long run though - all 14 minutes and 55 seconds.

http://www.neilyoung.com/   -  Horse Back -  This is even longer!

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Enlightenment and Obscurity

You have to hand it to Richard Dawkins - he draws attention to some pretty important stuff and gets people talking:

What is the proper place for religion in Britain's public life?

Britain became engulfed in a culture war last week as secularists and believers clashed over the role of religion in public life. Even the Queen intervened to defend the Church of England's role. Richard Dawkins, whose survey about Christianity in the UK ignited the row, defends his position on secularism, faith and tolerance in conversation with Will Hutton of the Observer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/19/religion-secularism-atheism-hutton-dawkins

Once again Will Hutton ventures into territory he's not really qualified to have strong opinions about. It's not clear from this article that he really understands secularism.

On the other hand, Oxzen has issues with Dawkins' disbelief in what some of us are calling spiritual intelligence. He's not the only one who fails or refuses to understand this crucial intelligence. Most people do.

Here's what Oxzen said in Layer 12:

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2008/04/layer-12-spiritual-intelligence.html

Key concepts for developing spiritual intelligence can be found in schemes of work with a sharp focus on human values. These are values that are subscribed to by humanists and by people of no particular religion, as well as by members of the many different faith communities throughout the world – values that give meaning to life and help to direct our most positive beliefs and actions. They are values that help to make our families, our communities and our societies better places to live in for all of us. Without such values we descend into strife, conflict, selfishness and aggression.


The following list is a summary of the key words and concepts we need to understand as part of a curriculum for human values and spiritual intelligence.


TRUTH
Curiosity, Equality, Honesty, Integrity, Intuition, Optimism, Truthfulness, Self-knowledge,
Reasoning


LOVE
caring, compassion, friendship, forgiveness, generosity, helpfulness, joy, kindness, tolerance, sharing, sympathy, patience


PEACE
calmness, contentment, dignity, discipline, happiness, honesty, humility, understanding, patience, reflection, self-confidence, self-control, self-discipline, self-respect, optimism


RIGHT CONDUCT
Contentment, Courage, Dependability, Duty, Ethics, Gratitude, Good behaviour, Healthy living, Helpfulness, Leadership, Initiative, Unity, Respect, Responsibility, Sacrifice, Self-confidence, Self-sufficiency, Simplicity, Perseverance 


NON-VIOLENCE
appreciation of others, brotherhood / sisterhood, citizenship, compassion, concern for all life, consideration, cooperation, unwillingness to hurt, equality, forgiveness, global awareness, good manners, loyalty, social justice, service to others, respect for people and property, unity, universal love, collaboration

My feeling is - without having read his book on science, religion and atheism - that Dawkins and his ilk set up a false dichotemy with God on the one side and total disbelief in any sort of spiritual intelligence on the other . . . . . .  whereas most people neither have any definite belief in God nor any disbelief in the 'spiritual'. This would appear to be a perfect example of the wisdom of crowds - that the majority of people believe there is something within most of us that directs us towards the values and virtues listed above - in the broad categories of truth, love, peace, right conduct and non-violence. The question is not whether spiritual intelligence exists, but where do we sit on a continuum that goes from high spiritual intelligence to low spiritual intelligence?

The two most spiritual words I know are lovingkindness & enlightenment. Professor Dawkins has a problem if he can't understand or reckon with these key Buddhist concepts. I commend him in a spirit of lovingkindness for his stance in favour of atheism, but I'd recommend him to pay greater attention to Buddhist philosophy and metaphysics.

Enlightenment? Don't know what it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(spiritual)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensho

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Layer 325 . . . Empathy, Social and Spiritual Intelligence, Saving the World, Enlightenment, Matt Harvey and Ben Howard

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Matt Harvey's a poet who used to be a regular on Radio 4's Saturday Live. The poems he's written for the programme can still be seen on its website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/saturdaylive/mattharvey.shtml

It's difficult to choose favourites - all of them are gems.

I saw Matt performing live for the first time on Saturday evening, and he was well worth missing the England game for. For me the best part of the show was his performance of Empath Man - a contemporary superhero he's created who tackles crimes and emergencies by using his "advanced listening skills and his ability to stay open and vulnerable in tight situations . . ."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkUGS2Hj1i0 - Empath Man
http://www.youtube.com/user/wondermentalist

Website - http://www.mattharvey.co.uk/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zyu6-_qCvo&feature=related - Torquay Boys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q90_phxAOk&NR=1 - on Transition Towns

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGIIXG5rWjQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZjt5NnDe7A&feature=related  -  Buying Curtains

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The point of mentioning the above, before I got carried away by memories of Matt's performance, is the importance of empathy and social intelligence. It's something Oxzen has gone into previously, over a year ago -

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2009/05/layer-162-social-intelligence-and.html

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2009/08/layer-183-grace-character-basics-all.html  -  A Force To Be Reckoned With

In yesterday's Guardian Madeleine Bunting wrote another excellent article on Big Issues - Empathy and Enlightenment:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/13/21st-century-enlightenment-revolution-mind

Can empathy save us?

We need to live very differently, argues a bold new text. And that calls for nothing less than a revolution of the mind

Hail the 21st-century Enlightenment. Ideas don't come much bigger

It makes a change to lift eyes from the detail of coalition agreements or the chances in the World Cup and take on board an analysis of the grand sweep of human history, new scientific insights into human nature, and how we can ensure our survival. This is the territory explored in a pamphlet calling for a "21st-century Enlightenment" to be published this week.

http://www.thersa.org/events/our-events/21st-century-enlightenment

[As I write this I'm half-listening to a programme I'm recording from BBC-HD called 'Wild China', part of which  focuses on Tibetan Buddhism and its concern with enlightenment . . . ]

It's an intriguing set of ideas pulled together by Matthew Taylor, in part to sketch out what an institution founded in the 18th-century Enlightenment [the RSA] ought to be doing – the answer being to generate the 21st-century Enlightenment, and this is now the new strapline for the Royal Society of Arts. No small ambition here.

The questions that underlie Taylor's pamphlet are echoed in the soul-searching around Labour's defeat: what do words such as liberal or progressive mean, and what kind of politics do they require?

"Progress in human knowledge and culture" is the slogan emblazoned round the RSA's auditorium. But can we still have faith in an idea of progress when the very inventions and ways of life that were thought would bring it about – market capitalism and individual freedom – are wreaking unprecedented environmental destruction?

We need to live very differently, and that requires thinking very differently. What's required is another revolution of the mind, a paradigm shift in human consciousness.

This is where [Taylor] becomes quietly optimistic. He believes this is possible to achieve – though not easy. The first source of his optimism lies in the research emerging from fields such as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, showing how deeply social our brains are. The perception of us as sovereign individuals, making independent and rational decisions, is a delusion; we are profoundly influenced by those around us, and prey to emotions which we only partly understand.

Just as the scientific insights of the 17th century led to the Enlightenment's profound shifts in the understanding of the individual, and the idea that the social order could and should be changed, so Taylor hopes science can prompt dramatic shifts in self-awareness, in how we understand human behaviour so that we replace individualism with more socially connected relationships of solidarity.

The second source of his optimism relies on heavy borrowing from the recently published The Empathic Civilisation, in which Jeremy Rifkin argued that history is marked by human beings' increasing empathy for others – which can be briefly summarised as from family to tribe to nation. The question is whether our capacity for empathy can expand to the human species, the globe and the biosphere in time to prevent the destruction of the environmental resources on which we depend. Empathy can save us, believes Taylor; it is vital to negotiations on how we share out natural resources, and vital to ensure harmonious co-existence on a crowded planet. But he acknowledges: "There are reasons to ask whether the process of widening human empathy has stalled, and just at the time we need to accelerate it."

If it has stalled in Britain, and it clearly has, it's in no small measure due to the changes in classroom practice in places like England, where teaching, in many of our schools, has again become a business of teacher-centred cramming for tests instead of a child-centred process which allows pupils to interact and collaborate in their learning so that their social and emotional intelligences are allowed and encouraged to develop.

But what of spiritual intelligence? Bunting goes on to say this:

The third element essential to the 21st-century Enlightenment is a "reassertion of the fundamentally ethical dimension of humanism", argues Taylor. What kind of human beings we want to be, what kind of society we want, are always ethical questions, he insists. Again, he cites scientific research that shows how deeply rooted ethical understanding is in the human brain.

Ethical reasoning and debate need to be resurrected. We need an ethics that challenges the dominant logics of market, bureaucracy, and scientific and technological development. Just because something will sell doesn't mean it should be sold; just because something can be discovered and developed doesn't mean it should be – now so painfully evident in the Gulf of Mexico disaster. It's a powerful, urgent argument.

Does this amount to a credible account of the possibility of future human progress? Although intrigued, I'm sceptical of the claims made for empathy, and anxious that arguments for ethics may fail to gain traction.

"Intrigued"? I find this conclusion very strange, and out of keeping with the whole tone of this piece. You have to wonder whether Madeleine has actually read Daniel Goleman's books on social intelligence and emotional intelligence? If so, what the hell is there to disagree with there? It's not a question of "making claims" for empathy. It exists. Without it we can't begin to develop what Buddhists call lovingkindness.

Has she read anything by the Dalai Lama, or anything on Buddhist Ethics? Is she even aware of the concept of spiritual intelligence? If even our leading journalists and intellectuals are lacking in such fundamental forms of understanding, then what hope is there for us becoming a more enlightened society?

Without emotional, social and spiritual intelligence there can be no enlightenment. Without enlightenment there can be little human progress. Without an education system that enables young people to develop these key intelligences, as well as creativity and imagination, we have no prospect of becoming a more enlightened society.

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Ben Howard

Ben Howard apparently dropped out of a journalism degree in order to pursue a career as a singer, musician and composer. He shared a gig last weekend with fellow Totnesian Matt Harvey, and played a great acoustic set in Dartmouth in company with a double bass player and a cellist (India Bourne) who also sang backing vocals.

Ben's a young guy who's rapidly maturing as an artist, as can be seen by a number of videos and audios on sites like YouTube. The quality of the vocal harmonies and musical arrangements, as well as the playing, seems to go up in leaps and bounds. None of what's currently on the Internet is as good as what he's currently doing, but it's worth checking out all the same, and it's well worth trying to see him play live.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPfhqTUkPgU&feature=related - These Waters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPpgeF1SV4s&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew7jafO9JOs&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efilu1CVVAk&feature=related
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Layer 168 Michael Rosen, Jim Rose, Ed Balls, Jim Knight, Uncle Tom Cobley and All.

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Michael Rosen has always been a man to appreciate and admire. As was his dad, Harold. His two-year stint as Children's Laureate has just come to an end, and to mark it he had an article in yesterday's EducationGuardian. As a poet and a writer he has a genius for spotting and summing up the essence of things, for showing us the little things that say such a lot about the state of the world, or humankind, or whatever.

For example, in this latest article he starts with this anecdote:

“Now here's one of the nice bits ... going round the classrooms and having a quick chat in each room ... open the door ... in ... this is a year 4 group ... and the teacher says that she's been working with one of my poems ... little heart-flip of pride ... yes, she says, the "quicks" have been making up poems of their own and the "slows" have been doing a wordsearch, using words from my poems. OMG! Quicks! Slows! I had no idea that poetry could be streamed! What do I say? I nod. I smile. I say nothing. I want to say something but I can't say anything because my mind is banging to the tune of 10 years' worth of government statements about "delivering the standards agenda" and "rolling out entitlement" . . . ”

Wonderful. Sums up the bloody sorry state of our Primary schools in one paragraph. He then describes meetings he's had with the likes of Jim Rose, Ed Balls and Jim Knight, and details their sheer incomprehension as to what schools should be doing and what the damn government's been doing that's wrong, bad and mad.

Jim Rose says to Michael, "We've got the alphabetical principle in place, now the next one to crack is how do we make books come alive?" For chrissake! “The alphabetical principle”! There's no such thing! What he means of course is that he believes Primary teachers have finally been battered into believing that “synthetic phonics” are the answer to overcoming slow progress in learning to read. Which is bollocks, of course, but Jim thinks he's fixed it, thanks to his rubbish report on the teaching of reading.

And “making books come alive”?

“I'm thinking, why is it a problem to work out "how to make books come alive". Teachers were doing this 20, 30, 40 years ago. There are shedloads of books on the subject. There are teams of advisers working out of local authorities or places like the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education who are training teachers to do this. There are hundreds of writers visiting schools doing this. He says he'll get back to me. He doesn't.”

He meets with Balls and Knight in the House of Commons:

To my left are several people who haven't been introduced, who are probably from "the department". We are talking about books. I say to the ministers that they've put in place a compulsory programme to teach children how to read, but there is no policy on reading books. They look at me blankly. Ed has half a mind elsewhere. The press pack outside want a bite of him. It's the Haringey child abuse scandal. I say that what's going on is discriminatory. Children who come from homes where books are being read get access to the kinds of abstract and complex ideas that you can only get hold of easily through exposure to extended prose. The rest are being fed worksheets.

Ed doesn't believe me.

"What do you want from us?" he says. "A directive asking every local authority and every school to devise its own policy on the reading of books. I've got a 20-point outline that you could send out as a guideline for people to adapt." "Send it to me," says Jim. "I have already," I say. "Send it to me again," he says . . ."

Moving on from stupid politicians who are too full of themselves to take any notice of what much cleverer and wiser people have to tell them, Michael writes with great affection and pride about his father, who worked as a teacher at Walworth Comprehensive and later became Professor of Education at the Institute of Education. This is from Wikipedia:

Harold Rosen (25 June 1919 - 31 July 2008) was an influential educationalist, particularly in regard to the teaching of English, a socialist thinker and a political activist, born in the USA but active mainly in the UK. He was a Communist activist in the 1930's; after World war II, he became an English teacher and later a teacher trainer; he became a major figure on the New Left after leaving the Communist Party in 1957; and he played an important part in debates and developments in the fields of language teaching and Primary education, particularly in the 1960's and 1970's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Rosen_(educationalist

Michael writes:

"My father dies. He was 89. There seem to be so many layers to his life. To me and my brother he was the bloke on camping holidays singing French folk songs, telling rude jokes, or back home getting in a state about our homework not being done. But as the letters and obituaries are written, we are reminded of him as schoolteacher, as teacher-trainer, as storyteller, as "animator" of study groups.

An issue of the English teachers' journal Changing English appears that is entirely devoted to him and his work. Simon, one of his colleagues at Walworth comprehensive school in south London, has unearthed the English syllabus that my father helped to devise in 1958. I read: "Whatever language the pupils possess, it is this which must be built on rather than driven underground. However narrow the experience of our pupils may be (and it is often wider than we think), it is this experience alone which has given their language meaning. The starting point for English work must be the ability to handle effectively their own experience. Oral work, written work and the discussion of literature must create an atmosphere in which the pupils become confident of the full acceptability of the material of their own experience. Only in this way can they advance to the next stage."

I am overcome with feelings of admiration, sadness, regret and anger. I start to scribble a letter to the editor of Changing English, Jane Miller. How did the Thatcher and Blair governments succeed so quickly to wipe out years of such thought, theory and practice? Did my father, my mother and everyone else struggling to figure out how to give every single child the right to speak, write and read not lay out these kinds of theories clearly enough?"

No doubt Michael's asking a rhetorical question and in reality he's familiar with the Shock Doctrine, and with the neo-conservative idea that in order to defeat progressives and socialists it's important that right-wing prime ministers and presidents act with great speed and are ruthless in overturning the ideas of their opponents, claiming that there's a national crisis of some sort, an emergency, a need to fix a massive problem or to remedy a set of failures attributed to their opponents. Of course Harold Rosen and his progressive peers laid out their theories and their methodology, which they'd developed from actual experience of working in tough inner-city areas, with enormous clarity and cogency. Reactionaries like Balls and Knight don't need to engage with those ideas – as head honchos they just feel the need to act on their own elitist instincts, their pathetically limited knowledge, and their ludicrous assumptions about methodology and the learning process.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/09/michael-rosen-creativity-in-the-classroom-teaching

http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/index.html

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Last year Michael wrote an article about SATs:

Sats: literally failing

The government is still wedded to Sats. Why, when the tests emphasise rote learning and cramp imaginations?

So, the government comes face-to-face with a failure. Someone better than me at basic numeracy might like to tot up the money spent on Sats, the various "strategies" and specific "hours", and Ofsted teams, along with the cost of schools closed and re-opened under new management. It's clear that Andrew Adonis is still wedded to the crumbling edifice of Sats, even though there is no evidence to suggest that the tests "lever up standards" as is claimed.

We know now that teachers teach to the tests. Every parent of a Sats-age child knows that the Sats year begins with your child's teacher announcing, "This is the year of the Sats", and sure enough, the lesson plans and homework soon come home. These are, in essence, mini-Sats full of the same kind of questions. In other words, the response to literature across the whole year (and indeed the whole school) is reduced to firing back answers on the facts in extracts in books, and reproducing the "sequence of events" as they put it. Literature is being shrunk into literacy.

The tragic fact is that [an] immensely potent way of giving children a reason to read and write has been turned into a series of dull, repeated exercises and tests, often conducted on books that are never read in their entirety – and all in the name of "delivering literacy". I suggest that whatever process of teaching children how to read is in place, this process on its own will never solve the problem of proving to children that reading is a worthwhile and interesting activity. In other words, any child might quite legitimately ask him- or herself, "why should I bother with this stuff?"

Ofsted inspects schools for literacy but not for whether children read often, freely and widely.

Only when all children are in a book-loving environment will they achieve literacy, yes, but a lot more: a confidence in handling abstract ideas, an understanding of a multiplicity of viewpoint and the complexity and diversity of human interaction that comes through reading widely and often. At the moment, the government is barking up the wrong tree. The regime of Sats, the literacy strategy and Ofsted will only carry on delivering failure.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/21/earlyyearseducation.sats
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I've just discovered, almost too late, an excellent comedy series on Radio 4 – The Secret World.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jsxhl
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Layer 8 Memories, Experiences, and Spiritual Intelligence.

Looks like another day for memories and introspection.

The first song that came up on the tape player today was Michelle Shocked’s ‘Anchorage’. I love that song. Don’t know anything about her, or what else she’s done, but that is a great song and a great production. I remember asking Pepsi when I was staying with her in Fons Sur Lussan whether she knew it and she said, “Know it? Every time I hear it I burst into floods of uncontrollable tears”, and I know exactly how she feels. There’s something about lines like, “Hey Shell, we was wild then”, and “I think I’m a housewife”, and the way she sings them, that really hits the spot.

The other day a friend asked me about the painting on my kitchen wall, which was given to me by its painter, Barbera, in Fons. It’s very impressionistic, painted in Barbera’s shaky hand, and depicts in thick layers of white and green paint the chalk hills she can see from her garden. I often look at it and think about lovely Barbera, how I met her in Daniel’s bar in Fons, and how she asked me to take photos of all her paintings before they went on show and on sale in Daniel’s place, La Goulade.

I wonder what she’s doing now, and how she’s coping with her multiple sclerosis. She phoned me a couple of months ago and it was so heartwarming hearing her lovely voice down the line - her lovely accent, still full of lightness and laughter. That time in Fons was the first and only time I’ve ever spoken with and spent some time with anyone who has MS. I must get round to printing the photos of her other paintings. I must phone her.

I have such fond memories of Daniel’s bar and all the brilliant music he played - rock, blues, jazz - and all the brilliant people who wandered in and out of the terrace of the best bar/café I’ve ever been in. There was such an amazing connection amongst the people who lived in that little ancient village, and so much of that was down to Daniel’s bar as its social hub. It was Daniel’s bar that inspired me to think about setting up a similar kind of place when my own daughter expressed an interest in running a pub. My own Blues Brasserie.

I remember the trip I made with Barbera to the local swimming pool, and then on to visit her parents’ farm, and watched her mother making goats cheese by hand in their little dairy. Such a different world, unchanged for centuries.

It was Daniel who insisted I phone Yanique to say goodbye to her on the day I was leaving, and through that phone call he brought about her surprise journey to Avignon, where I was staying that evening prior to catching the early TGV to Paris.

Apparently she’d been waiting in the bar at lunchtime to say goodbye, but as I was over two hours later than I’d expected she’d given up and gone home, taking with her a poem she’d wanted to give me.

Yanique with her mass of unruly red Breton hair, the same colour as my daughter’s. Over dinner in Avignon Yanique introduced me to “Les Passants”, Georges Brassens and Antoine Pol.

The way she recited the poem from memory with such expression and feeling gave me a real frisson. She worked in Daniel’s place, and I’d enjoyed talking with her and Daniel in the bar after hours, but I’d no idea she’d been thinking in terms of “passantes”.

The next day, sitting on the TGV speeding towards Paris, I read and re-read the printed copy of Les Passantes that she’d handed to me at the end of the evening. For the first and only time in my life I found myself welling up with . . . . something that was more a spiritual feeling than something that was emotional, to the point where tears started streaming down my face. Thank you Yanique, and Antoine, and Georges. It’s a brilliant piece of work.

Lighting one of the joss sticks I brought back from Japan the fragrance immediately transports my spirit back to ancient Zen temples and the incredible spiritual peace and harmony of their interiors and their gardens.

Speaking with Yoko on Skype yesterday, listening to her laughter and her giggles when she saw me on the webcam for the first time, had the same effect of making time and space seem irrelevant, at least in terms of who I am now and what I’ve been fortunate to experience in my lifetime. So many unforgettable and formative spiritual and emotional experiences. A long, strange trip indeed.

http://www.gard-provencal.com/an/vv/fons.htm
http://www.travelpost.com/travel/Oxzen
http://www.travelpost.com/EU/France/Languedoc-Roussillon/Fons-sur-Lussan/6177640
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fons-sur-Lussan

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Here’s a brilliant video of Georges Brassens singing “Les Passants” -

http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/Brassens/video/x18qox_brassens-les-passantes_music
It also has a copy of the words of the poem/song under the clip.
Nice comments posted after the clip and the lyric sheet:

Le thème des "belles passantes" de ce poème est magnifique. Voilà une belle façon de sortir de l'oubli le poète auteur du texte Antoine Pol ... Il était évident que ce ne pouvait être qu'un autre poète qui le fasse ... Merci Georges Brassens ...

ça me donne des frissons chaque fois que je l'écoute. a signaler la superbe reprise en anglais par jehro dans l'album putain de toi. c un pur délice

I know exactly what they mean by frissons - I still have them too when I listen to the song or read the poem. Un pur delice.

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/george-brassens-les-passantes-english-subtitles/1390312055
Another rendition on video - with translation in on-screen subtitles.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=l4Q7urIVYAE&feature=related Same song - with slide show. Some excellent comments posted on the site:

Brassens, poésie, génie, langue, sensibilté, joie, tristesse, réalité, connaissance des gens, respect, tout partagé dans ses chansons, que dis-je? Ses manifestos. Bravo Brassens

Quand ils ont annoncé la mort de Georges Brassens, j'ai pleuré à grosses larmes. Je n'avais que 10 ans. Heureux ceux qui ont connu l'époque de Brassens, Brel, Barbara et de Ferré

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C27QQXWle6c
This excellent version is sung by Francis Cabrel, with some nice bluesy guitar work and a fantastic blues harmonica solo in the middle. 5 minutes of real bliss.

http://dbarf.blogspot.com/2007/08/les-passantes-i-hope-you-enjoy-this.html
This is a really nice blog site on which a retired lecturer has posted a very good translation of “Les Passantes”. Also has other work by Brassens. Also lots of interesting stuff on the site about education and politics, and the politics of education.

http://www.paroles.net/chanson/19792.1 Just the words.

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Wikipedia

Today I made my first contribution to Wikipedia, and set up an account as a Wikipedia editor.

Maybe it was just a coincidence that the cover article in yesterday’s Guardian G2 was about the amazing Wikipedia: How I Fell In Love With Wikipedia. No doubt my little piece about Fons will get thrown off the site because it’s based mainly on opinion and not Facts.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia.internet
http://www.travelpost.com/travel/Oxzen

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Anchorage

http://www.last.fm/music/Michelle+Shocked/+videos/+1-vVxDIrhjLxk Site has video and lyrics. Also on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVxDIrhjLxk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hffcyJ1GAg

Amazon.com: The '80s folk revival yielded a diversely talented generation, some reared on the aesthetic and ideology of punk, some on their '60s singer-songwriter predecessors. They were looking for the directness of expression and connection with audience that stripped acoustic music promised. Michelle Shocked built an audience through her strident activist messages and raw, almost naked songs; she had the sincerity that the audience craved. Despite the militant cover--in which a cop is seen choking a protesting Shocked--the record is memorable for its reveries of childhood, its simple sense of hope, and Shocked's minimalist guitar and hoarse, youthful voice. --Roy Francis Kasten

http://www.amazon.com/Short-Sharp-Shocked-Michelle/dp/B000001FOH The site also has clips of other tracks that are on ‘Short, Sharp, Shocked’.
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