Easily among one of the best...

On Thursday night I went to see the Neil Cowley Trio at the Cornmarket in Newbury. It was a truly fantastic gig...

The're a Jazz Trio (Piano, Bass and Drums) which I first came across them on Late Night with Jooles Holland, and immediately bought both of their albums. 

Neil Cowley (frontman) is an artist with an impressive career history, at the age of 10 he performed a Shostakovich piano concerto at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, then went onto play with The Brand New Heavies and Zero 7, among others. 

I find it hard to describe how good they were... the craftsmanship, timing, energy, enthusiasm, were just awe inspiring.... I have a favorite track, His Nibs, which they didn't play... and it didn't matter. They played in a venue which was only a quarter full... it didn't matter (but it was a travesty). Just Brilliant...  I'm starting to gush now... and I don't care.

I know this next suggestion may be a little controversial,  but if you have to sell body parts of your own grandmother to buy tickets , then do it... and do it NOW without regret or reticence.

Tragedy is that Newbury was their last listed Gig, but they are playing around at the London Jazz Festival, and event that finishes tomorrow.

(Someone.... no names mentioned... has pointed out that I may have been a little influenced by alcohol or tiredness when I wrote this post..!!?? You decide?!)

Where is Jim...?

Just added a very cool gadget to my iphone called instamapper. It sends my GPS location to a site and updates a map at the bottom of my blog. So if you ever need to know 'Where's Jim'... you'll be able to find out. 

Here is where I am right now...

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

Visual representation of quantitative information

One of my favorite ever books is book by a chap called Edward Tufte, and called 'The Visual Display of Quantitate Information'. Two things about the book.

1. It's basically about how numbers can be displayed to help people understand what numbers are saying. There are some beautiful examples of both helpful and unhelpful diagrammes and pictoral representations. 

2. It's a really well made book, basically Tufte struggled to find a publisher who would a. publish the book, b. deliver the production values he was aiming for. So he published the book himself and it's just really, really nice. The printing quality is fantastic. 

But... if a book is not going to be sold on it cover... this is the book. 

This post was sparked by a post I saw which had looked at visual representation of voting in the US election, the post can be found here. Hat tip Andrew Sullivan... again.

The picture, above right, is a really great piece of work. It looks at the voting on a county by county basis, and distorts the map of the US because gives greater space to areas of higher population. What then presents itself if a purple country with swathes of red and blue running through the more rural or urban areas.

Classic...

From The Onion...



Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked. Another factor contributing to Obama's victory, political experts said, may have been the growing number of Americans who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American.



Citizens with eyes, ears, and the ability to wake up and realize what truly matters in the end are also believed to have played a crucial role in Tuesday's election.




Major hat tip to Andrew Sullivan

04:43- Off to bed

It's now 04:43, and I'm off to bed. As Gore Vidal just said "I didn't really expect it to be this easy".

I stayed up for John McCain's concession speech, now that was the man we wanted to see through the campaign. But, I suspect the Rovian clones who ran his campaign just wouldn't allow that to come out. 

I'll save Obama's speech for tomorrow, along with the final numbers for Montana, Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina. 

My Kid Could Paint That...

Just finished watching the film 'My Kid Could Paint That..'

For anyone who hasn't seen it, or heard of it, it's the film of a little girl, called Marla Olmstead. Read the Wikipedia page here...  In short, Marla was a four year old girl who, between the ages of 4 and 7, produced amazing pieces of abstract art. 

As you watch the film it moves from a story about a little girl and onto:

-  a family 

-  a community 

-  a nation 

After this the story takes a really interesting twist, and into a different journey about story. 

The documentary ends by saying "it's a story about what happens to stories", about the nature of narrative. 

To me the heartbreaking part of the documentary was what it had to say about what we do with the 'my story - your story - our story - the story' stuff, how distrust breaks apart the narrative we all depend upon to build common cause and community, and how hard it is to build again when trust and faith have been broken.  Do watch the film... 

American Fervour...

Just watched the third of four parts of 'The American Future'. The BBC/Simon Schama series on recent, post independence, history. This third part looks at the connection between Religion and Politics in the American context.


I've always really liked Schama's style of presentation and it's really interesting to see and hear a 'secular Jew' commentate so incisively and sensitively on this subject. Those in the UK can view it here.

The programme has always made really solid links between the past and present, and this third programme is no exception.


He never reverts to cheap gags or even the easiest of obvious shots, he just make a self-evident case that the Church has lost it's way in politics, away from the intent of the Founding Father's and the earliest Christian leaders who fought against injustice, and too into the hands of the American Right.... and back again?!


Do take a half an hour just to watch the last 30 minutes, it's brilliant. And watch he face at the end of a Mega-Church service... priceless.

McCain

This made me laugh...

"He's George W. Bush without the prudence and caution."

... and cry!

Back to my roots?

I've just clocked that the title of this post has just a slight overtone, with connotations of race for some. Well, as that is so far off the mark of what the post is about, I'll leave it up. 

I know for most people the success of Barak Obama's fundraising strategy will be of little interest, but for those of us who cut the teeth of our early careers in fundraising it's really fascinating, for three reasons:

1. At the start of his campaign turned down a guaranteed $150m (£86m) in state funding, because state funding would limit his spending. This was a significant gamble, but I'm sure the team had good numbers to back it up. 

2. His fundraising drive is based on a beautiful synergy between proposition, message and values. Saying to people 'I'm not taking your money unless you volunteer it', is simultaneously; pro-choice (in the non-abortion use of the term), anti big-government and participative.

3. The rest of his campaign is based on large-scale participation on the ground. Yet... his fundraising campaign is also large-scale participation (the average donation in the last month has been $84 (£49), with a supporter base of 3.1m) This, again, blows away the concept that we have two types of people - those who give and those who do. Giving and doing are, increasingly, seen as two sides of the same coin.  

Truth, Good, God, and Fullness

I found this really interesting piece through Andrew Sullivan, (who incidentally has been writing and collating the best stuff on the US election).

In a blog called Postmodern Conservative (multiple contributers) James Poulos writes the following under a post "Truth, Good, God, and Fullness..."

"We start longing for the experience of conversion, the gratifying sensation that we are surrendering ourselves completely to an insuperable power, rather than longing, say, to have been converted. This presumptive longing for the sudden, totalizing experience of comprehensiveness is, I think, a bit too driven by envy. And our longing, post-conversion, for the enduring, permanent experience of fullness is ditto too driven by pride."
I think his point about 'rather than longing to be converted' speaks about a preference for nice experiences over and above transformation.