mountain masala

giant rabbit

art group Gelitin have made a giant pink bunny rabbit on the side of an Italian mountain where it will sit for the next 20 years.

the rabbit is enormous, and designed so that people can climb it and feel small alongside its enormity.

the press kit says:

The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent;
and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy.
The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbitís body, a country dropped from the sky;
ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and
intestines.
Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel.
Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside.
Such is the happiness which made this rabbit.
i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.

high-res images on the website.what can you say??? what a brilliant idea and experience!

blessed cheese

birthday today, so I invited some friends to come to McLaren Vale for wineries and lunch. a pity I chose a weekday as a number of others might have joined us. we must be getting old, because we only managed one winery. we started going to Piramimma when we first moved to Adelaide. back then they were noted for their white wines and olives. now it is their reds that are absolutely stunning. it's a very old family winery and has resisted going upmarket. so there were quite a few to taste.

a gorgeous day - sunny, not too warm, a bit of wind.

then two wonderul platters at "blessed cheese" on the main road in town - smoked meats, dried muscatels, smoked meats, olives, eggplant, capsicum, dips and a Hindmarsh Island white wine! and nice coffee too. pay them a visit.

we had talked about going to other places but in the end we all had to leave early. didn't even get to try their chocolates.

tonight it's a family celebration with paella on the stove and some Piramimma wine. I'll post the recipe tomorrow.

so glad I'm not at the next decade for a few years. well, a couple at least.

new ekklesia website

The Ekklesia Project has a new website.

If you have an interest in the post-liberal church,
or a church that seeks to be an alternative political community
or like what "Stan the Man" (Hauwerwas) or John Howard Yoder have to say
or are interested in peace from a Christian perspective
or seek a Christian commentary on current affairs

go and visit. There's not much on the new site yet (not sure what's happened to the old stuff) but worth watching.

Tom Wright in Adelaide 2006

Monday 27th March 9.30am -4pm

Dr Tom Wright A Fresh Look at Paul

Venue: Australian Mineral Foundation
63 Conyngham Street, Glenside

Cost: $60 per person (inc GST and lunch)
Early Bird: $45 (before Feb 27)
Students: $30 (80 places only)
Phone Bec at 8357 1755

Email: Burleigh@sabu.com.au

ReBirth Lives On

Computer music legends Propellerheads have discontinued the mighty ReBirth, a software emulation of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, the TB-303 bass synth and the TR-909 drum machine.

So they've made it available as a free download at the ReBirth Musem. It's a mighty big download, but loads of fun.

Head on over there!

Or you can go and visit the Propellerheads site and check out Reason instead.

[just send my Tascam USB audio/midi interface off to get fixed, so my summer music plans are temporarily on hold... bother...]

hope prayers

tonight's theme at church was "hope", based on Isaiah 40. I was leading the prayers of intercession. cheryl had told me of an idea of using translucent paper around candles. unforutnately I left it until today to try to buy something suitable for an inkjet printer and couldn't find anything, so I trialled regular tracing paper from the newsagent.

You can click on the thumnails here to see a 720x540 version.

It worked fine - came out of the printer rather wet, but then dried OK. My initial aim was to collect close up faces from news 'hot spots' around the world and attach a story to each. but I left my run a bit late, so instead I had one image/story of a young boy in Kashmir who had lost his sister and brother in the earth quake, and has not spoken since the event.

For the other photos I simply used some generic images of people in need (mainly from iStock. Each image had some words from Isaiah 40 next to it. When I introduced the prayer I spoke of light in the darkness as an image of hope, and said that my prayer was that the light of Christ would burn in this young boy's life, and placed the translucent cylinder over a candle.

Now the bad thing about the tracing paper was the printer found it hard to feed, and after printing a number of these, one of the pieces of paper wrapped itself around one of the rollers in the printer, where it is well and truly stuck. So instead of having about 40 of these, I had about a dozen. I place then on the communion table, and invited people to come and make a cylinder and place it on a candle, offering a silent prayer for the kinds of people and situations depicted. Those who did not get to make a cylinder (as there weren't enough) could simply light a candle.

We only had one catch alight as it had been made into more of a cone!

I had been wondering what to play while this was happening. thanks to duncan, I was able to use the video clip of "Peter Gabriel's "Don't Give Up" by Bono and Alicia Keys (which I had read about just a couple of days before). It has been recorded for World Aids Day.

http://www.keepachildalive.org/dont.html

It's a 16 mb quicktime movie. Very stirring black and white images of people suffering in Africa.

Forgot to take a camera, so I've photgraphed them at home. It was actually really nice at church with reflection from the glass-topped communion table and the brass communion stuff.

There are a couple of mp3 files of a recent speech by Bono over at www.u2.com. I did a remix over the top of "40" from the "War" album. I had thought of using that as a soundtrack but decided that it would have been too much.

Now I need to find a better translucent paper!

when I left my job as an economist quite a few years ago (to become a youth worker), I sold many things so I could buy a real car so I could study full-time and not have any debts.

I sold many vinyl records that I am gradually recovering as CDs. Mind you, I haven't hunted down the BTO CD. (If you don't know what that means, you are very very lucky... although, b-b-b-baby, you aint seen nothing yet..)

but I also sold my Acoustic Research speakers and turntable and Marantz amplifier.... since then we have lived with my darling partner's Pioneer amp and speakers that she bought in .. er... 1978???

since then we've added a Denon CD and cassette and cheapo Luxman turnatable (yes, they made a cheapie)

three years ago, our retiring presbytery minister gave us his set of (better) Pioneer speakers.

then........ last week I was about to complete the last week of a six week "wired church" course in Seaton. This was the sixth week of driving into the local shops, ordering a large fried rice (or curry fried rice - I alternated) from the chinese take-away - then browsing in the blockbuster video next door while they were cooking (I bought sooo... many ex-rental movies).

BUT I went there early and the next next door electronics shop was open. so I came home with a 30 year old Rotel tuner/amp that had been put in for repair and not collected. $80. I probably paid too much. It was $400 30 years ago!

but I've plugged it in and I'm speechless. I can hear the music again.
and its a warm transistory thing, not digital. just wonderful.

yes, I have so many CDs, but I can actually hear the music.

and with the system, it's the jazz/folky stuff that comes to the fore.

this sounds like a tacky blog, but I'm digging out old vinyl and swooning with the sounds.

I come home and crank up the sound - AND you can turn up the amp and it sounds better, not worse!

30 years. 80 dollars. really.

habit can make us deaf.

I come home and run to the CD or record racks and crank up the volume and I'm in audio heaven.

I've got a big pile of LPs - the Call (collectibles), Sweet Honey in the Rock, Cactus World News, the Del-Lords (!!!), Talking Heads, U2's "Boy" and "War", Clannad, Sting's "Soul Cages", even Tall Stories EP. Then I'll play Patti Smith, vintage Randy Stonehill, the Alarm's "Declaration", Leo Kottke, a bit of Elvis (Costello), Stephen Cummings, and two exremely sublime discs from Van the Man (Poetic Champions Compose...), early Los Lobos, Sinead's first disc, and Sam Phillip's "Indescribable Wow".

Might even put on the Miss Piggy Exercise album.

ooohhh. strumming, soul, sax, s.... oh, you know... rock and other stuff.

I'm swimming, people. swimming.

aaah.

maybe the TV next. after all, it's a 13 inch and we've had it for 15 years or so. that's why we watch DVDs on the laptop.

what a weird household.

ha!

worship and culture

In "Theories of Culture, Kathryn Tanner reminds us that there is never a clear boundary between church and world, that Christianity is always borrowing and adapting from the world at large. However she also suggests that it is theologically problematic to suggest that

“the aspect of Christianity ultimately responsible for keeping this use [of borrowed material] on a distinctively Christian track – for instance, the biblical story – is simply Christian and not similarly infiltrated by borrowed materials”. (p 114)

Rather, she says,

“The only privilege Christian social practices have themselves is the privilege of humility; their own claim to fame is always the ironic one of knowing their own full humanity and therefore their distance from the purity of the Word they witness to. If it is to be in keeping with this sense of humility, the process of transforming borrowed material should be as much about self-criticism as it is about criticism of other ways of life; it should be a self-directed process of transformation in keeping with an awareness of its own need for criticism. That would be the case if, as we have suggested, Christian social practices are never themselves anything other than the transformation of what is outside; if, that is, Christian identity is established from the beginning through the use of borrowed materials.

One can still agree with postliberal theology that the identity of a Christian way of life is formed by a cultural boundary. This is not, however, the sharp boundary of independent cultural contents as postliberalism at its most extreme imagines. The boundary is, instead, one of use that allows Christian identity to be essentially impure and mixed, the identity of a hybrid that always shares cultural forms with its wider host culture and other religions (notably Judaism). In contrast, then, to even the more moderate postliberal position, Christianity is a hybrid formation through and through; nothing need be exempted out of fear that the distinctiveness of Christianity must otherwise be lost. Moreover – and most significantly – contrary to moderate postliberalism, the distinctiveness of a Christian way of life is not so much formed by the boundary as at it; Christian distinctiveness is something that emerges in the very cultural processes occurring at the boundary, processes that construct a distinctive identity for Christian social practices through the distinctive use of cultural materials shared with others. ” (Ibid, p144f)

part of my ongoing posting on these matters....
much more to come....

ipod envy

our household contains its first ipod....

and it's not even mine!