Talking to the Ghost of Food

Larry Gonick's "Cartoon History of the Universe" is always relevant.

 

  It's good to state at the outset that the reason something was developed might not be the reason it stays successful. In a episode of Radiolab called "The Cataclysm Sentence" contributors were invited to offer the single most useful sentence of human knowledge to pass onto a post-human intelligence, and of course I sarted thinking what I'd choose. I'm not a scientist but I'd want to pass on some fun short-cut to generating curiosity: maybe something about doubling the length of a string, then comparing its pitch when plucked to see, or rather hear, that leap of an octave – or something about the law of gravity: the idea that the very fact of our existence makes us attractive. Cute facts.

 

 One contributor was the excellent youtube mortician Caitlin Doherty, who's appeared on this blog before. She suggested, "You will die. Aand that's the most important thing... so you have to have Religion, you have to have Communities. You have to have Art. Those are created by our fear, and our strange, difficult, weird relationship with Death." Which is one theory for the invention of all the above, but listening along as a fellow atheist, I realised it wasn't mine. 

 What if we created Religion around about the same time we became evolved enough to start wanting to enjoy life, and to realise that wanting to enjoying life had a moral dimension – and that eating meat meant taking a life, for example, but that we still liked the taste? What if we created therefore a way to look upon the world not simply as an environment, but as a provider? What if we developed Religion not to help us deal with death, but to help us deal with killing? As I said however, the reason something was invented isn't necessarily the reason it hangs around.

Here's the episode.

This is somewhere on the riverbank outside Kew.

The German Choir of London go "Oh God"

 Here's matter ghoul adjacent. Back in March I took an iPad out to where Spitalfields borders The City, to see if I could get anything useful for a little promo Big Ben said we needed to make now that the Americans were favouring Harry Potter Tours – which we don't do – over the more nuanced, site-specific contextualising of the tragic murder and mutilation of unaccommodated Victorian women provided by Fred Strangebone's Ripper Walks. "Well, this will look terrible" I thought as it started to rain because I knew nothing about what makes a street look good. 

 The iPad was a gift from the Musical Director of the Deutscher Chor London, Barbara Hoefling. When I came to cut the Strangebone footage together I found a whole file of recordings she had made on it in preparation for a lockdown Hallowe'en Concert. Barbara's developed her own method of directing amateur choirs: instead of training each singer up to the standard of a soloist, she concentrates on perfecting the coherence of their untrained voices into a single instrument, to produce a sound I've heard no other human choir make. I tried playing one of the recordings I'd found over the footage of our route, and was instantly thrilled by how devastating I found the result – far too upsetting to attract even the Canadians however. So I knocked together a new soundtrack from some library numbers, Ben provided text and sound effects – car horns, golf swings, that kind of thing – and you can see the final trailer here, if you like. But Barbara Hoefling's brilliant work is below.

 

Staying In My Lane

 Those old explanations of ghosts – echoes of a trauma baked into place – is it only human trauma that has that power? Might parks be crawling with the ghosts of worms? Is this river haunted by fish, fish ghosts targeted by heron, more than a millenia-worth? I'm trying to get into the Hallowe'en spirit now that the weather is proper October.

 

 Unfinished business – that was another explanation. Do only humans get to have that then? Wait, is that all a soul is? Business? Is it? I haven't been busy this year. Maybe. Have I felt like a ghost? A bit. And it hasn't all been unenjoyable, but I watched a youtube essay last week about the films of the Beatles which reminded me that being A CREATIVE FORCE is, you know, an option, and initially may require nothing more than just thinking to yourself "I'm going to be A CREATIVE FORCE" and then seeing what happens, and it's really picked me up. (Here's that video essay.) 

 

 In this case a bit of what happened appears to be me going for a walk and then posting shit phone pictures of it here. Well, good. You'll have to take my word for it that there were joggers. It's odd to me, by the way, that that that's what it's called: "jogging". That's definitely what it looks like, but it's not the aspect you'd think they'd want to advertise. Jogging's normally something you want to avoid, in case you scratch the record or spill your drink. How can I make running forward feel more like running into something? Jog!

 

 Are these pavement demarcations a hangover from the pandemic, or permanent now? And has anyone studied their effect on a pedestrian's mental health? I think I hate them. They just seem like another thing to get on the wrong side of. It's nice to have somewhere to record that though. It's nice to be A CREATIVE FORCE. The next paragraph contains swearing.

 

 I also hate seeing so many people right now take the side of a side, rather than siding with people – to see so many call for an end to Netanyahu's response to the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holoocaust while not also calling - seeing as we're calling for things - for the safe return of Israeli hostages, as though we've finally run out of internet and there was just was no room for the Landaus. Well fuck that and fuck the war and fuck taking sides unless that side is Peace. Fuck Bibi. And fuck Hamas; buoyed by their actions, the Iranian Government announced last week it would be targeting Persian journalists working in Britain like my friend Faren. And, parenthetically (do go on, Simon) coming up to a year after the murder of Mahsa Ahmini by Iranian police for having loose hair I decided to search Xitter for any more news of protests, and found myself enaged in the following fun coversation about... let me check... yes, apartheid. Stick with it.

 

 

 

 I know, "mroe"...

 By the way, you can now find me on blue sky at @slepkane.bsky.social. 

 I really hope you're all okay.