Author: Mick Hartley

Given the role that religion’s played in so much of our high culture, Michael Gove worries about the lack of it in popular culture:

[O]ver the past 150 years the relationship between religion and culture has become more fraught. The number of artists who either proclaim, or even acknowledge, a religious inspiration in their work has diminished. There are some musicians working in a classical tradition — such as John Tavener, Arvo Pärt and Henri Gorecki — who are explicitly religious and widely admired. But most contemporary artists either ignore the claims of faith or — in the case of artists such as Gilbert and George, Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst — deliberately mock and parody religion.

Which is why I found myself warming to Matisyahu Miller. The world’s leading — and, so far as I know, only — Hasidic reggae and hip-hop artist, Matisyahu combines the style of Bob Marley with the content you would expect from a rabbinical teach-in. Matisyahu is currently riding high in the American music charts.

And given that the last pop record I can think of to combine an explicitly religious message with commercial success was Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe and Wine, I admired not only Matisyahu’s bravery in proudly proclaiming his faith, but also the passion that he brought to his performance.

Of course, there have been some commercially successful contemporary musicians who have alluded, either in their work or in interviews, to their faith. From the Proclaimers (in Sunshine on Leith) to the rapper Kanye West, there have been occasional references to belief from a variety of artists. But, Matisyahu aside, I cannot think of a significant contemporary music star — apart from, possibly , the soul singer Beverley Knight — whose faith is anywhere near as central to their work as Tavener’s, Pärt’s and Gorecki’s.

Perhaps readers can tell me if I am missing someone big. It certainly feels, looking back on centuries of religiously inspired art, as though our modern culture is missing something big.

Somehow it doesn’t strike me as a major problem: there’s nowt wrong with a bit of secular culture. Let’s mention Shakespeare just for starters. But of course religion has played a huge part in popular culture as well as high culture: black American music – which lies at the heart of current contemporary music – owes everything to gospel music.

And then there’s reggae. It didn’t seem so odd at the time, but it definitely does looking back: the way in the late 70s that rastas, punks, and all shades in between used to get down to the heavy religious imagery coming at you straight from Kingston Jamaica:

“King of Kings,
Lord of Lords,
Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah,
Elect of God, Everlivin’ God,
Earth’s rightful ruler….”

Strange times.

sment for the Western nations who invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taleban regime and install democracy.

In what sense is this an “embarrassment for the Western nations who invaded Afghanistan”? Installing democracy means allowing the Afghans to make their own decisions, so scenes like these are exactly what you’d expect as the disempowered finally start to make their voices heard against the established order. Giving someone like Malalai Joya a voice is what it was all about.

It was a bad law, but anything that gets rid of Brian Haw and his horrible peace camp has got to be good news:

Peace activist Brian Haw may have to end his five-year vigil outside Parliament as the government has won an appeal against an earlier legal ruling.

Last July, Mr Haw, 56, from Worcestershire, won a High Court action against a new law threatening his round-the-clock protest.

But three Court of Appeal judges have now overturned that decision.

The government had introduced the legislation with the specific intent of forcing Mr Haw to abandon his post.

The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 states anyone wanting to demonstrate in a 1km zone around Parliament Square must have permission from the police when the demonstration starts.

Previously in the High Court, lawyers for Mr Haw argued that his demonstration had begun four years earlier and therefore he did not have to apply for authorisation.

From the editors of the New Republic:

Never again? What nonsense. Again and again is more like it. In Darfur, we are witnessing a genocide again, and again we are witnessing ourselves witnessing it and doing nothing to stop it. Even people who wish to know about the problem do not wish to know about the solution. They prefer the raising of consciousnesses to the raising of troops. Just as Rwanda made a bleak mockery of the lessons of Bosnia, Darfur is making a bleak mockery of the lessons of Rwanda. Some lessons, it seems, are gladly and regularly unlearned. Except, of course, by the perpetrators of this evil, who learn the only really enduring lessons about genocide in our time: that the Western response to it is late in coming, or is not coming at all.

The Western response? Is it really up to the West to intervene? The answer, sadly, is….well, no one else is going to do anything about it. But the last time the West intervened to stop a genocidal regime – one which, quite apart from the massacres of Kurds and Marsh Arabs, had invaded two of its neighbours, was in breach of numerous UN resolutions, and whose leader Saddam Hussein made no secret of his ambition to acquire WMDs to further his ambition to be the new Saladin – the protests across the world, and most particularly in the West itself, were so deafening, and the vitriol hurled at Bush and Blair so relentless, that the chances of another intervention by the West – ie the US with its allies – is effectively zero. America marching in to another Muslim oil-producing country? Yeah, right.

So, everyone will go on pretending that the regime in Khartoum is part of the solution instead of part of the problem, and negotiations will continue, and the genocide will work itself through, and the conflict will very likely spread to Chad – has already spread to Chad – and we’ll continue to read articles like this one…..

So what’s Kim Jong Il been up to recently?

Pyongyang, May 7 (KCNA) — Kim Jong Il, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and chairman of the DPRK National Defence Commission, enjoyed an art performance given by the State Symphony Orchestra at the reconstructed Moranbong Theatre. Also among the audience were Kim Kuk Thae and Kim Ki Nam, secretaries of the C.C., WPK, senior officials of the Party and the army and officials in the fields of culture and arts and media.

The performers put on the stage colorful numbers including orchestral music “The Sound of a Horse’ Hooves in Mt. Paektu” and “Rich Harvest Comes to the Chongsan Plain” and world famous music pieces composed by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. The performers truthfully represented the unshakable faith and will of the army and people of the DPRK to accomplish the revolutionary cause of Juche and the cause of building a great prosperous powerful nation under the uplifted banner of great Songun at any cost and fully demonstrated the validity and vitality of the WPK’s literary and art policy of creating, arranging and presenting art works in Korean style from A to Z. He extended thanks to the creators and artistes of the orchestra, expressing great satisfaction over the successful performance given by them with high artistry. He highly appreciated their successes, noting that they have created a lot of masterpieces deeply loved by the Korean people by firmly maintaining the principle of developing symphonies in Korean style to meet their sentiment. He put forward important tasks that would serve as guidelines in further developing the Juche-based symphonies.

Bryan Appleyard bemoans the lack of interest in Britain for surrealist art:

Of all the 20th-century art movements, only surrealism really sticks in the popular imagination. In Britain, this is further reinforced by the way surrealism itself, not just the name, has always been a native form of fun. From Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, via the Goons, Monty Python, the films of Terry Gilliam, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, to the current Channel 4 series Green Wing, the British have always laughed at — and, I think, felt freed by — the apparently capricious subversion of dull reality. Surrealism is in our blood.

But not in our heads. Go to any important gallery and the impressionist rooms will be packed, the surrealist rooms — apart from the odd Salvador Dali or Magritte — ignored.

As a high art movement, as an intellectual programme, surrealism exists as a kind of afterthought, perhaps as a minor tributary of modernism, but not much more.

It’s an interesting – not to say symptomatic – contrast between the English and French, this surrealism business. As Appleyard rightly notes, British culture is steeped in surrealism, though we never bothered to give it a name, or form a movement, or write books about it. It’s just an aspect of our lives, from whimsy at one end to out-and-out weird at the other. It just comes naturally.

Then along come the French and go all high-culture and philosophical about it. They’ve invented a new movement! It’s revolutionary! It’s going to change the world! It’s a whole new mode of being!

What it is, it’s culture from the top down: as though something only exists when some intellectual’s written a manifesto about it. It’s what you get when you combine the kind of anti-clericalism of naughty boys rebelling against their Catholic upbringing with a lot of Freud and a little bit of Marx. It ends up with the absurdly self-important and humourless Andre Breton – the Pope of surrealism, a movement supposedly dedicated to liberty of the imagination – excommunicating heretics with all the ruthlessness of a Stalin.

And it’s kind of annoying that any kind of weirdness now gets described as “surreal”, and we’re meant to thank the bloody French for it.

What an end to the season, and to Highbury.

As West Ham boss Alan Pardew said, “I have sympathy for Spurs. It was the biggest game of their season and the food poisoning was a terrible blow.”

A terrible blow indeed. Snigger.

So we start next season, in the new stadium, in Europe….and before that there’s the small matter of the European Cup Final against Barcelona….

According to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, the situation in Darfur has deteriorated since she last visited in 2004:

Speaking in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, she told the BBC that sexual violence against women had continued at virtually the same level.

Many officials are in denial about the scale of the problem, she added.

A peace agreement between the main rebel group and the Sudanese government was signed in Nigeria on Friday.

While Sudan’s politicians and rebel leaders signed the deal in Nigeria, Ms Arbour gave a sharp reminder of the scale of Darfur’s problems.

“I was there in the fall of 2004, which was bad enough,” she said.

“We thought then it was at the height of the displaced population’s misery. And frankly now, not only there’s no improvement in their predicament.”

She added that sexual violence, rape of women who collect firewood was showing “virtually the same level of victimisation”.

On her last visit to Sudan the UN’s top human rights official spoke to women who had been raped by Arab Janjaweed militia.

This time many of those same women had given birth to young babies.

Government responses to the problem often existed on paper alone, Ms Arbour said. with many officials still in denial about the scale of the rape problem.

Whatever was agreed in Nigeria, for the two million people in Darfur’s camps the equation is simple – they will only go home when they can do so without fear of rape and further attack.

As so often in reports from Sudan, there’s the implicit assumption that the government is somehow part of the solution – if only they were more aware of the problem and not “still in denial” – instead of being part of, and a major part of, the problem.

ces, those institutes…. To admit that they have no more relevance than the most obscure scholastic disputes about angels on the heads of pins, or indeed the fine points of Dianetic auditing….no, it’s too much. Better to invoke some mystical notion of genius – unscrupulous, paranoid, and totally wrong on every count, but nevertheless a genius – than face that horrible truth.

Freud believed he’d shattered our illusions about the greatness of the cultured mind: underneath the finery, so to speak, it’s all shit. Well, to judge by the number of intellectual followers he’s had, at least he got that bit right.

* see also Bloom’s latest effort, “Why Freud Matters”.

Your attitude to the current Darfur peace talks taking place in Nigeria will depend to a large extent on how much you believe that the murder, rape and destruction being visited on the African tribes by the Arab Janaweed militia are an unfortunate by-product of a civil war between rebels and the government. If you believe that – and you believe that the Sudanese government are interested in a just settlement – then the fact that the talks are near to collapse will be cause for major disappointment:

Peace talks on the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region have broken up after two of the region’s three rebel groups said they would not sign a deal.

The talks, being mediated by the African Union in the Nigerian capital Abuja, ran through the night after missing a midnight signing deadline.

But the main rebel group, an arm of the Sudan Liberation Army, says it will return to negotiations in a few hours.

International negotiators say the deal is the best hope for peace in Darfur.

If you believe as I do, on the other hand, that the Sudanese government is using the excuse of a civil war as a cover for pursuing a policy of genocide against the black African tribes in Darfur, then hopes were never particularly high in the first place. But we’ll see.

Update. And now there is a deal:

The largest rebel group in Sudan’s Darfur region has agreed to sign a peace deal with the government.

The breakthrough came when SLM leader Minni Minnawi returned to the talks, following a late-night session.

However, two smaller groups say they are not happy with the terms of the deal on offer. The government has also agreed to sign.

Time will tell whether this’ll make any difference whatever to the fate of those in Darfur, still at the mercy of the Janjaweed.