One of the ways I use my (hand-written) journal is to un-jam myself through writing streams of consciousness. Logical, organised ways of thinking are all very well, but I don't want to be stuck in that mode the whole time.

Here's a one-minute example I did while waiting for my sandwich just jotting down whatever unconnected phrases came into my head. Why not have a go yourself?

Codes and celephapods / Dark fire 'cross wearisome wanderers / Deep O-type sanguinuity and skylark consciousness / Arc-weld the sentinel to their station / Breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, breathe in, breathe in / Oops - no more oxygen.

I'm making no great claims for it as writing, but it fulfils its function.

Hello all,

This is just a quick note from me to wish you all New Year's greetings. I hope 2010 brings you all you might wish for yourself, your family and your friends. :)

I'd like to extend my apologies for having been a lousy correspondent (if at all) over the past year. I didn't contact people over the Christmas / NY break largely because I was so exhausted from work that I needed to go dormant as much as possible. I'm feeling a lot better now, thankfully.

The past year has probably been a watershed one for me. For those who don't know (or may need reminding), this is the first full year I've been at Friends of the Earth and it's been a tremendously inspiring experience. I've worked with some amazing volunteers, I've learnt something every day of the working year and I'm doing something I feel passionate about. I even got to go to Copenhagen in December for the UN negotiations, which was phenomenal.

On the other hand, I've also put in way too much literal and mental effort. I've always had a strong work ethic but in 2009 I came much closer to breaking myself than I had ever come before. As well as the Christmas period, for example, I went on a lovely holiday to Wales with friends back in July and I was just dog tired most of the time. That's pretty much been my year in microcosm – inspiring work punctuated by fatigue and often feeling too drained to be sociable.

The positive way of looking at this is that I've accidentally tested whether I can live wholly from work – even work I really enjoy – and the answer is a definitive no. In many respects, the paradigm that's formed the backbone of much of my adult life has been pushed to its logical conclusion, and found wanting.

So I'm intending to make 2010 rather more of a year of re-balancing, connecting with interests outside of work, and making a concerted effort to do things differently. I hope to be in more regular contact with you all but if I continue to suck at this I'm going to at least be posting regular updates here.

Cheers and best wishes for 2010!

Tags: new year message

If I can summon up the dregs of regret for the demise of Oasis, I can only plead in my defense that

a) I was an impressionable eighteen year-old when Definitely Maybe was released.
b) The first four singles and the album that followed were, briefly, the biggest, dumbest, cheapest guitar pop thrill going in 1994.

But it's hard to throw a cordon around Oasis Mk 1 when you think what came after.

It wasn't just the repetition. A stubborn refusal to progress can actually be quite charming, as proven by the Ramones - a band which Oasis actually rather resemble in their retreat behind iconography and resistance to meaningfulness.

No, it was enlongated repetition what did for them. Longer songs, ever-more pedestrian riffs, the inevitable bleeding string section. And lyrically, the realisation that Oasis had nothing to offer but third-rate surrealism and those dreadful half-wise platitudes. The sense that there was nowhere to go but bigger, to borg as much classic rock insignia as the band could.

It's significant that Oasis have left very little legacy other than in the field of rock 'n' roll anecdotes and in other performers' Liam-isms - imitation imitating imitation.

Simulacra.

Tags: oasis music

I finally got round to reading this! I inherited a copy over Christmas when my parents briefly became a two-DFMF household, and the cover's been staring at me in a slightly accusatory (but oh so visionary) way every since.

Devoured on the Chiltern Line, Dreams is pretty good. It benefits from the fact it was written 15 years ago, before Obama's political career really kicked off, and so there's admirably less self-censorship and self-heroising than you might expect from a politician's autobiography. Yes, his personal and family history would make for an interesting narrative in almost any hands, but credit where credit's due, Obama can write. That he brings a fair degree of reflection and self-knowledge to the project is a particularly pleasant bonus.

The section which had the most resonance with me - quelle surprise - are the central chapters which deal with his early career as a community organiser in Chicago. It's a relief to discover that the kwisatz haderach of the Democratic party (can't find original attribution for this sobriquet - meh) had his fair share of screw-ups too when he got going.

Obama seems to have been especially fortunate in realising the perils of politics as ego-trip (the radical soap opera, as an old paperback I have by David Mairowitz puts it). One of the key moments in the book is his realisation that his activism, as with his behaviour, should not be just 'about him'.

Instead, Obama briefly but powerfully sets out a vision of politics and human conduct as being at the service of others, both those you know and those you don't know. "The copper-skinned face of the Mexican maid, straining as she takes out the garbage. The face of Lolo's [his stepfather] mother drawn with grief as she watches the Dutch burn down her house. The tight-lipped, chalk-coloured face of Toot [his grandmother] as she boards the six-thirty AM bus that will take her to work ... They all asked the same thing of me, these grandmothers of mine."

As environmental activists, it's easy to get lost in the day to day tasks of campaigning and organising. It's also perhaps simpler, more rational on the face of things, to focus on the self-evident abstracts like climate change. Doubtless our activity also fulfils some personal psychological need, much though we'd prefer to think it was 100% altruism.

Yet how our activism be real enough, how can we tell our stories of change to others, how can we keep our passion burning for the right reasons, if we cannot root our activism in real people as Obama suggests? For some, that might be those  we know or have met, for others it's those they have yet to meet, like their unborn kids. We can also make that empathetic leap to think of those overseas already on the front-line of climate change.

We all need a face, or a story, or a tangible vision of the future to hold in front of us like a talisman to help us do the right think for the right reasons. Which means we'll do it better, right?

What personal story gets you passionate about climate change? What stories can you tell to connect people with the looming abstract of the climate negotiations in Copenhagen at the end of the year and get them out onto the streets.

Tags: obama book activism copenhagen

Late at night, my half-awake reverie returns me again and again to a place which does not exist. An unreliable witness to a millenium of east Mediterranean history. A labyrinth in the form of a city port. A study in Levantine magic realism. Such is Jan Morris's account of her travels to the imaginary pocket state of Hav in the late twentieth century.

Occupying a small peninsula in an unspecified location (SE Turkey, my best guess), Hav was once a Crusader stronghold, then a way station on the Silk Road, a sleepy outpost of Ottoman despotism, a second Malta to the British, a Romanov fantasy of a Mediterranean Russia. It then saw out the twentieth century as an unwanted, a-functional micro-state – all aesthetic and cultural life of the near East overlying each other in dizzying assymetry. A shabby bauble of tolerance. A travel-writer's dream – one you would have to invent if it didn't exist, which is exactly what Jan Morris has done.

I came across Hav in the fantasy and SF section of Birmingham Central Library. On one level, it's a classic case of misfiling. What does a travelogue, imaginary or otherwise, empty of genre tropes, have in common with the wish-fulfilling necrophilia which passes for most mainstream fantasy?

On the other hand, channelling Grandfather Aldiss, we remember that it all comes back to the Gothic, that two-hundred year old fever dream. While the direct line of succession often seems to pass through the unwitting midwifery of Tolkien to the four-part elf-ridden pot-boilers of today, it's books like Hav which seems most like their ancestors in their atmospheric remixing of history and efforts to (re)create the geographical sublime in imaginary peoples and places.

Is travel writing the new Gothic then? Hmmm. At any rate, Hav has bewitched me, not least because I cannot visit it and dispel the illusion. Yet I feel melancholy for a place which doesn't exist but perhaps should.

Tags: books hav jan morris fantasy

The new Coen Brothers film could best be described as black hearted farce. Ex-CIA analyst and full-time alcoholic Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is writing his memoirs. Faced with a hostile divorce and attempted blackmail, he snaps, and plotlines coincide with bloody consequences.

Trouble is, I've made it sound much neater than it is in practice. Despite a great cast (Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, George Clooney, Brad Pitt), and some great scenes (mostly with Pitt), Burn After Reading lacks coherency and feels like at least one rewrite away from being even the sum of its parts. For a film set in and around Washington it's also curiously apolitical.

Even minor Coen is, on balance, worth seeing with judicious expectation management. And for goodness sake, it's comfortably better than their Ladykillers remake.

Tags: film coen brothers

I went to the Martin Creed exhibition at the Ikon gallery. Someone should really take him aside and tell him that having a few good ideas around repetition and interruption, making and unmaking, only counts for something if you execute those ideas in an interesting way. The light going on and off is boring. Films of people being sick is icky and boring. Films of ferries pulling into docks are utterly banal. And don't even get me started on the scrunched up and unfolded pieces of paper.

I'd be tempted to dismiss him as a second-rater, were it not for two works. I liked the metronomes he had set to different speeds, and positioned in a row from fastest to slowest. A good metaphor for entropy. Well done Martin! See what happens when you try a little harder!

Creed's sex film was also interesting in a 'compare and contrast' way with the Warhol exhbition. Whereas in the Warhol films such as Kiss everything, every light, every shadow, seems intended, complicit with the eroticism of the filmmaker, Creed's close-up of penetration is denuded of all poetry, all emotional content. Neither sexy nor repulsive, his presentation of sex as mechanics left me with a vague sense of disquiet.

Tags: art, creed

Now that I'm a little more settled down in Birmingham, I finally got round on Sunday to visiting the Unitarian church in the city centre.

For those who haven't encountered it for, my own personal abridged explanation of Unitarianism is that it's a liberal non-doctrinal form of Christianity. Some Unitarians would actually feel uncomfortable with the 'C' word, since the movement is highly open to influences from other religious, spiritual and philosophical traditions. 

I went to a Unitarian meeting house in Catford when I lived in London. Despite my conviction that there was no literal God to pray to and that no single religion could have a monopoly on truth, I still felt, for want of a better phrase, like an atheist within the Christian tradition. When I discovered that there was a denomination which respected these views, I realised that here was a way in which I could have a spiritual life without being required to surrender my convictions.

However, great as the Lewisham congregation was, it was (and remains) rather small, without a minister, and without the capacity to do anything other than a Sunday service. I used to read about the discussion groups, meditation sessions and such like that other Unitarian churches put on and wonder 'why not us'?

Here in Birmingham the congregation is somewhat bigger and does do more than just the 'hymn sandwich' and a cuppa on Sunday mornings. The Sunday service I went to this morning was a little bit more overtly Christian than I was accustomed to in Lewisham but it was nothing my internal translator couldn't handle.

So, I'm looking forward to going to my first meditation service there next Wednesday!

Tags: birmingham, unitarianism

Discovery: Andy Warhol actually did something I have a lot of time for!

At the Ikon Eastside gallery in Digbeth, they've been putting on an exhibition of Warhol movies. His short 'screen test' films of the famous, infamous and Factory scenesters are great. I was fascinated by the different ways the subjects responded to the camera close-up on the face - seductive, engaging, bored or impassive- and by the way the unblinking eye of the camera made me complicit in Warhol's voyeurism. I also loved the lighting in the films, which made the people on screen look like pale, numinous zombies.

The screen tests were much more erotic than the other more explicitly 'sexy' films in the exhibition such as those of lovers kissing or the shot of of a man's face as he received an off-screen blowjob.

Tags: art, warhol

Good news: Climate Change Committee recommends 80% cut in C02 emissions by 2050. This means the Climate Change Bill going through its final stages this Autumn is likely to contain that target rather than the 60% originally envisaged by the Government.

Given all the lobbying and campaigning that's been going on to get a Bill into Parliament over the past few years, it finally looks like we'll be getting the kind of law we need if we're serious about action on climate change. So on the one hand I feel like celebrating.

On the other hand I read the article below on the same day and, well, there's no written version of the 'head in hands' gesture poetic enough to do it justice.

Bad news: nearly a quarter of the world's mammals are now on the extinction list produced each year by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Tags: environment, news